One week from today, I’ll be getting myself to my local Best Buy so I can pick up my copy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom before returning home to lose myself in a brand new game. I’m very excited for this game, enough so that I’ve had to convince myself not to buy a digital copy of the game as well, so that I can start playing the game the instant it becomes downloadable. It’s difficult to wait, even though there’s literally nothing I can do to make it happen sooner. All I can do is try to be patient as I try to distract myself from the slowly ticking clock. The flip side of this is that time will continue to pass no matter what, so it’s not like I have to do anything in particular to make progress. I just need to work on passing time gracefully.

Thankfully, streaming has helped with that. Work has also been incredibly busy. Any time not occupied by those two things is writing, hunting for an apartment, trying to maintain an exercise routine, or sleeping. Thankfully, the apartment hunting portion of this is coming to an end. Unfortunately, it has come to a rather unsatisfying conclusion. I will not be saving money or finding a roommate. I will be moving, though, but only around my apartment complex. I’ll be moving to a second-floor apartment, so at least I won’t have to deal with noisy upstairs neighbors. I’ll have to deal with more stairs, will no longer have a private entrance, and will have to figure out how to make all my stuff fit in an apartment that is shaped very differently from my current place. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though, since I enjoy a bit of a changeup.

It kind of sucks that I’m only getting one of the three major goals I set for my apartment (lower rent, roommate, not living underneath anyone), but it will still be a positive change. It’s not like it can get much worse than my current place and still look nice enough that I’d be fooled into choosing it as my next apartment. In my own defense, though, it wasn’t like the leak, noisy neighbors, and horrible electric bills were things I could see during an apartment tour. Those are the kinds of things you only learn once you’ve lived somewhere. At least the new lease I’ll be signing will be easier to get out of if this place seems like shit once I’ve moved in. I’d hate to move a second time in a year, but I’m never settling for “barely tolerable” ever again. This apartment has had such a massive negative impact on my health and well-being.

I don’t know that this is really going to free up much time, though. I’d gotten my apartment hunting down to fifteen-minute bursts two or three times a day, so it’s not like it took up much of my day anyway. It will be a massive relief, though, to know that things are settled. I’m writing this a couple days ahead of when that’ll happen since I toured the upper floor apartments on a Friday and will be picking one and signing paperwork on a Monday or Tuesday [or later, as the situation has played out and I still haven’t seen any paperwork to make things official as of editing this the day before it posts]. Still, knowing what the future looks like and what kind of schedule I can expect is a huge weight off my mind. Actually getting everything squared away, with dates, numbers, and signatures on paper, will be another. Maybe then I’ll finally be able to relax. Or maybe I need to dial back my streaming a bit. It’s not like I’ll lose anything if I don’t finish my challenge.

I don’t know. All I know is that, as I’m writing this, I’m not excited about Tears of the Kingdom. At least not emotionally. I know I’ll love the game and have a great time playing it, but I just can’t push myself to feel anything about it after the incredibly draining week I had. Between work, writing, preparation for a Tabletop Roleplaying Game session that never happened, and finally giving up on trying to schedule things with my mostly uncommunicative Sunday group, I just don’t have anything left. I am tapped out. Running on empty. Moving forward because of inertia rather than acceleration.

I’d like to follow this all up with a positive spin. Some kind of “at least I’ve got this or that,” but I’ve got nothing right now. The one thing that sparked my enthusiasm last week was that TTRPG session and I won’t have another chance for one of those for at least three weeks. Things fall through all the time, of course, but it’s difficult to avoid feeling disappointed when that was the light glimmering at the end of a rough, exhausting, and draining week. I just hope I can recover enough to actually enjoy Tears of the Kingdom. I used to be worried that I’d make too big a deal out of the game and warp my expectations so much that it would never be able to live up to the idea of the game in my head. Now I just worry that I’m going to be too tired to do anything other than slowly drag myself through it.