@barbellsandbetasheets / barbellsandbetasheets.tumblr.com
It is incredibly refreshing to come back here and read about how much of a depressed retard you are due to the trauma and the tism. I love seeing that you struggle to connect with people because of how maladjusted and unlikeable you are. I truly hope that despite any academic successes, depression ultimately consumes you.
Imagine deliberately coming back to a person's tumblr to send them this. Babygirl, you are a *fan*. I wish rent IRL were as cheap as the rent is in your head.
I haven't been on tumblr in forever and I sometimes think about that post that's about wondering if your online friends are dead when they disappear from the platform on which you follow them, so for anyone who wants to know, I am in fact very much alive. I think I've finally just kind of outgrown this place. I'll probably keep an active account for posterity, but it's not likely that I'll use it much. I'm not really using social media at all these days, so you might just have to keep wondering if I'm still alive. But my absence isn't because something's happened to me.
I haven't been on tumblr in forever and I sometimes think about that post that's about wondering if your online friends are dead when they disappear from the platform on which you follow them, so for anyone who wants to know, I am in fact very much alive. I think I've finally just kind of outgrown this place. I'll probably keep an active account for posterity, but it's not likely that I'll use it much. I'm not really using social media at all these days, so you might just have to keep wondering if I'm still alive. But my absence isn't because something's happened to me.
Oh. I think I'm coming out of the hole.
Finally some good fucking news
I'm deeply lonely and deeply bored in this place and that state of being allows my anxiety to expand and expand and find any way to feed itself, any way at all. It's exhausting. I'm tired of being anxious about every. little. thing. (and every big thing, too).
I *have* found some friends, but they're kind of surface-level people and I so far haven't connected very well with them. They're the kind of people who wouldn't be able to handle hearing about how (relatively) difficult my life has been because their lives have been nice and lovely. Anyway, we do things like go to running club and go camping and those have been great distractions. I actually felt some peace camping last weekend, in fact.
I've also found some cool people to organize with against a local coal mine reopening, and my relationships with them are much more nourishing because we have shared values. It's great, but between both groups I still feel like I spend the vast majority of my time alone and anxious. Weekends are scary prospects, and this weekend has an extra day so it's particularly difficult.
I talked a lot about this with my therapist. We both think that even when I move to a bigger place, I'm still going to feel this level of disconnection for two reasons: autism makes connection difficult for me; and, I'm not and never will be cured of my trauma, it's just something that will always require work. I'm not expecting my move in January to fix these problems for me, but I am hopeful that the numbers will work better for me. It's easier to find cool people when there are more people around, after all.
I also think that maybe it's time to medicate this anxiety. It's obviously got a biological component because even as a child I would find anything to be anxious about, whether it was aliens or nuclear war or some imagined extrapolation of a negative news story I saw. Today, I'm fixating on climate change, but it has nothing to do with that specifically. It's just pure anxiety and that's something I can fixate on easily. If it's not climate change, it's the helium shortage, or the possibility of a massive volcanic eruption, or, or, or, all the way to the friggin heat death of the universe. It's stupid, and I need some help to handle it.
Anyway, that's my little melancholy update for this lonely Saturday night. Cheers, y'all.
I’m looking at property, and in general making plans for life in the city I’ll be moving to for my new gig as a prof and honestly I feel far too on the spectrum for any of this to make sense.
Today I was offered the tenure-track job of my dreams.
are the liberals actually going forward with this fertilizer ban? unless I'm missing something this will definitely lead to food shortages in a market where grocery prices are already skyrocketing. Surely avoiding starving out your population takes precedence in this case?
Policymakers: “hey we really need to work on the climate change goals, people are getting mad about us not doing anything yet”
Justin “I’m gonna buy a pipeline” Trudeau: *looks at and ignores all the damage the oil sector does* “cow shit”
Policymakers: “what?”
Trudeau: “we’ll stop using manure based fertiliser”
This is not a "fertilizer ban", it's a voluntary reduction in emissions by 30% over eight years through positive incentives to make fertilizer use more efficient. Currently, Canadian farmers use 25-50 excess kg of fertilizer per hectare, and this excess produces N2O, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and it damages the ozone layer. Since we already use excess fertilizer, reducing emissions without reducing output is absolutely possible. In fact, many farmers have already implemented the technologies and practices required to minimize excess fertilizer use. They exist. The federal government just wants them to be used more widely.
Yes, it's hypocritical to have purchased a pipeline and then asked farmers to reduce their emissions, but actually the Liberal government is implementing emissions cuts across sectors. These cuts are absolutely necessary for human life to persist. I'd love more aggressive action against the oil and gas sector, but literally every megatonne of GHG not emitted is a really important thing right now, so a reduction in fertilizer use is a good and necessary thing.
just found out that yesterday kim kardashian’s private jet produced 61 tons of CO2 emissions. over the last week drake’s private jet flights produced 182 tons of CO2 emissions. like what is even the point any more
the average person produces 7 tons of CO2 in a year. it would take the average person 9 years to produce as much CO2 as kim kardashian did in 1 day, or 26 years to produce as much CO2 as drake did in 1 week. is there actually any point in trying to go vegetarian? or cycling to work instead of driving? we will never be able to undo the damage of just private jet emissions at this rate
we could just kill them
Because my career is headed that way, I have been deep-diving into sustainability and climate change, and the more I learn, the more I understand that there are actually legitimate solutions to the problem today, and most of them are easy and low cost. It's making me hopeful, in all honesty.
Like, I'm learning now that the drought-flood cycle we currently experience is actually mostly due to poor water management, not CO2 emissions. I'm not sure how that'll change, but there are some really crazy positive stories about the effects of water restoration efforts in places that we think about as being completely dry.
I’m at a point where I don’t really want to work while there’s a “heat apocalypse” happening in Europe. I’d rather be hanging out with my friends to make use of the time we have before we literally die from this.
Went on a big, challenging hike, then had a lovely lunch and swam in the ocean next to jellyfish today. It was practically magical.
Thanks to my therapist I realized that my depression stemmed from a lack of meaningful relationships, so I started reaching out to form new relationships and strengthen existing ones, and now I finally feel like I'm coming out of the woods. I still have bad days, but I also know I have people I can call on during those bad days. The key has been to be open and vulnerable with literally everyone. That was fucking weird at the start, but got easier over time. I'm still working on it, of course.
All of this has also really helped me figure out what I want out of the next stage of my life, which was an unexpected, though welcome, side effect. I still feel a deep need to have impact in the world, but I also know now that that'll be impossible without the people I love nearby.
I got an invitation for a second interview for a tenure track position in Canada and it made all my anxiety about moving to Australia disappear, so I think what I really want is to stay in Canada, and NOT move to Perth.
In the short term, it would be a bad financial decision, but of course in the long term a tenure track position with a federal research institute is much more secure than a postdoc.
