Wednesday, December 19th: Hi everyone, I’m Gemma and I’m so sorry to have to ask this again but, would anyone be able to send me a few £’s to help me get through the winter months, especially Christmas & New Year?!
As many of you already know, I’ve been struggling a lot these past few months, due to my welfare benefits being revoked and without any government aid, I’ve been struggling to make ends meet. So far, I’ve been getting by with the help of some of the kindest people in the world but as it’s now winter where I live, I’m struggling to get through the festive period. To make things worse, I’m not due to receive a partial-benefit payment until the New Year and I desperately need help.I need at least £150, to help me get groceries/supplies and pay a few essential bills (keeping my gas + electricity on) throughout Christmas & New Year.
I’ve also created a wishlist with some essential items + Christmas gifts to help me get by (thermal clothing, boots etc..) and as many of the items are from the marketplace, you’ll need to join my listto buy any items.
If anyone could spare any amount to help me, even if it’s just £1/$1/€1, it would literally save my life and keep me warm and sharing definitely helps just as much as donations. Nobody is obligated in any way to buy anything off my wishlist or donate if they can’t or don’t want to, I know we’re all struggling. Thank you for your help 💖
It would really mean so much to me guys if anyone could possibly help out, I desperately need help to pay my bills and get through Christmas and New Year and I’m struggling so much to do so. Literally anything helps right now. 🙏💖
You have a thing at 2:00 PM so you set a reminder for 1:00 PM because you don’t want to be late, but you should eat by 12:00 PM. That means you should start preparing food by 11:30 AM, but you want to double check or confirm the appointment before 11:00 AM before everyone goes to lunch. So if you want to finish your other tasks by 10:00 AM, you ought to start at 8:00 AM, which means you’ve got to wake up at 7:30 AM and you may as well get ready to go out then ahead of time, and that’s how something that starts at 2:00 PM effectively starts at 7:30 AM and lasts the entire day.
ME. ME. ME.
Literally how I plan my day when I have a thing
This is literally just being a functional adult with basic organisation and planning skills.
It isn’t some special *thing*
No, it’s not. This post is about my executive dysfunction. It’s my performance anxiety and my depression. It’s dozens of people with ADHD in the comments remarking that this is the only way they can make appointments– often with each stage of this process tied to an alarm. Many of those people routinely fail even with that forethought. It’s people with chronic pain or disability who clock every activity in their day by how long it takes, when they have to prepare, how long they’ll have to stand or work, etc.
I am sure “functional adults with basic organization and planning skills” go through a milder experience of this thought process. But it’s comfortable to them– not something they think twice about, let alone make a post about. I made this post when I was dreading going to get my hair cut. A haircut. I made this post because I was reflecting about how crazy a simple visit to the salon was making me. It was an appointment I called for myself, on my own terms, an experience I enjoy and actively wish I did more often. But I don’t. Because making appointments is so hard for me, because I have executive function problems. It’s been about 9 months since my last haircut.
I almost flubbed college because I dreaded meeting with a single professor once at the beginning of a semester even though I wanted to.
I haven’t gone to the doctor since I got new insurance. I just struggled for three weeks to bring myself to arrange for a mandatory safety recall upgrade for my car so its airbag won’t explode into metal shards and kill me if I’m in an accident. I often fail to go out, to arrange meetups with my friends, to achieve my personal functional goals simply because all of that is going through my head whenever I have to make simple appointments or complete basic tasks.
Does that sound like “literally just being a functional adult with basic organization and planning skills?”
The SHARP MZ-80K (1979); the COMMODORE 64 (1982); the XEROX STAR 8010 (1981). Below: the first IBM (1981), and an ATARI 2600 (1977).
Though they were still quite rare back then, I grew up with computers around me. Computers, you have to realize, weren’t always household items, they were for nerds, accountants, bank employees. The most frivolous thing a computer had to offer was chess.
My father owned a chain of electronics stores. I well remember him sitting in his study at night, hunched over this strange, forbidding machine, typing with one finger and squinting at the screen every time he had pressed a key, then back at the keyboard, seemingly caught up in a tense political game. I learned not to interrupt him.
My uncle was a bank accountant and owned one of the first PCs. It always struck me how little he knew about computers though. The bulky apparatus was mainly used by my annoying cousin, who played illegally copied games on it: KING’S QUEST, POLICE QUEST, ALLEY CAT, SABOTEUR. I liked LEISURE SUIT LARRY: in what other game do you have to buy condoms? I thought it was so funny and edgy.
My brother was a nerd. An authentic one, with oversized glasses, a big digital watch that displayed all the moon phases, and a short temper. He was scarily tech-savvy; as a kid, he once shut down the escalator system at the local mall, then turned it on again just to see how it worked. He later became a geek (his definition was, “A geek is a nerd who knows he is a nerd”), and because of him, we got our first game console, the Atari 2600, followed by the Commodore 64, the Amiga, and a whole lot of PCs. Each time we progressed to a new computer, I was amazed at how much the graphics had advanced, but my brother wasn’t: he was always thinking of the future, whereas I was (and am) always thinking of the past.
My brother naturally beat me at every game we ever tried; he used to say annoyed, “Just leave the controller alone, you’ll have a better chance.” He played flight simulators and text adventure games with utmost concentration, like he was splitting atoms. I learned not to interrupt him.
One day I was sitting in the schoolyard when Gino, the local hoodlum, showed up with his cronies. The whole schoolyard cleared, it was like Moses parting the Red Sea. Gino had a wild mullet, a black jacket, and big black eyes like a crazy person. They walked up to me, eyes fixed on me as they approached. I prepared myself for trouble. Gino directed his finger at me and said:
“I heard you own “Space Invaders”? Can I borrow it sometime?”
So now I’m just remembering one year when we ended up doing a big grocery run on like the 23rd, trying to make sure we were well stocked up for when basically the whole country shuts down.
That time, not only was the store (our closest Sainsburys, in fact) a total madhouse worse than before a big storm back home? The fastest estimate he could get on a minicab home was like 3 freaking hours. Trying multiple places.
So yeah, we ended up taking turns pushing the overloaded trolley home. Good thing it was only about a mile, and the worst uphill you get around here isn’t very. Because of course it was vaguely uphill too 😅
ETA: Somebody had also nicked the trolley from outside the back gate when he went to wheel it back the next day. Another hike avoided, at least.
I actually thought I might still have a couple of days’ grace period left before the full-on Christmas rush made getting any grocery delivery slot outside prime hours impossible.
(I like the late slots, and those normally just don’t fill completely up at all. I’d have been willing to take an early morning one, which often don’t either.)
Yeah, not so much 😊
Should have gone ahead and checked that basket out when I added most of the stuff to it over the weekend. Though, from the look of things, that may have already been too late.
Hopefully I will remember next time, if it comes up again. Guess I’ll just need to either drag myself to the closest Sainsburys within the next few days, or give him a shopping list. We hadn’t gotten a delivery in a while, because I am pretty good at putting it off, and we do need several things specifically from there.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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