Just me things

More like ghastly and CORVID garments 🎃🕸

The remaining ones this year are:

May 2nd

August 1st

September 5th

October 3rd

Happy pride month lads! 🧡💛🤍💙

Me realizing it's about a beautiful lesbian couple and their gay son:

My heart:

I'm considering it again and there's a good chance I'm actually gonna do it

I'm only a year away from graduation, but...I've been having this deep sense that "this is wrong, I'm on the wrong path" for a while. I've never been able to convince myself that I should stay because it's what I want, only push down the feeling and try to convince myself I have no choice.

Despite many good things that happened, 2024 was almost definitely the worst year of my life (which is saying something, considering how 2021 went for me) just in terms of how much of it I spent utterly miserable.

I'm about to turn 25. I am so sick of being around 19 and 20 year olds, not that there's anything wrong with them, I'm just starting to struggle to connect with people who haven't been around the block a little bit and lived outside of the regimented, narrow constraints of school.

My school situation is difficult to explain but it's unlikely I will ever be given a better chance to graduate without debt. However, my school has proven completely rigid and inflexible in regards to several crucial disability accommodations, and I have fought so incredibly hard to make this situation work for me and it just isn't and every time I think it's finally going to be okay there is some other bullshit that happens and I am tired of running myself ragged fighting to survive in a place I don't want to be.

Not only do I not want to spend another year feeling like my life is a black hole of despair, I don't want to wait any longer to get my driver's license and figure myself out and learn who I am and form meaningful relationships and escape the narrow little crevice my college life is. I am so exhausted all the time when I'm in school that I can't work on myself, and I feel stunted. I feel like a plant in a too-small pot where its roots are all bunched up along the edges.

I was hopeful about getting some kind of career related to studying plants or working with plants or something, but right now my only career goal is for the pain to stop.

Family says they will support me no matter what I do, but seem to lack faith in me to take steps toward independence or something I want to accomplish. My mom just seems to live in fear that I will go back to how I was in the Burnout Year where I just laid in bed for months, as if this is all I'm capable of without the external structure of college. It leaves me doubting myself and whether I've actually grown any.

Family also seems to think that I'm naive to how hard a job would be, to which my honest answer is Jesus if this is the easiest my life is going to be I am just not going to make it. Parents keep saying college is hard, it was hard for me too but I think I just completely fail to communicate how much they don't get it. It's not that my classes are hard, it's not that the work takes effort. If anything it's not enough work, not enough stimulation. It's just...the stressors. The exhaustion of having to go to class every day for hours and participate in group projects and presentations and having to go to different meetings and appointments. Not having any control over anything in my life. Not knowing whether I'll have good food to eat every day, not knowing if the kitchen will be free for me to boil a pot of goddamn noodles, not knowing if my energy budget is free enough that I can hang out with a friend or make a dentist appointment without fucking up and contributing to an ongoing backlog of exhaustion that nothing, nothing, nothing but time ever can fix. The hyper-vigilance I have to maintain to avoid locking myself out of my own room.

I'm just...not 20 anymore. I can hardly stomach Ramen noodles and microwave mac and cheese anymore. I feel gross and nasty when I don't eat green things and fresh things and things with fiber in them. I get too exhausted to stay awake by 12:30 and wake up at 8:30am whether I set my alarm or not. I can't skip meals anymore, I can't just roll out of bed, stuff down a granola bar and function until lunch anymore.

I’m not sure how I actually made it though uni, and looking back I can’t believe it didn’t kill me. The learning part was easy but everything else was hard. I graduated maybe three years ago, and I’m still exhausted from it. I sort of wish I had been brave enough to quit or even just take a break; maybe I wouldn’t be so overwhelmed now.

There are jobs where you can work supervised (of sorts*) with no degree or even part of one. I had a traineeship when I started my degree and could have transitioned to a similar type of role if I had quit studying. But if you want to work with plants you could try local plant nurseries or maybe even the hardware stores that have a plant section for jobs. Depending on where you live there might be orchids, vegetable farms or wineries that have seasonal or full time work available too.

*Supervised work might mean that there is someone monitoring your progress or your finished work might be checked before being approved for use or sent out.

They announced that they were going to use AI for this a while back but now they're annoucing that they're getting rid of the contractors reviewing the AI generated content. So, very soon Duolingo is just going to be AI generated slop that might not even be correct.

step 1: log onto duolingo.com

step 2: there's a sidebar on the left. mouse over "more" and then "help."

step 3: scroll down the list of frequently asked questions to the "account management" category. click on "how do I delete my account an access my data" and then on the link to "duolingo data vault."

step 4: hit the big red "erase personal data" button. do not be swayed by the crying owl. he cares not for you, only for your data.

step 5: they should send you an email to whatever account is connected to your duolingo account. you can tell which email it is based on the spam you've gotten for the past several years reminding you to maintain your streak.

step 5.5: if you have a super duolingo subscription or got suckered into their free trial that does not cancel automatically, cancel that separately, they explicitly state that they will keep charging you even if you do not have an account which tracks for the company duolingo is now

step 6: find the email, click on the link listed after "delete my data link"

step 7: wait 7 days. you cannot get your data deleted any faster than this, but you can cancel it during this 7-day grace period.

step 8: apparently it will take "up to 23 more days" to delete your data entirely. pat yourself on the back. you're free now.

jokes aside, I'm still on step 7 myself, but I cannot see myself WANTING to undo my account deletion even if I could, so... for anyone who's confused about how to do this but wants to, hope this can help.

The email they send you to delete your account has three sets of links in a row. If you click the wrong one, it will stop the deletion of your account, and you must wait 30 days to try again. Thirty days!

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