5.18.20

With more order comes  more chaos. In terms of my "goals"  I have done a
fairly good job thus far of exercising more and cutting the junk food; I
already feel  much healthier  now than I  did. I'm going  to work  on an
outline of the projects I want to  complete, and a better outline of how
to accomplish them, which is all very good, I think.

Unfortunately, I've  also run  into some  walls. Things  have come  to a
point where push is  coming to shove, and I'm going to  have to learn to
speak up or totally lose my mind.  I've read that it's fairly common for
women to  have issues  with being assertive,  and that  definitely rings
true for  me. I've  had problems asserting  myself essentially  my whole
life, and I was absolutely discouraged from  doing so as a child. Not to
delve too deep,  but my father was very... let's  say "old fashioned" in
the worst possible ways. He definitely wanted a son, and he was woefully
unprepared for what he got. Either way,  I really need to learn to break
out of  that kind  of conditioning and  be my own  person. It's  my life
after all, and I should be able to  live it in a way that makes me happy
while doing the least harm to others that I can.

Some other good news, is that I've  got some more concrete focus on what
I  want to  do;  I would  really  like to  become a  Sysadmin  or a  NOC
Engineer, and to that  end I've decided that I'm going  to focus hard on
getting the A+  and Network+ certifications before the end  of the year,
and  start really  studying  Python, because  that seems  to  be a  very
popular skill  listed on  job applications,  and writing  simple scripts
shouldn't be much harder than  learning simple shell scripting (I hope).
I do wish I  had someone to study with who was in  a similar position as
me,  but I've  rarely been  averse to  going it  alone, and  this is  no
different.

Thank you, dear reader, for taking another peek into my life. I hope the
weather where you are is as pleasant as the weather where I am. It feels
like a rebirth.

-Vx