cyphercrypt

Huayuworld.org.

It's great that the Taiwanese government is giving away free textbooks.

Now I have another four volumes of books for beginners, so I should be able to fill in the blanks for all the low-level vocab I haven't learned. The six-volume set I've been studying has me learning vocab like "prepaid SIM card" and "telecommunications company," but hasn't so far even taught all the colors. I know how to say "ancient" and "capability" but not "sun" or "grass." It's bizarre. I'm glad to get a break from it, and I'm excited and looking forward to understanding more podcasts once my vocabulary is fleshed out. I'm also having more and more trouble finding this advanced vocab in the online dictionaries I use, and I don't want to deal with that at this point.

I was reading through the preface of this six-volume set and noticed that it's intended to take students from A1 to C1 CEFR. With just six books, no way. There's no way that much vocab can be crammed into 72 chapters. The chapters aren't long. And that C1 that students can allegedly achieve is going to be fake and hollow because, it seems, all sorts of A1-B2 vocab will be missing.

The goddamned earphones I just bought died today. Amazon is so full of shit. I didn't trust it, but figuring out where else to buy clip earphones was too much. Just after the phones died, I stopped at my local general store to see whether they sold any. I was surprised to find that they sell clip earphones, and not some off-brand ones either. So I didn't have to go even half an hour with broken earphones, but I did have to pay an extra eleven dollars. I went back to this store on my second walk and got some new earbuds as well. Same price. I was fortunate that today is the once-a-month sale. I wondered whether I could combine that with the veteran's discount the store offers, but that seemed a greedy thing to ask for, so I didn't bother.

Earphones are a big deal because I'm out walking for hours each day and working on my listening comprehension during that time. And they're also kind of a big deal just because I'm used to having something to listen to while I'm out. Being stuck with my own thoughts can be unpleasant.

Yesterday I decided to take my morning walk in the local nature preserve. It was closed. It doesn't open until spring. The way they close it feels so...I don't know. It's across a small creek, and they remove the little temporary bridge that crosses the creek. They don't pull it up, they take it away completely. It feels so final or something. Rejecting maybe. I hadn't remembered when it closes, and I was taken by surprise. After I arrived, I just stood there staring for a while at the creek water, which is so polluted, it is nearly opaque. And people still fish in it. There are signs up specifying how little of the fish people should eat depending on age and sex. I've lived in three towns that had local waterways, and all three of them had these signs. The filthy appearance of the water is the best sign of all.

Sometimes I think about the water having been clean at some point hundreds of years in the past. No, probably it's not necessary to go that far back. Industrialization and its pollution isn't that old.

I saw a bottle of L-tryptophan while I was shopping for a snack early this evening. It wasn't cheap but it wasn't expensive. I thought about buying it but decided that I'd first try increasing my dietary tryptophan. So I spent about an hour researching dietary sources. It's mostly in animal flesh and dairy, but it's also in oats, tofu, and certain nuts and seeds.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8511346/table/T1/

I was planning to buy some foods to increase my intake, but rough calculations suggest that I'm already consuming enough or close to enough. I eat firm tofu, flaxseeds, whole oats, and chia seed every day. I eat a lot of tofu and oats. The article associated with the linked table says that serotonin also plays a role in sleep, and I don't eat so much of the foods listed as serotonin sources (plus my mental state suggests that I may be low in serotonin), so I think I should focus on increasing serotonin more than increasing L-tryptophan. So I'm going to have two bananas for dinner and tomatoes with my bedtime snack, and more bananas going forward.

But I'm also going to try increasing my L-tryptophan intake a little by having more tofu plus sesame seeds tonight at bedtime. I had already been planning to increase my tofu intake (grocery day is coming up). Going forward, I plan to add cashews to my diet. I don't like the taste of bananas, but they taste good with nuts.

I was out walking at sunset, and, according to what I was told when I first sought insomnia treatment back in college, this can help me sleep.

If all this shit doesn't work, maybe I'll buy the L-tryptophan. Maybe I have malabsorption issues. Maybe I just don't eat enough food. I'm not a large person; my caloric requirements are low.

My daily schedule is all up in the air now; I don't know when I'll settle on going to bed, getting up, exercising. I feel less tired when I stay in bed til late morning, even though I'm not sleeping at that time, but I'd sort of rather use that time to study or something else. The difficulty of getting up at that point tends to make the decision for me.

It's starting to feel weird that my name doesn't have tones. I decided to create a "tonified" name for myself. So if I ever have to introduce myself in Mandarin in a social setting or just have a nickname to go by that Mandarin speakers won't butcher, I can use this new name. But Chinese names all mean something I think. I know what I want the name to sound like, but I don't know what those sounds mean. I have to look them up and make sure it's nothing offensive or funny. I kind of don't care what it means beyond that. I'll probably go with two falling tones because it's the easiest to pronounce.

Today I saw Asian people in town, something I almost never see. There was a guy carrying a young child, following a woman (I think). I don't know how they are related but it made me think of a family. At a glance the guy looked younger than me, and it made me think of how easy it is for some people to get relationships, marriages (which lead to children) and how difficult it is for others. Some people get married in their twenties and some date and date (if we're fortunate) and don't find anyone until much later, if ever. Particularly true for gay people, certain kinds of disabled people and other minorities. Some people are born into a community (typically ethnic and/or religious) that they can rely on for partners, some people get a community through various social channels, and then there are those of us who have no such community.

I now compose these posts while I'm waiting for software to start up.

I forced myself out of bed a couple of hours early today; usually I stay in bed until ten to ten-thirty am. I'm almost never asleep during those hours, and I want to do something more productive with the time. I went out walking early and enjoyed the sunshine. Came back and had lunch at ten am instead of noon. I had the big lunch; I'm trying to go back to two meals per day. It's not the size of the meal that was making me drowsy, it was the lack of vitamins. I was misled by the fact that the drowsiness came on immediately after I ate, but it makes sense that I wouldn't feel particularly drowsy beforehand, while walking. I feel fine now, just finished eating a while ago.

Now it's my new dinnertime. I just finished a delicious stew of jasmine rice, golden potatoes, green peas, savoy cabbage, tomato, and soy crumbles. Making delicious food at home is relatively easy and doesn't have to take long in addition to being cheaper, that's I guess part of the reason why I don't really get the focus on eating out I mentioned in a recent blog post. One doesn't really need to know much about cooking: just put staples and veggies together in a pot with water and seasonings. I just used sea salt, fresh cracked black pepper, and bouillon, nothing fancy. I don't have to know how to make it taste good because the proper seasoning mix is already in the bouillon cube. One can also buy any of a huge variety of pre-prepared sauces and condiments. I have however put a little effort into trying new herbs, sauces, and spices over the years. Simply buying one or two new types of seasoning per month is enough.

I think perhaps I was wrong about being at an intermediate level in Mandarin come January, which is when I would have taken the tocfl if I'd followed my plan of applying for the scholarship to study at the graduate level in Taiwan starting next fall. I need another year. I might have the vocabulary in time, but I need to have it reinforced in my mind, and that takes time because I need to hear it again and again. To help with the reinforcment, I've been using more of the resources I have: I'm no longer ignoring the exercises and the accompanying workbook.

Anyways, I don't want to do that degree; I want to do a year-long private language course, and I need at least twenty-five hundred dollars in my bank account to get a study visa. So I might have no choice but to go the degree route; coming up with that much money will be difficult if not impossible.

Now that I randomly get hot, I'm not so much looking forward to being in Taiwan. I don't have firm plans anymore. I don't feel safe here and I'm sick of my hateful, violent, aggressive compatriots, but I don't want to deal with being treated weird as a foreigner, nor the insects, nor the deadly traffic, nor the polluted air, and probably not so much humidity as well. If I find a partner here, I won't want to leave. If I don't find a partner, I'll be depressed, and under the stress of being in a foreign country trying to learn a not-easy language with a future of perpetual singlehood and financial instability ahead of me, I might off myself. And what kind of job will I be able to hold if I never solve my insomnia? That's another thing I need to seriously work on while I'm still here.

For the sake of my skin, I want to move to a more humid place in California, but I need money and I have no employment prospects. My financial situation will be tougher in the poorer county: here, I get eighty bucks a month to help me pay utilities, there, I didn't get anything like that. I can ride buses county-wide for free here with my veteran's ID; there, I have to pay. So I guess I'm planning on staying here and saving up for a temporary stay in a more humid town so I can execute a successful skin peel. I feel rather limited in my power over my life circumstances.

The only web browser that really works on this laptop somehow takes up a shitload of CPU, which slows everything down. Working around that has been trying.

More and more of the web is inaccessible. I received a job notification by email but couldn't get the linked website to load, so I've no idea what the job is. More and more websites fail to load for reasons unknown, even with cookies and javascript enabled, even when I disable the Mozilla browsers' extra tracking protection. The web is getting too advanced, and too insecure in the process. Today I got an email from an online bookseller that some type of bug made it possible for unauthorized parties to view our user account details, including name and home address. I'd rather have my information available to fewer websites, but it's all but impossible to find the kind of books I like offline. Most of the stuff I buy is rather niche, whether food, music, or clothing.

Why don't more womyn sympathize with the plight of dairy cows? They're trapped in reproductive slavery. If we'd been born in different places and/or different times, we would be as well. It wasn't so long ago that a womon had very few prospects other than wifehood and motherhood in this country, and that's the case today in some places. Marital rape was/is still legal, there were no rape crisis centers, social services, or safe and easily accessible contraception to rely on. Womanhood was/is two steps away from cowhood. Now that abortions are more difficult to obtain in this country, we're one step closer. And yet, womyn consume dairy. The production of dairy is another form of female exploitation and abuse.

The Microsoft Azure TTS Taiwanese Mandarin voice I use is pretty good, but it has issues with characters that have multiple pronunciations. Since my Taiwanese Mandarin textbooks keep introducing not-the-most-useful vocabulary, I thought I'd again try adding study of my China-based Mandarin textbook, which seems more traditional in its choice of vocab. It's also a good way to get more reading practice; another beginner textbook is at just the right reading level. More reinforcement. But the non-Taiwanese accent in this book's accompanying audio is unfamiliar and rather annoying, so I thought I'd use the TTS to pronounce the text. That's not turning out as well as I'd hoped, plus studying two textbooks at once is time-consuming. I've found that I can copy and paste from one of them, but I still need to OCR the other, then spend a lot of time correcting the OCR software's mistakes.

I'm so tired. Dragging myself out for a walk is really unpleasant. I try to remember that I end up feeling ok once I'm out walking. But I get soooo tired of the effort required by the dragging. The mental fortitude I have to continually put forth to do this unnatural thing, forcing a tired, sleep-deprived body to exercise late in the evening. The shuffling and sometimes stumbling through town like a zombie. Simply doing the same thing night after night, sometimes dropping activities I haven't finished because I've decided to prioritize weightloss, which means prioritizing exercise.

Why am i typing all this shit out. I'm procrastinating because the software has mispronounced a new vocab term and I'm stuck, too tired to think of what to do. A wrench has been thrown in my study session. Now my audio has stopped working.

I don't know what's going on with my sleep. It seems like I don't sleep at all lately, but that cannot be true because I don't feel as terrible as I feel when I don't sleep at all. I just no longer remember falling asleep nor waking up.

Today someone from the county social services office called to interview me for my (yearly?) food stamps recertification. To continue receiving food stamps, "able-bodied" adults who aren't disabled or caregivers (I think) have to work, seek work, or do some type of work training activities I think. That rule wasn't in place during COVID, which is when I moved to this county, but it's been either instated or reinstated in the past year or two.

During my last phone recertification, the social worker who interviewed me decided I was disabled because my sole source of income is literally called Veteran's Disability Compensation. It says so on the VA letter I submit to social services to document the income. So the food stamps work rule hasn't applied to me.

During this recertification, the social worker asked me if I'd been officially deemed too disabled work. I haven't been. Practically, I am, but I have no official determination, and I told her the latter. She didn't say anything more about it, but now I'm afraid that I'll be held to the food stamp work rules, which will be a huge problem because there are no available jobs that I can do, and my life will really become hell if I cannot eat properly and have to rely on the food bank.

Not only is the local food bank a sensory nightmare, they never offer enough produce. I already struggle to eat enough produce. I'd probably end up with nutritional deficiencies. I don't have enough income to pay for any significant amount of my own food.

I'm so goddamned tired of this clash between a disability I cannot get accommodated and the way this society works.

These recertification calls take forever, so I was quite tired after we hung up. I can't even handle a thirty-minute phone call, yet I have so much trouble being recognized as disabled. It's crazy-making. The problem is that people cannot really observe someone else's stress and fatigue, especially when they aren't in regular contact.

I've been having the urge to go out walking during the last light of the day. Normally, I go out at around nine-thirty pm, which pretty much never feels good but I try to maintain a routine. Today I gave in to my urge. It was a mostly pleasant walk, I felt much more alert, and the sky was more beautiful and had more to look at than it does later in the evening. But then I was reminded of why I go out later: there are still a lot of cars out, and the headlights hurt my eyes. I don't know why there are so many cars going through residential neighborhoods at 8pm.

I've stopped taking b6 and d3 in the morning because I take them with food and my first meal is now lunch. So I haven't been feeling the energizing effects until later in the day than what I'm used to. Apparently, no amount of caffeine can make up for these mild vitamin deficiencies.

Lately I've been forgetting to take these vitamins at lunch; I then end up taking them at around 4 pm with the midday snack/meal, and that's apparently late enough to keep me awake all night even though I don't go to bed until one-thirty am. The insufficient sleep certainly doesn't help me remember.

Nothing else matters when one is in pain. I take the liberty to speak for everyone, yes. I was fretting about getting a boyfriend a little while ago, then the stomach cramps started up and now I'm no longer fretting.

I took my vitamins at nine-thirty am today. No afternoon drowsiness. At least that problem is solved.