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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • I just turned 50. I have an extremely good memory for events long ago, like I remember parts of being 2 years old even without difficulty. This is the first year in my life that all those things seem so very long ago though. I don’t know how to describe it, but the fact I was alive before we got answering machines suddenly makes me feel very ancient when it didn’t before. I also try to describe how horrible 1980s parenting was and nobody really gets that, like how casually you were molested or sexually pestered by adult men and nobody cared, or girls at my high school having adult boyfriends, or my teacher dating Tanya Memme when she was underage, and briefly being suspended for it because it was Catholic school, but she graduated and they went right back to it. (Tanya is a good egg though). It seems very alien to anyone I’ve talked to about it who are younger, but it really was like that, your parents did not give one fuck about your safety. That makes me feel suddenly a lot older, because nobody else seems to understand or have forgotten how bad it was.






  • Web pages didn’t exist. I remember when Netscape began and it was such a surprising idea. We would use telnet talkers, which basically meant opening a telnet session and entering an IP address which you had written on paper, and there were all of these people there, mostly from a university, that you would talk to. I still have several as friends 30+ years later. It was super benign by and large, although there were sex telnet talkers that were sometimes full of pedophiles if you didn’t realize it. Nobody has the Internet at home unless you were in higher education, but there was what was called Freenet, which like it sounds was free internet, which you could only connect to for small amounts of time each week, and it was a question of whose modem got in first. It was super binary and full of ASCII art that was a marvel.

    Later when web based social media became a thing, we migrated to Livejournal, and as far as I’m concerned everything that was good about social media ever was there for a brief shining moment, and I still have friends from there and we know EVERYTHING about each other. Nothing has ever replaced those deep friendships. Before it got enshittified it was an absolutely beautiful place. I’m convinced that the earliest Russian forays into weaponized disinformation happened there because it definitely helped give birth to the crunchy parent movement, with mild vaccine disinformation (pre Wakefield), unassisted birth (the wildly dangerous birth stories I’ve read!), and silly things like claiming shampoo was bad and how you should clean your hair with cider vinegar, or things like extreme breastfeeding. I think it was Russia’s first steps into seeing what the west would buy into being manipulated with, and it was extremely successful. The Russian government bought Livejournal as a propaganda tool, thinly veiled by a company called SUP, and used it to disguise what they really do. Reply All did an episode about Russia disinformation on Livejournal.


  • I am fanatically polite, helpful, and very friendly in person and go out of my way to make people feel welcome and helped. My church friends and my patients absolutely love me, and I genuinely would give a kidney to most of them (well not every patient because some of them aren’t nice no matter what you do but I try to be very patient and hold space for what troubles them). I go out of my way to be generous in other ways despite the fact I have extremely little money, I’ll babysit your kids so you can go on a date, for example, and would never think of being paid. The kids at church adore me and I’m always sitting with a pig pile of them on top of me. People say I’m like a light in their lives. I genuinely want to do everything I can to make their day good, and I’m very funny and genuinely interested in other people.

    But life at home is simply awful. My spouse is a violent manipulative narcissistic sociopath who I am only living with because he’s wrecked my finances and my ability to cope alone, and I cannot afford to leave, and I think he’d hurt me if I tried. My ability to cope comes out of amber bottles, if I didn’t have meds I’d be hospitalized and ripping the hair out of my head. My spouse only speaks to me about bare necessities. I have no control over money at all, I work two jobs, usually 12 hours a day save for Sundays but that’s still 8 hours, have almost no time to myself and he judges me for what I do to relax (which is reading, television, and church). Underneath it all I feel like a black hole because of what he has done to me, I’m not even scratching the surface here. I feel like five different people sometimes even though I have a very good sense of self, but I feel like I have to keep these parts of my life separated so I don’t emotionally bleed on anyone. I really don’t know what will happen to me.