october 4th 2024 - back 2 school
SCHOOL HAS STARTED and the impact of being able to actually sleep is immediate and refreshing as expected.
most notably the amount of time eaten up in the first 3 days hasn't completely demolished my capacity of fucking around outside of work and school - my next step for this site is to fuck with javascript willy-nilly.
that being said, working two jobs at the same time does result in a questionable issue with my sleep not being a continuous 8 hours. im extremely tired right now lol
september 28th 2024
I'm at my second job, watching Awakenings from 1990 with Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro.
Four years ago I was working in memory care, having been hired just at the start of the pandemic - the week lockdown really began, if I recall correctly.
And, unsurprisingly, my grievances with the facility had less to do with the pandemic and more to do with the abject greed of the business that it was.
My second job is run by a church, one generous enough to compensate me for my experience for a tenth of a tenth of the labor involved as my position at my old facility demanded. And the lack of profit-driven motivations is clear in my position, as was the profit-seeking of my old position was.
There was a story when I first started working there about a prior attempt among my co-workers to unionize that had been neutralized through the promise of a vending machine and the threat of the building being shut down - and it's clear why, even before the pandemic, why they had so many grievances with the position.
The core of the issues in healthcare, in my belief, is underpayment and understaffing of facilities.
This, of course, isn't news to anyone remotely familiar with healthcare as a profession - though, one I believe to be less often written about. Going onto Indeed, some parts of the country are still offering wages as low as $12 / hour in comparison to their unionized counterparts elsewhere in the country can reach double that.
For-profit hospitals not only demand back-breaking and unsafe labor from their employees, but patients pay the price as a result. At the facility where I made $15 / hour, residents could expect to pay upwards of tens of thousands of dollars for their care - with no guarantee that the facility was ensuring that the staff there had the capacity to be as attentive as tens of thousands of dollars demands.
Although facilities will remark on the number of staff in the building when giving resident-to-staff ratios, the number of staff who actually are capable and more than that - willing - to actually care for residents, is a completely different question.
Often, there were only 3 people actively taking care of a group of 30 residents, all of whom needed attention that, physically, we often didn't have time to give them - or, in the case of other shifts who I was more than willing to point fingers at, lacked the management to ensure even a bare minimum standard of care was being held. I don't know how, but to some extent management was aware of when the State was coming to check if the facility was up to standard - and would go to lengths to 'smooth things over' so any missteps in care were overlooked.
For-profit healthcare is an abomination contrary to the value of human life that should, at the very minimum, be eradicated from the face of the planet. It's obnoxious in its lack of humanity, cruel in its apathy to the human condition and is a reflection of the lows people will drive us to in order to obtain an extra dollar at the direct expense of human life.
all this to say: if you catch me with a terminal illness, know that i WILL be in a pod in the swiss forests expeditiously.
september 15th 2024
big big big big webbed site update today!!
you'll find old aloe00 dot online is overhauled entirely with shiny new css and images - NOW featuring more than one page to peruse.
watch this space!!!!
In other news, I spent most of the day farting around revising the website, playing satisfactory and otherwise not being particularly productive.
i think im going to work on drawings / art side of the webbed site next and go from there.
september 14th 2024
aloe becomes Normal.png
I'm typing this from my second job which began this week, glancing over my shoulder at the FNAF-like security cameras watching over the place. Beside me is the half-empty bottle of gatorade that I've been sipping at over the course of the prior six hours I've been here.
I'm also enjoying a wholly unpleasant sensation of my right hand's fingernails hurting because in a restless fugue of this shift I opted to prepare for my upcoming school term by locking in and writing out 17 pages of notes about the statistics class that doesn't start for two weeks.
It's really hard for me to describe the sensation of my brain turning back on - like a magnet snapping back into place after its polarity was misaligned - slotting into place like it hadn't been giving me trouble before.
But my brain turning back on is genuinely what happens when the stars align and I'm not being smashed in the kneecaps by my various ailments (thanks to a hearty dose of medication and a breathing therapy device).
Given that my condition was like, literally causing me brain damage, it's no wonder that as i approach the 6 month mark of having engaged in this therapy that I become Normal - along with a dose of metformin recently prescribed.
juggling two jobs and being a full time student is certainly going to fuck that normalcy up - but we'll enjoy it while we can!!
september 5th 2024
bad week! in significant pain - money is an issue, as it ever is. more to come this weekend once i Become Normal.
august 23rd 2024
my wife often describes my health as a delicate flower ready to wilt with the slightest variation in environment or stimuli.
which, in my defense, is not particularly something that is within my locus of control. do we blame the passenger for a car crash as it happens?? sure, maybe the person in the backseat blaring distasteful music that only they enjoy and is of no aesthetic value distracted the driver - but were they driving???
unfortunately for everyone involved, a lapse in monitoring the careful balance of my health and wellbeing results in a lapse in my capacity for socializing - resulting in the current situation: lying on my stomach in bed staring at my laptop after work on a friday in the darkness.
which given there's like a ~5 hour window i'm awake after work, results in a particularly limited amount of time i can spend with my partner - which isn't particularly fun for either of us.
i'm sure there'd a better way to manage the situation but it's equally difficult because she's also juggling her own health and mental health wellness that would have to be factored in as well to reach that moment of synochrony where we're both feeling well and socialable LOL
-----
rant about the state of art online:
once someone (usually someone whose frontal lobe has decided to not, or hasn't yet had opportunity to, develop) decides that they're an 'intermediate artist' slightly above beginners they become the most insufferable presence online by a mile amongst non-harmful annoying presences online.
there is an element of snark that's desperate to be laid out by pointing out it doesn't exactly take two brain cells clacking together to notice that a beginner artist is fucking up - but it's equally as tempting to point out that over half the time you're talking to a beginner artist that critiquing them without invitation is completelyyyy pointless LOL particularly when it's teenagers or middle schoolers shitting up a comment section with their half-baked critiques
like no offense but if you haven't passed algebra you almost definitely need to worry about increasing your drawing mileage and having fun than fussing over studying MORPHO of all fucking books.
more to the point: statistically you aren't professionally going to be an artist, so stop making yourself miserable over something that will be a very fun hobby if you let it be fun. stop making yourselves and others miserable!!!!
august 19th 2024
witerally a fweaking webbed site
we've done it!! we've gone in full circle for what my brain can tolerate and manage when it comes to social media.
i thought i was a real fucking weirdo when i decided to demolish my entire social media presence once i graduated high school 9 years ago - devoid of instagram or facebook or twitter for people to keep up with me, i will sometimes google my own name out of curiosity and behold the wonders of what a preemptive excision from the world wide web will do for one's privacy.
i'm sitting in the townhouse i rent after a long year of medical issues (i'm now on a careful balance of metformin, prozac and a very expensive cpap machine in order to have the spoons to be able to sit up and write all this shit)
all this to say i am suffering from the burning urge to create in a space that is Only my Own and having a personal webbed site is the tonic or whatever.
anyway!!! watch this space for wholly needless words being shat out into the endless void of the internet.