Super low energy this past week. Did the whole hormonal period rollercoaster thing. Had a headache day, but it was pretty mild, maybe a 2. Getting off caffeine really helps, and I gobble up the magnesium and potassium, and that combo seems to smooth things over quite a bit. Felt like my head was full of agitated wasps but there wasn't much real pain. But I was so exhausted for no good reason. Right when I was trying to get my new year momentum going, of course!

It's really hard to stay off the caffeine when you're just dead tired. All that "coffee gives you energy" propaganda is very persuasive and I want so badly for it to be true. I want to just eat or drink something and feel energized, like a health potion. But it's no good for me. I stay off the coffee, I stay off the soda, I stay off the alcohol when the hormones go berserk. I did, however, eat grocery store brownies that spouse fetched for me because I was craving chocolate cake like mad and too lazy to make my own. They were delicious and I regret nothing.

Spouse went and got us a membership at the boujie local gym. The one with a pool and a steam room and all kinds of classes and massage and towel service and the works, and they won't tell you what it costs on their website. He needs to keep his fitness up for professional reasons (plus he's trying out for a special team that needs a higher fitness level), so I guess he figured it was time for us to be 'dults about it. I told him it wasn't worth it for me yet and to get his own membership - I'm working on just getting myself out for walks - but he did it anyway. So that's our christmas present. I'm looking forward to using it (I'd better use it, it's too fucking expensive to waste), especially since we have months of winter to go. Winter is tough for pedestrians.

I did get out for a walk in the park right next to us. It's a beautiful park, with paved and lit trails that are groomed for cross country skiing in the winter. It's very very nice to have nearby, like a chunk of Narnia a stone's throw away. (Except there's hobos living in the north part of Narnia and we stick to the south part, ha ha.) Once again, I feel we were very fortunate with the house we bought.

I'm sitting at one of the rolling worktables in the project area (dining room) adjoining the kitchen. I was working on my dot journal (like a bullet journal) and getting that fixed up for January. I started it back in October and it was going pretty good ... until I got sick in November and I didn't have the time to restart it proper until after the christmas party. So I've got my little cache of markers and stickers and washi tape scattered all over the table. I've made space for the laptop so I could write this entry. Pale cold light filters in from the sliding glass door, and beyond that the unmarked snow lays in a thick rumpled blanket over the porch and backyard. It snowed a few inches yesterday, but the skies are clear today. The world is painted in soft muted greys, pastel blues and palest peach, brightening from the deep cobalts and smeared charcoal tones of predawn. Nothing moves except the frosted exhaust plume drifting from a neighbor's furnace stack. It's 11am, but the quality and color of the light says 8am. I've got 5 hours of good daylight before the dark covers everything again.

It feels like a pretty good day, and a pretty good year. I'm feeling deeply positive. All this thinking I've been doing, all the tail chasing, all the searching and the fretting and the should'ves and the whatabouts. All the exhaustion. I feel like I've come to a place of calm. Maybe I've worn it down, outlasted it, I hope? Maybe it was something I had to get out of my blood. Like, who cares? Who cares about all that out there? Just do what you can in the next hour or day. Just do what you want. Don't know what you want? Then wait. Eventually, you will get hungry for something. Eventually, the seed will sprout. Eventually, the spring will come.

The true things are simple. We make up all these rules and qualifications to keep ourselves unhappy. So much distraction and confusion in our lives - we are cursed with limitless entertainments and busywork tasks and choices and knowledge. A thousand mouths howling about all the things we could be doing, could be thinking about, could be anticipating, could make our lives better, could make us healthier, all the things that could ruin a future happiness we perpetually dream of but never achieve in the current moment, all the things we can blame for our current deficiencies. Chasing the satisfaction we are shown in others but can never taste ourselves. What is this madness. Seriously, what is this madness?

I was thinking about what it's like to be a child, when you truly don't know what will happen next because you haven't lived the repetition of cause-effect that spoils surprise. When the possibilities seem endless and the smallest discovery is a delight. When learning is a joy because it all feels fresh. I was thinking about when overthinking starts, and how the need to do things "right" or the fear of others seeing your mistakes ends up strangling that joy of learning. Perhaps the overthinking is a symptom of craving more novelty, more enrichment, and being stifled by one thing or another. We need to feed ourselves more interaction, more new experiences, more opportunities, not to lock ourselves down and limit our action.

It's easy to say now. Maybe it's just something a person has to live and learn for themselves, for it to really click.

I've a confession: I snooped on spouse's older sister's social media. MIL was blabbing about her username and SIL's username to niece at the lunch where she said they weren't coming to the party, and I overheard because MIL is loud. Turns out MIL doesn't know the difference between a display name and a user handle, but whatever, I was stubborn and flogged the search engine until it coughed up the goods. MIL has bragged about SIL's social media following before and I had some curiosity. It wouldn't surprise me at all if she were popular on social media - she has a strong presence and she knows how to use words - it is more surprising that they haven't seen the opportunity in building a social media following because (I've told spouse this) they could be the next Alaska Bush People. (Seriously, if they could manage to put out content I bet they would make $$$ for sure. But they're too much of a mess to be consistent so, much to spouse's relief, I doubt we have to worry about them getting internet famous.)

So I found SIL's social media (and MIL's, but it throws up a login screen for her and I'm not invested enough to spend effort to get around it), and it was about what I expected, a nonsensical mashup of pagan hard right conspiratorial oddness, like orange juice and toothpaste. She's got 2k followers. Some personal stuff, some alaska wankery, mostly oddball inspirational stuff - the kind of deep thought woo woo memes that seem attractive when you're floundering. And then the praise of trump and vaccine hate. She's frank about being a shut in for years, after the failure of her business and marriage. Only this year has she regained mobility. It's a distorted reflection of her, but not inaccurate.

(But lemme tell you, the reality of how she lives is not as cozy as the photos she posts. She carefully gives the impression that things are functional but that place is a creaky depression pit. I feel bad for her current boyfriend, who came up to stay with them this past summer after meeting SIL online. I hope he has money put away to get himself out of alaska if necessary. Buddy, boy did you get yourself into something.)

Spouse's sisters are somewhat frustrating because I could see us being actual friends. We have stuff in common. We like similar things and have similar areas of interest, but different perspectives. We've been through/are going through hard times. I was hoping the christmas party would be a nice thing to start an actual friendship. Do you want to come and be friends? is kinda what I was asking. But they said no. And I see that their reasons are similar, that they are in similar spaces and trapped by similar patterns. When you NEED to think of yourself as an unusual sort of person, set apart, when you pursue and cultivate your own distinct brand and you are aggressive about your own uniqueness ... you preserve yourself at the expense of relationships with others who might overlap yourself. If I were more generic-mainstream, they would not want to be friends because I'd be what they've rejected (or were denied). But because I'm not, they also don't want to be friends because they are so desperately tied to their own individuality that it would degrade to competitiveness. They define themselves by the gap between themselves and others. I don't think they can maintain two way friendships right now - maybe all they can handle is followers, where the relationship exists top down, on their terms. They are not strong enough or secure enough in their identity to be vulnerable in the way a person must be to have any sort of real connection of parity.

I see those patterns and weaknesses in myself, too. I'm def guilty of needing to separate myself. When you're focused on putting out the message "I'M NOT LIKE YOU" because that's what you take pride in, well ... You doom yourself to swim in small ponds.

They remind me a lot of Kat Von D and her recent about-face turn back to christianity. It's possible to be rebel against the status quo so hard that you eventually wrap around like an ouroboros and become what you left. But to me, that says you value the identity of change and distinctness more than whatever philosophy you adopt or discard. It's just a vehicle. Kat Von D realized (consciously or not) that the field was too crowded with her particular mold of alternative tattooed personalities. She had a tv show, a book, a studio, a respected makeup line. But now what. In a way she helped make the mold that others adopted, and now her own identity is muddied. Maybe she felt the impact of ageing. Maybe she just got bored. What could be more shocking and unique and attention getting than flipping a 180 and returning to the christian roots of her childhood? Now she gets to be a celebrity tattoo artist sinner returned to the flock, standing above, fussed over, made much of. It makes perfect sense, she's farming a new wellspring of attention where she can be the star.

(Also I'm a teensy bit concerned that Kat von D's turn signals the beginning of a popular trend of quasi celebrities becoming vocal bible thumpers because they see that the christian community is desperate for born again heroes to spotlight. I don't like the religious fervor this could bring. Nobody likes an idol like conservative christians.)

I think spouse's sisters are in a similar vein. They're doing their own thing right now, they're walking their own road. They have their own work to do. Maybe we'll be able to be friends someday. Not now, though. They're def not ready, and maybe I'm not ready. Just because you can see stuff doesn't mean you can handle it.

The true things are simple.

I am so very fortunate to be in my current space and situation. Sure, I'm unemployed, and I have to start over, and my health needs work, and I'm fat, and my brain loves to tie itself in rotten little knots. Sure, I've got a lot of work to do, and it probably won't go easy. Also the Internet sucks and our culture is cannibalistic and everything is going to hell except the billionaires who will live forever in their bunkers. Sure, that too. But there's still opportunity. The things that are true will stay true, and the rest is change, as life was meant to be.

How fortunate I am to have had this safe, sheltered pause in my life to slow down and see this.

It's not that I don't care about things anymore, like this awful slide into christofascism. I still think things are important. I'm just not working myself up over it and catastrophizing. I know what's important to me, and I am building the small actions in my everyday life I can do to work toward that better future. I can choose not to buy plastic mass produced disposable garbage. I can choose to look at all my purchases carefully and make sure I'm not buying for the acquisition high. I can choose to buy local and secondhand, and reuse/recycle (alaska doesn't really recycle, but I can use things for a second purpose, like making drinking cups out of spaghetti sauce jars). I can choose to make my food from scratch instead of prepackaged. I can choose to get a box of farm veggies (shout out to arctic harvest deliveries). I can choose to use firefox and degoogle my phone. I can choose to stay off social media (except if I need to snoop on my SIL, shut up). I can choose to learn linux. I can choose to go for walks and pick up trash in my neighborhood. I can choose to vote.

I know what I'm about. They say the best revenge is living well. Maybe the best activism is living happily doing the best you can to demonstrate your ideals in an everyday setting. I cannot change everything wrong with the world on my own. But I can live a life that seems achievable to others who want something similar.

I haven't checked on my astrological transits in a while. Things look calm compared to earlier years. I'm past both my uranus and saturn oppositions, yay. Pluto is about to transit into aquarius, moving into one of my septile points. Also good, I think. Pluto in capricorn can fuck right off, what a mess. The solar eclipse on april 8 might be interesting (the whole series of eclipses this year might be interesting), because I'm approaching my nodes of the moon opposition. I was born the day before a solar eclipse with my north node and sun conjunct my ascendant. So this april 8 eclipse will be conjunct my descendant and south node in aries. It means for a short time I'll have a lot of oppositions because I have a lot on my natal ascendant and the eclipse will bring a lot of movement on my descendant. Then there will be another eclipse on oct 2, conjunct my ascendant, so a lot of transits there. Does that mean good things or bad things? No idea, just the potential for things. Change. Or death, supposedly eclipses can mean death. Sometimes reading astrology articles is like googling medical symptoms. You're better off not going down the rabbit hole.

But other than that I don't have any major transits going on for a while. I am very cool with this.

I'm optimistic about 2024.