I had three years of my life where every thing that could go wrong, went wrong. Among other things, a divorce and losing both parents. I’m invincible now. Nothing rattles me.
I don’t feel pride for past hard stuff I’ve made it through, not really. But I am grateful for the things I learned from the hard experiences.
I think the event that was most “useful” to me, and that I learned the most from, was running away from home when I was 16. It led to an immediate bettering of my situation.
I will caveat and say I was lucky in that my crappy family had a relatively upper-middle-class wealthy city gentrify around us, and I got to reap the reward of that well-funded support system because the foster system in my county was well-funded and capable. I hear that this is not necessarily the case in poorer communities, and people in other areas can end up in more of an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” situation. I definitely made a jump out of the frying pan onto the relatively clean and stable counter.
But going from a situation where I was a minor and without money or access to things I needed to survive, to a situation where I had a job and could use MY money on whatever I wanted (including a living situation that was safe) was far superior than relying on abusive people to feed and shelter me.
It’s always funny to me when people hearken back to their teenage years when “everything was provided for them” and they could just do school and have fun without any worries. I never experienced that. A job and bills was a step UP from my previous situation where every bite of food I ate was flavored with fear and every blanket I fell asleep under had the potential to be ripped off of me while I slept if some adult decided they were mad at me for some petty, cruel reason.
Being kicked out of my family > Barely avoiding homelessness for 3 years now > helping a friend out when their family passed > managing to stay employed > getting my gf away from her abusive parents through a skilled mission of infiltration and gaslighting towards the abusers (used their own tricks against them). Now I'm just trying to scrape out of homelessness again as the housing market where I live is just godawful terrible. I'm 21 goddammit, I didn't expect to be thrown into new game + right off the bat. I still wanna go to college so I'm at least proud I kept my ambitions.
Years ago I might’ve said something like school or overcoming my setbacks, but if that were the case, it’s less so now because my mind no longer squares the view that they’re challenges with the view or understanding that I would not wish many of the things I went through on anyone, if it ever did. Can you imagine going through things you were never meant to go through while people watch silently and measure your self-worth based on your success in endurance as if to imply the moments that haunt you forever were all a game and one you wanted to play?
People like to say things like, “It’s so inspiring you got through XYZ! I could never do that!” The news sites run a lot on that sentiment.
But if you look through history, people of all stripes actually are good at surviving through stuff, simply because there’s no choice. You just go forward. You see this in action in war-torn countries…everyone, of all different stripes and different personalities, surviving in one way or another. It’s not all that unusual to survive shitty things.
So I feel like the worth is in what you learned from those experiences, as some people survive them but don’t learn much from it, while others wring the crappy experience of every scrap of knowledge it can possibly offer.
But you can wring experience from good experiences just as well as bad ones, so wouldn’t it be nice if nobody had to have bad experiences?
Basically, I don’t think suffering brings any sort of grace, but if you are forced to suffer, it seems important to wring any scrap of knowledge from it you can. Tear the silver lining out with your fingernails if you have to, haha.
Before I had a car with a remote, I really liked Keyport organizers. They’re a good way to stop keys from getting clanky and stabby in your pocket. And they have a snazzy flashlight and pocket knife. They’re a fun fidget too.
Oh my gawd!! Looking into this now! Because of my job, I constantly need to carry far too many keys around, including my damn car key fob — meaning when I lean over, I sometimes end up pressing a button on my fob! These look like problem solvers!
Yeah, I kind of oops’d my way into this. Have a plastic tub, and I use…not zip ties, but reusable variants of them…to keep various cables together.
It’s mostly SATA cables, HDMI or DVI cables, and computer power cables and a few small power/USB strips. There’s a weird satisfaction to needing a cable for something, opening the tub, and being able to just lift the right one out without dealing with a rat’s nest of whatever.
Have a plastic tub, and I use…not zip ties, but reusable variants of them
Double-sided Velcro works great for this. They sell pre cut strips but it’s cheaper to buy a whole roll of it and cut it as needed. I actually made a jig to cut the roll down the middle so I could get twice as much. I’m pretty much set for life on that stuff now.
My variant on this is a bunch of toilet paper and paper towel rolls upright in a box with the cables folded up and slipped into the rolls with the connection ends up. Need a USB-C to HDMI? Easy to find. Ethernet, DVI, whatever, all there, easy to find.
I haven’t missed or been late for an appointment in probably a decade.
Literally just put it in your calendar and add a notification for enough time ahead of it.
I also snooze emails instead of letting my inbox clutter. I have an empty email inbox. Those concert tickets will pop into my inbox right around the day of.
I pre-send texts with a timer. Like if I know I’m driving 5 hrs to see my folks, I’ll pre-send a text for that day that says “on my way, should be there around _____”
That way all I need to do is update them if something goes wrong.
Idk, cell phones make being present, available, and on time, really fucking easy. Like I have severe ADHD, if I am always on time and you’re not, you’re fucking up somewhere. Use the tools in your pocket. It’s easy.
1-gallon jugs of Arizona iced tea. I drink a ton of the sugar-free Arnold Palmer, and the jugs, as well as their screw on caps, are just high quality. They are thick, high quality plastic, and the cap is sturdy with a good seal. I use them for keeping pre-treated water for topping up my fish tank, isopropyl alcohol for the wash station of my resin 3d printer, and other stuff like that. We also use them for cat food/litter storage and dispensing. I have also used them to store coins, when I had a job that involved cash tips that were mostly coins. I’m sure there are a ton of other uses for such a container. The jug is free if you’re going to spend the $3 on the iced tea anyway. Buying a similar quality jug/container at Walmart costs twice as much, or more, and doesn’t come with anything to drink inside.
Was constantly in need of more Tupperware type containers for left overs or meal planning and I started noticing that’s exactly what the packaging for the lunch meat I got was. So now I don’t throw those out. I just take the paper label off, clean em up and use them for storing things. It doesn’t even have to be food! They’re a good size for all sorts of things and they are stackable.
Look out for the type of plastic it’s made of. Some plastic are less reusable by design (the disposable ones typically) harder to clean, and tend to harbor more bacteria.
Not seeing Ready Player One listed here. There were some choices made in that movie that might seem fine to someone who hasn’t read the book, but the huge number of absolutely unnecessary discrepancies was just gross.
It was and will always be impossible to turn RPO into a movie, first there are the copyright issues and second the challenges are really boring to watch.
That doesn’t excuse swapping Wade’s deliberate-servitude-to-hack-the-system with Art3mis’s damsel-in-distress-happening-to-save-the-day-by-chance sequence, nor Wade’s decision at the end to shut off the Oasis two days of the week (what about people who rely on the Oasis for their livelihood or for self-worth, like severely disabled people? Hello), nor him saying his friends are his “clan,” something they are vehemently against in the book.
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