March 31, 2026 - exhaustion and fanciness

Been a couple days. I'd wanted to write a bit every day but sometimes there's too much going on, or I'm incredibly tired, or I'm frustrated that I can't smack the shit out of the blinking cursor staring back at me from the screen.

Sunday, Nikki and I drove to Ashland and we built the floor for Lisa's garage apartment. We started on the half-wall but we were basically dead on our feet and I still had to drive back home, try to sleep (failed), and drive to work yesterday morning.

I am still incredibly tired and my whole body is sore. I don't feel like I did enough to hurt like this but apparently I'll be feeling sore and exhausted until at least June thanks to recovery from the surgery in December.

Today is Trans Day of Visibility. Every year, I forget. But this year, Kristi Noem's husband doesn't seem to have forgotten. Now about all these ridiculous anti-trans bills and policies......

Tomorrow is Patti's birthday and in true MJ fashion I ordered her gift in such a way that it'll arrive a day late. BUT she's off that day and will be home to grab it. So y'know. Silver linings.

Work has been fairly chill lately with the background hum of inevitable restructuring as my company will be sold off at the end of April and will switch hands to new, unknown masters. Here's hoping I have a job at the end of it.

I'm still having trouble feeling like anything I do makes an actual difference, but at least in my downtime I helped Lisa build a carhole apartment. I always wish I could do more. To who much is given, much is expected, and no one you know has been given more than I have. I just wish I had something to give back, or... well, to pay forward.

Yesterday when I got home, Levi had a meltdown about having his technology taken away because he lied about not having his tablet overnight (he's supposed to turn it in at bedtime). He is emotionally attached to an app in which he chats with various fictional characters, powered by adversarial neural networks (I don't want to call it 'AI' because it's not actually intelligent--like everything called 'AI,' it's just aggregated plagiarism in chunks through a screen), and I am not a fan of my kid's emotional regulation being attached to whether a third party's server is online or not. 

We still managed to have a good night. Took him to Walmart to get him some shoes for a field trip to Boone Tavern today where he got to learn what a salad fork is and to pass salad dressing on the right and stuff. Idk how fancy people eat.

pinky up, motherfuckers
 
Hopefully it'll be a decent evening.
 
I'm very loved and very lucky. I'm just also very tired. 
 
---
 
Cash app: $MikkoJTR
Venmo: @mikko575 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

March 28, 2026 - remembering Granny

28 years ago my grandmother died. In the years since I've often recounted that day, and hearing for the first time the desperate, primal wailing of a son who just found his mother on the floor as my uncle beat our door in the morning, screaming and inconsolable. I want to spend this anniversary remembering who she was, or at least who she was to me . Above all, Ortha Marie Chapman Kotlarz was as faithful a woman of God as she knew how to be. When we moved to Blackbottom in 1995, we all stayed in the house on 49th Street with her and her husband, who (whom? Whomst even knows anymore) we called Poppy and whose given name was Ken, for a couple weeks and my mom found soon that the house she grew up in on 47th Street was available for rent. And the landlord, Roger, was a legitimately kind man, and as such had no business being a landlord. I hope all his dreams came true. We'd have been homeless for most of my childhood if not for that man's kindness, and if you know anything abo...
Read more

hello, world

I'm struggling a lot with even the concept of 'worth,' especially as it relates to me. According to various people and agencies, my worth fluctuates between "$22 an hour" and "why are you still here? Shouldn't you be in the ground feeding the worms?" There is an ever-dwindling number in a bank account that tells me exactly how much I am worth, and it's up to me and my partner to work out how to use that number to sustain our family until it briefly bumps up a little bit once every two weeks. One thing I've been trying (and largely failing) to remind myself is that these numbers are not reflective of who I am--if anything, they reflect what I do . Essentially these numbers are the collective response to people, corporations, and governments asking "how useful is this person to me? To what degree can I exploit this person for their utility to me?" To me, human beings have inherent value (with the possible exceptions of tho...
Read more