gods. i really don't even know where to begin with these past few days.
i try to avoid getting into personal information about other peoples' lives for their privacy when i relay events, so i guess it'll have to suffice to say there's been shit going down at the spouse's job and i am. livid. livid. as to how their boss and coworkers have been to them about the whole thing. the only thing preventing me from going on a war path and having these peoples' heads on a platter is that it wouldn't make the spouse's situation any better at all, and would likely only make things even worse. so i abstain, seething as i am. for now. i am fully prepared to look into legal action if i have to, though.
people at my own job remain not quite as infuriating as spouse's coworkers but still exhausting to be around. i don't really want to have to deal with people whose intellectual curiosity stopped at age 5 and react to, for example, the existence of foods that are not a plain hamburger with cheese and ketchup on it with suspicion and disdain.
eww, you eat eel!? eeeewwww!!!
yeah, and so what if i do? why's that such a big goddamn deal? the food you consider "normal" is entirely cultural, there isn't any actual objective and quantifiable difference between the "weirdness" of eating a cow vs an eel. there's just an (extremely small) amount of animals you're taught are for Food and everything else Isn't. for Reasons. and people just accept this blindly. like even as a neurodivergent person with food texture and taste sensitivities i'll try most things once, even if i don't like it i'll know i don't for the future. and even if you don't want to try things, why attach value to that?
grumble.
and yet. not even ten minutes later everyone around me gets into a conversation that culminates in everyone repeating some mantra of life is too short to be weird!
yeah, it's good to be weird! why would you want to be the same as everyone else?
from the same person who couldn't stop ewwwing at me that i eat eel and avocado roll sushi not even ten minutes before.
i really can't stand this kind of bullshit, if i'm being honest. it's infuriating the way people are so eager to embrace "weirdness," but only if you're the "acceptable" amount of weird. the Real Weirdos will be bullied ruthlessly until they conform, as per the last almost four decades of my life have been. i always feel caught in the crosshairs of this, always painfully aware of how shallow far too many peoples' acceptance of the truly weird actually is. you see this also in how again far too many terminally online LGBTQ+ people act as gatekeepers to the community, though that's a post for another time.
so infuriating. my personality has been permanently damaged from how vicious people have been to me my entire damn life, justifying it with that i'm "weird" and therefore an acceptable target. and you're never allowed to be angry, anger is the realm of Bad People Who Aren't Really Victims, You Brought This On Yourself The Moment You Became Angry. "real" victims are only allowed to stand silently weathering the storm, a single tear rolling down their cheek in protest of the cruelty, i guess. but even taking it silently is taken as proof that you deserve it, why didn't you just stand up for yourself? you pussy? you doormat? clearly if you were really being abused you would have done something about it.
i don't want to be bitter. i don't want to be filled with the world's venom, and i fight every day to resist it, though too many days the evils of the world are overwhelming and the fight is lost, the struggle to resist peoples' cruelty condemning me to be biting and mean myself left to tomorrow. i wish it didn't have to be like this. i don't want it to be like this, and i try so hard to embody what i want to see in the world, to be forgiving and kind and patient with people and their problems and ills and meanness, but not everyone deserves it and sometimes i just can't. and i feel like when my legs finally break out from under me and i'm crushed by the weight of everything in my life, most of the people i trust and thought were my friends just stare at me. what's wrong with you? why aren't you trying? it's like you want to suffer, like you enjoy it.
i've lost so many. so many friends who sided with the people who were the abusers and bullies in my life. i'm so tired of losing people i thought cared about me and were friends. and yet at the same time if they're going to listen to the sweet lies of the people who broke me over myself, well, they're unfortunately not worth keeping around anyway.
i just don't need this either. when you already can't feel human connection anymore, every connection becomes an ever important lifeline as they dwindle. even if i can't feel them i want to know they're there, damn it, that someone fucking cares. that everyone won't turn away when i need them most over, and over, and fucking over again.
whatever.
this journal format is still working quite well for me, so i'll probably continue doing it indefinitely. i've already had to endure reading the criticisms of professional tech workers about "using php to inject layout is not what you should be using php for," but frankly i don't care about what i "should" be using php for in a small personal site with traffic that largely amounts to myself checking the live site for coding errors. i've done my time using javascript and iframes for layout and fucking hated it; i was only even tolerating it at all because i love neocities so much. after looking into static site generators i honestly also don't see what everyone's so jazzed about them over; either you're uploading your entire 80 page static site when you make the most minute layout change (absolutely fucking not interested in that even slightly) or you install it to your server and just have it generate the site there, which i guess is "better" than php-generated html in some mystical way nobody ever wants to actually quantify to me, but i'm very much less than impressed with that idea as well.
all that really matters is my site's working out well for me in the ways i want it to with regards to this journal. may i have many more entries in the future to write.