IT FEELS LIKE WE'RE PULLING TEETH
April 28, 2026

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Been a while since I wrote a full one of these! I'm avoiding an important paper for one of my classes...
I ended up going with the internship for the big lgbtq center here in Denver rather than the medical examiners office, but despite thinking it'd be lighter work and better for my career... it kind of sucks. Well, see, if it waas a job I think I'd like it. The issue is that I'm an intern which I suppose I should have known is the lowest form of organism known to man, apparently. Especially because the center is not hiring interns with the intention of keeping any of them around. It's more a "we can't afford real employees, let's just make them do whatever we want then shit them out" thing. Everyone's very fake-nice. I think that's a very Coloradan thing from my experience, being fake-nice. There's a lot to hate about the South, but the "Southern Hospitality" is much more real. If they ask you how you're doing and the real answer is like absolute shit, a Southerner, or at least most Texans I know, will sit down with you and legit care. Coloradans have a formula for interaction and if you deviate from their formula in a way that "inconveniences" them, they look at you like you have a mental deficiency. It's strange and very offputting. It's this passive-aggressive and self-centered core disguised in friendliness and therapy speak. A wolf in sheep's clothing of sorts.
I can't wait for my friends to move here. I've only really half made any friends here in the last 4 months. It's harder now, too. I have class, my job, my internship, and now a research lab I'm helping in. And then people have the gall to ask me about self-care. "Omg yas self care! I sage my computer every day and have Stephanie read my tarot cards, and then I hike 14 miles in my 1 day off per week!" That's what they'd love if I said. And oh yeah, they're all white. That's why at least my paid job is more relaxing. This sounds crass to say, but people of color and recovering addicts are just... not artificial in that fake-nice way. It is a kind of white, affluent phenomenon.
Speaking of my paid job, CIA guy is doing fine. They're having some trouble getting him out to long-term care because he keeps saying the CIA is going to pick him up from here to discharge him from his mission, so he can't go off somewhere else. I asked a coworker who has been here longer about his medications, she said they have been adjusted and he's "better than when he first got here," but I feel like they shouldn't have stopped trying to find something that works better for him. He's such a nice and well-mannered guy, my heart breaks that he may never escape this delusion. Another coworker said maybe it's best he doesn't know the truth, but that breaks my heart. He dies waiting for his CIA mission discharge, expecting to be reunited with his wife who looks like Winona Ryder in Beverly Hills? Not knowing who he actually was, a well-regarded street artist whose psychosis drove off his real wife years before, and eventually got so bad during COVID that he's just gone from facility to facility ever since? That's... brutal. Found an old Facebook post from him; "punk is not just your music, it's your lifestyle."
Well with that dose of heartbreak, I should get to doing something productive. Will see y'all around...

xo,
ace