Hey all, it's Leyla again. Thank you for the help paying my deposit and rent, it is much appreciated. Right now I have 3 days left until my first paycheck back out of rehab. I have food in the fridge and rent paid, so the majority of my needs met. I have about $20 in transport costs in the next 2 days though, between going to work, and my outpatient counseling appointment. Any help would be greatly appreciated <3

So tomorrow will be day 60 of not drinking, and I'm feeling pretty good. Had myself a great breakfast this morning and cooked my ass off today at work. I got prescribed arthritis medicine in rehab and the task I was dreading the most since returning to work was no problem today! Today my entire view on work changed, I was a far better cook than normal, I wasn't half assing recipes like I did when I was always hungover/withdrawaling. I even had time to do a bunch of cleaning around the kitchen. I even have energy leftover to cook when I get home. Probably due to drinking 8 red bulls today, but hey whatever makes me feel good and doesn't ruin my life, plus I get them for free at work. Gonna go to a meeting tonight and make some dinner

How are y'all today?

I'm going to start off by saying this is inauthentic as hell. This recipe is made to be quick and to be done in a western home kitchen with no smoke and ingredients you can find at most supermarkets. Substitutions can be made, quantities of ingredients can be changed to tasteIf you're good with a knife, you can realistically have this done in 30 minutes. This is also a recipe I made to cook for 8 people so cut the recipe in half for less

Ingredients

Sesame oil (any oil will work, just don't use butter) 1 bag of green onions, sliced 1 white/yellow onion, diced 2 tbsp of garlic 2 inch knob of ginger 2 tbsp red pepper flakes 1 bag of frozen stir fry mix of choice 1 bag of broccoli 2 cups of Soy Sauce/Coconut Aminos 1 cup of Lime Juice 1/2 cup of Rice Vinegar 1 cup of Chicken Stock 2 tbsp white pepper (black pepper is fine) 2 tbsp salt 3 tbsp brown sugar (white sugar is fine, use less if you used coconut aminos) 2 tbsp garlic powder 2 tsp peanut butter Whatever chicken you have laying around (idk, I just used leftover rotisserie chicken) Cashews (I also just used leftover cashews for this)

3 tbsp corn starch 3 tbsp of water

3 cups of Jasmine rice (any rice works, Jasmine just cooks quicker) 4.5 cups of water

Steps

1. Start by preheating your oven to 450f and getting your rice water boiling. You're going to bake your vegetables. You do not have a big enough pan to brown all the vegetables at once, and you don't want to do it in batches, that will take forever. Oven. Start this before you start on the stovetop, because it's pretty involved once it's started.

2. Start by cutting up your stuff. Dice your onions, slice your scallions. Use a cheese grater to grate the ginger, it's way faster than dicing it.

3. Fry the white onion in your oil of choice for about 5 minutes on fairly high heat, char is completely fine, preferable even. Add in the white parts of the green onion after this and fry those for about 2 more minutes.

4. Add in garlic, ginger and cashews, keep it moving at this point, don't burn the garlic. This should take about a minute

5. Once everything starts smelling fragrant, add in your liquids to keep it all from burning and add in all your spices except for the salt.

6. Let it simmer for a bit and taste it for flavor after the acids have boiled off a bit. It will taste too sour at first, but the acidity will boil off as it heats up more. Add more sugar, chicken stock, or sesame oil to balance out the acidity.

7. When the vegetables are done, throw them in the sauce and stir them in. Add in your leftover chicken at this point too. Give the chicken a few minutes to warm back up

8. Make a corn starch slurry (cold water and corn starch whisked together) and stir it into everything to thicken the sauce and boom you have yourself a "stir fry"

Have fun cooking!

Ranting here because I don't have anywhere else to do it. It's been 4 days and these people are already driving me up a wall. Some are very kind, others are just taking my groceries, not doing their dishes, constantly starting shit, and just generally being nasty.

Came in, the fridge was full of moldy and rotten food that had been in there from last year. Nobody had thought to throw it away. The dish situation has gotten so bad that the house manager is now going to throw away all of the actual dishes and replace them with paper plates and plastic forks which I hate in my soul. I can't bring any of my nice kitchen stuff here because these fuckers will just abuse it then get it thrown away by just not cleaning it. Dish doesn't get done? It goes in the trash. House manager's rules.

I bought groceries yesterday, nothing too major, came up to about $50 and it should be enough to feed me and a few other people in the house who are struggling financially for the week. Some bitch stole a can of beans all to herself yesterday. So now the tacos I planned on making later this week? No can do. Then proceeded not to clean the pot. She's also the person whose only interactions with me are asking me if she can have my food. And when I give her my food, she takes so fucking much that other people end up not getting any. Also always starting shit.

Go to take a shower for the first time since I've been here, and the water is fucking HOT AS FUCK. Now as many of you know, I've been in kitchens all of my adult life, I can handle some heat. This water was too hot even for me, I could barely take a shower in it, my head is minorly burnt from this water. I think this is what set me off so hard.

Then I go outside barefoot to get some sunlight (not smoking anymore!). Big mistake, there's a shit ton of broken glass all over the place nobody thought to clean up or warn me about until I stepped on the broken glass.

There are also meeting requirements in this house, so I have to go to 4 AA/NA meetings a week. No big deal, I already planned on doing this while I was in rehab. Problem, my home group is a zoom group and they only count one zoom group a week, so now I gotta put up with the bullshit local meetings with no car. At least there's busses here, unlike where I lived before this, but I don't know them at all, and I can't just leave the house to learn them until I'm paid up and working.

It's not all bad though, some of the people are really nice, and I do need the extra accountability to stay on top of my recovery. I don't know, maybe I'm just getting irritable because of PAWS, maybe I just need to stay in my own lane and things will get better eventually, but goddamn if this isn't annoying right now

So being in rehab for a month and a half takes a toll on one financially. I had to buy groceries and some other essentials like hand soap and toilet paper and I'm still missing some things I need (a towel so I can take a shower, money for my deposit, shaving stuff, ect.) Fortunately I go back to work next week, and I'm supposed to have a food stamps phone interview next week so my financial worries should be pretty short lived, but I'd really appreciate any help I can get in the mean time

Cash app is $thenewcashtag and Venmo is @thenewvenven (lazy names I know) normally I'd take PayPal too but I don't have access to my PC right now so that means no password manager access. And I can't go to the place where I have my PC until I've paid my deposit and rent so it sucks a bit. Idk, I'm just glad to be sober and not homeless

While I was in rehab, I read a lot of books, some were really good, some I wasn't really feeling.

First one was great, a book called 2 Trans 2 Furious, a collection of poems, essays, stories, and art about Fast and Furious made by trans people. I could not stop laughing at this book the entire time, the sense of humor was on point. I had never seen Fast and Furious before this, and it made me love the movie when I did eventually watch one (I watched 4, wow it's so gay. Family.) The book has unexpected emotional moments, some decent body horror, and a lot of comedy. Would recommend. The cis people at my rehab wanted to burn it when I talked about it, so you know it has to be a good one. Check this out if you're trans and love a good high effort shit post

Second one I read was also great. Normal Sucks by Johnathan Mooney. This book really changed how I viewed the world. It's part personal narrative written by a person with ADHD and Dyslexia, part history lesson on the way normal came to be, part stories of the disabled. There's a lot in this book, and it's fantastic. I will warn, the author does use the r***** word a few times in the book, but in the context it's being used I don't find it offensive. Check this out if you want to be a nicer person.

Third book I read was Bible Belt Queers, a collection of art, poems, personal narratives and other such things from well queers from the Bible Belt. I was so so on this book, I found the essays and personal narratives to be really strong, but I didn't really care for the artistic side of the book. Some of the poems were good, but most of them seemed to drag a bit, and a lot of the art didn't really catch my eye or was too cluttered for a book page. Maybe I would have felt different about some of these if I saw them on a computer screen or a canvas, but wasn't a fan of the art in the book. Your mileage may vary though, check it out if it sounds interesting.

Fourth was Fast Time in Palestine by Pamela Olson. The library I was at was fairly conservative, so there weren't a lot of picks for books on Palestine that weren't Zionist, so I picked up this one. My biggest criticism of this book is it's written by a Midwestern American and it often shows, but as she spends more time in Palestine she seems to understand the local's positions more and more as she sees the oppression they're under. It's split between her personal narrative and the stories of horrific violence her Palestinian friends had witnessed, with occasional bits of information about how the genocide is enabled by the rest of the world interspersed throughout. This book is a good read to anybody who isn't 100 percent sure about what's going on in Palestine, definitely one I'd hand off to lib friends, not sure if anybody here would really care for it though.

Fifth and final book is A Land with A People, a collection of essays, poems, and art from Palestinians and Jews confronting Zionism. This was a much better read than Fast Times, diving much deeper into the problems of Zionism, into its history, its effects on both a wide scale and a personal scale through both art and essays. This book is really high quality, albeit a bit hard to read as a monolingual English speaker (I was in rehab, I couldn't Google the anglicized Arabic words, give me a break) but even with the occasional linguistic problems I still got a lot out of this book. I wouldn't give this book to libs because it goes hard on terms like settler-colonialism, but I appreciated it actually tackling that so much. 10/10 would read again.

What should I read next? What have you read recently that's interesting?

The book switches between being a personal tale of growing through being neurodivergent in a world built around being "normal", how "normal" was created, and how normal doesn't even exist. It's a really good read

Well, it's been a while. Didn't expect to stay 44 days in a 30 day program, but that's what happens when someone forgets to put out a cigarette and burns the building you do classes in. There were many trials (mostly cis people being cis people) but I made it through and I'm better for it. I'm going to a sober living house for trans people, so I'm hoping that's better.

This is the longest I've gone without weed in a while, and I feel a lot better without it. Alcohol was my problem, but I can't say that weed wasn't a problem either. I got it cheap and I sold it, so it didn't effect my finances, but I'd go without eating because I was too lazy to cook, I was too lazy to read. I didn't want to do anything for myself but smoke more weed and zone out.

I just got out, so I don't know what life is going to hold for me, but I'm excited about life. I didn't think I could do it sober for a while, now I don't know how I did it drunk and high.

So I have been completely removed from Cable TV pretty much my whole life, didn't even really have it as a kid so I never got used to it. Well, I'm in the hospital right now so I've been watching a lot of TV, and I love animation so it's been Cartoon Network for the most part (and some Disney Channel when Bluey is on). And holy shit, the way they do their programming now is fucking atrocious.

First off, the new shows. I'm not here to be some fucking boomer complaining about "kids these days", I'm asking where these new shows are. I haven't seen a show from the past 10 years other than Teen Titans Go, and even then they play the same episodes every time. I keep seeing ads for Craig of the Creek, a show I'd love to watch, but it's nowhere to be found. They've also been advertising a new show called Iyanu and it looks pretty good. Only one issue, they're premiering it at 9:30 in the morning on a fucking Monday. How do you expect kids to ever watch this shit?

And what's worse is half the shows that are being shown right now premiered at 6-7pm when I was a kid, so what changed? Adult Swim starts at 4 now, sure they usually start with older shows (watching Courage The Cowardly Dog now) or more PG shows like Bob's Burgers or King of the Hill.

Cartoon Network has completely abandoned children to pander to millennials and I hate it. The children aren't getting anything new anymore, they're getting rebroadcast the exact same shit. I've been watching pretty much 24/7 since I ended up in the hospital and still haven't seen anything I wasn't watching as a kid. Do kids not deserve to have shit to be excited about? Are the only options for new cartoons for children right now Bluey and SpongeBob spin-offs?

If you saw my previous post, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Last time I tried doing something similarly suicidal, I was pretty much fine. I passed it off as alcohol withdrawal and was pretty much fine afterwards, no real hospital visit besides for getting shot up with some Ativan for seizures.

This time was not the case. I needed a breathing tube, I got completely sedated by medical professionals for the first time, I was on multiple IV fluids for a few days. I would have had to of been very passed out for them to be able to put a catheter in me without me trying to run lol. I came really close to dying this time. Part of me wants to downplay it but I really can't because this is the worst it's ever been. My past suicide attempts were things I was able to get myself out of, this one wasn't the case. If I handled this like my past suicide attempts, I don't know if I'd be alive.

The social worker said I probably earned myself some grippy socks (my words not hers lol) with ending up in the ICU and all. I'm really hoping they'll just let me pass onto rehab instead, but oh well I'll live with it if it happens. Idk, maybe they'll let me smoke in there

Anyways, day 4 of no ciggies because they won't let you unhook your IV to go smoke in the ICU, go figure. I want one so bad, but maybe this will be the excuse I needed to quit. Can only hope really.

So we had an employee party last Wednesday. Normally not one for uhh socializing but I like all my coworkers pretty well so I decided to come. Also gave me an excuse to get girlied up and that made me feel pretty happy, especially when multiple people didn't recognize me because I didn't have to follow health code so ear rings, dresses, my long curly hair was down for once. I had a really good time. They even gave everybody a free drink ticket.

When I first heard about this event, I was worried about everybody drinking around me, like I thought it would make me want to drink. I texted my manager about this, asking what non-alcoholic beer we had at the restaurant. Turns out, all my choices were absolutely terrible (beers I wouldn't even accept with alcohol) but if those were my choices, those were my choices. However before I even responded to the text with the beer choices, she offered to order a non-alcoholic beer especially for me. So I asked for her to order some non-alcoholic Guinness. It didn't come in time for the party, so I had a shitty beer instead, but honestly it's the thought that matters to me. She did that for me, and I really appreciate it. It helped me not feel weird ordering something non-alcoholic, like I was just a normal person ordering a drink. And now, I can actually visit my work's bar after work (I asked them not to serve me alcohol already so I haven't done it in a while) and it feels really nice to do so without drinking. This is who I want to be, and it's great to be that person.

My personal pick is "The Forever Story" by JID This album blew me away on first listen. Every track on this album is near perfect. I haven't been taken so far into an album since To Pimp A Butterfly released about a decade ago. It's been years since it's come out and I'm still in love with every song on this album