Unfortunately your guy / girl / whatever does not have any deep introspection on the nature of my fragmented personality, because right now my headspace is focused on something that happened today that just won't exit. Today wasn't a particularly bad or difficult day. I was assigned tasks, I completed them, I moved on. But between one of my various odd-jobs and the end of the day there was an incident in the 5th grade room. For reasons beyond me the teacher was having students doing wood carving. With actual metal tools and no safety equipment. Now Phil, the responsible adult that he is, wouldn't let us; almost adults; use the carving tools on RUBBER without making sure we knew proper technique and how to avoid nicking ourselves with the blades. And I'm sure he went through all the proper channels to make sure we were ALLOWED to use such tools. 

For some reason, none of that happened in this classroom. Apparently the teacher had gone behind the school's back for this project and never asked permission to do so, and based on some of the behaviors I was briefly witness to I don't think they actually taught the kids how to carve, because I saw a few of them HAMMERING THE BLADES INTO THE WOOD. Not that proper technique was the issue, it was the gross incompetence that resulted in an actual bodily injury to a student. I don't say this to say that "oh the school I work at is irresponsible" or that this organization needs to be chastised. This is as much a shock to the school as it is to me, an outsider looking in. They are handling this as best they can, and I'm only putting this here because my thoughts will not stop racing about that entire mess. As far as I'm aware, the girl who got hurt didn't strike an artery or go past the dermis, the staff were super nice and helpful, and she got sent home early because of the injury. I have no idea what will happen after this but I likely won't be saying anything more on the matter because 

1. I am an intern and do not have the connections to find out what happens after incidents like this.

2. Anything I say is only gross speculation and will likely do more harm than good.

and 3. I don't want this PERSONAL. BLOG. to just become some gossip hub about what's happening at this school. 

I don't have anything else to say on this matter. It's messy and gross and I don't want anything even resembling it to happen again while I'm working here.

You know I didn't really have anything in mind for this post, it's honestly even more of a non-sequitur than the previous one because at least that one tied back to my internship. This is just sort of a train of thought coming to it's station. I kinda just spent the day going through my tasks and the only one that stood out to any degree was setting up a chromebook cart and then going upstairs to fix the old ones before shelving them for the rest of their unnatural lives. And that just kind of made me think about technology as a living organism. Everything alive has an external source of energy, a way to store said energy inside itself, a brain to think and connections between the rest of its body and the brain. Computers are basically living things in every sense except consciousness. It's a weird thought to have because I feel a sort of kinship with machines and animals more than I do with other people. We receive a task, we are given time to complete said task in the most efficient way possible, and upon completion we receive another. Obviously there's some differences in the idiosyncrasies of flesh and blood person versus a box of silicon and wires. A computer doesn't need to eat or sleep and just kinda needs a constant source of power while I need both of those things unfortunately. I honestly think not being human would solve at least 3 of my problems, existing as a bodyless consciousness inside the wire that can just experience the world free from the limitations of physical space would maybe be fun, idk we haven't gotten to that point yet. There's nothing else I really have to say on the matter I just dislike having skin, especially in this humidity.

With my first week on the job coming to a close I decided to reflect on what I was doing and I gotta say, I feel good about it. A staff member thanked me for all I was doing because they would've been doing these things over the summer. And that reminded my of a time I was working with my dad and uncles. We were cleaning a place my uncle was hired to clean solo, and I was in charge of the windows and vaccuming. At the time I didn't feel like I was doing much, but my dad told me that if I hadn't been working on the windows, they would've been there another hour doing what I had already completed. The most time consuming jobs aren't the big projects, it's the backlog of smaller jobs that need to be completed while you work on the big one. And an extra pair of hands going classroom to classroom, doing odd jobs that would've pulled someone else away from their current job saves alot of time in the grand scheme of things. I think I called it "meaningful busywork" during junior year and that still rings true in my eyes. While it's not glamorous or some vital part of the ecosystem, it takes a load of everyone's backs so they have one less thing to worry about that week and I just think that's nice.

Also not to be rude but all the due dates are janky. The dates listed are all Sundays but the calendar says they're all Mondays. I'm still completing these by the SUNDAY due date for safety but I think that should be updated just for safety. 

I kinda didn't feel like making anything over Saturday and Sunday, and right now I'm filled with a certain indescribable but all too familiar feeling of malice and contempt, so I'm just gonna make this up as I go. Today was mundane but it feels like my own fault. The long cliche humble brag of "I work too hard" turned out to be a genuine flaw as I burnt through my workload like it was never there to begin with, this happened at my previous internship but at least there I was given odd jobs or was able to shadow or assist a different IT person in another building. Now I just sort of loaf around until someone needs help with something. I don't mind the free time but it's almost exhausting. When you can do anything there's nothing in particular you really WANT to do. It's a feeling I don't enjoy even if it just means I get a "free day" because what am I supposed to do with that? it's time I can't spend anywhere else and I just have to waste it doing nothing until another assignment manifests itself into existence. 

I don't know maybe that reflects on some deeper need to always be doing something, because when I get under-stimulated my brain starts to cannibalize itself and get me to do stupid reckless things in order to fell SOMETHING because the sensation of nothing is too great to bear. And if I have nothing to do but think, I start thinking about everything, minor mistakes I made in the past, embarrassing moments from between the start of middle school and now, and traumatic memories. What I'm trying to say is I'm both compelled to - and subsequently harmed by completing my tasks as fast and efficiently as I can. Because doing it all at once leaves me out of things to do, but I feel terrible about saving things for later.

Hey so like there's a fire down the block from my house and it's not like spreading towards us or anything but the smoke is blowing downwind and its very much BLACK smoke not STEAM so its not extinguished yet. I'll probably be fine but onto the journal entry. Today was again lackluster and rather mundane but I chalk that up to again; my own extremely quick and effective working habits. Which is sort of ironic as in school I am like a solid B+ student with the work ethic of a retired racehorse, I'll get it done but It won't be fast. It might just be that ADD / ASD thing where I'm less inclined to do work I don't care about but when put to work on a task I'm interested I get to WORK and burn through it. It kind of makes me reconsider my own interests and future. I honestly should try mechanic stuff at some point, it lines up petty well and even if it doesn't pan out as a viable career option it's still a good skill to have. I don't really have much to say or ruminate about today, other than the SITE VISIT IS TOMORROW and Lauryn makes a guest appearance to watch me do like half a task for 3 hours and wait for the next job because of all the days she decided to show up it had to be during the week after my glitchless any% WR internship speedrun.

Maybe I'll have an unfiltered stream of thought and introspection once I come to a conclusion tomorrow but for now this is all I got.

This is just a sort of mixed bag of unfiltered thoughts pertaining to nostalgia and gender identity, nothing particularly groundbreaking, just me being me. There's a sort of painful nostalgia I get commuting through san diego every day. It's because I used to and to some extent - still consider this place home. I was born and raised here, but now I'll never see it outside of work or school because its 1-2 hours from home and I'll never really need to stay there for extended periods of time beyond passing through to visit a parent on the other side of the border crossing. Every moment we spend in the present immediately fades into the past, we can never return to that exact moment every again. So instead of just stopping to smell the roses, its nice to take a seat and just stay a little while. It's the last time you'll ever be there after all.

Moving on I feel as though with no problems left to really discuss in my life its come down to the sort of primeval entity that is gender / body dysphoria. Because there's never really been a "right time" to bring it up I've spent most of my time repressing the deep discomfort I feel about my given gender but now that the cat's out of the bag and the overlying issues are being managed quite well, this specter that's haunted me since I want to say fourth grade has begun to seep into my everyday life. It's invaded my headspace and now there isn't a day that goes by without me thinking about it. What makes it worse is how hard it is to vocalize in a therapy setting. I get therapy is supposed to be a place where you can feel vulnerable but I haven't gotten to build that connection that well. Part of it is my fault for just passively engaging with conversation rather than coming in with an issue I want to resolve and being up-front about that. 

But another part is this fear of judgement. Growing up during the twilight years of the internet as this new and mysterious technology has sort of branded this scorn into my head. That I, as a trans person, am a punchline to bad joke or just something to be objectified and mocked. The number 41 has taken on a meaning I never thought it could and it just enrages me. But it also makes me feel afraid of sharing these things even when I feel safe doing so, because I'm afraid of being mocked or cast aside as some mentally ill guy who doesn't know what he's talking about. The first question I was asked when I brought up gender dysphoria was if I felt that was because I had an opposite sex attraction and was trying to justify it. I clarified that wasn't the reason but that stuck with me.

Maybe its a standard procedural question. But the assumption that I'm experiencing this agonizing mental and emotional divide between who I am on the inside and the stupid meat body I was born with is because I like guys just.. It makes me not want to engage in the conversation because I don't feel like I'll be taken seriously. It's an unpleasant experience to feel like your body isn't your own, to constantly look at people and wish that you were them not because of their wealth or status or any surface level details but because they are who you have always wanted to be but never had the chance to vocalize that. And all of that being blamed on me potentially liking a guy is just... it doesn't feel good. 

I'll be open about this, I've dated both men and women before. I'm comfortably pansexual. It's never been a sexuality thing. It's always been a gender identity thing. 

that's about it. all I really have to say. complain about my use of punctuation and capitalization as you see fit

So you remember how back in entry 2 I said I wouldn't say anything more on the matter of this teacher because I didn't want this blog to become a gossip hub? 

YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED TODAY

I want to preface this by saying today was a slightly more productive day than in days past. I got a substantial amount of work done despite the majority of them being odd jobs, and I also acquired a new skill relating to administrative work, that being how to do a mail merge. I learned much more about network engineering than in days previous which I am thankful for, as not only did it expand on things I learned in my previous internship, it gave me a broader understanding of the discipline and how things work within a school. When a school sets up its internet connection, they need to connect a router to the service provider, and then that router to a core. From there, the core creates several other networks that devices connect to through smaller routers that link back to the core. But to add security, these devices are connected to a VLAN or Virtual local area network, which acts as a sort of echo chamber. Basically if a third party gains access to a device inside the VLAN, they can't access anything further up the chain because the V-LAN is segregated from the host network. 

The only issue is if something happens further up the chain, everything kinda collapses. This is where redundancy comes in. In the same way cars have crumple zones to reduce impact force, or how an electrical grid uses fuses, networks also have redundancies to minimize damages and maximize uptime. So in the event something happens to say, the core, there's something else that the network can connect to so nothing changes. Or if the ISP goes down, there's a 5G tower or something to keep things running. Basically the principle of having multiple layers of padding to keep things working under pressure applies to all fields of engineering not just the usual suspects.'

AND NOW ALL THE BAD STUFF

disclaimer: if you do not want to hear more schoolyard gossip then consider this blog over, this is just something that kinda PMO.

So. The aforementioned teacher from entry 2 still works here. I can't say I anticipated that but I'm sure the process of dropping someone from your company is alot harder than it sounds. But that's not what I'm here to whine about, its more of a select few incidents that left a bad taste in my mouth. The other day I was going classroom to classroom making sure the kids didn't peel off the stickers from their devices and inevitably replacing the peeled off stickers. When I got to that teacher's room, a good 80% of the stickers were missing and the devices were mislabeled with masking tape, giving them inaccurate numbers to what their asset tag said they were. This rubbed me the wrong way but only in the way that a subtle deviation from the norm can.

It's not a massive problem. its not even a large problem. But its such a minute thing to change and disregard for no reason? I understand on some level its easier to put in temporary numbers so you know what chromebook belongs to who. But giving EVERY device in a room a blue tape label with a name and number is a level of bespoke inefficiency that can only really be met with confusion. There's no benefit to this system other than it was made by the teacher. But that's the less blasphemous thing on the menu. The more pressing matter was something that happened today. The kids at SDGVA do taekwondo in the community center next to the elementary school and its a grand old time for them. But for whatever reason, this teacher held one kid back from doing it. From what I could tell he had done nothing wrong, he hadn't really done anything or was doing anything to indicate misbehavior. He was just in a dark room, alone. Which threw me because I thought at least the teacher would be there but nope. She was out on a porch with a chromebook and headphones doing whatever.

During this little incident I was given a word of "advice". Well not advice more like a bit of context that might help me understand the world slightly more. "The teaching profession attracts Type A personalities". From what I've researched this is considered an outdated model in personality psychology, but it seems to persist into the modern day. Type-A personalities were defined by higher levels of neuroticism and extroversion than in Type-B personalities. Meaning someone in that category is more likely to try imposing their authority on others and ignore any guidelines or procedures involves in their position, as they believe in their methods above others. 

It's an outdated way of thinking but I see where it comes from. Though I'm not exactly in a position to play psychoanalyst when I can barely understand myself as-is.

Hey uh sorry for not getting that friday journal entry out in a timely manner, it should be out by this point but today was lowkey so uneventful that I had no deep introspections or random trains of thought to consider while performing my daily assignments. So uh.. go read the friday monologues if you wanna see some chains of thought. The most eventful thing that happened today was a kid calling me a weird girl and me getting to witness the result of a budget surplus in SDGVA: the room filled with board games, 3 PS4s and 20 or so Nintendo Switch Lites, each with physical cartridges that cost 60$ a pop.

Pretty much nothing happened today, refer back to entry 9 where i tell you to refer back to entry 8.

Today I was more or less a passenger for time as I did not a whole lot the entire day. It was the end of the school year for the kids and all the staff were either having fun and food with the kids or on the field trip with them to round 1 bowling. 

So nothing really provoked thoughts from me from my job. But I did have some ruminations on mortality, and not the existential kind where I have a panic attack. This was the kind where I start thinking, and I don't stop until hours or days later. My step-dad's mom (technically my grandma) passed away recently and I didn't feel a whole lot about her passing. It was tragic, yeah but It didn't really rack me with grief. I felt worse when she was alive because she was dealing with a heart issue and dementia, so she was cognitively declining as her body was withering away. It was sad seeing her like that because I remembered her fondly. Maybe that's why I felt detached at the funeral, because there are definitely things worse than death and this was honestly for the best all things considered. In her final days she was stuck to a bed at all hours and was effectively immobile. But that's not what I'm here to talk about. It's part of it but not the main thing. 

For the last several months I've been dragged along for estate proceedings for what remains of her house. And oh my god this sucks so hard, everybody is yelling at eachother and this house went from old but well maintained to a husk of what it once was with everything that made it a home gutted and strewn out on the lawn. I get that when someone dies all their stuff is free for the taking by their next of kin but like they're tossing most of what she owned. Not selling it or anything just chucking it. Also the place is a mess and has been a mess for months at this point because my step-dad's sister and other people are squatting in the place while they "clean" it. Death is by extent part of life, and the painful process of mourning and grieving takes its toll on everyone in unique way.

But the introduction of financial and real assets into that soup of complicated emotions is bound to cause a lot more heartache and most likely some fighting over how things move forward from there. I'm mostly just tired of getting home late because of all the mess. Sorry if this is incoherent but I'm honestly just too exhausted to care about whatever's going on at this point.

You wanna know what's on my mind right now? I gotta justify to my therapist why I am trans WITHOUT bringing up how gender dysphoria amplifies my self hatred and how genuinely uncomfortable it feels at all hours of the day except the ones I'm unconscious. Also I dunno if this is me being too woke or whatever but I feel like the word transvestite is a smidge outdated. I don't know if its just me reading too deep into something or noticing a potential issue that will be coming up moving forward, but that specific language stood out to me.