What's the new year bringing?
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It's been snowing for days here in Portland. The
snow always makes me feel quiet and withdrawn. I
don't know why that is: if there's something
about the feeling of being a little more closed
off from the world, the outside muffled except
for the soft crunching sounds, or if it's just
the memory of winters during my teenage years
after we left Texas for the midwest.

It's not a peaceful feeling, though, not this
year. I'm still feeling weighed down by
uncertainty about what's coming in the next
year. We had so many plans for my various jobs
about opening this makerspace and running
in-person classes again that are all up in the
air now that omicron variant is tearing through
the US.

Yes, I know, there's a lot of reason to believe
that this variant won't be as bad as even the
original covid but that's not the scary part,
right? The actually scary part is that it has a
lot of headroom for becoming more virulent as it
doesn't have a lot of the adaptations that made
delta dangerous. The more people who get
infected the more dice rolls for further
adaptation we get, the closer we get to a
literal and figurative covid omega that tears
through us.

I think I'm also just feeling really sad and
sick of how social media works. I try to keep
some presence on twitter because, despite my
annoying egging, a lot of my friends are still
on there and it's the best way I can keep up
with their lives.

But the cost of that is witnessing just the
stupidest petty shit all the time, people losing
their minds over things that don't matter. I
don't fucking care who the main character of the
day is. No one is actually being hurt by 99% of
the assholes everyone spends 24hrs dunking on
before they forget the person's name.

Like a few years ago when half of twitter spent
a week making fun of a woman who said that she
showers every day but doesn't scrub every inch
of her skin.

People literally spent days debating on whether
or not she was filthy and disgusting for
this. It was surreal because who fucking
cares. It was just days of people being mean but
trying to cast it as a Social Justice issue
because [handwaves and fart noises]. It didn't
matter. It was just gossip for fun but no one
will admit they're just the worst stereotype of
a knitting circle except made up of cliques of
thousands of people at a time.

I think I'm just tired of so many things right
now. I just want to feel less burned out by
everything.