Sick of suburbia life! City life is MUCH better and open!

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Public transportation, grocery store.

government offices. Especially if and when I go on government benefits

Can't do without

The rest does not matter that much. It is just recreation

However I would be paranoid and afraid if I had to live somewhere that it is easy for someone to rape me. There have to be witnesses. But not too crowded or urban

plenty of recreation out here as long as one is an outdoorsman. if not, there's always the great indoors.

What kind of recreation?

Because I would be paranoid about getting raped if it is so secluded

cross-country running, biking, hunting and fishing and boating and mountain climbing/hiking, outdoor sports in general.

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Thus far have not had a chance or a desire to do so.

However, if I did, it still would not be worth not living close to buses or grocery stores

Driving costs $$. Gas, insurance, repairs, car crashes

Driving makes me a bit anxious and scared

Where I live some locations have a lot of heavy traffic or insufficient parking spots

And sometimes I get restless, greedy. And then I gorge. Emotional overeating. For that reason, among others, when I purchase some merchandise, such as chocolate, candy, click bars, bread, or sushi, nowadays I only get enough for that one day

To make it harder to binge

Thus it would be too dysfunctional to live so far from grocery stores that I have to drive

And $$ is running out and I might end up homeless and without a car

So I keep the driving close to near minimum

I do all my grocery shopping on a Saturday. only once per week do I leave my tin can.

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What do you do all week long in your tin can?

You can only spend so much time cleaning and repairing your house.

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Because I am 34 years old and I feel like I have run out of things to do

"Life" contains plenty of things I should avoid.

Fear of rape

Fear of dogs

And et cetera

But I only got a couple jobs. And they fired me. Applied for a long time to a wide variety of jobs. No response.

Ain't got no precious lil"friends". The risk of social rejection does not appear worth the prospective reward

And even when someone accepts me, then what?

Everything seems meaningless and useless

Almost everyone, including myself, seems annoying and stupid

Plenty of times someone else has acted like I was annoying

And they were not factually incorrect or mistaken

Just exaggerating

And ain't got no hobbies

Nothing left to do in "life"

Except hate and fear things

Nothing seems worth the effort it takes

Nine months ago started counseling with the current counselor. She told me that the insurance only pays for 3 more months of counseling

Thus it appears that I have exhausted all the options

And when I am awake usually feel exhausted

Sleep nine hours a night

I spend all too LITTLE time cleaning and repairing anything. i'm a slob, dyed-in-the-wool. I admit it. i'm like one of those poor slobs you see on any given episode of "hoarders." i'm too busy with my enjoyable hobbies [music and audio restoration and fitness] to be bothered with mundane housekeeping tasks. audio restoration is a very time-consuming task.


a big reason for my hobbies is because it distracts me from those fears.

nobody seems to wanna hire me either.

mee too, I know nobody I can confide my secrets in.

the "then what?" in my case ended up a disaster, but it was a learning experience, stress the latter word. it taught me what my existential limitations [as a human being] are.

my hobbies give my life meaning and give me a purpose. my hobbies make me feel good that ain't chopped liver!

I was like that before I dealt with my dysthymia. there is light at the end of the tunnel but you gotta find it, nobody else will find it for you. I was lucky in that I found it. I pray you have the same or better luck.

most of my life, I've seen shrinks, and what that has shown me is that nobody else can possibly understand me like I understand me. I've had so much shrinkage that I have oodles of it to share with you if you wish.


I myself am reluctant to leave my nice cozy bed each day, and look forward to sleep at night but just the same if I could do without sleep that'd give me that much more time I can use to do fun things [aside from dreaming my technicolor dreams ]

if that is solid sleep, that is a good sign. when you get to be my age, mr. bladder and mr. arthritis take tag-team turns at interrupting one's sleep. but I should be happy to be woken by mr. bladder, as the alternative would be messy or hazardous to my health.

you would think that that is a bad sign. yes it is solid sleep. b/c needing eight to nine hours of sleep daily makes it really hard to do anything else. no time and no energy.

going to bed at 9pm? that's a bit extreme. but otherwise can't wake up before sunrise.

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to think, when i was 20, desparately wanted to enlist in the Air Force. of course not.

sleep deprivation, firewatch

meals ready to eat allegedly cause extreme chronic constipation. and already got that problem profusely.

getting yelled at. hearing sensitivity

inspections/superficiality

mess halls, limited choice in what to eat

going to the head takes a long time

president trump trans military ban

don't ask don't tell

hazing, rape, homophobia, racism, sexism

coping with change/moving from civilian to basic training, then advanced individual training, then the fleet. then getting deployed

prisoner or war

seriously i am so ashamed of myself. and i can't handle even a part time civilian job. not even easy jobs. what makes me fancy that i could handle active duty Air Force? military?

living in the barracks.

many single-reed, fipple and brass mouthpiece wind instruments. string bass. a little drumset [haven't touched one in decades, though]. guitar and baritone ukulele, a bit. dual-manual home console [Wurlitzer-type] organ, the kind that useta be in many homes. NO sports to speak of but I vigorously walk up and down the hills of my hilly neighborhood, my legs are pretty hard from this. do pushups and chin-ups and other core exercises for my back, recovering back patient. "I hate sports the way a person who likes sports hates common sense." (h. l. Mencken said that)

I played various sizes of clarinet in school. my fave clarinetist was the late great Pierre Dewey LaFontaine, Jr. ["Pete Fountain"]. nobody could make his horn sing like he did.

my mother was Japanese and despaired that I was "too stupid!" to learn it. I think you got the better end of the deal, at least you can speak some Japanese now, whereas all I managed to learn was a few Japanese curses from my mom. in school band for many years they made us march at ball games and parades. wore a slightly ludicrous uniform that looked like some 3rd world dictator's honor guard.

for a brief period I played tuba in the salvation army band, I hadda practice in my car as it was a no-go in the army barracks where I was stationed at the time. I hadda play the danged thing sideways to fit.

some of the ones on your list. am not sure anybody [other than a family member] would wanna rape me, but I better not assume that. some folk are mightily desperate to dehumanize another, no matter what. fear of becoming homeless again. fear of disease and pain and not being able to see a doc due to not having health insurance which is priced beyond my ability to pay for it. fear of being victimized. fear of [what's left of] my family abandoning me. the usual.

if you don't mind saying, what sorts of "wrong statements" from you are problematic for her?

there is wide variability in need to sleep and biorhythms. my sis tends to be a lark, early to bed, sometimes before 9PM even, early to rise, like 5 in the morning. I am a born owl, quite the opposite. I don't really do mornings.

AF was my first choice but they were the first to reject me. navy and marines no-go also. only the army would take me, and only after several waivers [mental illness, physical illness, record]. they always are the last resort. I useta look forward to c-rats, later MREs as they are tasty. they never constipated me, at least partly because the serving sizes are so miserly. IOW not enough "there" there to plug me up. hell, my intestines barely noticed there was anything passing through! Charge Of Quarters at least got me a day off from duty the next day. I was mostly left alone during that. our mess hall was one of the more civilized, there were hiding spots I could eat un-noticed. inspections were no fun. never are. I was not allowed to be my normal slobself. bah humbug. all my life
I saw my army time as indentured servitude, I had a calendar that I x-ed out each day towards the end. yes, going to induction station/basic was quite a dislocation. luckily it just lasted 8 weeks. of HELL. AIT was prolly the best time I had in the army. we just went to classes 8 hours a day, then the rest of our time was free once we did our barracks duties. we were treated like human beings then, not abused cogs in a nasty machine. there were lotsa gayfolk in the days before "don't ask" was even conceivable. no matter what laws, there will always be gayfolk anywhere. they can't legislate the human genome [yet]. luckily there were no "blanket parties" [aka Hazing] in my time.

if you saw me in the army back in the day, along with many of my fellow GIs who were more or less as inept as me, your fears would be largely relieved, of this I am positive. IOW if I of all people could make it out the other end, ANYBODY with a pulse could. the army back in the day was about the most idiot-proofed institution imaginable, everything was designed with the idiot in mind. including me.

When I was 20 years old, an AFROTC captain had the nerve to tell me that I showed that I was "undisciplined" by taking six years to graduate from UCSD with a BS in Structural Engineering. And he told me that ROTC does not take "undisciplined students".

But you can't measure discipline. Someone could be more disciplined in some ways and at some times. Besides, he got a BA from SDSU in criminal justice and he was a cop.

Maybe the academic subject that I flunked out of fourth undergraduate year (Structural Engineering) takes more academic skill than criminal justice.

But you can't measure the skill. And if you could, then what? The captain did not care anyways.

But whatever. That was 2003. At the time the policy was Don't Ask Don't Tell.

The civilian and military worlds have changed in many ways since then.

However, I could not fancy that any chance in military law would make it feasible for be to go to active duty. Mostly it is the social side. Living in the barracks. 24/7. Crowded. That sounds like it is easy to get communicable diseases. The other thing is working long hours. Twenty four hour watch.

But hey whatever.

The military also employs civilians

Civilian working for the military

And some contractors too

And civilian jobs also serve functions

And sooner or later, everything is useless anyways

So whatever

Maybe if I were to have joined the military I would've given framed for a crime and sent to the brig
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Going to bed early makes my energy levels and emotional mood as high as they get. Which is still pretty low.
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Previous counselor have acted totally disgusted when I told them that, starting October 2012, I went to about two new bathroom per week and made bowel movements. At this point it takes a lot of energy to go somewhere new. Numerous times someone had the nerve to tell me that I took too long and to leave. Petco, food max. Some of them told me not to come back. Nordstrom, cafe Leila, performance Bikes. At Starbucks and Tuesday Morning (store), At least two times someone called the security guard.

The other thing is that I strongly believe that almost everyone acts like they have way too much self esteem. A previous counselor told me I was "important", but if I am important then everyone is important. And then what is so great about being important? Same with being "smart". Previous counselor would not tolerate it when I disagreed with them

When I was 20, a psychologist at UCSD told me that the average college graduate earns one million dollars more per lifetime than the average college graduate. At that time I told her I was flunking out of structural engineering and wanted to enlist in the Air Force.

After I flunked Structural Engineering, the school gave me a chance to major in something else. (The policy was that they did not always do that). Got a BA on cognitive science.

Whooptie do

Ten years later I have still only had minimum wage jobs

However maybe the psychologist's job description required that she tell everyone to stay in school


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In high school I took Japanese 1 and 2. Not nearly enough for fluency. Wish I had taken Spanish instead. Where I live plenty of Spanish speakers

discipline has never been my strong suit.

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But you can't measure "discipline"

Someone could be more disciplined at certain times and in certain ways

But whatever

If the ROTC captain had the nerve to tell me that I was not disciplined when I was 20, he should see me now

Now I am much less disciplined than back then

But whatever

Maybe he was just inarticulate. Instead of "undisciplined" he meant "inefficient"

So what

He did not do anything illegal

Besides if I were to have joined ROTC, and could've gotten hazed. Raped. Prisoner of war. Physically injured.

So whatever

The Captain gave me what sounded like a bad explanation. But the outcome was in my favor

And that is much better than if he were to have told me I was disciplined, taken me into ROTC, and then I could've gotten any number of victimizations

So whatever




The Captain was right but not for the reasons he told me

But still, now that I am34, I still fantasize about enlisting in the Air Force

But it is just a fantasy

Just like the fantasy of being a Structural Engineer

Just like the fantasy of being a skinny smart handsome white man. Cisgender and neurotypical

FWIW, when I couldn't find a safe place to rent in a rising market near a city, I moved to my car and drove to an area of declining population. There, I found a house that I could buy for what had been 3 year's rent. Most of my daily needs are just two blocks away. I was lucky to have an unusually good (still poor) counsellor working in town, but she is gone now, and I've given up on making friends with the current residents. More refugees may arrive, though.

For city living, I found a bicycle was excellent. I never needed a car, with all those expenses, and I had the fastest, most convenient way to get around, along with the exercise needed to stave off depression. Using it to find my home, work, and shops, I could do a very fine-grained search, and they were all within easy range. At first, you may only be able to manage a few quiet blocks, but if you make it a habit, range and traffic-comfort steadily increase until you can cross continents if necessary. A 2-month bike camping tour was a highlight of my life.

BTW, I have a friend who lived on a beach on Vashon Is, WA, accessible only by canoe or kayak, and he says it is probably still available.

^^^that Vashon island thing [other than cold sea winds] sounds calming.

...Santa Cruz is sorta a weird " 60s holdover ~ all (mostly) gone rich and slapping each other on the back ' We've still got the 60s spirit ' " ~ for better or worse ~ town.