Between therapy, not sleeping well last night (I was actually in bed on time for once, I just couldn’t fall asleep and then I kept waking up throughout the night), and the general events of the last two weeks, I just do not have the energy for much today. I finished Sea of Stars and want to write about it, but the thought of even starting on that post (by copying over the relevant bits of a discussion I had with someone about the game) have me feeling so exhausted that I’d rather lay down on the dirty floor of my office and not move for a week than try to parse through all the pieces of that largely one-sided discussion (my mistake for engaging with someone without checking if they were up for in-depth critical analysis). I mean, hell, I can’t decide what I’m doing to do for dinner and tonight’s grocery night, which means I could guiltlessly cop out by ordering Chinese food from the local place since I’ll be getting home late. Nothing like buying a bunch of food and then not eating any of it. Sure, it’s because I’m exhausted from a long day of work and then going grocery shopping afterwards, but it still feels weird to do. Plus, as much as I enjoy getting takeout from the local Chinese restaurant, I tend not sleep as well after eating it. Seems like eating something else might be the better choice in order to address my exhaustion, but that will take a degree of effort that picking up my dinner would not.
Continue readingMental Health
The Difference Between Mourning And Closure
Content warning for discussions of death, grief, and childhood trauma.
I wrote about some family-related stress a couple weeks back. I spent my therapy appointment between then and now working through my feelings on the matter and what I’d do in the future, which turns out to have been particularly prescient of me (and seems even more so when I add that my therapist was ready to cancel our usual every-other-Monday appointment for the week I wrote this since it was a federal holiday and I instead suggested we reschedule for a few days later that week, which turned out to be the day after I wrote this). My grandmother began to fade earlier this week and passed away today. I’m, of course, still processing this. All of the emotional preparation and complex feelings of relief and grief intermingled don’t make this any easier. Even my complex feelings about my family and how I have processed my feelings for them don’t really help since, ultimately, this moment is when it all goes from being abstract and self-enforced to being incredibly concrete and real. No matter how else I feel about her, my grandmother was a major part of my life for my entire childhood. She is in many of my oldest memories, even if they’ve taken on a more bitter than bittersweet cast as I’ve come to better appreciate the horrors of my childhood and the way my grandmother served as a source and focal point for much of the generational trauma in that side of my family.
Continue readingI Feel So Relieved Already
Just one week later, not even seven full days getting my mole removed, and I’m already wondering what I was worried about. Sure, I’m still in the active wound-care stage of things, but I’m notably less self-conscious of the bandage stuck to my face than I ever was of my mole, and that’s even with the bandage feeling way more noticeable than the mole ever was. It just bothers me so much less. Honestly, the only gripe I’ve got about this whole process is how I have to shave every single day. I learned the hard way that more than a day’s worth of facial hair growth makes the bandages fall off much more quickly. Most of the other gripes I’ve had (such as how bad the wound looked) either faded away in the first few days or I’ve learned how to counter them. For instance, I might still be unable to bite into large things (like an apple), but I’ve gone back to drinking as usual and gotten the hang of eating various more easily bitten foods without making a mess or accidentally putting pressure on my wound. It has all become fairly routine at this point and while I’m definitely eager to get to the point where I don’t have something stuck to my face twenty-four hours a day, I’m honestly just happy to not have the mole anymore.
Continue readingI Overextended Myself Once Again
I wound up staying up until about 2am Friday morning, since I only finished building my character and all that in Baldur’s Gate 3 at about 11:30 Thursday night. It took a long time to download and I had a D&D game I was playing in during the earlier hours of the evening, so I was faced with either going to bed without playing BG3 or staying up a bit to play just the intro. I chose the latter, which turned into playing for about two hours. That, plus a bit of research I did following my introduction to Gale is what informed last Friday’s post since I wrote that during work breaks in my morning and then finished it between chores Saturday morning. I was pretty busy for pretty much the entire day and evening, so I had to get pretty focused with my topic for Friday. It’s not like I had any extra time to play more or do more research about the game that day, nor have I had much since then.
Continue readingI Miss Pretending To Be Someone Else
I’ve been so busy lately that I’ve hardly had the time or energy for doing anything after work other than settling down in front of my TV and not moving again until it’s time to go to bed. I had plans to start putting a puzzle together or maybe work on a Lego set at some point this week (in an effort to spend some time away from screens and take a break from books. The book break isn’t because they’re bad or they’re twisting my mind in some way (though doing a massive binge of The Dresden Files has definitely influenced my recent dreams, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post), but because I’m spending too much time hunched over things or folded up in chairs. I need some activities that let me sprawl. Or, I thought I’d need them since I planned to get a full week of daily workouts in this week. Instead, I’ve done zero workouts, stuggled to get to sleep on time, and all the energy I have for any given day has been consumed by work as I juggle projects, prepare for a company event (that has happened by the time this goes up), and attempts to sort through my feelings about a whole range of stuff.
Continue readingThe Improbable Spider-Man and The Case of the Incredibly Stressed Author
When I finished Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and wanted to relax with an older, more simple favorite, I decided to replay Spider-Man: Remastered. Since I bought a PS5 just a couple months ago and opted not to transfer my save files, I wanted to make sure I had a finished file on my console before the sequel comes out (well, besides Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which I bought and am excited to play once I’m finished with SM:R). I figured this would be a great opportunity for it, since I also wanted to catch up on my podcasts a bit and the storytelling of the game isn’t strong enough that I feel terribly compelled to follow it on a replay. Plus, I love Spider-Man. I’m a big fan and I’ve always enjoyed swinging around New York in every Spider-Man game I’ve ever played. For the most part, I’m having a great time. I’m much better at fighting enemies than I was the first time I played it (so much so that I can’t even comprehend why I used to struggle in battles since now I can handle everything with ease unless I’m going for style points and focus too much on gimmicks rather than effective combat strategy), so the main source of mild frustration I used to feel is now entirely gone. However, I have a new one and it’s odd because I think it is pointing to a change in my gaming preferences rather than a change in games as a whole.
Continue readingSleep Cycles And Bad Habits
I read a review by Linda Codega (the reporter who broke the Dungeons and Dragons/Wizards of the Coast OGL news back in January) the other day. They were covering Pokémon Sleep, the latest app in Nintendo’s continued pursuit of becoming a lifestyle company. The game is fairly simple, in that it monitors your sleep habits (by being open on your phone, which you’ve left facedown on top of your bed) and scores you based on how much you moved around in your sleep, how long you slept, and who knows what other data. Based on your score, you get the chance to power up your Pokémon, capture new Pokémon (via taking pictures), and advance in the game. It’s fairly simple and straight-forward and, to me at least, does not seem terribly appealing. I sleep pretty poorly, though, so maybe I’m just not interested in a game I won’t be good at. That said, what has me thinking about this fairly bland game days later is what Codega muses on in the latter portion of their article. If this app is the last thing we think about before we go to bed and the first thing we think about when we wake up, what does that do to us as Humans? What are going to be the long-term consequences of the continued gamification of life, as we turn sleep from something meant to prepare us for another day into another form of entertainment? They end the review without coming to a conclusion, saying they would need more than one night of using the yet-unreleased app to really dive into the cultural implications, but I realized that this is something I’ve already done to myself and have been doing for years now.
Continue readingOne Week Of Rest Later. Sorta.
I am officially one week into dropping streaming and specifically not replacing it with other projects. I have actually done my best to rest, even if I wound up spending an entire weekend busy and emotionally exhausted from a variety of frustrations, some disappointment (which has only contributed to my emotional exhaustion because I spent the time and energy to emotionally process it), and a very Midwestern party. I have not entirely succeeded in resting over this past week, since my sleep schedule is still royally messed up, but I actually had the energy to write two long blog posts and most of a chapter of Infrared Isolation (which will be going up the weekend after this post does, meaning I’ll have skipped another Saturday update) yesterday. It felt great to be able to work on something and actually have the mental fortitude to focus on it for more than a few minutes at a time. Which I mostly lost between yesterday and today because I was up too late playing a game (Cassette Beasts is great and I’ll eventually be writing about it), but that will hopefully be mostly fixed if I can actually get some sleep for once.
Continue readingFilling My Free Time
As I go about planning how I’m going to spend my time, conscious of both my need to rest and my desire to fill my day with things I feel are fulfilling and rewarding, I am finding it difficult to strike a proper balance. Since I stopped streaming because I had overburdened myself, I now have a bunch of time available. Sure, it used to be filled with something that I found enjoyable, but it was also frequently more draining than it was restorative. Right now, I’m trying to keep this time clear so I can actually get the rest I need to recover from the past eight months, but I’ll admit that I’ve already begun to think about what else I could be doing with that time. It might seem like this is happening too quickly, but I’m pretty surprised that it took two whole days, one of which used to be a streaming day, for me to get to this point. Normally, I’d have expected myself to start planning what I could do with this “extra” time before I’d even made the decision to stop streaming. I dislike feeling like I failed at something, after all, and it is more difficult to feel like I failed when I stop doing something if I can convince myself that I can now do something else of equal or greater importance to myself. It isn’t more restful, though, so I’m trying to take it easy. And I mean actually easy, not “easy in comparison to my usual amount of effort.”
Continue readingRelief From A Weight I’ve Never Mentioned
I went to get a mole checked out today. I wasn’t super concerned that it might be a sign of some kind of skin cancer since I’ve had it for as long as I can remember, but it has long been an inconvenience at best since it sits right between my nose and my lip. It gets in the way of shaving, of blowing my nose, of wiping my nose, and it can interfere with sneezes if I don’t have them absolutely locked down. It tends to bleed easily, if I scrape or pinch it hard enough and it frequently itches in a way that encourages me to scrape or pinch it. If I shave too thoroughly and indelicately around it, it will bleed the next time I brush against it with anything rougher than my hands. That said, I’ve been living with it for as long as I can remember, so it hasn’t been an issue for much of my life. Only occasionally, less than once a year, will I accidentally cause it to bleed or otherwise hurt myself by absentmindedly interacting with it. It has been easy to ignore as I’ve dealt with more pressing issues because I had the tools and skills required to cope with it in an effective and safe manner.
Continue reading