thoughts and things written into the void
previous: issue 2.
list updates
i updated the book list (two more books and an author's section) and the youtube list (now with youtube channels). i also added a "back to the list index"-thingy on top of each page to make things easier to navigate, as well as a new websites list, with useful resources, fun stuff and wikipedia articles. there are also two other neocities websites listed and i plan to add more over time. i still feel very new to this, so i don't know many or what the etiquette is.
university thoughts
i've been in university for a while now and it continues to be a struggle. which is very frustrating, but unfortunately studying at university still seems like the most viable option for me. i don't have the capacities to do an apprenticeship ("ausbildung") or to go to an university of applied science ("fachhochschule") because both are more rigidly structured and don't allow for the variability that i need. my health is very inconsistent and i can't commit to a strict schedule, because i just don't know how the next day is going to be.
for example: i was pretty fine yesterday and spent the day hanging out with friends. it was really nice and i had a good time. today i can't leave my bed for long. my skin is hypersensitive to everything (it hurts to touch cold things, feeling the shirt on my skin is uncomfortable bordering on painful - i think this hypersensitivity is called allodynia?) and my muscles feel painful and sore. yesterday i would have been able to go to work or uni, but today i'm unable to do that. fortunately, i don't have work today, but tomorrow i do, so let's hope this is only a small crash.
so yeah, it's a bit difficult and even with my current accommodations (which i'm lucky to have) i don't know if i'll be able to finish my bachelor. which is why i'm currently thinking about changing directions. again. man, i'm tired of this.
PHYSICS (WHAT I'M STUDYING NOW)
i love math and physics, so after trying out engineering just to notice that it was "too practical", physics seemed like the obvious choice and i do really like it! especially astro and particle physics have been my special interest for years and there were few times i was more excited than when i was visiting CERN or attending a lecture by a former astronaut. hell, a lot of childhood memories are hazy, but i vividly remember watching the news when the discovery of the higgs boson was announced or when i spend my pocket money on a collection of scientific essays about it. so this enthusiasm and wonder has been with me for a very long time and on paper, studying physics should be the correct thing for me. unfortunately it's too energy and time intense and the way it's going, i don't think i can make it. or at least not in a sustainable way and i really don't want to fall back into autistic burnout. but it's really frustrating and saddening to have to stop doing what I want to do because of health reasons. it feels like "personal failure", even tho i know that it isn't. i think the fact that i don't even know what is going on, makes it harder to accept, if that makes sense.
LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
so since physics doesn't really work for me, and other STEM fields are probably similar in time and energy costs, maybe it's time to try something else. i said that physics is a long-term special interest (and it is), but it's not the only one. the other topic that has always excited and fascinated me, is books. reading, writing, printing, designing and collecting them - everything about books is amazing. even my current job is in a library! so maybe studying library and information science would suit me. i'm admittedly not great at computer stuff (and that is a part of the degree), but i have a sense for structure and organization (autism, yay!) and i'm interested in preserving and distributing knowledge. i've also been looking into community archives and archiving as activism, and it's really interesting. i could imagine myself doing that and i think it's more realistic than physics. the course is in at a different university, but in the same city, and from what i could find out online, less intense. plus libraries and archives could be a stable source of work, and probably/hopefully more accessible than the hellhole that is scientific reasearch grants.
idk, spelling it out like this, it seems kinda obvious that library and information science is probably a good idea. i just finally want finish something, have something concrete to show for the years i've been at university. i'm still in my early twenties, but seeing other people my age finishing their degree is kinda getting to me to be honest. internalized abelism and high expectations probably play a big part in that, but still, i don't like feeling "lost".
galleries
i added two galleries. the first one is a kind of a fake instagram. idk, i have instagram but don't really use it because i get overwhelmed and annoyed. plus, meta sucks. i do really like the format however - square photos in a grid are pretty aestethically pleasing to me - and i have a few photos on there that look cool. so i thought it would be nice to have a place to put the pictures.
the second gallery is for polaroid photos. i'm still learning, but it's a lot of fun!
small gender / post-surgery euphoria moment: donating all the unopened unused period hygiene products that i still had to a local "social period" box! their goal is to provide free hygiene/sanitary products to people who need them and since i will never (!) need them again and i support the cause, i donated what i still had at home. which wasn't much, but still. i haven't had my period for maybe three years and it wasn't likely to randomly come back, but it was always a stress-inducing possibility. until now! now there is no chance! i will never have to worry about that again and i think i'm slowly realizing what a relief that truly is. it was always in the back of my head and now it's gone. plus, so far i haven't had a single nightmare about pregnancy. which maybe doesn't say a lot (it's only been a month after all), but that was regular nightmare-fuel and it would be great if it stayed far away from me from now on.
worms and binary
the first one is called WORMS. it's a pretty short text, more of a snippet really, about dermatillomania ("skin picking disorder"), which i have, and how it feels sometimes.
the second one is BINARY and no, it's not about gender. i think i mentioned somewhere that i struggle with moral perfectionism and that heavily went into this text. i've worked on it on and off for a few months and i admit i'm still not happy with it. it feels partly unpolished, not as impactful as i’d like it to be and i wanted it to be more claustrophobic and fast-paced. while working on it, i realized my goal/wish is: i want to write texts so sharp they cut. i'm not sure if i succeeded with that, but it still has some nice body horror.
"binary" also deals with (internalized) abelism and activism and i feel the need to clarify that i am not against activism. the text is not a critique of that. i'm also not completely against non-nuanced slogans (like the ones i used in the text) - i'm a pretty practical person and completely get why they are important and needed. it's just that my brain is itself not nuanced and tends to interpret things literally, which can be kinda stressful. i can only read so many signs and listen to so many slogans until they start eating at me. which is primarily on my and my problem, i do however think that there are a lot of i also don't like a lot of the conversation that i'vso i often feel like a bad person for not being able to for example go to protests.