Month: December 2023

The Newest Act In The Modern Circus

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Todd, phone to his ear, rifled through a stack of papers. When he found the one he needed, he glanced at his boss’ open door across the room and decided he could probably land it on his desk as a paper airplane.

As he folded, the hold music on the other line disappeared. The chipper voice was deafening after the tinny music. “Hello! Thank you for waiting. How can I help you today?”

“Hi.” Todd shifted the phone to his other ear. “I’m calling to check on the status of an order that was due last week but hasn’t been marked as shipped yet.”

“Ah, let me transfer you to our shipping department!”

“They just-” The hold music started playing again and Todd sighed as he tossed the folded report through the air onto his boss’ desk. Howard, also on the phone, quirked an eyebrow at Todd who shrugged as he turned his attention back to the email he’d been writing when Howard had asked for the report.

As he wrapped that up, a delivery woman stepped out of the stairwell. Todd flagged her down and pointed toward the meeting room next to Howard’s office. When she hesitated at the door, Todd called out “just go in. It’s just a group project.”

Todd shifted his attention back to his inbox before the woman had even touched the doorknob and started sorting through the messages that were piling up while he was stuck on the phone.

Instead of answering any of them, he took a moment to breathe and switched his attention to a different document. As he reflected on his attempts to punch up his resume in order to avoid getting another job like the one he’d grown to hate, he wrote “professional juggler” down under his Other Skills section. 

Ending 2023 On A Positive Note

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I wrote a couple days ago about how I do not really care for all my year-in-review things that have been cropping up all over the place since they mostly just remind me of the incredibly varied and emotionally draining year I’ve had (and I’ve had more of these things crop up since then that just further cemented this unfortunate pattern), but I wanted to take some time to end the year on a more positive note. I spent all year writing about my struggles and what made the year difficult, often in broad strokes that brushed aside all the positive stuff that actually happened, so I wanted to take some time to paint my year in review by connecting all the bright spots in a way I rarely take the time to do. It is, after all, so much easier to be miserable. Still, I think it’s work worth doing before I wrap up 2023 (well, aside from one last piece of Flash Fiction that will be posting tomorrow) and maybe it will help lift my mood as I prepare myself for whatever heaven or hell 2024 will bring.

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Practical By Necessity

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The other day, as my team at work was eating our traditional holiday Qdoba lunch, our boss asked was what we were planning to get ourselves for Christmas (at 32, I’m the youngest person in the group, so this is mostly adults with grown children or older adults without children with two other exceptions beside myself). We bandied back and forth a bit, talking about upgrades to home theater systems, parts for a boat someone is building, good suppliers for smart home appliances or gear until the conversation began to stymie and I tossed out my answer. Since my PC is about eight years old and can’t play more and more modern games (the latest updates to Cyberpunk2077 upgraded it out from underneath my ability to play it), I’ve been saving up for a new high-powered gaming computer and will just be tossing a bit of money that way rather than buying myself anything specific. One of my coworkers joked about Gamer LEDs, water cooling systems, and overclocking computers but, once we’d gotten all the jokes out, I said I was planning to buy a computer strong enough that I wouldn’t need to overclock it for the stuff I wanted to do since I could just save a bit longer and not potentially shorten the lifespan of my computer by putting too much stress on it. My boss commented that I’m so practical, which was probably just an offhand comment in his mind, but it’s been stuck in my mind ever since.

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A Warm Start To Winter

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Aside from a two-day period of low temperatures, high winds, and biting cold (it was so windy on one of those days that I was almost knocked over by a particularly vicious gust and I’m difficult to even stagger, let alone topple), it has been a fairly mild December so far. Most days, the temperature spends a decent chunk of the day above freezing, there’s some sunlight, and my wall AC/Heater unit is enough to keep my apartment comfortable against the chill. Sure, we’ve had an oddly rainy and grey parcel of days lately, with occasional periods of snow sprinkled in for flavor, but it’s been kind of nice, especially compared to last year. Last year, it was so windy and cold that it permanently damaged the aircraft transportation network in the US (and almost made me miss my trip to Spain due to the cascading ripples of the week that so many flights were cancelled rather than rescheduled). This chilly, wet, and sunless weather might not be welcome, but it sure beats the pants off how awful last it was this time last year. I actually had to buy firewood and go through my plans for what to do if I lost power because I’m pretty sure my apartment would have frozen if I’d lost my ability to heat it against that drafty cold. So I can put up with this, even if I’d probably be better insulated against the cold and wind in my current apartment than I ever could have been in my previous one.

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Hiding From All The “Year In Review” Messages I’m Being Sent

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It seems like everything has a “your year in review!” thing these days. Sure, I get it as far as Spotify is concerned, since they’re all about music and basically stealing from musicians, and having all of that data is a great way to generate some buzz and attention to your platform, even though they share the data before the year is over and don’t include your entire year’s worth of listening. Nintendo started doing the same thing, but with video games, showing the number of games you played and how much you played them. My podcatcher app (Podcast Addict) doesn’t have one, but it does compile your stats in a menu somewhere so you can look any time you want rather than needing to wait for the end of the year. Amazon has one, if you use any of its media services. Barnes and Noble even sent me some kind of email about it that I instantly deleted. I don’t want to know how much money I spent on books this year since I know precisely how many books I actually read and the disparity would probably make me sad, especially after I was finally able to get myself back into a place where the quiet I needed for reading was within my grasp again. Honestly, the only services that don’t seem to do this kind of year-end review are social media companies, which I really appreciate since I would hate to see just how much I posted and how little interaction I got.

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Happy Holidays!

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Today is the official winter holiday that my workplace observes (Christmas), so I’m choosing today to not do any writing, so instead of a blog post, I’m going to direct you back to my post from US Thanksgiving for some ways to escape if you feel the need to do so this holiday season. If you’re disappointed that I don’t have anything to entertain you, I suggest checking out Infrared Isolation, which will return to updating every Saturday (assuming I can keep up with the weekly demand for chapters, which is NOT a given even though I’ve got four weeks of updates already written, reviewed, and scheduled) on January 6th. Now is a great time to get caught up, review the story thus far, or dive in for the first time if you’ve not read my near-future, apocalyptic sci-fi story about a band of guides and survivors who made a living navigating the tundra that used to be the Midwestern United States as they find themselves facing off against everything the apocalypse has to throw at them after years of uneasy but safe living.

If you’re just here because you saw I updated then, well, thanks for stopping by! Happy Holidays and I hope you’re having or have already had a great winter holiday season.

This Might Be The Burnout Talking, But I’m Incredibly Frustrated With Stuff At Work

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Today (specifically the day I’m writing this, not the day you’re reading this), I’m whiling away my afternoon as I mostly just keep plates spinning at work. We’re rapidly approaching the holiday season and not a lot is getting done since the office will be closed a week from now. It’ll only be closed for the holidays for a few work days, but that’s already more than we usually get, so everyone’s really feeling a proglonged version of the “friday afternoon” complaceny that tends to hit the office. No one expects much to happen and those of us who are still trying to get things done are pretty much out of luck. So, instead of getting anything done that I had planned to do today (since some of the stuff I needed to do any of that work is officially eight days past due), I’m just trying to keep people from forgetting stuff that I need them to do. It’s boring work, comprised of a lot of writing down lists and looking through my emails and chat messages for the latest updates, but it’s pretty much all I can do right now that is still going to help me complete all my high-priority work before the holidays. Hopefully, anyway. I’m only in the office for four days next week and then I’ll be gone from the office for twelve (total days, not work days, unfortunately), so my window to get anything done before 2024 rolls around is rapidly shrinking [and has officially closed, thanks to holiday delays stretching from US Thanksgiving to the beginning of 2024, so none of that stuff will actually get done this year].

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Spider-Man 2 Is The Most Human Superhero Game I’ve Ever Played

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After realizing that I could not be trusted to play a reasonable amount of Baldur’s Gate 3, I made the decision to swap my evening video game time back to Spider-Man 2 rather than carry on staying up way too late every single night. It wasn’t a difficult decision, to be honest. I’ve already beaten BG3 and while there’s a lot of fun to be had in the game, I recognize an unhealthy coping mechanism when I see one and that game is one from its character creator to its epilogue (for me, specifically. And, you know, probably other people as well). So, I returned to Spider-Man 2 and my relatively new save file, complete with a lot less podcast listening time than I prefered and fears about being as underwhelmed by the game as so many other people seemed to be. A lot of people have decried the game as being annoyingly short and while that doesn’t necessarily deter me (I love a game that won’t take 100 hours to beat just as much as I love a good game that takes 100 hours to beat), it had me putting off the game so I could savor it longer. Now that I’m back into it, though, I kinda regret putting it off as much as I have since it’s actually my favorite of the trio (Spider-Man: Remastered, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Spider-Man 2).

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Pushing Back Against My Loneliness

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Last night, I had a call with one of my friends. I think it was the first time I just sat down and had a chat with someone in at least six months (the last time was when I got to see a friend in-person for the first time in years and we met up after a wedding to get lunch and just talk, which was honestly really great except for the fact that I don’t remember half of it because I was so tired that my head was full of cotton). Most of the time when I talk to people, it’s to serve a particular purpose. Sometimes it’s to plan an event, sometimes it’s to play a game together (video or online tabletop), and sometimes its to provide emotional support. Rarely, these days, do I ever sit down with people, in person or on the phone, to just shoot the shit. Which, in retrospect, is probably part of the reason I’ve been struggling with feelings of isolation for a while now. I love talking to people for no purpose other than to talk, but it’s really difficult to do since most people are busy and it’s much easier to plan an activity with other people than to just set aside time to exist with each other in companionable conversation or silence, whichever happens.

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