SHIRTS, Y'ALL

Oh man, this week has some real bold moves. I feel like I am now post-taste, I can't even tell when I'm making insane things anymore.

Pictured here: the best my hair has ever looked, and a flannel dinosaur shirt. The fabric is all black and white, but I had the idea of buying some fabric markers and treating it like a coloring book. I plan on carrying around the markers with me when I wear it so that other people can fill in a dinosaur if they want.

Horrible horrible quality, but here's a picture pre-washing. Picture one is after the first wash, the colors become a bit more muted and pastel.

"You're not actually going to wear that in public, right?" - My Mom, 2k16.

Birds and flowers and flowers and birds. Did some fitting after I took this picture.

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It now takes me about 2 hours and 1.75 yards of fabric to make a short sleeve shirt, which is pretty exciting. I will probably be making a new shirt every other day until I leave, which leads me to:

Leaving for Portland in 15 days!

I am very excited.

EDIT: I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been giving me support and advice, I really do appreciate it. Thank you for finding value in my work.

I've been programming a lot this week for a bunch of projects. Programming is something that really makes the hours fly by. It's frustrating at times but a fun mental challenge nonetheless.

Because of this post I wanted to see if I could run the numbers myself, to compare the shift in voting behaviour since the last time a GOP candidate won (so, Bush) with the shift in racial diversity from 2000-2010 on a county level. My apologies to people who are sick of politics right now but I wanted to share what I've found so far.

Here you can see clearly the shift towards Trump; you would expect counties to be on the black line if their voting behaviour didn't change. Above the line means a county voted more for Trump, below means that it voted less for Trump and more for Bush:

I also made a scatterplot comparing the change in diversity on the x-axis and the change in vote behaviour on the y-axis. If a county is in the top right quadrant, this means that diversity increased between 2000 and 2010 and that it voted more for Trump than for Bush. Strikingly, 62% of all counties fall into this category: (ignore the line, it doesn't mean anything)

edit:

I had possibly the best weekend of 2016 right at the end of the year. Spent it out of town, out of my head and present with good friends, some new and some very old.

Friday

Get into town at 11:00, immediately begin whiskey tasting with a friends dad. Make it to our first bar before midnight, close down the second bar with a duet of Hooked on a Feeling. Back to my friend's place where I actually learn how to play euchre properly for the first time in my life, and continue to drink liquor far above my paygrade. (Never tasted the bottle with the three dimples before)

Saturday

Slept in, beat the hangover with eggs benny, took the dogs for a walk along the frozen beach. Went to a craft show and got a surprising amount of my holiday shopping done while supporting local businesses. My friend's younger brother opened up for Prob Cause and The Floozies at The Intersection in Grand Rapids and the show was a lot of fun! It was refreshing to see physical instruments used in conjunction with CDJs and DJ iTunes. Invited my high school sweetheart to the show and she really enjoyed it, and I enjoyed catching up with her. She had just finished her last clinical of nursing school and said she appreciated the chance to let her hair down. She gave me a kiss on the cheek as we said our goodbyes after, and we have dinner plans for the week after Christmas.

I was DD back from the concert, and I had a good conversation with my friends (Relatively new) girlfriend. I'd met her several times before but this is the first time we'd spent much time together for long. She's a Catholic, who chose the faith as an adult. She's an oncology nurse who works with mostly terminal patients. She tends her faith and positivity like a garden. Cultivates it with great care and deliberation, making sure to select only the proper plants, nourishes them with what she knows to be effective. She doesn't try to be everything to everyone and this makes her more effective at being the things that people do need her to be. To continue the garden metaphor, she doesn't try to grow industrial-scale animal feed in a rose garden. She gave me a lot to think on, and was the precipitating factor in that post I made on Monday.

Sunday

Woke up to almost a foot of snow and more accumulating. Spent the whole day just driving back to Metro Detroit. What should have been a 3 hour drive maximum turned into almost 7 hours on the road. One near-death experience later, and we made it back home.

Now I'm happily typing good things into pubski while I wait for some scheduling requests to process.

Feel good Hubski :3

I got quite a big promotion this week, one I've been working towards carefully for almost two years. Currently, I do clerical work for a medical clinic, making appointments, handling records, dealing with insurance companies, and telephone triage (which is my main task).

I've been trying to get a job in the very small behavioral health team for several years, and it finally is going to happen. I was vaguely aware it was possible, because the Psych Assistant is leaving come January, and several of the BH providers have been asking me if I'd heard anything. I was pulled into a meeting Monday which was the most informal interview I've ever had. "This is the job, the providers and management both think you'd be a great fit, we're not interviewing or considering anyone else right now. If you want it, it's yours."

So I've been starting my training while HR preps paperwork for it. I'll be the Case Manager for the program. I'm pretty excited and nervous.

Passing exams like crazy, and that's not even the examination session :D. Real Analysis? A+. Differential Geometry? Same. Theoretical driving? 20/20. Practice ICND1? Again, a near-perfect score. I'm beginning to think that this is my main skill - just being good in taking exams.

My doctor gave me permission to join the track and field team, although granted it rather reluctantly. Next cardiological check-up is to be made in March. I have to say that I'm really happy about it, after having to take it easy with sports since May I was getting restless.

Dear god, I'm a fucking mess. Almost punched the mirror of my hotel bathroom when I was seeking shelter so that the cleaning ladies out in the hall couldn't hear me sobbing. Gotta pull it together before my Chinese roommate returns.

I've worked 80 hour weeks for six weeks straight doing research and studying. Took my final exam today after presenting my research at a conference yesterday, and I fucking bombed it. I'll probably be expelled. Got put under pressure and spent too much time on research.

Overdrafted bank account, completely out of shape, thousands of miles away from home, no privacy, but no one to talk to. I'd make a joke about how the Golden Gate Bridge is only a short walk away, but one of my classmates killed himself earlier this year. Apparently it happens every few years or so, and it's a very small department. What the fuck is going on in graduate schools? The situation is ripe for a journalist to come in and blow the lid off this shit.

Edit: and the only reason you poor chaps are reading this pile of dogshit is because my girl isn't around to cuddle me into contentedness. Sorry, I'm better now.

Would you rather have a degree from a prestigious university that you felt didn't appreciate you, or have a degree from somewhere of lesser note that made you feel appreciated? I can't decide. Christ, I'm vain.

Had this weird moment a few days ago where I just felt...happy and in the moment. Was at a bar with some friends before one went on a few week vacation, and just felt very in tune with everything, it's really hard to describe but I had absolutely no feelings of anxiety, wasn't thinking much, and just enjoying the conversation and the way I was feeling at that time. This partially carried over to the next day, but I think it's getting to the point where because of everything that has happened this year, it's easier to be happy and appreciate what I do have. Especially physically now that I'm back to heavy running.

As a birthday present I took myself to a welding course at a local fab lab. Really glad I did it, wouldn't mind practicing more often but I'm not really sure how to go about that shy of getting a membership at a Fabrication Lab somewhere. Look at how ugly these welds are! (Note: I have never touched a welder prior to last night)

Lost another friend to cancer today. Catherine was a beautiful young woman who went to the doc for a toothache three years ago, and found that her entire jaw was cancerous. Fought it, got a new jaw, won, fought it again, won, fought it again... and this time was just too much for her body to handle.

She went into hospice care on Thanksgiving, and died this morning, with her husband and parents by her side.

Damnit.

And now I am leaving work to go see the Burlesque Nutcracker.

Life: it doth yank one's chain mightily.

Damnit.

Reddit seems to not so discretely track outbound clicks now. I've told my friends I know that use Reddit and they're all displeased, just not displeased enough to give up that website. I can't judge them though, as even I fall to its siren song during a boring lunch break. That said, since I've been using it a lot less, I've also noticed I've had less of a desire to get stuff. I don't feel an urge to keep track of what's going on in the world of comics, movies, music, etc. Hell, I completely forgot the new Star Wars is coming out this month, though I am gonna see that.

Saw a Hyundai Elantra Sport yesterday. I kind of want to test drive one, just to see how it is. Winter is here. The snow tires are going on my car. This makes me sad.

I have yet to post a Craigslist ad for the comic shop. It's been an interesting month. That said, I'm slowly working on expanding my social circle. We'll see how that goes.

Life is good. Work is in the slow, mostly just a push to get all the technical data organized before Christmas.

My wife and I have been reading The Hobbit aloud to each other in the evenings. I am really starting to like reading aloud and listening to her read. I get more absorbed in books than I do in most movies or TV shows. And reading a book aloud is way more communal than TV is most of the time.

Taking the last exam of my college career (naturally it's a take-home exam, so effectively an all-day effort).

If only a moderately above-average number of things are on fire by the end of this week, I'll be happy.

So my family is planning to head down to Florida for the holiday season to spend time with family down there. I'm going too, which sort of spooked my parents a bit. They are convinced this is the last trip I will get to take with them, but I honestly doubt it is the last one. I will eventually have a lot more responsibility that's for sure with the prospects of jobs, relationships, etc. I'm excited to see my grandparents, but part of me wishes I could spend the New Year with my friends up here. I'm not too bummed about it though, my friends will be here when I get back.

Finished my holiday shopping yesterday. I hope the gifts I bought fill that practical need in the peoples lives.

I've received the bills for medical procedures before the results. If there is anything that can end 2016 more perfect than that one statement, I don't want to know.

Morale has not improved, so I guess the floggings will continue. It's a shit time to work for the government. As morale dips, everyone else seems to put less thought into what they're doing, which in turn means I spend more time cleaning up others' messes. So today was definitely a day of frustration. I would be more annoyed about this if I gave even a portion of a fuck about my own productivity, but meh. My best-case scenario right now is to stand still, but there's still a lot of uncertainty about what's going to happen with us specifically and the civil service as a whole.

My shrink said something a little while ago that has stuck with me. She said (paraphrasing) that it seemed like I was walking in circles in the snow, but couldn't see my footprints. In other words, I struggle to have any conception of my effect on the world, and the result is that few things are especially satisfying. This in turn means I spend a lot of time frustrated and restless. But identifying the problem is the first step, so progress has been made.

I'm looking forward to the holiday break, and I think the time off will do me some good. We'll be spending Christmas proper with my family (as we do every other year), and I think it'll be easier than last time, since my daughter is a good 2 years older and so is much lower maintenance. We don't see my family as often since they're not local, even if they're not far, so that'll be good too. Mostly it'll be nice to just hang out and not have to think about work or the rest of the world. I have my reading list all planned out: more Greek (I asked for a Greek edition of the NT for Christmas), more Dune (Children of Dune, specifically), the odd foray with the Dao De Jing, and I think I'm going to take my copy of the Kuen Kuit, a book on Ving Tsun written by my sitaigung (great-grandteacher) Moy Yat. I'm of course also taking my laptop with as many games as I can cram onto it. As an aside, can any of the Linux folks on here recommend some good resources in that regard? I already have Steam installed, and have as much of my GoG library as is cross-platform installed too.

Crazy busy days, but good. Also building a house on the cliff, it's going to be awesome. And this evening I surpassed all of my friends on Candy Crush and am momentarily king of Candyland. Not sure whether to be proud or ashamed of that...

This weekend I reconnected with a drummer from an old band and we jammed out some ideas for an atmospheric bass-heavy music. I'm actually pretty excited about seeing what we can do with it. I need to learn how to use my little synth unit now and come up with some stuff to go with it.

Also calculated the driving route I take to go to practice with my existing band when picking up people to carpool. 100 miles. Twice a week.

Started doing stuff this week. Academic debts, which looked terrifying but is, in fact, but a heap; learn some things, make others. Cooking, which has always been difficult when energy is low, like it is now. Making healthy choices, body and mind. New Year hasn't come yet, but that's no reason to sit around waiting for the miracle to happen.

Talked to the dean today. She said she'll see what she can do about financing my trip to the forum; said she'll get to it next week. Can't wait.

Had a nice time with a girl from the French division and a British exchange student. Didn't plan to: the opportunity just turned up, and I thought I didn't have any classes for the time, so I asked if I can join them, without thinking about it. Thinking would've killed it, now that I think of it. Been the finer version of myself during the time; fairly outgoing, too. It took some energy but was well worth it. Turned out that conversations on a single topic are difficult to hold up even among three people.

Been revisiting previous relationships in my head, learning from past mistakes without keeping blaming myself for them. Self-acceptance and being honest with myself has gotten me places; accepting the way I am has relieved me of worrying about what others might think of me. By accepting myself, oddly enough, I seem to have come to accept others, too, and not asking a lot from a relationship made those relationships lose the anxiety and frustration that I've so often attached to them alongside high expectations. People in my life have left plenty of mental treasure to recover, and following the leads is both exciting and leading to self-improvement. Learning a lot about what I want, about boundries that shouldn't be crossed and about what it takes to establish trust between people; time is one of the main components, others things being positive, and in the past I lacked patience necessary for the trust to be built.

Been thinking about my relationship with my groupmates, too. They were fun to return to at the beginning of the year, back when we were eager to spend time together again, but now I see that I barely have anything in common with most of them. By now they came to resent me again, not in the least part because I've been a jerk due to personal problems spilling over; I guess I still have higher expectations of them than I should for my own good, and that led to tension. It dawned upon me, however, that, as unpleasant as it may be, it may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. I realized that if I can't lead the group into a better place, I can frustrate them into it, instead. The idea that I can be the common enemy they'd team up against has been a relief. If they'd want to do better just to spite me, I'm okay with taking the flak.

I miss my hometown. No person or thing about it, but the feeling that I've always had when walking through it. It brings me a peace of mind no other place did, so far. Going back would mean staying at my family's apartment, and I don't like the idea quite a bit, but I'd like to go back for a few days still.

Been tired the last couple of days, in a good way. Working through the tiredness makes me feel badass.

It's late, bartender, and I have a long drive ahead of me. Can you find some of that new Bailey's Chocolate Cherry liqueur to add to my coffee?

mmmthanks

Now it's off to the airport. mivasairski is arriving from Vancouver for a month! Unbelievable. There will be much more to say and do, but meanwhile:

I just skimmed through 15 hours of pubski comments and felt moved and touched and transported by all the thoughts and feelings in this pubski thread.

Going to Germany for a week at the end of this week! open to suggestions for things to do/see if y'all got em :)

i have been pants at the scifi club lately and the guilt i feel in that direction is stronger than any other current feeling i have