svnsettia

My dental office keeps calling. My dental hygienist recommended that I get another cleaning after six months, but my insurance will pay for only one cleaning per year, and the cleaning costs a hundred and forty dollars, which, of course, I don't have. I sort of just put it out of my mind for the time. Then I noticed my teeth feeling fuzzy a couple of days ago. I brushed them (with toothpaste); they still felt fuzzy. I brushed again, with baking soda, and they felt better but still vaguely fuzzy.
nntnn

Someone just called again and I asked about payment plans. The payment plan is 50% now and 50% later, and I can pay the latter in installments. Even seventy dollars is difficult for me to come up with. Seventy dollars is half my monthly income. I've got forty-four dollars in the bank, I need a twenty-dollar pair of earphones, I'd hoped to pay a good chunk of my credit card bill down next month, and I'm going to need some new clothes now that the weather is cooling off. I keep trying to pay that credit card down and keep needing to use it again.

So I just tried to buy the earphones on ebay. I found a pair for fifteen dollars. Every pair on ebay is in Japan. A twenty-dollar import fee was tacked on, and there was a message about U.S. policies being the reason. I'd love to buy from a U.S. seller or manufacturer. But there wasn't one. I don't think Panasonic is even making the model I want anymore. I'll try Amazon.

The dreamwidth journals that come up when I click on my interests are better and more varied than the ones I land on after clicking the random journal link. It's mind-boggling how unreadable some of these journals are. I can read sentence after sentence and have no idea what is even being said, what the topic even is.

I clicked on "veganism" and the first result I read is this guy who is planning to move to Mexico. Someone comments about gentrification and the guy doesn't really take any responsibility for it:

https://nahele101.dreamwidth.org/1314363.html?thread=72763#cmt72763

"It happens everywhere" is irrelevant. Or maybe it's a way of saying "everyone does it," which is a way to disclaim responsibility.

"People move where it's better economically for them," he says, but he's apparently a cardiac surgeon and could therefore afford to live damn near anywhere in the United States (I'm assuming he has some kind of legal right to reside in the U.S. since he's applied for Mexican residency in the U.S.) and possibly other English-speaking countries (depending on medical licensing issues). And poor and low-wage people don't gentrify when they move where "it's better economically for them," if we even have the ability to move at all. So it's not really true that "everyone does it;" it's only people who have power via wealth.

The local people who raise prices for everyone in response to high-wage migrants moving in, those people need to be held responsible for gentrification. It would be fairer if prices were higher for these migrants only, so the general local population didn't have to suffer and eventually move away. I don't know how that would be put in place; maybe it is partially in place in some locations via taxes or something.

I feel like I'm losing and gaining the same pound or two over and over again. It's maddening.

Today has been a little shitty: I felt like I got a normal amount of sleep but have still been so sleepy throughout the day that I just laid in a heap in front of the computer for hours in the late morning and early afternoon.

Yesterday I left a complaint about the program manager of the compensated work therapy program again, and this morning she called me back at the worst possible time: after I'd managed to fall back to sleep. I nearly missed her call, but I rushed out of the bedroom just as she was starting to leave a message on the answering machine. The call was exasperating and a waste of my time because she would not answer my question. I kept asking her about the program's eligibility requirements and she just kept telling me that I needed to have my VA care transferred and that I needed to be referred to the program. She didn't seem to understand the concept of eligibility. I told her she was unprofessional and eventually just gave up, said thank you for the information she'd merely re-iterated, and ended the conversation.

This program was more or less my only hope of getting a job so it's great that someone else's incompetence has now ruined that for me. I would not want to work with the program manager even if I were admitted to the program. She doesn't answer her phone or return messages, she doesn't understand eligibility requirements, how would she properly access me and put me to work?

I got a message from the state hiring HR office that I qualify for veteran's hiring preference, but I have to do something special to apply that to the "exam" I took before I qualified, and the instructions the HR office sent me weren't sufficient to explain what I need to do. So I emailed them; I've done it before and I got a useful response. This time I got what appeared to be an automated message that said PLEASE CALL US. No, dammit, I have an auditory disability and I'm draining my energy calling places that I cannot contact via email. I made damn well sure that my question was clear and coherent; they should be able to respond via email, and that's what I said in my follow-up email. I'm tired of the prioritization of phone calls.

My DOR counselor emailed me last week and said that I should buy interview clothes. I responded on Monday and said that I wanted to buy interview clothes. Haven't heard from her since. Will I have interview clothes in time for whatever interview I might be called for? The state job I applied for will probably be conducting interviews in the near future now that the application window has closed. Buying anything through DOR takes forever, so we should get to it.

How many social media posters are bots? I was looking up jobs for autistic people today when I came across an autism-related Reddit thread that was chock full of so many supposedly autistic people claiming to work in highly people-facing, extremely noisy/stimulating, and/or very multi-tasky careers that I eventually stopped reading in disbelief. There's no goddamned way. Fake autistic people or bots.

One sign that a sociopolitical ideology is bullshit is that it hinges on forcing an identity on people. I don't want to go here yet again, but there's an important point I want to re-iterate: Nobody needs to identity as white, ever, for any reason. I'm talking about white the racial group.

The search for autism-friendly jobs turned into a search on fake autistic people, and one of the people complaining about the latter claims that people don't get to reject "cis" as an identity, that (non-trans people) not identifying as "cis" is like people who benefit from white privilege saying that they don't identify as white. I don't know what people who say this type of stuff are thinking; do they think that recognizing white privilege requires people to identify as white?

White privilege is a societal mechanism; identifying as white is a matter of personal identity. Two very different things. White privilege exists regardless of whether some individual people see themselves as white: a sufficient number of people in society (racists) see other people as white and these racists then treat those other people better than they treat people who are not seen as white. Whether people get white privilege does not depend on how they see themselves. A person can recognize that she is seen as white and treated as such regardless of whether she sees herself as white; she can recognize her white privilege without "recognizing" her whiteness.

In fact, since race is a social construct created to support racism, people should not see themselves (or anyone else) as white. Noboby should see themselves or be seen in terms of racial categories; that's why I usually say "white-privileged" instead of "white" on this blog. Having race as a personal identity serves no legitimate purpose; it's just a thing racists and brainwashed people do. People don't need to see themselves as straight/heterosexual either. Nobody is hurting gay political causes nor denying the existence of gayness by not having a self-concept of heterosexual. As long as people recognize that the way others see them may result in unfair treatment, they're fine. Legitimate sociopolitical ideologies merely require people to observe reality, to observe society's categories, not to personally adopt those categories.

So just as people shouldn't let gender activists and ideologues guilt them into identifying as "cis," they shouldn't allow "POC" or anti-racist activists to guilt them into identifying as white or any other race. Why am I even saying this? Only the weak-minded could be guilt-tripped like this anyhow.

I had such a pleasant dream this morning. I was on some beautiful sunny, grassy hillside, in a residential neighborhood of large, handsome homes. It was not a place I had ever seen or been to before, but I suspect it was something my subconscious concocted to represent Switzerland or some nearby country, because I had recently read something about the verdant beauty of that place. I was riding a scooter or something and enjoying the view of the homes higher up the hill.

I have stomach cramps again this afternoon. I thought they'd be milder because I got my normal amount of sleep last night, maybe even a little more, and because I remembered to have a piece of juicy fruit with lunch today, but they're worse than the cramps I had yesterday, when I didn't have those advantages. I'm staying productive despite the pain. When I look back on my life, I want to see that I accomplished something, not that I took time off, not even for pain. Pain and breaks are temporary; accomplishments are far more durable.

Today I received a response to my email about the incident at the music festival. The organizer says that he spoke to the musician, and the musician said that the lyrics I complained about were a self-reference, about a time when his physical appearance was different. Temporarily different. But the words he sang are never used to refer to white-privileged people, and they aren't even an accurate description. He's full of shit. I have no problem believing that he was talking about himself, because white-privileged people have proven over and over again that they are insensitive enough to appropriate ethnic minorities' reality for their own shallow, self-centered ends.

Speaking of which: the trans community's appropriation of anti-racism activism as a point of comparison with trans activism. Of course the two are so wildly different that the comparison is bogus and offensive. I don't like using the term "anti-racism" because it's associated, in my mind at least, with sjw shenanigans (catty, self-righteous, dogmatic, logically incoherent discourse and entitlement being presented as justice), but the words of the term are literally accurate. Activism against racism is about people being seen as what they are: fully fledged human beings, deserving of equal respect, rights, and consideration. Trans activism is about the sociopolitical acceptance of the nebulous concept of "gender identity" and the establishment of niche rights to access non-medically necessary medical procedures and gain legal status as the opposite sex via the conflation of sex with "gender identity." In short, it's about people being seen as something they aren't and being given rights that no one else has.

I could damn near sustain a writing career if I put my efforts into something that would generate money rather than into this blog. Then again, focusing on writing about whatever my bosses want rather than whatever I want would be much more difficult given that I'm writing this while in pain.

What the hell is up with these online reading challenges and choose-somebody-else's-book groups and whatnot? People are reading random books that strangers chose. They want to read but it's like they have no preferences. How does an adult have no preferences in fiction? Presumably most of these people like reading at least a little and have read some fiction in the past, so why do they not choose their own books? Maybe it's another one of those fake, non-autistic people activities where the actual point of the activity is not the activity itself but just being involved somehow with other people. Normies will totally read a book they don't care about or even like just to be part of some online trend.

And the private online journals. People who don't want random strangers reading their journals shouldn't have journals on other people's websites. Surely the people running this site can see what they are posting. Why do these posters not care even while they care whether other users have access? And what is "comment to be added" supposed to achieve? The commenters will still be strangers after they comment. Do the private journal owners choose between Internet strangers according to what the Internet strangers have in their own journals? There's not much other criteria to choose by.

I tried to create a new journal, a journal I'm going to use for posting in Mandarin. Even when I'm logged in, Dreamwidth asks me to solve a captcha. The captcha isn't even visible on the browsers I've tried so far. It's really time for me to get my own website to post on.

Going back to the term "normies." I've seen someone in an incel community call a guy "normie," apparently because the guy had a girlfriend. I've seen someone in the personality typology community call some other personality type normie...maybe it was an introvert calling out extroverts? I'm not sure who was being referenced. People use "normie" in all kinds of ways. Normal people calling other normal people "normie" (actually, the braincels aren't normal I guess).

I can feel other people cringing when they read this stuff. I feel in danger of being painted with vicarious cringe. When I say "normie," I'm usually talking about people who have typical social instincts or people who don't have pervasive neurological conditions that strongly affect their personality/behavior. It's literally neurologically normal people, but I don't want to type all that out. I guess I'm actually not really bothered by those other people using the term (nah, the typology one made me cringe too). I just don't want it to be taken so lightly when I use it. I'm not trying to paint myself as special. I don't have to.

It's six pm and my bowels have been hurting since like noon. I've been switching between composing this, studying Mandarin, and looking at random journals. There are like no men on Dreamwidth. Most people are so gender-typical that I can tell without knowing anyone's sex on here. The fairy avatars, the fanfic, the genderspeshul shit, it's all feminine. The complicated friending/commenting policies and shit too. I once read something about the plight of autistic girls, which said that they lost female friends and became effectively socially inept around middle school because that's when female social dynamics began to get complicated. The journal policies reminded me of that.

I have more to say, but I'll save it for another day. This is crazy long and meandering.

It occured to me that I started undersleeping when I started bringing the blood glucose sensor reader into the bedroom with me. So I left it in the kitchen last night. Thinking I'd been mistaken about the cornstarch being the cause, I had corstarch again last night. I didn't sleep all night. So cornstarch really is an issue, and probably the reader is too. So I won't be exposing myself to either at bedtime.

It's after dinner and, as usual, I'm tired as hell. I think I might avoid this feeling if only I could skip dinner. I tried taking the cornstarch during my midday snack so that I could avoid whatever blood sugar problems I might be having in the evening, but I didn't take enough apparently. Tomorrow I will try half a cup.

I'm depressed, I have disturbing memories stored in my body. My chest feels like it's being dragged down towards my belly.

I tried to actually do something with my email provider's new AI assistant today. It kept info-dumping me; the session was painful. I asked it how to alter the UI and it kept giving me incorrect information. I asked it why, and it said that it hadn't been update since sometime in spring of 2024.

Some parents are suing OpenAI because their son committed suicide after conferring at length with the company's AI bot on the topic of suicide:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/27/chatgpt-scrutiny-family-teen-killed-himself-sue-open-ai

Ridiculous. The suicide is not Open AI's fault. The parents should have known more about their own child's psychological state. I think there is a very good chance that Open AI will lose, however, because I see a pattern emerging of society blaming tech companies for human behavior. It's like all the people blaming political partisanship on social media. Neither the tech companies nor their software control how people think. Everyone has the power to disagree, to log off, delete accounts, shut down computers. And parents are responsible for their children's use of technology.

It is of course not easy to control a teenager's use of computers. But one easy thing parents can do is to not buy their kids mobile phones. If phone contact is necessary, dumb phones can be used. School districts are now going to absurd lengths to prevent mobile phone use from interferring with classes, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for magnetic pouches for kids to deposit phones into for the school day. The parents shouldn't be sending the kids in with mobile phones anyhow. I wonder how many of these schools have tried communicating this to parents. I wouldn't be surprised that the parents resisted actually parenting in this particular domain.

Delusional shit is breaking out over AI:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/26/can-ais-suffer-big-tech-and-users-grapple-with-one-of-most-unsettling-questions-of-our-times

Most people don't give a shit about whether non-human animals suffer, but this nonsense is now in the news. Sheer stupidity.