so tired. life is so exhausting.
today marks the second tech-related job i have been offered and ultimately declined this past year. i am very much looking for a new job, the one i have now i admittedly hate and has always been a poor fit for me, but a desk job where i have to spend time actively solving coding problems sounds like hell on earth to me.
weird, right? i feel weird in my own skin even contemplating this. in a silly / joking way i feel like i've kind of let down trans people and furries everywhere by not working in tech like so many other trans people and furries. in a not-silly way i can hear my parents' horrified scolding in my head that i'm utterly stupid to have turned down a "real" job, even all these decades later. they were always appalled by how much i prefer manual labor jobs and find manual work inherently fulfilling, always telling me i was "so smart" and should "do something with my brain." but i am doing something with it, just not what they or often society wants me to be doing. if you're "smart" you should want to solve problems, right? make the world a better place? but manual work is just as effective at making the world a better place, too. i honestly loathe the thought of having to sit in a boring box thinking about corporate web dev problems that don't interest me even slightly. i'd dissolve into nothing from the sheer, torturous boredom of it all. frankly, if anyone wants me to use my brain for "something" they should start paying me to work on this website, because it's the only tech-related project i'm going to have, lmao.
i've just never been able to monetize my hobbies, i guess. i've been getting pressure for decades for it all the way back when i was in high school, from sometimes well-meaning and sometimes less than well-meaning people to earn money from the things i love. and for a while i tried, i did things like art commissions, and let me tell you i'd rather work the awful job i have right now for the rest of my life than ever do that again. "hate" does not even begin to quantify how i feel about forcing myself to draw things that have no personal interest to me at all.
and in the same vein, i feel the same way about web dev. i love working on my site and it's definitely a passion project, but everything i would have to learn and know to do this kind of work in a business setting i actively hate. i hate frameworks, i hate javascript and all the shitty libraries built in it including and especially jquery, i hate dealing with wordpress and all other backend database horseshit, i hate webpages-as-"apps", i hate everything about the modern web and corporate web design. i would gleefully burn it to the ground without a second thought if given the opportunity. just dealing with wordpress for what, a week? when i was entertaining having this journal be wordpress powered was all it took to get me to decide i hate wordpress actually and purged it, database and all, from my webhost entirely.
i still want a forum, though. i've had one in the past and will (begrudgingly) tolerate sql whenever i decide to install phpbb again, but god. it was a pain in the ass back then, and my dealings with wordpress have shown me it's not any better now. how do people not only choose to work with these things for a living but enjoy doing so? it feels alien and strange in the same way it always feels when i contemplate things like how some people actually legitimately want children. which i mean, fair enough, if anyone's going to be parents it should always be people who are excited to be parents and love their children fiercely, i just can't relate even slightly. reading the job listing for the junior web engineer position i was offered was just. surreal. like who enjoys this? who wants this? i can't even imagine feeling anything but revulsion for the thought of working with all that worthless software.
oh well. i'll just keep hoping the moving stock in a warehouse or janitorial position of my dreams is out there waiting for me. which, that also feels a bit weird to type out, but i'm always serious when i say i enjoy manual labor as a job i'm being paid for and vastly prefer it to other kinds of work. it's so satisfying and people are way more likely to get out of your way and leave you the fuck alone so you can do your job. sometimes they even ignore you like you're not even there... the dream, for real. don't look at me, don't talk to me, just stay out of my damn way so i can work.