welp looking back at my last post where i was like “i’m done with this activism / social work stuff, it has clearly been terrible for me, time to focus on fun technical problems and work and make money”

WELP

turns out i’m a federal employee and my workplace went from happy chill nerds to hostile workplace in the space of 3 days. like getting daily emails in my inbox saying “you suck, why don’t you quit” “if you don’t quit we’re going to fire you” except it’s all my coworkers and my supervisors and no one knows what’s going on or where we’re getting orders from (hint: some rich f*kwad probably)

i have so many thoughts on this, but i’ve just been messaging friends and writing angsty notes to myself and such instead of idk getting activism stuff done. also i have been actively trying not to get activism stuff done i guess. keep an even keel

is this how i felt about COVID in 2020? probably. but then i felt alienated from my coworkers. here i at least feel everyone is in the same boat (in some sense. some much worse than others)

i.e. there’s a high likelihood i’m going to lose the one person i work with on a daily basis to this for no reason other than random cruelty

yea let’s put the “we should traumatize all employees” person in charge of HR, A++ qualification

ugh in the meantime i still need to get science done but i really just wanted to sink into the cool technical problems for like a year or two, really, truly

i mean in an abstract sense life is still great. people would kill to be in my position. i’m not sure why i cannot let this rest and have dropped all my side projects and even interview prep (which now of all times , when stable government job turned into harassment and random firings job, should be a time to keep going). i have been trying to balance it out at least. i did not sink my all into a petition for vought (see: “we should tramatize all employees”) so i only lost one night of sleep when he was confirmed rather than two weeks. and i was crushed but the next day picked my next goal to focus on.

ah. one day i’ll stop being an angry person and just be happy. some day.

that’s enough for 4 am today i think. need to give a work presentation tomorrow, write actual data science / machine learning code so i can be where i want to be in 3 months or so (idk on the way to a publication?) which tbh i haven’t felt paid well enough to focus on (and also working completely alone made me super grumpy)

anywho

oh yea happy very late vday, this made me laugh:

https://ml-valentines.github.io

nerds, the lot of them