The Grouch's Trash Pile [Baldur's Gate 3]

hope it all runs smooth for you!

 

I did it...! But since I cannot schedule for shit I had to haul ass the whole time and I have Regrets. Going to slowly melt into a puddle now....

 

Some hours later -- definitely not feeling so great what with the fatigue and body aches. Congestion is almost entirely gone, though.

 

Witnessed for pushing too hard, but I'm glad you're recovering well from the respiratory nonsense!

 

Subtly throwing shade at all the suggestions I recently got to mangle other languages or do convoluted shit to make up words in order to create names for settings or titles or whatever. Some people are very good at it but I'm not one of them and I know it, so I'm saving myself the effort and the tortured results. If you're not good at it the result is very bad and I hate encountering it in fiction; I'm sure not going to put myself and my readers through that.

 

Ohhhh I am not as recovered as I thought, a light workout and then a trip to the store has kicked my ass. T_T

 

And now I feel terrible! I didn't sleep very well for no particular reason so that's contributing, but it also feels like the aftereffects of overextending and I'm just like, how. I shouldn't be this unwell still. T_T

 

Health is better, morale is low. Job coaching always makes me feel so useless and unemployable.

 

Well! Today I'm so depressed I can't function! That's... sure something!

 

That sucks to hear :( If it helps, job coaching is a very artificial experience and actually having a job is much easier.

 

Ohhh I am in a BAD mood today. At least it isn't 'utterly crushed by depression and anxiety' (that was... scary, I don't usually get completely non-functional) but it is 'I will tear you a new one if you test my patience' now that some bright spark went and tested it. Fucking hate this shitty excuse for a holiday.

 

A walk in the SUN!!!! this afternoon healed my soul considerably, even though it (and the subsequent endless walk around the grocery store) also really wore me out.

Yeah... it's just super discouraging that the job coach doesn't quite seem to know what to do with me. I don't know what to do with me, that's why I'm there! For some reason it's hard to figure out what to do with someone with a shaky grasp on Finnish with no marketable skills, who just wants to write. :P

To be less self-deprecatingly jokey about it, it's also disheartening because I've told TE-toimisto that I have ADHD and I need support for that. I need structured training and plans; this choose-your-own-adventure style of self-teaching is really, REALLY failing me. And so far the job coaching is... personality tests, more competency assessments, and getting showed all the sites I can search for courses from! I'm not learning anything I didn't know, just having it reinforced that all my self-learned writing and editing skills don't mean shit without a degree to show for it, and I can't get a degree for it unless I suddenly become fluent enough in Finnish to struggle through an education that will allow me to do writing assignments in English, do a long distance one from another country that would cost me a lot of money I don't have, or waste my time and possibly money on shit like Udemy courses that are geared toward people who haven't written a word of fiction since high school.

God, I'm getting upset again. Deep breaths...

I think at this point it's safest to assume that's going to be a non-starter and my best option is to focus on writing in my own time and figure out what to persue that isn't going to make me want to die physically or mentally. I genuinely think I will never be able to work full-time again; when I was going to the rehabilitation center, it was four hours a day for three days a week (and then two hours of commute) and I had times where I was feeling stretched extremely thin, mentally. So I'll need something that allows for part-time work that isn't going to exhaust me mentally or physically, so I have enough left in me to work on my creative stuff. I don't know what my options for that realistically are, especially with being physically disabled, and I wish someone would TELL me instead of being all "well what would you like to do? :)"

Hell, I don't know what all my options COULD be, period.

 

Yeah, Finnish job support honestly sucks if you're not already someone who wants to work or has a clear idea on what they wanna do, and if you're even slightly developmentally different and struggle to express those sentiments in a way that passes the language check (in Finnish!! Let alone if Finnish is your second language, holy shit, my deepest condolences) they will simply not help you at all. This was my experience for the five years between realising that I could not hack it as an animator, and realising I had to quit my part-time thing at Posti because it was destroying my self-esteem. I just happened to luck into talking to someone who was working in the industry I was interested in and went "Oh hey that was something I was interested in. I could do that."

I wish I knew what to say to help. I simply found the creative industry too hostile for my particular brain bullshit, and was more willing to risk my physical condition worsening, going into an industrial job, than put myself in the shredder all over. I got extremely lucky in that once I was no longer as stressed, I started recovering (I'm back to not using a cane!) and by picking an industry I knew I was interested in as a teenager that had an easy nine-month vocational track for me to take. For more severe physical disabilities, a lot of office jobs are locked behind a Finnish Nepotism shaped gate, I almost feel like you'd probably be more lucky getting the job experience through trying to find international remote work, or going straight to Finnish job agencies (Bolt, Eezy, Go On) that let you interview in English.

TE Toimisto is horrendously behind their times, getting anyone who doesn't already have one of a very small handful of marketable experiences a job. Almost everyone else, they want to push into getting retraining, which is difficult if you don't already have a Finnish vocational school diploma of some kind, and if you can't take the courses in Finnish, the only other options are Swedish and Sami, which would probably require you physically move to go to one of the schools offering them. Overall, you're not wrong to feel abandoned and like they don't even *want* you to find a job, because they're not really trained to get people employed, they're trained to find people to do specific high-volume jobs that are good for the economy.

 

The validation helps a lot in fighting back the helplessness and feeling crazy, so thank you for that. It's given me some things to consider, too, so I'l ruminate on those a while.

 

It's unfortunate that my physical problem is kind of intracable -- congenital hip dysplasia that wasn't properly corrected. (My mom tried, but the doctor brushed her concerns off and said I didn't need a brace.) At this point in my life I'd need surgery to correct it, assuming I could get taken seriously at all; the last time I tried the doctor told me that my leg only turned outward like it does because I'm fat, and clearly thought I was lying when I said it had done that all my life. Maybe one would take me more seriously now that I'm much less fat, but who knows. And that still wouldn't unfuck my ankle on that side, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway. IT work of some stripe seems to be the route that's most likely going to see me employed, since a lot of training and work here in those fields is English-friendly. TE-Toimisto sent me a link to a full stack developer training; it wants "basic knowledge of relational databases and SQL", which I don't have, but I guess I could study up on it two months between now and when the interviews start. (Can you tell my enthusiasm is just off the charts here? </sarcasm> But at least it's a COMPLETE training...)

Sooo, I don't know. There was a point in time I would have been thrilled to have this as a major option, but I'm pretty sour about any and all tech industries at this point. Maybe I should just quit being a baby about it.

 

Job bullshit aside, it's been a good few days. On Sunday, my Eureka Orthos group got to floor 80 before we wiped to the boss, which didn't feel bad because it was our very first climb and we fought that bastard tooth and nail. I also felt pretty good because I saved us from a wipe twice on the 71-80 floorset before we got there :3 We're all on voice and they're a really fun group, so even when everything goes pearshaped it's a good time.

Then I got Luka and Aud started on a Palace of the Dead 1-50 clear so they can unlock the other two dungeons. Voice again, which was a lot of fun and very preferable to having to stop and type everything out. Got to 30 before I had to call it a night; we should be able to get 31-50 next run, although it might be tight because I went mch instead of a tank or a healer, and I don't have any sustain potions (since I'm using an alt that hasn't cleared story mode before). 30 was a bit hairy; Luka was desperately using summoner physick on me to keep me upright XD V. rude of PoTD to be so stingy on potsherds.

Yesterday I got a decent chunk of editing started on a friend's manuscript, which felt good because I wanted to start last month but got absolutely flattened by that damn cold.

And today J and I did what we've been meaning to do for ages and culled all the books we're never going to read again (or at all) from our shelves. We have so many books they were two deep on a lot of our three tall bookshelves, and a LOT of books that need to go, so it was past time to do it. I also culled all of the old computer parts that were hanging around uselessly. Now we just have to figure what to do with all of these while we figure out how to get them to the recycling center (which, for non-Finns, is kind of a charity resale shop. They'll refurbish or upcycle donated items where appropriate). The only bad thing is that the amount of dust we raised is incredible. My poor sinuses...!

 

I'm also looking at the two Umberto Eco books I have (Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before) and wondering if I'm ever going to really make myself sit down and read them, or if I just want to be a person who's read Umberto Eco. >_>

 

Sometimes I take a picture of myself to send to Aud, and every time I do part of me goes, "Oh no! I look like some middle-aged guy! D:", while the rest of me goes, "Hell yeah! I look like some middle aged guy! :D" Like, sorry the part of me that's still poisoned by beauty standards, but this was kind of the whole goal. (Well, technically the goal is to hit the sweet spot of "Butch lesbian or middle aged guy??" ambiguity but sometimes it veers one way or another lol)

Spoiler: I need a haircut.

 

Realized I need to rename a character because they inadvertantly share a name with an actual person I never, ever want to even imply positive associations with. Didn't even realize it until a friend told me he'd died six months ago. She has far more reason to be glad he's dead, but I still don't want any characters sharing a name with him.

I've been dissatisfied with that character's name for ages, so it's not a burden to change it.