Audiobooks+ some other mindless activity shuts my brain off really well. Find a series you love that your library has and pick up a new sudoku or other puzzle app and go to town.

If you’re having trouble finding books I recommend a long sci fi or fantasy series. The Expanse is great, or Dune is also fantastically long. If fantasy is more your style maybe someone can recommend something but I know the wheel of time has a ton of books.

As for mindless things to do while you listen to audiobooks, either find a puzzle game or pick something up to do with your hands that requires few materials and is calming and productive. Here are a few that work for me:

Coloring (you can print out free coloring pages from the Internet like the ones here: https://www.crayola.com/free-coloring-pages/adult-coloring-pages/)

Color by number

Crochet or knitting (lots of good online tutorials and making a scarf is a good first project)

Modeling clay (just reuse the same clay over and over again if you want to save money/supplies)

Yoga

Walking on a treadmill or riding an exercise bike

Weightlifting with free weights at home

Tai chi

Best of luck, I know this type of thing is tough. Try to stick to regular wake/sleep cycles as much as possible and get outside during the day if you can, it definitely helps. Sending hugs and hoping things get better soon.

Yeah… We’re talking about people who literally want us dead. And because it’s America, they likely own guns. Some of them are literal neo-Nazis or Christian fascists and might actually try to do you harm if you’re Jewish, Muslim, or gay. Making friends with them isn’t just painful and unpleasant, it’s dangerous.

Just to give you a sense of the type of things that you might have to sit through to be “friends” with these folks… My cousin had a kid in her Catholic school class write an essay comparing gayness to bestiality. Another cousin’s husband constantly misgendered my trans sibling on purpose. My parents’ neighbors hung a flag on their wall depicting a person pointing a gun at my parents’ house.

I’ll give you a pass since you’re from Europe and have no sense for the level of extremism embraced by our right wing political groups but trust me… If “just talk to your neighbors” worked we’d be doing it. As it is, your best bet is to avoid them knowing your politics and get out if you can.

Ataulfo mangoes. At least in the northeast US, they are reliably delicious and ripen on the counter.

Cortland apples

Yeah I feel you on that, the fieldwork stage of the job can get tiring really fast, especially with the more routine stuff like asbestos and LNAPL spills. Vapor intrusion work is less of a bear, we’re doing a lot of that lately and it’s nice because it’s indoors in the winter. I work in a larger company with a variety of projects so I’m not always doing the same thing and that definitely helps. In my current company people do tend to graduate out of the field positions fairly quickly (like 5 years) and move on to a desk job or at least a partial desk job but those first few years when you’re in the field a lot can be hard and maybe impossible if you have any dependents that keep you from traveling.

I think it depends on your field of engineering and how much you enjoy the work. I find environmental engineering to be satisfying and a very dependable/lucrative income compared to many other non-engineering fields I might have been interested in.

Add to that most other fields that pay similarly or higher (doctor, lawyer, etc) require more/costlier schooling and it’s a pretty sweet deal to be able to go into the job market with only a bachelor’s or masters and making a decent wage right off the bat.

Of course the same enshittification/race to the bottom for prices affects us too but I don’t know if there’s any career that escapes that entirely.

I would also think maybe certain engineering fields are more stable than others. Mine is particularly recession-proof since we’re driven by regulation (and bipartisan-supported regulation at that), not the economy. Massive layoffs are not that common in many of the other more “physical” engineering fields like structural, electrical, or mechanical either and even if you are laid off there is usually another company hiring. The skills are pretty portable as well so if you want to change careers you have a pretty good chance at being successful.

Is it a field of rainbows and butterflies? No, but it’s a hell of a lot better than plenty of other jobs out there and it pays the bills.

Environmental engineer. I clean up chemical messes like oil spills, and make sure that the resulting land is safe enough for people to live on it.

It’s fun and challenging, if somewhat depressing at times. Some things take a LONG time to clean up. On the plus side, I have great job security.

Seriously, that stuff is delicious! Don’t throw it out.

Add it to cornbread, use it to fry vegetables, put it on popcorn, use it to season your cast iron… The list goes on and on. And it keeps almost indefinitely in the fridge thanks to all the salt. There is almost no reason I can think of to throw out bacon grease unless you eat so much bacon that you can’t possibly keep up with the grease or you don’t have a refrigerator.

I find it almost impossible to pick a favorite poem of hers, but if I had to it’d probably be “Tutaj” (“Here” in English) by Wislawa Szymborska.

https://medium.com/illumination/here-671e29357dcc

“Starvation Camp Near Jaslo” and “Foraminifera” are two other favorites and Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak have done an amazing job at the translations.