This is for my weekly journal!
I've often wondered about whether journaling would help me stay focussed on some of my long-term goals and help me put words to some of my thoughts. I'll try to put a short journal on this page once a week, and I'll see where it goes.
February 4, 2024
I haven't journaled in a few weeks for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is that I am trying to get into an apartment before my job starts on 2/19(two weeks from now). I decided to do this after a particularly unfortunate set of circumstances left me without a phone or any consistent means of transportation for two weeks. Despite this I had to get myself to appointments for my onboarding process, pick up groceries, and shop for business casual attire for my job among other things. Some of this could be done online, but when scheduling, everyone expects that you have both a phone and a car if you are an adult, and it's implied to be a big pain if you don't. Previously I had kind of been depending on my parents for transportation and housing while I applied to jobs and didn't think to stop when I finally got one. Now, though, it's clear that I have to start making myself independent if I want to be able to function properly as an adult.
I've been able to officially accept a job offer, and I'm in the application process for a lease, which will hopefully begin before my job starts, but since then I've repeatedly run into the same problem: these systems are designed for people who are already in the system. Applying for a lease required income verification, which, while fair enough, I didn't have because I hadn't started working yet. To be clear, I had a signed offer letter, and a salary on it, but they only officially accept pay stubs, so I had to call and convince someone over the phone to just take the offer letter. When I was applying for my job they wanted the last 5 years of employment, but I haven't been employed for a full 5 years(the people hiring me knew this). I essentially had to just incorrectly fill out their form in order to get past that part of the process and hope they accepted it anyway.
Ultimately, I will probably still make it despite these things, but they are so simple, that I have to wonder how narrow-sighted the designers of these systems are. How did NO ONE designing the lease system realize that a person might want to move into a new place before they started a potentially busy job? Especially since a lot of people probably move so that they can actually commute to work at all. How did NO ONE designing the application process at my company realize that someone might not have previous work expeience? The hiring team certainly seemed open to it. I had to rely on the goodwill and critical thinking skills of real people working in these institutions(which is sadly a lot less common than I'd like) in order to get things that I needed to live. I just hope I can get past this, so that I can finally settle into my own apartment and my own schedule. Then again, I'll probably have this problem with the internet in a few weeks anyway.
December 31, 2023
Yeah, I couldn't limit myself to just working on this on Sundays. Not only is there just a lot of stuff to do in one day, but I just haven't been able to get my mind off of this. I now have at least one post in each page, which is nice, but there is still a lot of backlog of stuff from the discord server for the review and ttrpg pages. I do feel a lot better having set everything up and having a template for posts now. As I find more tools for webdev though, I want to add and change more to fit the actual vibe I've been going for.
In the meantime, I just got back from a day-long trip to the St. Louis area where my mom's side of the family lives. There were thankfully few discussions on politics(most of them probably would have been arguments), since most of them were focussed on congratulating me for my new job and the fact that I hadn't visited in almost 6 years(since before I went to college). On the car ride there I talked with my mom about the various family members, and I got some wild stories that I had somehow never heard before. In one of them, my cousin had apparently got kidnapped by her estranged mom when she was a baby, and my grandma had to organize a whole group of people to communicate with local authorities and drive around to get my cousin back.
One of the other things we talked about was what kind of long-term stuff I wanted to get involved with once I got to a more stable place with my job. One of those things was charity work. I am interested in just straight-up donating money to causes like homelessness and world hunger, but I also want to get a little more involved in the organizations that actually deal with these problems. I would want to have a little bit more a of a personal connection to some type of larger cause. I don't know exactly who I would get involved with, but my mom suggested teaching, like with grade schools and other supplementary programs, and I kind of like that idea. Maybe my academic background might get me past a lot of the learning curve that I might experience with other types of charity work. It might be hard to find a version of that type of work that works with my normal job hours, but I just don't want to let this idea go. I want to stay committed to things long-term and actually feel like I've achieved something other than money or a degree(not that those aren't valid to go for). That's part of the reason I made this site after all.
December 25, 2023
The night before this I had stayed up until 3:50am. I felt like I could barely focus on anything else. Recently, I've been having a lot more of these hyperfixation feelings. On one hand, it's a problem from an organizational and social perspective. It was Christmas Eve yesterday, and it's Christmas today, yet I still feel a greater urge to work on this than to celebrate with any of my friends and family. I also forgot to eat lunch, which I haven't done that in a week. It isn't even really that I lose track of time. When it's noon I think "I can wait 'til 1pm", and then when it's 2pm I think "I can wait til 3pm" and suddenly it's 4pm, and I think "might as well wait til dinner. I'll fix my eating habits tomorrow."
On the other hand, I feel like this is the most I've gotten done in weeks. Even if it's just a window-dressing organization thing, I actually do have a new functional thing that I can point to and say "I did something with my time." I also don't want to completely discount the value of window-dressing organization thing. The success of long-term plans and tasks that require a lot of backtracking and making mistakes often depend on the process used to complete them, of which organization things are a big part.
I don't know if there is a real answer to this, but I want to keep working on this. I hope that it'll keep me focussed on all of the hobbies I've put here. I just have to keep a promise to myself to stop at noon and 6pm to eat. As for my friends and family ... maybe I limit myself to only working on this on Sundays.