Daylight Saving Time is back in the US and continues to be some absolute bullshit. My entire rhythm is fucked up. You’d think that, with how messed up my sleep schedule already is, that I’d be a bit less troubled by other disruptions. You’d think wrong. I’m just as susceptible to the disruption of having the sun’s position relative to only my external clocks suddenly change. So, despite getting a decent amount of sleep over the weekend, I’m still starting this week with less than I’d like thanks to having my sleep cut short by an hour on Sunday and then struggling to fall asleep later that same day. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to do some course correction as I go through this week, but I’ve got a lot of potential events on my calendar for this week (mostly in the evenings [and none of which wound up happening]), so there’s no knowing how long its going to take for me to sort this out [the answer was still “all week” though]. After all, a lot of my struggles around getting to bed on time are a result of trying to make some time to enjoy myself or play some video games in the evening and I might be even shorter on that time than usual. Plus, thanks to all those events, I have to make sure I’m getting out of bed on time so I can actually get my usual ten-hour days in before I have to leave work for my evening events, which means my usual release valve of “sleep in a bit” isn’t available until Friday at the earliest and even then I’ll want to avoid being too late to work on Friday since I don’t think I’ll be able to bank any extra time this week to balance out any days that have to end early.

My main consolation is that work is currently pretty quiet. Thanks to some delays, most of my projects have hit a lull and while there’s going to be plenty to do soon, I can finally take a breather and work at a more measured pace. I’ve got tons to do still, some which needs to get done before those projects come due or it’ll never get done, but the pace feels a lot less frantic and that’s worth a lot. It means I’ve finally got time and energy to turn my attention to getting my one Dungeons and Dragons campaign (which met the day before I wrote this and which I’ll write about the day after I wrote this) into a decent and sustainable place. I’ve got another that is mostly there, but I’m still getting back into the swing of things after a year and a quarter away, so I mostly need to dig out my old notes, review what I had going on for things that have slipped my mind since I came up with them, and then get the boat on course for the next few plot beats. After that, it’ll be time to figure out what to play next with my alternate Sunday game once we finish Heart: The City Beneath, and then prepare myself for whatever that will be. Finally, in what seems like late April at this rate, I’ll be able to turn my attention to where my blog is going to live on a more permanent basis. That doesn’t leave much time to figure things out before I need to be off my current WordPress (.com) hosted site, but that should be enough since it will give lots of other people plenty of time to try things out and post about them on the few social media sites I still use (assuming those are still around then, since it looks like Cohost, my favorite of the new crowd, is having some financial difficulties that they may or may not be able to resolve).

With all this in mind, the Daylight Saving Time stuff and personal projects, all I’ve really got to say is that at least it’s light out when I leave work now. Unless I have to stay until eight in the evening (a fate I try very fervently to avoid), I should be able to leave work to increasing amounts of twilight and then, eventually, daylight. Sure, all the time-skipping-around stuff sucks, but at least it’s still light out when I’m going to my car in the evening. That helps buoy my spirits enormously. Not as much as having access to a window and daylight from the lab in which I do most of my work would help, but I’ll take what I can get. On top of that, all of these personal projects (minus the blog hosting one) are things I enjoy working on and get some measure of satisfaction from, so that feels nice to sprinkle throughout my day and into my evenings. Sure, I might wind up tossing it all aside to work on the blog hosting problem just to get it off my plate, so I can stop having it needle at the back (and sometimes the front) of my mind, but I have a lot of good reasons for organizing things this way and it usually helps me deal with something if I’ve done the work to justify not working on it immediately.

I’ll admit that it still feels odd to be writing posts here, on a website I know I’m going to eventually at least partially shutter or significantly change when I absolutely don’t know if any of this work will carry over to wherever I wind up going. Not wrong, mind you, just weird. After all, a lot of the thought and work behind this place involves building it to its current state. There is a weight behind it. A new place won’t have that, especially if I can’t bring my archive of posts over. Still, I don’t really struggle to keep writing (now that the urgency and high-stress of the initial event is over, anyway) since the real reason I write is to tell stories and, kind of reductively, to write. I do this because I love doing it and because it feels good to do it. I’m not doing it for attention, even though I appreciate the attention. I don’t do it because I want to leave a mark on the world around me, even though that is a nice side-effect of my work. I don’t do it because I feel that people ought to read what I have to say about stuff, though I’ll admit I do love a bit of engagement or the signs of readings passing through. I do it because I will always find a way to write. I will always find a place to record my thoughts, even if it is incredibly private, like in a journal or on the walls and floors of whatever cave I wind up living in after the collapse of society. For now, that’s this blog. Soon, that’ll be somewhere else. Even if I have to start over again–which, let me be clear, is the second worst possible outcome and only just barely philosophically better than staying here where my data and creations are treated as someone else’s property–I will do it without hesitation. I’ve done it multiple times in recent years as I’ve become more discerning in my relationships, as I’ve left behind social media sites that have felt increasingly hostile and toxic, and as I’ve closed out past blogs. I’ll do it again if I must. And probably complain about it while I ruthlessly do it.