selfaware soup

Esther Weidauer

Week of Breathing

Growing mental and physical space, also Pokemon

2025-05-25

Screenshot of Pokemon Blue on a GBC emulator, the player character in front of a pokemon center

University

My schedule at uni is starting to relax. I planned my courses to that all the big block seminars that fill a whole day and often need a lot of prep work for their respective projects were happening early in the semester. The idea was that I’ll have more time to study for my exams towards the end. I think this is working out as intended. Most of these seminars are over and the remaining ones don’t have any more project work.

More importantly though, I finally made a decision about my academic and professional future that has been on my mind for months now. When I started this psychology degree it was with a pretty clear plan to eventually become a licensed therapist. But the more I learned about the subject the more it became clear that this is not a job I can reasonably do. It is inevitably a role that operates within a system of government, health insurances, and other authorities that does not align the patient’s best interest. This isn’t to say that therapy isn’t useful. It very much is. I just can’t see myself working under those conditions. Others can, some even do a really good job, and I have much respect for that. But that’s not me. I also don’t believe I could do this job without utterly ruining my own mental health.

Over the past two years however I have become increasingly interested in the research side of things and I think that is the path I’ll be following now. The big drawback there is that it probably means relatively precarious employment for the foreseeable future but I’m willing to accept that.

Thinking back, four-year-old me wanted to be “a scientist”, for a small child’s vague definition of that term of course. Now, decades later, I have the chance to actually become one. Maybe I owe her that.

Home

For years now my small kitchen table has been mostly storage space for groceries and other random items that would pile up. I think this started during the early days of COVID-related lock-downs when I tried to minimize my trips to the grocery store and piled up a lot of shelf-stable stuff in my kitchen. But I’m usually someone who only buys groceries for a few days at a time at best so my kitchen doesn’t really have a lot of storage space. So my kitchen table quickly became unusable as a table and then stayed that way because I never made the effort to really solve that mess again.

I’ve also long had the habit of eating my meals on my couch, usually while watching something on Youtube or maybe a TV show or movie. Now, a lot of people will tell you that this is a bad habit, and even though I do it a lot, I agree.

This week, I cleared that kitchen table, threw out a lot of stuff, gave it a good cleaning and got myself two little shelves for my kitchen for the things that remained. And you know what? It’s nice to have a kitchen table. It’s nice to sit down there in the morning and drink my daily green tea instead of having breakfast in my bedroom. It’s nice to make dinner and not carry it elsewhere but put it down right there and eat it without turning on a screen. I get to look at the plants in my kitchen and listen to the birds outside. Pretty good stuff.

Games

I’ve been looking for a nice game to play during breaks at university to get my mind off of things, something calm, that doesn’t need a lot of attention and that can be interrupted at any time. And I found it: Pokemon Blue/Red, the original from the 90s. I play it in an emulator on my tiny Pocket Reform laptop.

Even after nearly 30 years (or 25 for us here in Germany where Pokemon released in 1999), it’s still such a good game.

Technology

I’m migrating my Pocket Reform laptop to the upcoming new stable release of Debian Linux. I’ve been running Debian unstable for almost a year on this device now and while it generally worked alright, there’s always anxiety involved when upgrading packages which I of course do frequently to get security updates, and I’ve had a few issues with unfixed bugs. Now on the stable distribution of Debian that should become much less of a problem. The migration itself has proven a bit tricky but I’m not alone in this. There’s a pretty long Mastodon thread on figuring out the issues

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