There is this expression I first encountered in playing Magic The Gathering (which is probably used in a lot of card games, but I don’t really play many card games so I’ve got no idea) that I wish more people were familiar with so I could actually use it as much, and in as wide a variety of situations, as it pops into my mind. Sure, the explicit meaning of “top-decking” is that you’re using whatever you draw from your deck as you draw it, but the actual meaning behind that says a lot more. You see, when you’re playing one of these card games, you are generally using a deck built around a specific function or theme. You’ve assembled cards to enable types of play to help you win and the rest of your deck is usually built to get those cards into your hands or to respond to other types of play so you have the time you need to get a winning combination in place. So, when you’re top-decking, what that usually means is that you’re out of options, you’ve done everything within your power at the moment, and all you can do is respond in the moment with whatever comes into your hand. You have no ability to respond to other players’ actions and all you can do for the future is hope that you eventually draw something you need or that will get you what you need. Which is how living my life feels a lot of the time.
Continue readingMusing
Instability Makes For Poor Resting Conditions
Well, I got one decent night of sleep. Went to bed at my usual weekend time, fell asleep right away, and slept for a solid eight before I got up on my own and started my day. One night isn’t a lot, but it’s better than nothing and it hopefully signals the approaching end of this period of insomnia. I didn’t sleep as much the following night, but then I was up late editing videos for the absolutely smashing opening to this year’s Cross Realm Wrestling (the Final Fantasy 14 roleplaying wrestling league I’m recording and editing events for) season. That was a choice, as was waking up after not enough time so I could spend time with my siblings, so I’ve only got myself to blame for that one. Last night’s relatively sleeplessness, though, was back to good ol’ insomnia. I sometimes wonder if I have trouble falling asleep at night because I spend so much of my day struggling to stay awake, but that thought is really depressing so I try not to spend too much time on it. I mean, it’d make sense, you know? I’m constantly struggling to stay awake and putting a lot of effort into not falling asleep during the day, so maybe I’m just training myself to not fall asleep easily. Which fits last night’s sleeplessness really well. Lot of dozing off and then twitching awake, lots of shifting my legs to try to find a comfortable position without any pain for me to focus on. And a lot of desperate thinking of topics I can’t remember as my brain just fires off thought after thought so my brain can’t truly wind down. If that’s not at least a part of my sleep issues, I’d be genuinely quite surprised.
Continue readingA Life’s Worth Of Problems To Solve
Last week’s anger is still around. It’s currently locked in battle with my exhaustion in a way that is amplifying all my other emotions in ways I do not particularly appreciate, but then very little that’s positive has happened. I mean, I had a nice weekend, that was good, but I haven’t been able to make much headway on any job applications, nor have any of my floating problems resolved themselves. They’re not even closer to being resolved than they were before. Hell, I feel like I’ve made negative progress on some of them. I’ve tried talking through what’s going on with some people and that hasn’t actually helped at all. Normally that helps a lot–normally thinking out loud like that helps me push towards a better understanding of what’s going on with me but I feel like that hasn’t worked lately. To cap it all off, I feel like this is all pointless because I’ve got practical problems I need to solve now and all this theoretical stuff, while incredibly important to my sense of self, doesn’t matter as much. I just got my lease renewal which stands to raise my rent by over one hundred dollars, there’s some big changes happening at my employer that necessitate reconsidering stuff I thought I’d already settled about my future, and everything I thought I’d settled about how and why I spend my energy is suddenly in question again as a couple interactions that should be inconsequential have bent me out of sorts.
Continue readingReflecting On My Relationship With Trigun Over The Last 15 Years
I’ve begun to watch the latest season of Trigun (Trigun Stargaze, to be precise) and while there’s still more to watch before I share my thoughts on it, it did kind of jiggle something loose when I started watching it last weekend. You see, I first watched Trigun about fifteen years ago and it quickly became my favorite anime. A cheerful, happy protagonist (Vash the Stampede) who endured endless suffering but still managed to get out there every day and crow about love and peace? That was what I aspired to be for quite a while. It was easy to admire his dedication to not killing anyone, his ability to endure in the face of unspeakable pain, and his willingness to sacrifice himself in order to save others. After all, that aligned him with the vision of myself I’d been raised to hold and it fed into the still-unhealthy parts of said vision that I carried forward into my adulthood. It was easy to take his side as he preached against killing, as he tried to redeem his ally (Nicholos D. Wolfwood) who would kill as he thought he must, and just as easy to mourn but celebrate Wolfwood’s death at the end of the first anime (the one from the late 90s) because Wolfwood ultimately chose the path of nonviolence and self-sacrifice. These days, it is much less easy. These days, after decades of self-sacrifice and burning myself up (and out) to keep others warm, I find my perspective has shifted. I still appreciate Vash and his optimision, I still appreciate his commitment to protection, but I can’t really align myself with it any more. I like what he does, I like the way that he is perhaps the least gun-using gunslinger in this western-adjacent anime of the last few years. But I find myself on Wolfwood’s side more and more now. Sometimes, no matter what you want, no matter how much you sacrifice, no matter how strongly you will it, some one needs to be stopped and you won’t be able to redeem them.
Continue readingAt Least My Thoughts Are More Directed While I’m Still Unable To Sleep Enough
More time has not fixed my sleep problem. It has gotten better, but it hasn’t fixed itself yet. I’m able to think fairly clearly. I’m very tired still, and a day at work is still very draining, but I think I’m getting through the worst of the mental muddling that has left me in this state. I haven’t really figured anything concrete out, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I feel about all of the stuff going on in my life (namely my tendency to throw myself into projects with a dedication rarely reflected by those I work with, what part I wish to play in the various communities I’m a part of, how much should I temper my passions in order to avoid further burnout, and so on) and I think I’ve at least figured out what I don’t want and taken a couple steps on the road to somewhere. I know I don’t want to return to my old quiet days of playing games by myself and going entire weeks without talking to anyone save my coworkers. I don’t want to do nothing but what I need to. I also don’t want to give up on some of the things I’ve started, not entirely, even if they can be draining. I know I need to continue to work on balancing the energy I spend against the rest I’m getting. I also know that I want to be a part of communities and that community doesn’t happen without people to oragnize it and do the work. Someone has to be the person to say “let’s do stuff” and while it doesn’t have to be me all the time (and shouldn’t be me all the time!), I am a very organized person who does enjoy logistical work, so I need to figure out how to find balance between this truth and the just as real truth that I’m burned out and constantly exhausted these days.
Continue readingKeeping My Anger On A Slow Burn
There was a period in my life when I did not consider myself an angry person. A pretty long one, actually. I only began to question that assertion once I no longer had a (sometimes healthy) outlet for any aggression I felt, which was in my mid-to-late twenties. I spent my entire childhood miserable, my teen years surviving, my college years starting to get in touch with my emotions, and still didn’t realize how angry I was about a lot of stuff until I was forced to grapple with the emotional toll of my grandfather’s death and my separation from my parents. You see, I survived most of my childhood by repressing my emotions in a way that had a lasting negative impact, as perhaps best exemplified by the fact that I didn’t experience any kind of mixed or nuanced emotions until sometime in my twenties. I only ever felt one thing up at a time up to that point and it was only as I began to unpack the way that my grief touched everything else I felt that I started to recognize the complexities of what I was feeling prior to that. And thus came the anger. It had been sublimated into so many other emotions, into so many parts of my life, that it was differnet to pull out and understand on it own, especially because I was raised in a particular masculine tradition where not even anger was a “proper” emotion for a man to have. The only proper emotions where love (for god, of course) and remorse (for not loving god enough), so I tamped down a lot of stuff in order to play the part I was assigned.
Continue readingFear, Trauma, And Self-Regulation In Modern Times
Some days, time crawls. There’s no reason for it. It’s a normal day as far as you can tell. Things are happening, there’s stuff to do, but the minutes refuse to speed up and each second must take its time in the present before moving to the past. This feeling is magnified, though, when times are not ordinary. When your days are not normal. When you live in the years leading up to the rise or fall of a facist government where at least an attempt at democracy once stood, you can wind up with some pretty extraordinary days in the worst way possible and time absolutely crawls then. In better times, your escapes might have brought you relief or a few moments of inattention that let the clock speed up. In current times, there is no escape. Everywhere you look, someone is talking about what is going on in the world and even taking a break from all that to rest isn’t true relief because how can you really stop thinking about that? As someone with a lot of experience with trauma, I’m familiar with how that dagger of an experience can stick in your mind and heart in ways that resists all attempts to quickly dislodge it. I’m not surprised that there’s no real chance at escaping it, but it is still so exhausting and, on days when there isn’t enough going on to distract me, causes every minute to drag out unbearably.
Continue readingMy Job Really Stinks Sometimes
I have spent the last week working on a now months-long issue at work. I mean, I’ve been working on it for months, but over the last couple weeks it has become a particular focus for me as the mechanical engineers and I are taking some of my recent test results and reproducing them again and again, tweaking variables here or there, as we try to find a path out of this mess. Since I work on heavy machinery and the software that goes in that machinery, this means that I have spent my time working on gearboxes and the goop that goes inside them. Which means that I finally have a job that involves getting my hands dirty despite largely being a white collar worker (well, this job is a sort of interesting mix of white and blue collars but it’s still mostly white collar since it is still a knowledge job by-and-large) and that I’m also using all the engineering, math, and physics knowledge I’ve picked up over the years of being raised by two engineers and mistakenly believing that I was going to study math and physics in college because I was really good at calculus. It also means that my poor, sensitive nose has been assaulted by some of the most heinous scents I’ve had the displeasure to sniff. The only things that outdo them is raw sewage and the sulfurous chemical solution my chemistry teacher in high school made everyone sniff on the first day of class so he could threaten to put it under our noses if we ever fell asleep on him (which smelled so much like raw sewage that it is pointless to make the distinction between the malodorus mixtures). Even through a properly-fitted N95 mask, some of these stinks send me reeling, lightheaded and nostrils aflame, any time I’m unfortunate enough to stand over one of these suckers when we crack them open to check our test results.
Continue readingA Mixture Of Interest, Dread, and Exhaustion
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 readingThe 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.
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