As Time Goes By
I've reached an interesting and... disconcerting milestone. I wish I could have noted it exactly when it happened, but such is life.
I have had a livejournal for twenty years. That's 20. Two zero. My first post ever was February 26th, 2003. It was about boys, because of course it was. I was a sophomore in high school, and had just been cast in Fiddler on the Roof, though I didn't say that in the post.
Anyway, I'm old. It's weird having a place I've existed like this for such a long time. Hallmark of a Millenial? We were the first generation to make a life on the internet. Almost my entire high school life is documented here. There have been gaps in posting; there was that time I tried to have another journal for three years during and after my move to Los Angeles. (I finally brought those posts here, so instead of a 7 year gap, there's only a 5 year gap before the next.) I have written in other journals. I have a few posts in 750Words, which is designed to get you writing every day, but I have never been consistent with. I have several physical journals I've poured my heart into in different ways. I've tried to write to work out emotional and psychological issues, but nothing has quite ever compared to livejournal. When I was young it was the first Social Media I built community in. I wrote to the world and the world talked back. It was the way I updated family on important life stuff for a little while. Going back recently, though, it has struck me how much of it feels like letters to my future self. It is proof of the things I was going through, logs of how I felt, what internal and external troubles I was facing, and over time has showed me patterns that have always been there but that remain unseen until I could view them with distance. Where many people find reading the writing of others makes them feel less alone because other humans have the same experience, I enjoy reading my older writing to feel less alone; in some way, knowing that I have faced the same feelings before and come out of it just fine is incredibly comforting. It also gives me a continuity of self that can be lost in the moment. I have changed a lot, but I am still fundamentally here, having the same experiences. I can be my own cheerleader looking back at a younger me and being proud of where they have come and what they have been able to accomplish.
So, it's always been this, but I think I really want to lean in to this being a letter to my future self. I'm writing to the me who will read this in a few years. Hi future me! I hope you can be proud of the decisions I've made and the life I have built. I'm pretty proud of where I am right now, but I have no idea what the future will hold.
At the moment, I am an analytical chemist at Oak Crest Institute of Science. I am mired in the study of novel peptides, which isn't exactly what I was hired to do (metabolomics) but it's not too dissimilar. I have a husband (James) of 5 years who is currently my House Spouse. He is learning Blender (3D graphics), and I am learning editing (Davinci). We are making a music video for our friend Jesse. We've always wanted to make films together and we are finally building the skills necessary to do it ourselves. I have been working on my voice a lot, and he has been learning piano and a bit of music theory. I would like us to take a music theory class together since that is something I've never done. We watched ALL of the academy award best pictures, and now we are going through the IMDB 100 best directors of all time. We have completed Darren Aronofsky, Wes Anderson, Ken Loach, Nicolas Roeg, and now we are on Agnes Varda. I have been very impressed with her work, and it's been giving me creative inspiration.
This summer has already been one of the hottest on record globally and it's only just begun. We brought the pool out for the third summer in a row on July 4th. I just got my first pro level Mertailor fabric tail (coral cove) and I'm building my mer character (I hate the name "mersona" though that is what it is...)
SAG is on strike, the WGA is striking. Teamsters might be about to strike. It's a labor summer! COVID is still here, but hospitalizations continue to drop. My great uncle was hospitalized, but only because COVID caused him to pass out and hit his head. Long COVID continues to be a risk, so we are still being cautious and not doing any of the crowd stuff we used to. We are not going to theme parks or water parks, or indoor concerts. We rarely go to indoor sit down restaurants. I want to fly back east for Christmas this year, but I'm still concerned about flying. While hopitalizations and deaths directly from COVID have declined a ton, I think we are starting to see the long term effects creeping up. I have known more young people with cancer than I ever imagined; cancers that seemed to pop up over night. More strokes, more heart conditions, more diabetes... Basically everything they said COVID could exacerbate has been, but deaths aren't counted among COVID deaths.
We lost Chrissy, Les's sister, this year. We can't say for sure it was consequences of COVID... but...
We stopped testing at work. Well, not one hundred percent, but it's on a case-by-case basis now instead of being two or three times a week. Me and my sister were tested when she first got here to visit for a week in February.
Let's see, other major things going on at the moment? Biden is president, but we are heading into another election year. Trump is indicted by the federal government for keeping top-secret documents he shouldn't have (a sh*t ton of them), and by New York DA for misusing funds to pay hush-money, and likely will be indicted soon for inciting the Jan. 6th riots, and possibly will be indicted in Georgia of election interference... But he's still the front-runner for the GOP. I'll believe they can actually make any of these stick when he's behind bars. Until then, he's got a shot at a second presidential term. I was right when I said everything changed with Obama's election... it emboldened the White Supremacists. They fear for their existence and are fighting like hell.
The next couple years are going to be very important.