demonsarefriendly9198

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Dec. 13, 2019

Today was really chill. Didn’t do a whole lot of anything, really.

Meditated for 10 minutes today. I couldn’t meditate yesterday because my eczema was so distracting. I thought about it, and have come to the conclusion that most likely either my laundry detergent or my soap is causing the problem, and the winter air is making things worse. So today, I brought a body wash that is supposed to be okay for sensitive skin. I took a quick shower, and feel better. I don’t feel perfect yet, because my skin’s still really messed up, but I don’t feel absolutely miserable, so that’s a plus.

Stupid eczema...

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Dec. 11, 2019

Well, classes are over for the semester. We have the weekend to study, and then exams begin on Monday. I have two that day and one on Wednesday, and I’m not looking forward to any of them. But I suppose it’s best to just get them over with.

I meditated for 10 minutes today, as is the norm. About 6 minutes in, I was suddenly struck by laughter, something that persisted, to some degree, until the end of the session. I tried to focus by acknowledging it and letting it pass, as I was taught, but it was too stubborn. Strangely, though, it subsided shortly after I finished meditating. Curious how things like that happen.

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Dec. 10, 2019

I had the verbal portion of my Korean exam today. It was a bit rough, but I think it went about as well as it could have. I'm just glad that part is over.

10 minutes of meditation today. I'm feeling calmer every day, except when my roommate starts chatting. I swear, his energy is infectious.

Only a week left before I can go home for break. I got this

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Dec. 9, 2019

Another uneventful day. I only had one class today -- two were cancelled, and one has stopped meeting because the individual verbal exam period for it has begun. Mine is tomorrow, and I’m not looking forward to it.

I meditated for 10 minutes today, and again was able to sit through the entire session without losing focus. I noticed myself calmer today, my head cooler than it has been in recent days. I never should have stopped meditating, given the benefits it carries.

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Dec. 8, 2019

Today was very uneventful. I spent it listening to Bach concertos and reading more Harry Potter fanfiction. My roommate went home last night, so I’ve had the room to myself today. Even though it gets quiet when we’re working, it’s always slightly jarring to witness the silence when he’s gone, so accustomed have I become to how loud he is.

After I wrote yesterday’s entry, my roommate’s ROTC buddies came by and we played Cards Against Humanity. Being my first time playing, I hadn’t known just what kinds of crazy things come up in that game. My roommate’s friends being who they are, it was quite the experience for a first-time player. Fun though. It’s always good to see them, even if the shenanigans are sometimes a bit much.

Today, I meditated for the first time in quite a while. As I write this, I feel significantly calmer than I have for weeks, months even. I meditated for 10 minutes straight, which surprises me. It used to be that I’d open my eyes at least once or twice in the middle of the session for some reason or another -- not today, as I didn’t do so until I heard my alarm signalling the end of ten minutes. I’m sure that this will help me as I seek to regain control of my emotional side.

Additionally, it seems that meditation helps me control my eczema response. During the entire session, I felt not a single itch as I focused on my breathing. Unfortunately, the sensation has returned as I write.

Finally, I feel conflicted. I’ve been single effectively forever. There was one girl in my junior year of high school, but that wasn’t really a relationship. She really just wanted a hand to hold, as all my other friends tried to tell me. Did sixteen-year-old me listen? No, of course not. Things were unsteady -- on and off and on and so on, and even then, we hardly spent any time together, her being a year my senior and thus busier with school. She was my first kiss, and I can’t even recall what it felt like, though that might be the fault of depression mucking with my memory. To be fair, though, that’s all that really happened. Make no mistake, we had become good friends, and we did talk. We talked, supported each other if needed, and shared some kisses. We hardly spent time together in person, however.

That “relationship,” dare I call it that, ended more poorly than one could hope for, and I have not spoken to my “ex” since we broke up approximately four years ago. And now we get to the root of the matter. I’m twenty years old, more than halfway through college, and hardly interact with people my age, much less ladies my age. Part of that is social anxiety, and another is this fight between the emotional and logical parts of my mind. My emotional side feels the discomfort of loneliness, longing for affection, and my logical side, fueled by my social anxiety, tells me that I’m better off keeping to myself. Notice the wording -- keeping to myself, the connotation of which is that this is all voluntary. Is fear considered voluntary?

I don’t see myself ever having children, or even a partner. It just feels off.

To add to this, I find myself conflicted regarding intimate physical touch. At times, I crave nothing more than to be held by someone who cares about me. At the same time, I’ve noticed that I can’t stand being touched. I can barely tolerate having my hair cut, something that previously did not bother me. I find myself shrinking away, and am all too glad when the haircut is over. Even hugging my own mother feels uncomfortable at times, and I don’t know why -- thank whatever gods there are that my father and I typically shake hands, if anything; my mother hates that fact about both of us.

I feel almost certain that, were I in an intimate relationship of some kind, with anyone, it would soon crumble due to this fact.

Distance just feels so natural for me, and yet it causes such anguish and confusion. I haven’t any idea what to do.

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Dec. 7, 2019

So it’s been a while again. To be honest, now I’ve just been lazy. And tired. And feeling things.

The semester is almost over. This coming week is the last week of classes, which is good. But then we have exams, and I am most certainly not excited for those.

I feel drained and just generally done. I just want it to be over so I can go home and relax for a month. I’ve spent most of my time listening to music and reading Harry Potter fanfiction. Man, there are some really great writers out there. Their world-building and their character interactions, as well as character development are fantastic.

I’ve been reading a lot of Harry/Daphne stories as of late. I love how the community characterizes the latter, especially in contrast with Harry. It also makes me think that I need to get back into meditating -- the ability to temper my emotional side would be welcome. When emotional, I tend to swing between too quiet and too vocal, though not necessarily loud vocal -- as stated in the “about” post, I tend to curse a lot, particularly when frustrated, a habit of which most disapprove -- I really need to curb that one. I definitely did notice better emotional control when I meditated regularly.

There are days when I just wish I could disappear and not have to deal with anything ever again. Just disappear off the face of the earth. I couldn’t even answer why. I just feel that way. sigh

Also, my eczema is really annoying. It’s quite mild, but it’s all over, and that fact drives me insane.

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Dec. 3, 2019

So, it’s been a hot minute since I last edited this journal. Blame the horrible wifi as well as my dislike of typing on my phone.

Classes have been much of the same in the last few days. I got back to the dorm on Saturday night and it’s been relatively chill.

my Ethernet cable finally arrived, and I’m glad it did. Unfortunately, the Ethernet is capped at 10 Mb/s for some reason; Wi-Fi is capped at 100 Mb/s. At least Ethernet is stable, though. It doesn’t cut out nearly as much as the Wi-Fi.

Can’t wait for the semester to be over.

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Nov. 29, 2019

Last night’s Thanksgiving dinner was great. It was good to see family. Several of us also ended up playing some rounds of Uno. Having three decks and five players made it a lot of fun. 10/10 would play again lol

Today was pretty chill. Set up the Christmas tree. We have, or at least used to, this household tradition of buying a new Christmas ornament every year after Christmas when there are sales, so our tree is full of all kinds of ornaments, which always makes it fun to decorate. I figure there will be a time in the very near future when our tree will be able to hold no more ornaments. I wonder if the fake tree we use is going to wear out before or after that happens.

I’m probably going to go back to my dorm tomorrow to beat both the crowds that I assume are going to be coming in on Sunday as well as the bad weather that’s supposed to be coming in that day.

As good as the last few days have been, I can’t help but feel down. I don’t really know why, to be perfectly honest. I have little reason to feel this way, but I just... do. Winter always makes my depression come back to some degree, and I hate it. I don’t know what to do about it.

I’ve suffered from this shit long enough to know that it absolutely is temporary. It’s been six or so years since the first time I felt depressed. Six years, and I’ve taken myself to hell and back many times -- an entry of its own. The emptiness and numbness ends eventually, every single time. Thus, I have come a long way from my high school days when it just felt so hopeless. I’m okay enough to know I’ll be saying the same damn thing in five, ten, twenty years, just because it’ll be more of the same “fall down”-”get the fuck back up” cycles. But the thought of knowing that it will be part of me forever, quietly hiding out to present itself every so often? That’s frustrating.

The only good thing? I’m still relatively high-functioning, mild social anxiety notwithstanding. I really should count my damn blessings more. I could be far worse off. I have been worse off. I don’t mentally self-harm nearly as much as I did in middle and high school. And even then, I was still kinda functional. Curse depression. I’m stronger than this, goddamn it.

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Nov. 27, 2019

Well I’m home for the holiday now. It’s good to be home, regardless of how briefly I’ll be here.

Didn’t work on my concerto today. Still trying to get ideas for the second movement -- composing is hard >_< I have only the utmost respect for people who compose for a living. I could never do it.

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Nov. 26, 2019

Today was good. In Korean, we watched a thriller which was pretty good. I didn’t get to stay for the whole thing because I had to go to my second class for the day, but it was good enough that I’d definitely consider finding it elsewhere to watch the end and find out how it plays out.

I worked on my little violin concerto today, and I finally have a satisfactory first draft of the first movement. I’ll definitely continue to work on it, hopefully to add more complexity and nuance to it, but for now, I can put it aside and start working on the second movement.

I actually have an opening phrase of 8 bars written for the second movement, but I dislike it and plan to scrap it and start over. It doesn’t have the feel I want. The work is in A minor, and the second movement, as it stands, is also in A minor. Baroque tradition seems a bit split here, with some minor-key concertos having a second movement in the relative major, and others having the second movement in the tonic. I don’t know what I want to do. All I do know is that I want to rewrite the theme.

Today, my roommate went home for Thanksgiving. I’ll be leaving tomorrow around midday, which is exciting. It’ll be nice to go home for a little while and see family. And hopefully have more time to work on the concerto. At the least, I need more ideas, more material to draw from.

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Nov. 25, 2019

So it’s been a few days since I last wrote in my journal. Blame the atrocious Wifi of this university. I could have used the Tumblr app on my phone, but I really prefer typing on my laptop.

For an institution whose annual fees are in the range of $70,000 USD, this is absolutely unacceptable. Don’t get me wrong -- the connection in most academic buildings here is pretty good. The dormitories though? Ha! Forget it.

The average throughput is about 10-12 Mb/s download and maybe 10 Mb/s upload, tops. Honestly, I wouldn’t even be upset with that. At home, because of the service my parents pay for, we get maybe half those speeds. However, at home, we have a mesh network so that despite the limited bandwidth, it doesn’t matter where in the building you are -- you get the full speed, load notwithstanding. And it’s very stable to boot -- rarely, if ever, drops out.

Here? Forget it. The signal cuts out all the time because there are just too many devices and not enough infrastructure to accommodate them. So what is theoretically 10-12 Mb/s really averages to probably what I get at home, at best.

Even then, that wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that half of my homework has to be submitted digitally, either via a Web browser or via SSH.

The only slack I will afford the university comes from some of the inherent differences between wired and wireless connections, things I admittedly didn’t really know until earlier today, courtesy of a YouTube video. A wired connection is more stable. This I knew (it’s the reason I usually opt for wired devices -- headphones and keyboards), but I never really thought about the interference aspect. Wi-Fi bandwidth is very narrow, in contrast to Ethernet, so of course it will be much easier to retain data over a wire -- there’s more space to ensure interference doesn’t mess with it.

I also didn’t know that wireless data can only be transmitted in one direction at a time. I knew vaguely about half-duplex and full-duplex systems, but did not know that Wi-Fi is only a half-duplex system. Ethernet is full-duplex, meaning it can do more at once.

In any case, I will be very pleased when my Ethernet cable arrives. I won’t really be able to take advantage of it at home, as I don’t believe I have an Ethernet port in my room, but I won’t really need it to begin with. The Wi-Fi is more than stable enough to use.

Still, fuck this university for not stepping up their game and fixing this stuff. They don’t tell you this kind of thing in orientation. I wish orientation student guides had told us this kind of thing. If I’d even considered the question, I know I would have asked it.

Classes were good today, and I’m very eager to go home on Wednesday.

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Nov. 23, 2019

I couldn’t journal yesterday because of my university’s atrocious Wifi. God forbid it ever work right. Yesterday was relatively quiet, though, so there isn’t really much to say.

Today was much the same. Very annoyed, though. My eczema has been flaring up as of late for the first time since it first appeared in the spring. It’s maddening. It’s not even that severe compared to that of people in my family who I know have had it in the past. Mine’s in small spots or pockets all over my body. As a result, even though one alone isn’t bad at all, and I could very well ignore it, the sum of the irritation is greater than that of the parts. It’s not so bad when I’m awake and conscious and can stop myself from scratching at it, but at night, it’s miserable. We need to find a cure :(

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Nov. 21, 2019

Today was pretty good. Feeling better and better, though not at 100 percent yet.

I purchased a Linux scripting tutorial on Udemy today because I want to get better at scripting, whether to use it for personal productivity or for professional work. However, I still have some setup to finish. Ugh.

Good thing the weekend is coming up soon. Looking forward to have more time to rest and recover.

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Nov. 20, 2019

Today was a good day. I’m in the stage of the cold progression in which you sound far worse than you feel. Hopefully this means I’m in tip-top shape by the time I go home for Thanksgiving next week.

Korean class today was pretty fun. So we’re on the last unit for the semester. Each unit consists of two conversation pieces that include new vocabulary and grammar. So 선생님 (teacher) had two of us read the parts. I read one, and another person read the other. The other guy is normally really good -- fluid and everything, because he speaks some Korean at home. So at the beginning, he was fine. But he got to a long word, and began struggling. And then he made a bunch of silly mistakes and we all started cracking up. It just got worse and worse, and I honestly don’t know how we managed to get through the text because both of us were just laughing so much xD It was great. It’s a shame that not all of us will be taking Korean together next semester. I think only a few of the people in that class are taking the same section as me in the spring. Oh well.

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Nov. 19, 2019

Well today wasn’t too bad. I felt better this morning. Still not great, but better still than yesterday, and certainly the day before. The only problem was my eczema flaring up. Ugh. And to think I didn’t even ahve to deal with eczema this time last year.

Other than that, I had a hell of a time working on my computer. Time for a rant...

So being a CS major, I started using Linux -- that’s the platform on which the majority of development occurs. I love Linux because I hate Microsoft’s inability to make an operating system that works, and because Linux OSes give me more freedom for customization.

Anyways, there is a plethora of Linux OSes out there. I was previously using Ubuntu because that’s the best-known system, and it’s relatively stable. That’s all well and good, but the software packages are only updated when there’s a new release of the OS -- every other year. Being that the most recent stable release of Ubuntu was in 2018, the packages are effectively a year old on that system. I found that unacceptable.

So what did I do? I switched to Fedora, one of the other “big name” Linux systems. The Fedora devs release a new version very six months, which means upgrading is going to be kind of annoying. But. their package repositories are more up-to-date, meaning my computer can stay more up-to-date. Yay for that. So we’re running Fedora now.

Installing an operating system sucks though, no matter what, because you have to start all over from square one again.

The other thing that sucks is that I dual-boot, meaning I have Windows and Linux running on the same computer, and can switch with just a reboot. Why do I have both? Two reasons:

1. Sibelius, a music notation software. I like the workflow, and the sound samples are absolutely gorgeous. Oh, and it’s a proprietary program, the license for which I paid a good bit of money to obtain. 2. PC gaming. Gaming on Linux is coming along very well, but it still isn’t perfect, meaning Windows is really the best way to go.

A Windows compatibility layer for Linux does exist, but programs don’t always run smoothly through them, if they even run, meaning they might be better off run natively on Windows. This is especially true for proprietary programs, like Sibelius and most video games.

The day that Linux is able to fully replace Windows in all aspects as a daily system is the day I dream of. That is the day I wipe the Windows partition from any computer I will ever own and run Linux 24/7 without a backward glance, because the above points are literally the only reasons I hang onto Windows. I have a music typesetting program that runs on Linux, and produces some of the most beautiful sheet music I’ve ever seen, but the MIDI files it generates sound like nails on a chalkboard, so that’s just for prints. As for gaming, well... I’m not giving that up any time soon. Ugh.

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Nov. 18, 2019

Well, we got the skit over with. It was far less awkward than I expected it to be, well, except for the moment I got confused while clicking the scene backdrop slides. Ha. Ha

The skit was more fun than I expected, actually. The script was so dumb lol. Basically, it started at the beginning of the academic term with the three girls (two mean, one nice) catching up. They go to a restaurant to eat, and the nice girl talks about having met me. Mean girl #2 makes a snap judgement once she hears I have glasses. Like, come on. Are we in elementary school here? :P

Of course, I happen to be at the same place, at the same time, and the mean girls rip me to shreds in about 20 seconds or so. My favorite one is this: “How much are those glasses? 1 won? 5 won?” For reference, 1 South Korean won is about $0.0009 USD, or 9% of one US cent (thanks war-era inflation...)! Ouch. The best part? The girl who says it is like the nicest girl ever, someone I can’t ever imagine uttering anything mean about anyone.

So anyways, yeah. It’s over and done. Yay!

As expected, I’ve still felt like utter crap, but marginally less so than yesterday. I’ll take any improvement I can get, honestly. The sooner it’s over, the better.

[demonsarefriendly9198]

Nov. 17, 2019

Ugh. Today was pretty pitiful. I feel like garbage. It's not even a bad cold, but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck. I'll be glad when it's over.

Tomorrow's skit is gonna be *fun*. I just want to get it over with. And if only I didn't have a stupid 18:30 lecture. That doesn't help anything