Fisherman75

Food bank only had raisins. My food stamps were cut by two thirds. Inflation is way up. Specific shortages. I asked some people around me and they're also struggling. No emergency announcements. Feels like a cover up. I heard US shale oil is peaking. All this and I live in the central valley of California, ag central. I should have food easily, instead it's a struggle.

1. I'm a 2 on the kinsey scale; people seem to think there is just gay, straight, and bi and are less exposed to the idea of a spectrum.
2. I'm passing white; part mesoamerican, always grew up knowing I was part native american then took two DNA tests and it was confirmed at least that I was part native mesoamerican.
3. I have always struggled with getting a handle on my gender and biological sex whether it was my year of identifying as nonbinary or people mistaking me for a female throughout my life or my body issues around whether I am feminine or masculine in one way or another; as I cover in another post I am currently trying to wrestle mentally and emotionally with my seemingly feminine pelvic bone despite being male assigned at birth.

These issues are obscure enough to be ignored by basically everyone, so with more conservative types I have to suffer gaslighting, covert and overt abuse, and interpersonal neglect, and with more 'liberal' types I have to suffer a different kind of rejection wherein it is denied that my issues qualify as oppression because there are simply limits to what any one liberal is educated on.

What are some good tips for dealing with this kind of life situation?

I was assigned male at birth but have increasingly started to notice over the years that other guys don't have a big notch on either side of their torsos like I do. It's my pelvic bone. I would go to a doctor to see what they had to say but they've seen me plenty of times and said absolutely nothing about being intersex and now I live in a rural conservative area and they don't seem to diagnose the same way in hardly anything that is a conservative third rail. I just seem to have a really wide pelvis just like a female. Everything else seems male. I am a very normal weight so it's not fat tissue - its clearly bone. I just feel gaslit over it and have been trying to gauge perceptions people have of me in my life in order to get on with things. I hate to turn to the internet but this is driving me crazy. I need something to work with, somewhere to start.

Am I not understanding FOSH (free and open source hardware)? I have always dreamed of open source hardware but it has always seemed unshakeably and fundamentally reliant on for instance massive open pit mines mining all over the world in finite dwindling supply wrecking local ecosystems every element necessary for computer components, factories able to produce at scale fueled by an enormous amount of energy from god knows where, massive pollution and waste every step of the way, and every other ill of extraction and production which seems like it can only be handled by large scale industry almost entirely capitalist for the foreseeable future. Am I missing something? Is it a pipe dream? Even if we find a way to get to a point where we can sustainably and ethically develop any new hardware we need, won't that require persisting in the mean time in the present capitalist paradigm physically? Is this just kind of a microcosm and reification of the problem of democratizing the economy anyway?

My grocery store is 0.25 miles away. That's the farthest I go within a month apart from the bank. I realize that it would be ableist to expect everyone to carry two tote bags full of groceries back from somewhere that far regularly walking, but like what if there could be a service for disabled people to fetch groceries that way in the neighborhood? I saw some old people walking recently in my neighborhood and was considering doing that for them in exchange for some pocket change I needed for the laundromat right next to the grocery store. The farthest I go on a regular basis is a 25 minute walk to get my cashier's check my landlord requires for rent. The buses in this town are too slow and inconsistent for that to make sense for me. I'm actually very proud that I don't drive and wish I could make errands for physically disabled people given my fitness.

I find myself comfortable month to month staying within that 0.25 square mile area. I recently went about 100 miles west to a California beach for a day and night and I feel like my ordinary lifestyle made it that much more profound in contrast. It's strange how that sort of compression and expansion of a sense of everyday space can change the phenomenology of a place, make something feel bigger in an odd way. The ocean was so amazing.

And so it just kind of seems like there's no singular amount of minutes that should define your lifestyle but rather like maybe concentric circles with no absolute outer bound. And so this is very open-ended. Sort of musing here. I could be wrong. I work from home.

I've tried getting into peertube to have something to watch. I'm exploring copyleft music on open audio / funkwhale. I'm on here in lemmy as of this week. I'm playing with mastodon and the fediverse. I've tried studying psychology and psychology-adjacent territory like Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault and Derrida so I can break down what the Facebook algorithms are doing to me, how pop and mainstream music is designed and produced in conjunction with advertising to screw with our heads and make us buy things, how YouTube music suggestion algorithms screw with my head and ultimately make me buy things, and I've tried to start learning to code on a basic level at least so I can convert my chromebook to Ubuntu and hopefully my android phone, which I've paid off completely, to some kind of fully open source OS.

I've let my Netflix subscription wither away after just not paying it and try to not care about it anymore. I have no idea what to do about Amazon or Amazon Prime. I have some very important movies like 'Unhinged' and 'Donnie Darko' on there. I need to buy certain things in the present framework of my life right now, things that, in a small town with a particular disability keeping me from driving, I can only get on Amazon.

I'm doing a lot. But I still find myself jonesing for that death consciousness of mindlessly scrolling through Facebook totally vulnerable to an AI superpower extracting maximum profit from me perpetually. Moderation no longer seems remotely realistic. I can't shut the machine out. Has anybody found anything else I could try? I'm trying to find as many little strategies as possible.

Is it just me or do poor neighborhoods of the US have a safer vibe now and the suburbs like a distinctly threatening vibe? I live in a poor neighborhood and these days being somewhere like this and seeing like a gangbanger-ish car roll down the street doesn't make me nervous but a cop car definitely does kind of like how those same types of gangbanger-ish cars made me nervous when I was a middle class kid growing up in a nice neighborhood in the 2000s but police cars made me feel safe and protected. Like it's all switched for me. A few days ago I stayed a few nights at my dad's huge house in nice neighborhood and I was alone one night and felt extremely unsafe. I was so relieved to get back to my apartment alone in a poor neighborhood. Has anyone else had this experience of such a transition over the last twenty years or so?