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Toth

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  1. Okay, elaboration to that, my social anxiety is wrecking me at the moment and I feel particularly wretched about comparing myself to a guy who seems to have all this social networking stuff down. Because I'm becoming painfully aware that this is my third year at my school and I still haven't managed to get any kind of acquaintances I can freely talk with. And now I'm basically in awe watching this newly hired guy who got a place in my staff room. One week later a colleague was already driving him around the city and now he's got a flock of colleagues around him with which he makes plans for dinner and sports activities, while every Monday he's telling his tales of how he's crossed half the country to spend the weekend with his various illustrious friends. I'm getting painfully self-conscious listening in to this sitting at my lone table at the door while the rest of the room has created this tightly-knit group at the windows. And again, I have my pride. I can't exactly insert myself into these conversations or move to one of their tables. That would look too desperate. If they wanted me anywhere near them, they would have asked me. God, this sounds so childish typing it out, but I guess it just adds to the glum and isolated atmosphere going on. It's not helping that I must look particularly vulnerable and easy to push around at the moment. Over the last two weeks I had several instances of strangers on the street mocking me as I passed them. The students must have picked up on that as well and keep trying to push the boundaries. And as if a blast back from the past, two of my classes have spontaneously taken on the habit of yelling my name at the top of their lungs whenever they see me, something that I already complained about in the past in regards to something middle-schoolers have been doing with me, but never high-schoolers and not to the degree that it's two quarters of a class doing it and then hide in the crowd when I come around to discuss why this is unacceptable. So now I can't even go anywhere outside the staff room without causing an uproar. -.-
  2. I must admit, the Corona lockdown had succeeded in turning me crazy. I don't have a garden. I don't even have a balcony. But still at the beginning of all this I jokingly thought to myself that it would be neat to be self-sustaining like some kind of prepper. So I started randomly planting all kinds of seeds that piled up from whatever fruits were currently on the table. I planted loads and loads of orange, lemon, tangerine, pear, pomegrenate, tomato, pepper, currant, strawberry, cherry, mirabelle and gooseberry seeds. Absolutely convinced that they wouldn't become anything anyway, so I planted them in wild abandon. Well, fuck me. By now all window sills and the whole dining table are covered in plants. Oranges, tangerines, peppers and tomatoes definitely work the best. Mad as hell that my lemons and pears got killed by a spider mite infestation. For the last month I have been able to harvest lots of tomatoes and peppers, the peppers even tasting astonishingly close to the hyperengineered supermarket peppers I took the seeds from. In fact: Those fucking peppers! I took all the seeds from a single yellow pepper that I thought wasn't ripe anyway and threw all of them into one bucket of soil, learning far too late that yellow peppers are just a type of pepper and not a state of ripening. Next I knew I had 45 goddamn pepper plants to tend to. I... honestly can highly recommend it, these little guys are perfect for your little home farming enterprise. The pomegrenates are also terrific. Planted three, two sprouted and even though one at one point looked a bit frail, they have now grown to quite the impressive height. Unfortunately I don't have the patience for any kind of stone fruits. I read somewhere that you can drastically increase the speed of cherries sprouting by carefully cracking the shells, so I did that, but it didn't lead to anything. Berries hate me as well. Now the next step of insanity came upon me: On my way back home I found a couple of marron trees that were already dropping their fruits. Well... I grabbed a handful of them and we'll see whether I can make some of those sprout. Has anyone experience with those?
  3. *squints at Superman & Lois* Well, there is still hope...
  4. Thanks. And of course good luck with your plans! In my case I probably shouldn't use my spare time reading heated tirades in a troll infested other forum and wedge myself in. I may be starved of social interaction, but this is the opposite extreme. -.-
  5. Ugh... I'm actually not that much down as I usually am when I post here, but I am feeling particularly pathetic right now. Earlier in between lessons I saw that a comparably recent acquaintance (whom I met two years ago, but only very recently had some longer conversations with) was online in Skype despite it being the middle of the night in her time zone. I felt somewhat mischievous because she barely ever looks into Skype at all if I message her, so I rang up a call. Nothing happened and she got offline an hour later, but now I look at this unerasable "No answer" thing and feel bad for pestering someone for no good reason. I guess it's just the penultimate episode in a string of events that keep reminding me that I don't have any kind of real life social network and once the online contacts I found disconnect I'm left alone entirely. And that seems to happen quite frequently recently because of acting up connections or people simply being busy and absent (myself included, I'm frustratingly aware of that). Meanwhile in the real life staff room at my table of four two people changed seats elsewhere and the fourth is barely present. So if there is a conversation in the room, I'm physically shut off from it, sitting alone behind their back at the other side of the room, which is a literal representation of how I always feel with people. While I may be able to follow after them, it feels like I'd be overstepping my place/look desperate if I do that. I know, my worries must seem extremely silly...
  6. Anyone else following Higurashi Sotsu or Magia Record right now? In Higurashi Gou/Sotsu's 34th episode they went and had a bit of a meta escalation extremely reminiscent of Umineko. I seem to be in quite a minority with my take on things, but given how the internet hivemind bolstered by leaks and the like always turns out right, I'm somewhat confused. Meanwhile Magia Record keeps massively improving upon the game's story, setting up in wide strides the events of the game's finale. And I pretty much love it! Damn, the writing is impressive and I'm still awed what the fuck happened in the gap between this second season and the painfully mediocre first season.
  7. Just fyi, in my now deleted post I covered that on a weekday I have to be up at 4:45am. If I have to wake up any earlier, I can scratch sleep altogether.
  8. What is happening? What should have been good is mediocre and what should have been mediocre is suddenly actually great? Now a couple of weeks ago the second season of the Higurashi sequel, now dubbed Higurashi Sotsu, started. Individual scenes are well crafted and there are a lot of interesting visual callbacks to the original Higurashi in there. Unfortunately that's all there is to it. There are some stunning leaps of logic in there and it is all so stunningly predictable, depicting the most lazy way the 'mysteries' presented in Gou happened. I suppose the idea is indeed that they think it clever that it's the original arcs, just that the most obvious solution is this time correct, but for this kind of non-twist the show has far too many episodes. It drags on and on detailing stuff that has been already blatantly clear since about 20 episodes ago and it's so goddamn boring. Please go back to the meat of the story with the whole post-Matsuriyabashi looper-thunderdome. Then the second season of the Madoka Magica spin-off Magia Record started yesterday. I went in with all my hazy memories of being disappointed in the first season not being daring enough to actually change the meat of the rather thin Mobile Game it is made from. And then comes in this episode that works basically on the premise of how Madoka and Homura not being present during the arc where they had been originally introduced has massive consequences on the dynamics of the cast as they end up having to speed-run through the core revelations of the setting and work out their issues in time to go rescue Mami in Kamihama. This is all Anime original stuff and it was fantastic. Especially as a Sayaka fan, her journey through all kinds of emotions during this episode was a massive treat and made me somewhat teary eyed. My girl is so strong here! XD Hot damn. Am I being more hopeful? Fuck, I think the first episode of the first season was also rather good. No.... please don't give me hope only to then be mediocre again, please... But until then, I can encourage every Madoka Magica fan to watch at least this episode, because it's absolutely worth it: https://imgur.com/a/JO4xXsv
  9. So since Thursday it's summer break here. The thought of spending five weeks locked inside at home with my mother fills me with dread. In fact, I... I am seriously at an absolute low point. I have so many little things I would love to do, but can't muster any motivation. I'm constantly exhausted, my body is aching and each time she waltzes into my room I'm getting stress convulsions again. It's also not helped that she keeps berating me for not thinking of doing stuff she expects me to do and mocking me for not doing my own stuff either. I just feel so extremely hopeless. I'm 28 for fuck's sake and I can't get my life forward in any way. Why do I even bother with anything? I can't change anything anyway, I have no control over anything and am just wasting my time away until death arrives.
  10. Okay, today sets out to be a considerably miserable day. I was just ripped out of my work to be sent out to get bread rolls and was suddenly overwhelmed by a total sense of helplessness, that I should just throw myself down and die. My chest is seriously hurting. It's all so... pointless. Why am I even trying to change, why am I even trying to have goals and aspirations? There is no wriggle room for me, I only exist to serve my mother and every attempt to do something for myself that even faintly looks like 'leaving her behind' is met with accusations and guilt. I really need to truly give up on myself or else I will continue to hurt as long as I live. I need to be content with where I am and accept that I just don't have what it takes to make experiences normal people make. I suppose I'm just blowing things out of proportion again, but I just... am not in the right place mentally at the moment.
  11. ... and of course up until now no reaction whatsoever. But oddly enough it doesn't faze me. Probably because I'm too busy preparing for school again I guess. But I also just have to note just how incredibly fast my headspace recovered after deleting these dumb online dating profiles. It is astonishing how much pressure I put upon myself to present myself well and how much anxiety was generated just... well, sitting around and seeing my efforts to increase my social interactions in time of crippling loneliness go absolutely nowhere. Instead I... just go about my day with a clear head, which is I guess also something that needs to be acknowledged.
  12. I should probably note what happened with my Higurashi Gou watch: The show has wrapped up its first season and is on a break with a second cour following in July. Now looking back on the show I am extremely conflict. The core idea and the conflict that they want to create is really great and I love how Gou is built to be a crossroads for the wider When they Cry franchise which up until consisted only of rather vaguely connected individual stories which take place in completely different worlds and only a very meta-textual overlap of characters. And then in comes Gou and massively fleshes out that concept and telling a story that Umineko alluded to that seemingly was Higurashi, but never quite and now rectifying that dissonance. Unfortunately on the other hand of the spectrum I must note that the direction is abysmal. I already noted in my previous reviews that I found myself very irritated about how the show keeps covering already well known Higurashi material for no other reason than an initial joke that got dragged out for FAR too long. Similarly the second half, while starting out as a great bridge between Matsuriyabashi and Gou to explain what the fuck happened that the characters got stuck again in 1983, it ended up surprisingly hasty in explaining how it happened while at the same time treating the necessary character development haphazardly and outright ignoring characters and motivations that would have affected the outcome that they wanted for the villain of the story, something that goes extremely against Higurashi's core principle of being a character-driven clockwork made of confliction motivations that all create the plot. It's a serious shame because I could see it working out extremely well with a tighter script and only half the episodes. In other news, I also recently saw the third Fate/Stay Night Heaven's Feel movie. If you had read some of my reviews here before, you probably noticed I'm a masochist for the Fate franchise. And the weirdest part is... I... I actually liked the movie! Bloody hell, how did they manage that? Okay, I do know how they managed that, but that only makes me more confused: The movie was basically just a barrage of pivotal character moments where they agonized about the decisions they are making and question their motivations. The only problem is that the two movies before that do an abysmal job getting these motivations across (if they even attempted it at all). So... Heaven's Feel III works great, for people like me who spent the last seven years tearing this franchise apart and know these characters and their motivations by heart. People who just watched this and UBW (and you have to watch UBW because Heaven's Feel I skips all the scenes they have in common) will probably feel super confused and not buy it at all. Also the fight scenes in this one are spectacular in a good way. So far I had been very disappointed in the fight scenes in ufotables Stay Night in comparison to Fate/Zero since their fights and their choreography rarely accomplished anything other than paint the characters as super duper powerful. Something Fate/Zero accomplished utterly implicitly if you bothered to look at the carnage around them, but the focus of the Fate/Zero fights still lingered on the strategies of how the characters approach their fights and become more a test of their motivations than anything. Meanwhile in Fate/Stay Night it's just flailing with pretty CGI effects. So imagine my surprise that I found them actually interesting here, given how short most of the fights are and how they usually served a clear purpose for the advancement of the plot, while also allowed moments of characterization to shine through instead of "Gate of Babylon goes brrrrr". Apparently it helps that they poured all their budget into the ultimately relatively meaningless Rider vs. Saber fight that goes on for seven fucking minutes and is just 'splosions as Michael Bay took over for a bit.
  13. Ironically this conversation has reminded me that I wanted to write a message to the single member of my university study group that had promised to meet up even after university (but never did) who hasn't changed their number in the meantime. Which I now did. Hey, maybe I can raise our contact to twice a year or something. XD
  14. Could it be that you found yourself in 100% of cases the one initiating a conversation/meet-up? I always had a similar feeling, one which could be best described as being a 'social ghost' who only exists in people's minds as long as you are physically present and I feel like it's heavily connected to a sense of disappointment/exhaustion that nobody else ever bothers to contact you on their own (or pretend they don't see you when you meet them coincidentally...). Unfortunately I don't have any good recommendation for that either. It is one of the few issues that has come better with time since I've gotten online acquaintances who actually occasionally do write a first message, but since every single one of my real life contacts has died away after leaving university and finishing teacher training, I have hardly any argument that the feeling wasn't absolutely true.
  15. I mean... I feel you. I started to watch the entirety of Detective Conan, about 7 years ago and still only got till... *checks bookmark* Episode 855. Detective Conan just hit the 1000 episode mark as well.
  16. Okay, I'm curious whether you can tell us in, like, five years or so whether they found the damn treasure yet.^^
  17. That just made me check when the last time was I replied to my father's What's App messages which usually consist of passive-aggressive links to memes about ungrateful children. It was February 2019.
  18. I today noticed that I can't remember the last time I woke up refreshed. Waking up and feeling absurdly exhausted has become part of my normal schedule as I start the day forcing myself to the computer and failing to get something done. This week has been especially maddening. I lost two days to a project management training on top of my regular homeschooling and presence-schooling and got the idea to go an extra-mile for this weeks presence-schooling to get my students attention back now that we are back in school. Unfortunately that completely ate away my time to give the still homeschooled students feedback and I also fell behind in the organizatorial part of tracking the attendance and replying to work mails because I was too ridiculously tired after spending every minute of the day in videoconferences and classrooms. So now here I am, having only this weekend to catch up on the stuff I didn't do last week and preparing all my stuff for next week. And I feel absolutely miserable. My neck and back is in pain, I have a headache and my motivation is agonizingly low while I'm at the same time stressing out to the point of having spontaneous shivering fits. I'm just completely baffled how I am supposed to survive the rest of this semester...
  19. I make it a principle to never speak about my home situation under any circumstances, so I luckily never get to the situation of having to insist on the semantics. It's the anxiety about the possibility that anyone could find out and make a judgement that wrecks me, but I know that's just all in my head. Thanks. I will try to take it easy today as well. I especially need to get my health back in line.
  20. Okay, I just managed to write an E-Mail where I phrased my thoughts so far instead of doing any changes myself. Only took me two hours or so. -.- Good for you! Those thoughts are nasty and... I must admit when I read your words I found them to be really uncomfortably close to my own thoughts of giving up trying to establish relationships because I can't break out of this. Also I sometimes did have thoughts about dabbling in dating and heck, even with the thought that having a child wouldn't be too bad, but quickly abandon it because it's just too late and I'm too used to being unable to deal with social situations. Not to mention the additional baggage of me severely disliking even touching people or any expression of affection, really (or... being able to feel affection, as a starter^^). It IS an unexcused lesson and the class teacher when I explained this to him dryly remarked that they pulled the very same stunt with him recently as well. Our school has its own video conference tool that is secure, but very bare bones and doesn't have such a feature. I mean yeah, you probably got that impression because I have been pointedly using this distinction, but I'm well aware that all outside observers aren't really caring about the semantics, especially when it is a bunch of teens and tweens looking for an opportunity to mock their comically young looking teacher. Or colleagues who'd think their part if they ever learned of my home situation. The thing is, they would be right. I'm 27, nearly 28, and only ever lived on my own for a week. That's ringing all kinds of alarm bells in people. No, it's more of a common theme that she's looking at my father's family's history of alcoholism, schizophrenia and violent outbursts and suggesting that I'm just as fucked up. Though notably that's his siblings, my father's only part in that history is his temper and... well, the incessant self-pity I'm also obviously guilty of. So yeah, in that regard I have a lot of similarities to him aside my frustrating outward resemblance. I just try to vent this stuff in the internet in order to not end up showing too much of my fucked-upness to people I actually would have to look into the eyes afterwards. I did that a few times, usually citing time constraints, but she's usually extremely pissed and takes it as an insult if I eat alone. Especially now when I'm not really have any excuse, what with there being a week of holiday and so on.
  21. Hey! What do you think you are doing there? Feeling restricted in establishing relationships because you have to take care of a family member who drags you down is my thing! I have copyright on that, so don't you dare allow that to happen to you! In related news: What the hell is going on with today? I've got a week of holiday, so I'm trying to get through my backlog of work mails I dragged out replying to. Of course my work week ended on a horribly low note with one class boycotting my lesson because I wasn't doing video conferences and they convinced themselves that I'm not doing my job when I only use the group chat. I made the mistake of voicing my frustration about this to my mother who... of course just as confused about my refusal to do video conferences from home with her in the background mocked me and promised to crash any video conferences if I ever did one because I needed to 'toughen up' and that she's convinced that my students won't mind because they have family as well. I felt eerily reminded of back during my own school time when random strangers I never met mocked me in the street as a mother's boy and she got angry at me for letting that get to me and refused to talk with me for a week when I brought it up. She seems adamantly refusing to believe that people do in fact raise their eyebrows about me still living with her. Anyway. For the last 12 hours I have been sitting at the computer trying desperately to draw up a curriculum for four semesters that I was drafted into, but actually wanted to do a month ago. Unfortunately my mind is set on fucking me over, so I'm feeling horribly unfocused and get nothing done whatsoever. As of yet I haven't managed to write a single sentence. I wanted to use an old curriculum I wrote during teacher training as a guide, but couldn't find it anywhere on any storage device I have despite having been utterly convinced that I saved it somewhere. Apparently I accidentally erased it when changing schools and clearing out my "school administration" folder. Of course at the breakfast table my mother got into a rant that I'm as fucked in the head as my father and need to get therapy because I wasn't talking to her, which in turn wasn't really beneficial to my state of mind either. In fact I am having my usual anxiety attacks whenever my mother comes in to talk with the cat every five minutes. I'm also still struggling with tenosynovitis and aches in back and neck. I initially wanted to have this fucking curriculum done this morning and then focus the rest of the day on working out, but as usual I haven't managed to do either.
  22. First of all: I felt significantly better yesterday evening after I managed to work through most of my backlog and it looked like I actually accomplished to have some more breathing room. I still had to spent most of today from 7 o'clock onwards at the PC correcting returns and writing mails with only two breaks for breakfast and dinner, but it was somehow enough to get my mind out of the drain. Only my neck pain and slight headache are an annoyance. But I even managed to somewhat brush off an argument I just had with three students once again crying foul and complaining about my workload. Okay... fine, I probably overstepped my bounds a little by letting it slip that hearing that about today's task with this class is utter bullshit. It used to be a jigsaw task that I initially created for a 10th grade class, but I stripped it down to them just doing the task of each topic group one week at a time. Which is a huge time waste, I admit, but at the beginning of the current lockdown I already offered them a cooperative assignment where everyone got a different task and they had to bring it together in a shared document online, but that was an utter disaster because only four students did anything at all of which only 3 returns were usable, so all the following tasks building upon their gatherings fell flat hard and forced me to abandon all attempts at cooperative learning methods online. Long story short: Today they had to do a task a 10th grade class managed in 20 minutes and this 13th grade is harping on me that it's impossible for them to do the same in the 90 minutes they would have had for today's lesson. For real? And yes, among that was once again the demand for a videoconference instead. Like I said, that's something I cannot do psychologically, if not practically. My mother knows no boundaries and her presence makes me nervous as hell even when I'm not facing my students. In the shit-hole village I grew up in I was already mocked in the streets for being a 'mother's boy' back when I was in high school, I can't even imagine how my students let loose if they find out about my circumstances. The possibility alone wrecks me. Right now my lessons are done in the way that they get the materials with both a written introduction of me monologuing the point of today's lessons, the materials and a couple of tasks while at the same time offering to discuss questions in a chatroom in our school network. Yes, it's dull, but every attempt of mine to do something cooperative so far only ended in utter failure because of the lack of response. Lol, there are no guidelines and no expectations, much less any training. I guess I could get lessons this way going if I wanted to, but once again, my reasons for not doing them are purely psychological. Thanks, I will look into it later on. Eh... but those are accomplishments I bought by sacrificing virtually everything else. I started out as a bullied pariah who was otherwise mentally fine to a guy with severe social anxiety who spends the whole day at the computer even though the external factors ceased to be and I should have been able to fix myself thrice over. That was pretty much my reaction, but it's a common theme. I already complained here before about similar incidents about me wanting to do jogging and one summer trying to go swimming at a lake. My mother is deathly afraid that I'm "overdoing it" when I have such fancies and tries to discourage me with the devastating effect that I usually drag out such decisions for days or weeks until I decide to sneak or force myself out to avoid her comments. She really just would prefer to wrap me in cotton and never let me go out.
  23. Well, thanks and sorry that you have to read this nonsense. The thing is that it is entirely on myself that I need so much time for my work. Other colleagues deal with the same workload or more and it's just me being an idiot that prevents me from finishing this stuff in a timely manner. And then the quality... I guess I become more and more aware at my current school how much of my self-worth I'm getting from the job I'm doing. Which... is kinda logical, given how I have nothing else, really. Having a positive impact on people is all that I crave and it's getting to me that all I'm getting is outraged mails about how my lessons are too difficult and instead of engaging with my offers to ask questions in the chat, some just demand better tasks and leave it at that. I know I'm at a difficult school when it comes to the catchment area and it just shows how much I fail at accommodating that with my preparations. Anyway, enough complained for today. Another break that I didn't need. I need to get going.
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