summer

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one of my friends from texas came back from a nine month deployment to the middle east. we texted about him coming up to wisconsin for a week and i didn't think that anything was going to happen, but then like eight hours later he randomly texted me a screenshot of a flight ticket from aus to mke. arrival time 12 am on a worknight, awesome! milwaukee is a whole three hours away from me, so i set up my alarm for 9 pm and took a nap after work. i woke up at 1 am to my friend blowing up my phone, oops.

one of the things that is apparently a midwest staple experience are supper clubs. we went to some supper club named george's, i ordered a t-bone steak and he ordered a new york strip. while waiting for our food, we ordered drinks. i KNOW that he loves fruity sweet drinks, so i suggested he get some of the ice cream drinks like the grasshopper or a pink squirrel, but he wanted a martini. fine. we got our drinks and he wasn't able to drink it because it tasted too much like alcohol... we switched drinks and he got himself my grasshopper.

i took him to milwaukee to see the public market and downtown. at the public market, we had barbeque. at first, we joked about it being shit yankee "food" but it was surprisingly good. hit up some malls and a round 1 arcade. we then spent the rest of the night skating around the city. it was beautiful; the weather was crisply cool, and there was an abundance of people wandering around and bright lights decorating the city because summerfest was going on.

we spent one day in downtown appleton just barhopping. he warned me, "dude i can't drink anymore if i have five drinks i'm gonna start hurling". when he had his fifth drink he really did start throwing up in some bushes outside of the houdini plaza LOL. what a visionary, he should have bought a lottery ticket. i don't remember how we got home but i know i didn't drive.

at some point while we were drunk in my apartment, i just started complaining about my life, mostly about how this one year of living alone sucks and how i'm expected to do this for the rest of my life. partly about how i was going to die alone because of something i wasn't able to quite articulate just yet. probably some combination of bad luck and awkwardness. all the advice he gave me sounded hollow; he always found his way through with jobs that gave him a good amount of money for self-described little amounts of work, and it seemed like he never wasn't in a relationship, so why should i take his advice? i loathed everything about my life and resented everything about his. it was silly in hindsight, but neuroticism and inferiority was something i've always felt my whole life. i'm certain there are many people who would see me complaining as being ungrateful; i have a job, roof under my head and am in college, not everybody can say they have those things.

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june 21st marks the summer solstice for wisconsin. as opposed to how wisconsin usually is in the winter time, people are actually going outside, streets are filled with runners at any given time of the day and most importantly, it's no longer dark when i go to work and when i go home. 5:00 am sunrise and 9:30 pm sunset was something that i never knew i wanted so badly until it was gone in october.

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one of the girls i had been on a date with prior had invited me to see the play that she was the director for. it was pretty fun, even though it's not really a medium that i particularly enjoy or would naturally seek out. the building was in the middle of nowhere, and the town it sat in was also in the middle of nowhere. the entire town felt like it was haunted by slenderman, really. the actors for the play baked a bunch of treats to sell to the audience, i had a nice tiramisu cupcake.

when the play ended, i met up with the girl and helped her clean and put everything away. when i left, we hugged and said goodbye, it was the last time we would see each other.

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mile of music is some really big event that happens in downtown appleton every year in august. essentially, a bunch of no name local bands come through and play music in every single venue and bar. this was the most amount of people i've seen in wisconsin so far, almost reminded me of being back in the big city. looking through the setlists, there was a filter for emo bands but clicking on that filter yielded no results, very sad day for me.

on the first day, i had ran into some people i met in a bar maybe four months prior. when we initially met, we had talked about skateboarding but i remember having to go because i felt myself about to black out lol. there were five of us: diego, crow, some guy whose name i forgot and his girlfriend. we headed to player 2, an arcade bar, and diego spent the entire time flirting with the bartender while her boyfriend sat across from us, pretty awkward. we probably drank 50 cherry bombs between the five of us, thank you 3 for $5 cherry bomb friday. after the bar closed, we all headed to a park nearby and played frisbee golf. when the night ended, we said we would meet again but never did.

the next day, i was walking around until i saw two korean looking dudes going the same direction as me. i've never seen another korean person before while in wisconsin, so i asked them if they were korean and they said they were actually hmong, but joked that they got being called korean a lot. they introduced me to more of their friends and i would hang out with these people every weekend after that. kind of weird to think that if i didn't just walk up and talk to them that i wouldn't have met my best friends from this state.

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i will be totally transparent and say that at this time, i've never really felt uglier in my life. all the friends i would make in wisconsin weren't very receptive to hanging out a second time and all of my dates thus far have gone horribly. it never felt like my friends and family back home really understood me either; if this internship experience is just a diet version of moving out of the nest and getting a job and settling into a new place, i don't want to live through the real thing. i think i just attributed me having a hard time living alone to being really outwardly ugly. maybe if i was prettier, people would like me more. i started going on incel boards, at first under the guise of irony, but then i started feeling comforted knowing that i could "softmax" and becoming prettier would magically solve all my problems.

i started following the advice for some of the realistic looksmaxxing techniques like working out, skincare and eating healthier. it didn't take long before it felt like my clothes starting fitting better, my acne was going away and i could start lifting more weights. was it mentally unhealthy that i was going to incel imageboards for some generic and broadly applicable advice? probably, but i've always buried myself under 10 layers of irony and i feel like i do a good job of sorting demoralizing negative shitposts and real advice.

when i first started receiving compliments for how i looked or dress, my immediate reaction would be that of confusion or to get defensive. never really received any remarks about those before in my life so it was hard to believe that they were telling the truth, i guess. but after a while, i was able to be accepting of them. my confidence grew and it felt like i was able to be a more positive person because of it. your compliments to me are genuine, and so are mine to you.

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the company i work for has a really bad time with employee retention, though i'm sure that's a problem with every single manufacturing plant in the world. the pilot plant technician role was something that never seemed to be filled for more than a few months at a time, with the last one having lasted february through march. it was eventually filled in august but i kind of wished that i was alone again LOL.

the new technician and i don't really get along, just differences in work style. he always felt the need to justify any mistake or mishap to me. he would tell me what happened, what he thought would happen, how he was going to fix it and how it was never going to happen again over and over and over again and honestly, i don't care. whenever i made a mistake, he would make sure to tell my supervisor and pilot plant engineer what happened and how he told me that whatever i was doing wasn't a good idea. whenever i would ask him a question and the supervisor was around, he would start answering the question to them and not me like i wasn't the one who asked? didn't help that he would talk too much AND his breath stank real bad, it always smelled like sewage and opossum carcass dowsed in monster energy drink.

even though he's really annoying to me, it seems like the supervisor and engineer get along with him really well. i don't understand why; maybe it's because he's really good at ass kissing, but it's probably more that i'm just bitter and not pleasant to be around.