Feb 19, 2017, 2:44 AM
@Catsmeow I'm incredibly sorry. Fuck Cancer indeed. Much love from an internet stranger.
RL Anger
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I finally found a core exercise I really liked... and probably overdid it. I gave it several days to rest after soreness settled in and yesterday - searing pain in the right side of my stomach on the first rep.
I'll go to a doctor this weekend but this sucks. Best case scenario it'll probably push me back weeks. Meh.
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To be fair, you haven't really posted a political thought here either.
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I lost my job in my new career field in August, in part due to my depression and anxiety getting out of control after giving up on paying for the doctors' visits and medications because I couldn't afford to keep throwing spaghetti at the wall. My unemployment runs out next week, and the idea of going back to my old 'career', or honestly even working for someone else's benefit at the expense of my own at this point, makes me want to go walk into oncoming traffic.
Meanwhile I'm working on my bachelor's in the field I was fired from despite not knowing if I want to keep working in it. And while I might be able to scrape by doing the thing I actually want to do, I'll never be able to save enough to set up the facilities required to do more than scrape by that way.
Goddammit, life, we're supposed to have our shit together by now!
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@PuppyBreath I am not going to give you any platitudes, because they don't help. I will say, it's becoming more and more recognized that people change careers and such many times over the course of their lives these days than it once was -- and many people don't find 'their thing' until much later than we were always told as kids we were expected to know what that was and be immersed in doing that thing.
I feel your frustration on scraping and putting every scrap scraped up into trying to get further on a thing you love. If you really do love it, keep the faith in it and do what you can with it.
In case it's something artsy, well. This may help. (Even if it isn't something artsy, much still applies.)
Oh fucking well.
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@surreality said in RL Anger:
@PuppyBreath I am not going to give you any platitudes, because they don't help. I will say, it's becoming more and more recognized that people change careers and such many times over the course of their lives these days than it once was -- and many people don't find 'their thing' until much later than we were always told as kids we were expected to know what that was and be immersed in doing that thing.
This is absolutely true.
I was involved in a lay-off of most of my entire office (about 50 people total) and got some 're-employment' courses as part of my severance. The guy leading them said that on average people stay at a job for 2-3 years. It's not only accepted by employers, turn-over is expected at this point and the old 'stay at the same desk for 10 years' can hurt you in a lot of ways.
I'm also doing something radically different than the thing I got my degree, though the degree itself was useful when I was transitioning (just having a degree at all is useful at a certain point). There's far too much emphasis in our society on finding YOUR DREAM when you're 14 and never deviating from it. It's not healthy. I've done what I needed to do to get along in life and searched for my bliss along the way. It's worked out OK.
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@surreality said in RL Anger:
I will say, it's becoming more and more recognized that people change careers and such many times over the course of their lives these days than it once was…
Free anecdotal data point: I started my "adult" life thinking I was going to be in the military. This didn't pan out; I'm not the kind of mentality that does well in the military. (Turns out "why?" is not a question people want to hear when you're told what to do.) I had a fallback of sorts in software, so I fell back to software and had a very lucrative career in that. As that progressed, however, the ever-mounting soul-sucking nature of the job brought me to burnout and beyond (to the brink of suicidal ideation).
My getting fired was a blessing.
My inability to get any other job in the field (largely because of self-destructive job interviewing) was a blessing as well.
I had the luxury of a year's worth of high living courtesy of the monetary benefits of my former career, so that gave me time to think of a "Plan C", which turned into living in China teaching English for 15 years.
A paperwork fuck-up on the part of my last employer killed that possibility (the rules for getting work visas for education tightened and I no longer practically qualified, so when my employer screwed up my visa extension I was doomed). I had, however, not kept my fingers out of software, so I was easily able to snag a software-related job in a local hardware engineering firm. So I'm back writing software (although I'm not in a software shop, thankfully). Which is good, because I actually love writing software. It's the software industry I despise.
That's four "career" prospects and several dozen job changes over my lifetime.
This is the new normal.
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@surreality Neil Gaiman is always nice to listen to. Thank you!
I've always been more of an artsy person than realistic, as my father would say (spoiler alert: we aren't very close). But other than dreaming about it in that kind of far away happy place, I've never really considered making a living at any of it.
I've never fit into the standard work environment very well. My first career was as a dog groomer for about 12 years; never enjoyed it despite being good at it. Then I was a web developer, but my brain does not brain good when depressed. That's what I was fired from. My bachelor's is in software development. Theoretically it could be decent money, but I've never been the sort of person willing to hate my job for a nice paycheck. I'd rather hate my life less and make less.
Other careers I've considered much more seriously these last six months: author, screenwriter, youtube personality, prostitute (okay, less seriously), horse trainer.
The only vaguely viable one is probably the last, and only if I was kind of lucky. But I've been obsessed with horses since I realized they existed, so that's something, I guess, even if making money with them is a crap shoot.
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It really is. And you know, I will list my jobs over the years if it makes anybody feel better 'cause I promise you every one of them is ridiculous in some way.
I studied to become a costume designer. I started learning it and related skills by the age of six and that's no joke, because my mother and grandmothers were very crafty. I knew how to weave on a four-harness loom by the time I was four years old that was almost three times as tall as I was at the time.
And then I got into a car accident. A bad car accident. I can't lift anything over 5lbs again. I fought that. I fought that really fucking hard through another three years of college and it just would not work; I kept doing my body more damage and it kept breaking down. Then, I did, because I'd worked so long and so hard for that.
And I made jewelry -- had been selling it with my mom since I was somewhere between 8-10 years old or so. So I dove into that headlong while studying commercial illustration, which I was seriously not bad at at all.
Then web design.
Then, through a complete quirk on the part of the best teacher I ever had in college, I made designer doll clothes for a living for about 4 years; won a big competition with one of the designs, too. That broke down thanks to a shifty postal agent stealing packages, however, and I had to do something else.
So it was back to the jewelry. Dove in headlong. Made amazing progress. Got published, even! (If you go to the Amazon.com page for a book called 'Beadazzled' with a red cover, flick through the additional image -- the two page spread with the gingko leaves necklace is one of the three in there of mine, won stuff in that, too, and all the other names in the book but mine? Nationally known.)
Then for some weird reason I started making Poser content. Really. Seriously. I made Poser content for about 8 years and I did pretty well; things changed with the tech and until I replace the comp I can't do more of it, but I will probably, eventually, because creating imaginary people visually is often as much fun as creating imaginary people in text to RP.
Then I started dyeing yarn. Really. Three years of it. Sold stuff at shows, got stuff sold through others -- but it died then due to a bookkeeping screwup.
Back to jewelry. It's a mainstay that always works.
But seriously. It happens. They all were real jobs -- successful, too, in most cases. But it can happen.
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My friend passed away from her fight with cancer this morning.
Fuck cancer.
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@Catsmeow I'm incredibly sorry. Fuck Cancer indeed. Much love from an internet stranger.
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@Catsmeow My condolences.
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My friend passed away from her fight with cancer this morning.
Fuck cancer.
I'm so, so sorry. Though I doubt any words can make it better.
But that's my own great terror right now. My mother was diagnosed with stage 3 peritoneal carcinomatosis literally two weeks ago. Bad enough they rushed her into surgery to remove what they could less than a week after the diagnosis.
Now we're looking at weeks of recovery from that surgery, followed by months and months of chemotherapy.
And I hate—hate—that there's nothing really I can do about it. I can try to be there for my mother, but nothing I can do that will likely have a measurable impact on her ability to pull through this.
So you have my heartfelt sympathy.
a.k.a. Packetdancer (or "Pax" for short)
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It's hard but selfishly, I feel bad. I mean she was my friend. She was young. She was a single parent to a young daughter and I'm sad she's gone.
Unselfishly, she was ravished by this horrible disease and she just got tired of fighting so much. So hard. So she deserves to rest. Death is just always hard.
Thank you for your thoughts, I'd ask that you keep her daughter in prayers/thoughts/candle lighting. She's only eight and wrapping her mind around death, let alone cancer and her only parent (that she knows) dying; well, she's going to need the good thoughts.
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And I hate—hate—that there's nothing really I can do about it. I can try to be there for my mother, but nothing I can do that will likely have a measurable impact on her ability to pull through this.
Completely wrong. That is exactly what you can do for her and it WILL have a measurable impact. Doctors only lay out a course of treatment. It's her family that provide the support she needs. Don't underestimate the benefit of your care.
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And I hate—hate—that there's nothing really I can do about it. I can try to be there for my mother, but nothing I can do that will likely have a measurable impact on her ability to pull through this.
Completely wrong. That is exactly what you can do for her and it WILL have a measurable impact. Doctors only lay out a course of treatment. It's her family that provide the support she needs. Don't underestimate the benefit of your care.
This. Be there. Be there in more but body as much as you can, and if you can't be there in body be on the phone or texts or skype or something else. Be engaged. Do things with her as much as possible in that time.
My mother failed hard on this with me and it's something I struggle with. (While her daughter was dying according to the docs, my mother was reading a book and ignoring me, and crying over a character in the book dying and ignoring my attempts to talk with her or watch something fun with her and so on. DO NOT BE MY MOTHER. I am a pretty forgiving person but that one will take a while...)
Oh fucking well.
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@surreality said in RL Anger:
This. Be there. Be there in more but body as much as you can, and if you can't be there in body be on the phone or texts or skype or something else. Be engaged. Do things with her as much as possible in that time.
My mother failed hard on this with me and it's something I struggle with. (While her daughter was dying according to the docs, my mother was reading a book and ignoring me, and crying over a character in the book dying and ignoring my attempts to talk with her or watch something fun with her and so on. DO NOT BE MY MOTHER. I am a pretty forgiving person but that one will take a while...)
Ironically, my mother's made it pretty clear that at least right now, she wants the opposite of engagement; she wants the presence more than attention, at least at this stage of things. She wants people there and reading while she reads, or watching TV with her, etc. (She's gotten on my dad's case a bit about him not letting her just read or play Solitaire on her computer, but wanting to sit and talk or something instead.)
I think everyone has different ways of coping with recovery. Though I expect once she's recovered from the surgery and the chemo starts, her feelings on this may change.
a.k.a. Packetdancer (or "Pax" for short)
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I wrote this code yesterday. It works. I can no longer figure out why it works.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@Thenomain said in RL Anger:
I wrote this code yesterday. It works. I can no longer figure out why it works.
That's my favorite kind of code.
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Usually the code question in my world is:
How the hell did you break THAT?!
Same answer though, no clue.