Personal

The personal record

Preoccupations

Preoccupations

by | Feb 25, 2025 | ,

Time really seems to pass a lot quicker the older I get. I’ve been meaning to push an update, but with everything that’s been going on over the last few weeks, even my private journal hasn’t been seeing much action. Last month’s points of distresses ended up being a massive time-sink for me. In the end, I followed through with attending San Diego State University and accepting the federal student loan being offered, finally entering the world of student loan debt after having successfully evaded it all this time. When it came to registering for classes, I enrolled in 16 units across 6 different courses. Using the university’s degree audit feature, I noted that my 69 units of transfer credits had me starting the equivalent of my third year at 58% completion towards my Bachelor’s and leaving only 51 required for completion—meaning that at a full-time clip of at least 15 units per semester and some infill during the summer/winter intersessions, I could potentially be done and ready to graduate with a Bachelor’s degree at the end of the Spring 2026 semester. Getting used to having an academic workload again was a bittersweet transition, glad to have the opportunity to keep advancing my studies while at the same time resentful that my celebratory freedom from homework, exams, and that awful Canvas platform had to end up being so short-lived. It was a very “back in the car” a la *Jurassic Park* feeling. Well, I'm back in Canvas again... It also didn’t help that the first few days of the semester were lost towards preparation for my evidentiary hearing in my Civil Harassment Restraining Order case. That didn’t play out as it should have, with the letter and spirit of the law upheld. Instead, I found myself at the receiving end of even more judicial misconduct and failure to uphold the law. I have follow up actions planned, some of which I’ll be forced to move on fairly soon, but for the moment am dedicating all my care and focus to my studies first. I have a lot of...

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Distresses

Distresses

by | Jan 11, 2025 | ,

t’s hard to believe we’re already almost two weeks into 2025—time’s been flying by, and already bleeding together on account of all perpertual stream of bad news. The state of reality as a whole seems like a sick bizarro joke, a satirical take you would have seen in a 90s or 00s movie and brushed off as far too ridiculous to ever actually happen, yet here we are in a timeline where Idiocracy proved to be depressingly prescient. And just as the National political farce capped off a first-week-of-the-year with a preview of the chaos and farce we’re all slated to endure over the next four years, the current Los Angeles wildfires started.

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Beginning Anew

by | Jan 1, 2025 | ,

So many times over the past two decades have I tried to start a personal website. Some with grand statements of intent, others with introspective rumination over how to try to find an online voice in an ever-changing internet landscape that is so vastly different from its original form and rampant with data leaks, content scrapers, and the evolving dangers of AI. And each time, they’ve all ended the same way: abandoned over the need to prioritize other obligations in life and the doubts over self-expressing online; that’s even circumstantially been the case presently. But as 2025 begins with the expectation of it being a harbinger year of challenges, from the global levels all the way down to the personal, it also comes with a certain confidence to be had from all the lessons learned and ridiculousness endured throughout 2024, from the national stage all the way down to the individual.  I’ve long joked that I need to find the way to start living life with the unearned confidence of those small breed dogs always willing to scrap way above their weight class. Better and simpler I’m finding it to accept and step into my earned confidence, and committing to leaving the footprint I’ve always wanted to make. There are already at least three personal essays waiting to be extrapolated from the above, but all in good time; self-patience is an understated key part of operating effectively. 

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What’s In a Name? Change.

by | Oct 20, 2021 |

Earlier this month, I initiated the process of a legal name change. As far as the what and why behind it, the easiest way to explain is to go name by name. Jimmy/Jimmie Throughout the entirety of my lifetime, the clerical error made by whoever filled out my birth certificate once upon a 1986 by defaulting to “Jimmy” instead of my father’s “-ie” spelling. Aside from technically making me not truly being a “Jr.”, that small misspelling has proven to be a fairly inconvenience when having to verify my identity within certain systems since I became a legal adult: government, medical, and banking. However, the $500+ it typically takes to pay for the court fees and the required newspaper publication of the court order were a high hurdle for someone trying to get a work history going right before the great recession of 2008. Seeing it as a very costly spelling correction, I figured it would be something that I’d get around to later on in life. As I moved through early adulthood, the notion of having a nickname variant as a formal legal name began to irritate me. Every so often, I’d get asked if “Jimmy” was my “actual” name, to which I’d begrudgingly answer in the affirmative. Even once I did get that spelling error fixed, I’d still have a diminutive form a name as my own proper one. When 2012 rolled around and my relationships with my family started dying off, getting rid of this name became a decided part of my exhaustive parental separation. Still, I avoided getting it done. Partly due to the costs involved, but more so on account of my own psychology. At first, the hesitation of making such a definitive move and forfeiting what I’ve known all my life—would I even be able to get used to being called a different name? Would I end up regretting it a few days after hearing myself addressed by a new name? And the more I slid down that depression spiral all that time ago, the more it became undesirable to have my name changed. I felt perpetually mediocre and...

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