Raising Science and Repair skills.
So things have been going pretty well lately, with the exception of allergies kicking my butt. Jenna hooked me up with some local wildflower honey and that feels like it's helping me get things under control. I know trees need sexytime and all, but I like breathing, dammit! I also discovered that even when my allergies flare, I should probably not use nyquil to induce sleep despite my inability to breathe. Reason being is the same reason I feel like it's a bad idea for me to drink, my brain does not respond well to depressants anymore and starts to not be very nice to me. So natural defenses seem better if I can build them.
As for building things, I'm slowly getting some skills in soldering. I've been practicing desoldering a lot as well for the sake of having Repair around 25 to 30 before I start working with the PCBs for my arcade stick (yup, I'm using the Fallout template for real life. I don't have a problem though, really. Really.). Even though I'm still all noobish, I'm having a lot of fun practicing and learning to tinker. I'm also about to install Ubuntu on my old PC now that I cleared all the media I've collected since Summer when I put Azula together.. This will be my second time giving Linux a whirl, and unlike the first time, I'll have stable internet for when I inevitably have problems and questions. Basically I'd like to learn some basic programming skills and how to work with computers better. Increase Science and Repair why? Mainly because the idea of making things like this is so fucking cool. Will it develop further? We'll see.
I've been thinking about a concept that bothers me as of late. It started when Dan and I were talking about our favorite characters in Voyager (like the nerds we are). Chakotay is probably my favorite, and Dan argued that he was too "beta" for him (which despite my contempt for the concepts, made me go "lolwut?" having seen Chakotay on the show for more than three minutes). And with that I started thinking how Alpha/Beta doesn't make much sense to me, and how it seems to polarize people, especially men. Even worse is the variance on other people's interpretation of those concepts. Like, a charismatic go-getter could be considered an alpha. But assume the person also has some self-esteem issues...would that mean the subject is really beta because of a lack of confidence? How do you quantify, or do you even quantify certain aspects of a person and then just identify based on the difference? Are there particular traits that can determine one's status alone? I could understand the term in regards to animals without a sense of rationality or culture or any of the other things that make up civilization, but the more I look at it, the more confused I am by how people can apply it to other people.
Whatever. Tomorrow I try my hand at some romance with someone I've been connecting with (and subsequently finding myself more attracted to) more over the last few weeks. It'll be my first time attempting something like this in a long while, and the first time I didn't feel so conflicted about just having the emotion in the first place. So, we'll see how that goes. Yay for rising mental health!