There was a time in my life, a pretty long time actually, when I would have read the next Dresden Files book the night it came out. I’d have my acquisition strategy worked out, I’d have left work early, and I’d have powered through it in a single evening, staying up until an ungodly hour to finish it if required. Today, the book’s been out for a week and in my hands for five days and I haven’t even opened the package it was delivered in. I actually didn’t even realize it was coming out until a couple weeks beforehand, promptly forgot again, and only got it eventually because one of my coworkers brought it up when I was at my computer so I could order it immediately. I’m sure that my penchant for staying up to ungodly hours to play Final Fantasy 14 has something to do with my shift in priorities, but I have to admit that I’m just not as excited about the franchise as I once was. I’m still gonna read the book and however many more there are before the series comes to an end, but I’ll admit that the shifting scales and recent story events have kind of lost me. I mean, I understand that this kind of noir-adjacent story requires the protagonist to be the perpetual underdog, even as his competence grows (this is the 18th book in the series, after all. Harry Dresden HAS to be a power player at this point) and I understand why a major character was killed in the last book (age is an issue for a series that covers about a year per book and only SOME of the characters have special magical regenerative powers that slow their aging/divine blessings that keep them combat relevant as the baddies turn from local vampires to deities and deific figures), but I don’t have to like it.
Continue readingMusing
The Return Of The Polar Vortex
Once again, the Polar Vortex has returned. I am writing this the day before it arrives and brings wind-chill temperatures into the negative fifties to my area, thinking about how long it will be before we get another day where the high temperature is in the upper teens like it is today. It’s not a big deal for most. We’re used to it at this point. I even had some people make wisecracks about my shorts and how I’ll need to find some pants or whatever (I won’t be outside in the wind long enough for it to matter tomorrow). Just another normal week of incredibly low temperatures made worse by heavy wind out of the north to make the further collapse of the jet stream that once kept these polar winds north of the Canadian border ninety-nine times out of one hundred. The rest of the country, from Texas to the distant northeast, is preparing to mountains of snow. They might be relative mountains–a couple inches in texas and multiple feet, potentially, in the plains and new england–but they all promise far more snow than the area is used to. Which I’m kind of jealous of, if I’m being honest. Where I live, all we get is temperatures far too cold for it to snow or precipitate at all and occasional snowfalls. I mean, we’ve had maybe a foot of snow fall this year so far, which is up from previous years, but most of it melted after the first round and the subsequent rounds have all been relatively light. This is not an opinion I voice anywhere that people are expecting to get slammed by snow because most of those places don’t have the infrastructure required to handle it (though, to be fair, judging by how miserably any of this year’s snow has been handled, I’m not sure my home has the infrastructure to handle it anymore either) and I don’t want to come off as insensitive, but I really do miss the days of heavy snowstorms and large amounts of snow accumulation.
Continue readingWhen The Wind Changes
People will tell you that they always agreed with you hours after telling you that you were wrong. You can return to a conversation after taking a break to let the heat die out and find the person you were arguing with suddenly agreeing with you. It requires that they believe (or at least pretend to believe) that you two were just arguing about two nuanced positions that are ultimately aligned, but if the opposition that caused the arguement is suddenly gone, it is pretty clear that someone’s thinking or position changed. Which is what it feels like so many of us are experiencing now that the winds have shifted, the tide has changed, and suddenly it seems like everyone agrees that the various parts of the Department of Homeland Security, a troublesome organization from the first, have gone too far. There’s this phrase that I see get repeated a lot lately: “one day, everyone will have always been against this.” This is the title of a book by Omar El Akkad, itself a paraphrasing of a tweet by the author in October of 2023, and is directly about the genoicide in Gaza, but the idea is such a powerful one, and so reflective of so much of Western culture and politics (which is part of what El Akkad discusses in his book), that it’s easy to apply it widely (ow things played out with the invasion of Iraq is the one I see most often used as evidence that this statement is true). After all, as we are seeing today following the execution of a white man–a veritable angel by all accounts–by DHS agents, suddenly everyone is pushing in more or less the same direction, from those with their boots firmly planted in the ice and snow of Minnesota to those with their heads so far up their own asses that there was a popping noise as they suddenly changed realigned themselves.
Continue readingWaiting For Something To Change
Hell is anxiously checking for a response to a message you haven’t even typed yet, much less sent. It is having made a decision that you haven’t followed through on yet, essentially forcing you to make the decision over and over again as your mind picks at it. It is knowing that you have to keep making a decision every day for years if you want it to ever pay off, despite how far away that moment might be. It is knowing something and being unable to act on it, not now and probably not ever. It is all these moments of anixety and powerlessness and more besides. These days, I find myself steeped in such things: conversations I don’t know how to start, things I feel foolishly compelled to heavily qualify before sharing, decisions made long ago that I must stick to because nothing’s changed enough to reevaluate them, and recognitions of problems I can do nothing positive to resolve. All my other choices are worse than whatever I’ve picked, acting on anything will most-likely return bad results, and no amount of practice is going to make it any easier to start conversations I feel weird for having because I was trained to ask nothing of people and still struggle to ask for anything that might require other people to put in effort on my behalf. I hate being in these kinds of no-win-but-the-long-run situations and even my therapist agrees that my life is pretty much entirely made up of them these days. I just want problems that are easy to handle, a society that doesn’t feel like it is on the verge of collapsing, and the ability to ask things of people without feeling the need to preempt all the potential negative directions the conversation could go if I was misinterpreted.
Continue readingFighting The Tide So Current Events Don’t Sweep Me Away
It’s all kind of a lot these days. The invasion of Minnesota, the planned invasion of multiple other cities, Trump posturing to stake a claim (likely violent) on Greenland, Trump’s government trying to manufacture consent for the invasion, the ever-present spectre of the Epstein Files looming over everything, and all of the patently obvious politically-motivation prosecutions of democratic-run states, democratic officials, and any of Trump’s perceived enemies. There’s just no end to it. I’ve been trying to rest, to get away from the constant churn of misery and awfulness long enough to unwind at least a tiny bit, and every time I go back to the internet or social media, I discover some fresh hell has been unleashed. More killings by cops or feds, increasingly violent rhetoric meant to justify the invasion of Greenland, cops and feds attacking protesters, some new neo-nazi has decided that it’s their turn in the spotlight, and so on. I can’t even remember everything that’s happened this week because it’s just so much all the time and I’m certain I didn’t even see all the most viral of this week’s events. The media environment is too fractured by all the big names joining Trump’s side or attempting to rehabilitate the bullshit he’s spewing as more and more of how we communicate and learn about the world beyond us gets consildated into the conservative grasp of a cadre of malignant billionaires. Our would-be leaders throw up their hands and repeat a bunch of out-of-touch bullshit about prices being too high and citizens being unable to afford groceries like it’s a mantra meant to summon donations or an additional term, all while people are yanked out of their homes and kidnapped out of their cars in the violent blitz that Trump has brought down on various cities in the US. And the pace seems to only be increasing as this desperate attempt to break Trump’s political opponents begins to turn the neutral parts of the country against him.
Continue readingBurgeoning Burnout And Undeniable Exhaustion
It has been a difficult week. Following my therapy appointment a couple days ago, I spent the rest of that day and all of the next at home, taking time off work. Today, the day I’m writing this a week before it goes up, I’m in the office for a normal 10+ hour shift and mentally prepared to not go in to work at all tomorrow since I’d only need to spend two days of PTO at that point. If I’m not going to get any overtime this week because of how acute my burnout is and how exhausted I feel from coming face-to-face with said burnout, its causes, and the things keeping it the same size at best or growing at worst with each passing day, I might as well give myself an extra day off so I can maybe get enough rest to tackle next week without needing to cut my days short. I also just don’t want to be here. I have described, in detail, how much things at my job have wrecked me over the past two years and I can’t pretend, even for a little bit, that I’m okay with this, comfortable with what’s going on, or happy about any of it in the slightest. I mean, it’s not like I’m being actively tortured or anything, or abused by any meaning of the word. I’m just being taken for granted and have Hard Work’d my way into an untenable position where my entire team not only expects me to do a great deal of organizational labor that isn’t at all a part of my job, but will actively make my life difficult if I’m not doing it by complaining to my boss that I don’t seem to be working much at all. It’s not a great position to be in, especially because my boss agrees with them, or at least he did six months ago when he brought it up during my yearly review, and I’m not entirely sure what to do.
Continue readingA Recipe For A Better Year
After more than a month of thinking about it and nearly three weeks of sitting on the (frozen) supplies, I finally took the time today (a week before this gets posted) to make a little recipe one of my friends prepared for us when I was visiting over Thanksgiving. It’s a relatively simple chicken dish that is basically a simple stir-fry, but it’s a recipe without a card or instructions beyond what he told me since it is entirely of his own devising. You see, over the recent years, he has taken to cooking not like I do (starting with a recipe card and making alterations based on smell or taste until the recipe becomes my own enough that I don’t need a recipe card or instructions any more), but by learning from professionals on YouTube. There’s a lot of great channels out there that cover quite a variety of things, but the best ones aren’t how to prepare a recipe and the background of the recipe, but how the various components of recipes work. Fats/oils, aromatics, various techniques: that sort of stuff. He’s had to rely on them since he lost most of his sense of smell when he caught Covid a while back, but knowing the basics, how things eventually taste, and why it all works the way it does is clearly the superior method to winging it by nose as I do. It allows him to put things together in new ways without needing a starting point like I do and it seems to be working out really well for him and his wife. And, now that I’ve recreated one of his recipes at home, me too.
Continue readingCoping With A Normal, Healthy Reaction To What’s Going On These Days
There are days, more and more lately, where I am heartsick at the state of the world or floundering and unable to escape the vortex of my own personal miseries. Unfortunately, the world does not give you space to have days like that. Life must still be lived. Bills mut be payed, money must be earned, food must be bought, and the necessities of life require you to carry on despite how much you want to take a moment to just reel at the enormnity of it all. How do you do that? What can you do to make some distance, create a little space, and find a way to take the next step forward because you have to no matter how much your heart demands you lay face down on the ground? There’s plenty of self-care tips out there for this sort of thing: log off, stay hydrated, make sure you eat, get some fresh air, ground yourself in the present moment, find ways to be active locally, in-person, so you can provide yourself with some measure of control to fight back against the feelings of powerlessness that are often at the center (or at least near it) of these overwhelming moments. That doesn’t always do it, though, because sometimes you also have to clean your apartment or deal with other people who are making reasonable requests of you or you need to find a way to write about something, anything, to help break your mind out of the paralysis gripping it. What do you do for that extra boost, the tiny bit of impetus required to break out of the rut you’re in so you can do the things you really should be doing today but don’t really NEED to do today? You can’t leave it all for tomorrow, you know? Tomorrow will have it’s own things, it’s own trials and miseries to make doing things difficult, so stacking up more and more important-but-not-necessary effort is only ever going to add more weight to your shoulders.
Continue readingNowhere Left For Escapism
Once upon a time, I used to take breaks from the work I was doing to go on social media. I’d see some art, look a whatever had gone viral, post back and forth with some friends, maybe idly browse for a bit, and then return to whatever I’d been doing. It was fun. It was enjoyable. It was a small hit of happiness during my long, often-boring days. Nowdays, I feel like I do everything else in my life as a break from social media before I eventually have to return to doom scrolling so I can keep up with whatever hellacious, objectively evil thing has happened since I last looked. There is no joy to be found there and, more and more frequently, not even any escapism. All I can count on getting from the internet these days is at least a modicum of despair and yet my brain keeps telling me to go back and check again. After all, maybe this time I’ll actually get that little bit of serotonin I’m craving. Maybe this time I’ll just see some nice art or a funny joke or an announcement about something of interest to me and not spend an hour scrolling up and down the page as I trepidatiously follow whatever unfolding disaster has occurred (such as “law enforcement” of various types killing someone in what can only be reasonably described as an execution or the various media and government personal talking about just how reasonable it is for Trump to consider acquiring Greenland through whatever means he desires). Nothing I have seen on social media in the last year comes even close to making up for how much absolute misery I’ve experienced as a result of scrolling around and yet I can feel the need to scroll, to bear horrified witness to these unfolding tragedies, tugging at my attention despite not wanting to see yet another post about how surely, this time, they have gone too far.
Continue readingNew Year, Same Problems
I went into my two and a half weeks of vacation thinking that, by the end of it, I’d have found my voice again. That, after enough rest, even interrupted by the holidays, I would find myself gravitating towards the blank page that used to speak to me. Instead, I spent the weekend before the end of my vacation thinking about what I’d do today, the day I’m writing and posting this, since I hadn’t written anything and all I really felt as a result of my time off was more doubt than ever. I came up with a couple good ideas related to that, but whatever they were vanished into the haze of my incredibly disrupted sleep schedule and the emotional lassitude that followed an entire afternoon and evening of fun and rewarding roleplaying with some people I’ve gotten closer to over the last few weeks. This morning, as I prepared for work, I had some kind of idea about directing my writing in such a way that it was more of a means of giving voice to specific ideas rather than just giving voice to my otherwise silent thoughts and feelings, but my exhaustion from not sleeping well and the busyness of my workplace has caused whatever distinction I came up with to slip from my mind. I am running around empty-handed as the hours of the day tick past and nothing I can think of feels like more than the usual complaining and navel-gazing I leaned on so heavily before my break. Which begs the question, did taking my break actually change anything? Did all that rest actually result in some amount of recovery? Eighteen days have passed and did I do anything other than pass through eighteen days of time?
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