It has not been the best year for me.
February will mark a full year of unemployment. This time last year I was happily coasting off of savings from my posh startup job, figuring I could make ends meet while contracting. I chose a very bad time to make that bet. Now, 11 months later, I am jobless, penniless, and living off of charity and my boyfriend’s meager income. Nonetheless, I persevere.
Work sucks
In February I completed a simple contract for OpenSesame. The whitelabelled version of the project is available here. This was all completed under time and under budget, from the extensive playwright testing to the front-end animations. I was asked to use no dependencies whatsoever, so everything in this project was coded from scratch in Typescript before running through a custom compilation pipeline into a SCORM-compatible format. I’m decently proud of this work, though I do wish it had landed me more opportunities. This contract was secured through A.Team before they pivoted to AI. I was, and am, fairly certain that AI is a volatile investment ready to pop and crash an already fragile and oversaturated market. The same thing happened to a lesser extent with cryptocurrency and the metaverse (remember the metaverse??), though AI has been the wet dream of every technofuturist since the invention of the calculator. It’s natural that this bubble would bloom upward and upward, not the least bit stalled by the reelection of Donald Trump and his insider trading partners at Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, and X with their large investments in his campaign. The subsequent payout - millions of dollars of tax payer money and lifted regulations - has enabled these companies to snatch up a huge portion of the American economy, taking out all the air in the room with them.
Now, the AI bubble is not the only reason I am unemployed, although it plays a very large factor. There has also been an increasing trend to hire in-office, and my remote midwestern position (and lack of moving funds) has made it near impossible to find work of any kind. Throughout the year I’ve been briefly employed, first at a Little Caesar’s (I had a panic attack on day 1 and bailed), and then at a local bakery. The bakery was quite nice, I enjoyed the people, but the hours were long and the work was hard for minimal pay. This is to be expected, so please forgive me for my bourgeois sentiment here, but I really am not built for that kind of work. At least, not anymore. As I’ve aged my eczema has only gotten worse (I am now taking injections every other week). I am temperature sensitive, no doubt exacerbated by my childhood days of passing out from farm labor in the summer sun. And, mentally speaking — I’m not always the most stable person. I have complex PTSD and a bakery is a very stressful place. Doubly so around Thanksgiving, when I started working. Socially, it was mostly fine, but being queer and educated really sets you apart from the proletariat crowd. I can’t help but feel a bit guilty about that. Many of my coworkers were friendly enough, but the majority would describe themselves as college students, full-time mothers, or day drinkers.
I don’t mean to make excuses. But when I go to work and my body refuses to let me leave my car - something is wrong.
Good things are still possible
All this is not to say that I’ve been idle. Far from it. This entire blog was created this year, and you can see all the work I’ve been posting here. Admittedly, I stopped around August. I think this is when shit hit the fan and I began to really start looking more seriously for work. After I had my last hurrah with q_service - which I have now abandoned in favor of tfw - I began the process of finding a shitjob. Obviously that didn’t work out. Now, having come back from visiting my boyfriend’s family in Florida for two weeks, I’m looking forward to a reset. As soon as we got home I rearranged the living room, organized the medicine cabinet, rearranged my blog. I suppose if I can’t get my financial life in order I might as well get my stuff in order. Start focusing on what matters. Now that my boyfriend has picked up enough hours at work to cover rent, we have time.
I’m still hard at work on qproj. Mostly, this means working on dev tools for bevy. In the past month alone I’ve completed work on psync to synchronize work between my desktop server and my laptop, and began work on a bevy-native dev console. Alongside psync has come a significant amount of work setting up a custom jellyfin-based media center. I created a full-stack PWA to monitor and navigate my homelab, all of which is available through a public domain, secured with zerotier ethernet-over-LAN, and running through a docker-compose instance on my personal machine. I’ll have to write more about them now that I’ve found myself with time while everybody celebrates the holidays.
Speaking of free time, I’ve been putting in some effort to take breaks from manically pounding out code to avoid the sense of impending doom. I recently starting chewing through Patrick Jagoda’s dense Experimental Games and have been brushing up on Deleuze and Guatarri. I have always been disappointed in the direction that English-language philosophy took since the linguistic turn in the early 20th century. Its sequestering of logic and reason to our linguistic faculties alone - logical positivism as the last truly scientific philosophy - and the isolation from Marxist thought, and thus the vital currents of continental philosophy, has done nothing for the field. It’s been dried up and ruined, disconnected from the rest of the humanities in service to the United States’ fetish for (military-industrial) technology. I only recently found out about the affective turn in the humanities and social sciences - and only by reading outside of what is typically labelled ‘philosophy.’ I find it frustrating at best that my once-alive home field has turned into a factory for Bayesian exegesis.
I’ve been thinking about studying up to write another admission essay - this time perhaps on the importance of non-linguistic reasoning and how it can be used to explore philosophical problems. My prior research was on Heidegger, and I do believe this is there under the surface. The same is true for Wittgenstein, especially the latter Wittgenstein when he continues his investigations despite knowing that he cannot articulate himself adequately in logical-empirical terms. Perhaps this sort of spiritual draw to reason and truth - this subterranean pull to something higher - brought him back. Or perhaps it was because he threw away his inheritance and got kicked out of Austria for beating the schoolchildren, who knows.
The trans experience
This year I started subcutaneous estrogen after taking pills for several years. I saw an instant change in breast growth and development, as well as changes to my mood and libido. It’s very much worth making the switch. Injecting estrogen is painless with the right gauge needle, and if you live in a state which blocks transition care then DIY is easily accessible. Personally, I order needles from a veterinary care website and source my HRT from an organization in Chicago, not too far from my home state of Kansas. I do wish it was this easy for my boyfriend, also trans, to get his testosterone, but as we all know T is a controlled substance for sports (betting) reasons.
I’ve been involved in a local organization effort as well, though this has sort of fizzled out as the economy has soured and our main sources of income have dried up. We’re planning on reconvening in January, and I’m excited to continue the good work. And I have to say I’m proud of my friends and my community for continuing to stand up to the shit-ass world as it is. Even here in Kansas I would see the No Kings protesters stirring up some good trouble on the main strip every Saturday. It’s remarkable that those 60s riot kids are still kicking and biting the hand that feeds.
Local life has been fairly normal. My daughter is in first grade now, finally moved into public school. (I am eternally grateful my coparents decided not to homeschool her.) She’s enjoying herself, making lots of friends, going on playdates. She’s even developed her first crush! This is so disorienting. She’s six, how can she have a crush on somebody?? Part of me doubts that’s a real thing, but I can’t tell her how she feels. In any case, she’s extremely smart and precocious. She’s scored in the top 80th percentile for reading and 90th for math. Take it as proof that she’s been playing on scratch and making dragons poop.
I don’t go out much. When I do, it’s mostly to take my boyfriend to work, to bug my friends about activism, or to take my daughter somewhere. Being openly trans is scary, even if my town is supportive, even if I sometimes pass. I don’t doubt that it’s a factor in the interview process. But aside from that, there’s really not a whole lot to do out here if you’re not a student. I used to visit the university libraries but I don’t do this much anymore, and I certainly can’t afford to frequent the yuppie crunchy coffee shop I love. That’s just another side-effect of being poor, I suppose.
What’s next?
This is not the first time I’ve been in this sort of situation. After my ex and I separated, I lived in a roach-infested hellhole for a while. I was similarly unemployed due to traumagenic and hallucinogenic psychosis. Couch-hopping sucked, but it was doable. My current life is a far cry from that. I have consistent shelter, food, and warm clothing. I have a car and plenty of entertainment. Most importantly, I’m seeing my daughter again, and I have loving and supportive friends to help keep me afloat. I’m very grateful for all of that.
I plan on continuing to work on qproj. I’m fairly close to completing a baseline build of bevy_command_prompt, so look forward to that soon. I’d like to blog more often, perhaps to show off some of my photography (as featured in this post!), to think more about the digital humanities, and to talk about whatever I’m up to. That’s the point of a blog, isn’t it? To that end I decided to stop organizing my posts by category and instead just post shit in order. Like a log… but on the web… a weblog… hm…
Hopefully I get some sort of employment in the next few months. I have a few things lined up, but that’s always been true, and nothing has worked out this far. Wish me luck.
All the best,
-ada