At far too late at night (an admittedly subjective time), I finished Fruits Basket with my friend. We started Season 2 a few weeks ago, but got caught up in it as the second season came to a close and wound up watching the last season of it in about a week as we crammed it all in before she and her husband would be entirely unavaiable due to traveling for a wedding. I was desperate to finish watching it, swept up in the story as I was, and she was willing to sacrifice sleep to share one of her favorite stories with me, so we burned the candle at both ends and now I’m at a loss for what to do with myself once again. Less so than with Final Fantasy 14, but, unlike Final Fantasy 14, I still find myself thinking “I can’t wait to watch more Fruits Basket” and then remembering that there’s no more for me to watch and getting utterly devastated as a result. I wouldn’t really compare the two since one is a video game that took me 1100 hours to get to the end of the first major story arc that has completely reshaped the way I spend my free time every single day and the other was a 60-some episode anime that took a few months to watch only because we took a bunch of time away after my friends went to Japan for their honeymoon and I got super caught up in Final Fantasy 14’s story line (which didn’t leave much room for anything else, especially during a period when I was so emotionally exhausted even before dealing with the emotional complexity of Final Fantasy’s story). Feeling at a loss after Final Fantasy 14’s story is a result of not just storytelling but the end of something I’ve been doing for half a year, but the feeling following Fruits Basket is entirely due to the strength of the storytelling, the memorability of the characters, and the uncompromising manner in which the truth of the characters is laid out by the end of the show.
Continue readingMusing
Growth, Change, and The Illusion Of Both
It has been a bit over a month since I first wrote about it, but I haven’t stopped thinking about the Ship-Of-Theseus-Of-The-Self in regards to myself, my biological family, and my experiences with them. It’s not really an active, all-consuming thing, but the entire train of thought hasn’t been far from my mind in a while. Historically, summers have always been rough for me, especially in regards to family issues, due to a string of birthdays and how often the worst events of my childhood happened during the summer, so it’s not surprising that I can’t really get these thoughts that far from the surface of my mind. I’ve also been encountering a bit of family issues in media recently, what with watching Fruits Basket and finishing Final Fantasy 14’s Endwalker expansion, so that certainly hasn’t helped keep it off my mind. It was actually the stuff from Final Fantasy 14 that prompted the latest branch of this thought tree. In Endwalker, there’s a difficult family situation that is resolved by the end of the expansion and, as I played through the post-expansion patch content, the thought occurred to me that the family member causing problems in the expansion “lived long enough to grow into a better person.” Which got me thinking about my grandfather, who probably did the same thing, and my parents, who might never. It’s a grim thought, that, and one that filled me with a great deal more grief than I expected it to when it popped into my head, but I genuinely have no idea if my parents will accomplish that particular feat or not.
Continue readingFalling Asleep, Waking Up, Or Staying Up
For a few years now, I’ve had the end of Friends At The Table’s fourth season (Twilight Mirage) bouncing around in my head. Not the way the story played out, though I’ve thought of that plenty, but the very end of it. As the season wraps up and the last bits of the game they played slowly fade out, the final theme starts to play over what turns out to be one of the characters from the season interviewing his allies. He cycles through a bunch of questions and the person answering them usually changes from one question to the next with very little repetition, with one notable exception. This final question lends itself to the name of the song that’s playing as the season winds down and the various characters answer questions posed by the interviewer, and is what has stuck in my mind for so very long. The interviewer asks the crew if they prefer falling asleep or waking up. Everyone answers with their own thoughts on the matter, providing information about not just their answer but also their view about the world and the part they have to play in it, because they’re not just answering the question but speaking about why they prefer their given option. The way this question and series of answers are framed makes it clear that one answer isn’t “correct” or that one mode of thinking isn’t preferable to another. Instead, it leaves you, the listener, to consider their words and reflect on how these interviews, which ostensibly occurred at the halfway point of the season rather than the end of it, might change or alter how you feel about these characters and the events you’ve been listening to for some thirty-ish episodes. It’s really well done and has stuck with me as much as anything Friends at the Table has done (and that’s genuinely a lot).
Continue readingNo Socially-Enforced Patriotism For Me, Thanks
For past decade, almost, I’ve felt a decent amount of shame every time Fourth of July comes around. The US hasn’t been worth celebrating in a long time (perhaps ever, given its imperial nature, horrible systemic treatment of its own minority citizens (not to mention the treatment of non-citizen minorities), centuries-long campaign against indigenous peoples, etc., etc.) and, with every passing year, I feel more and more reticence to even mark the day, let alone do anything that could be construed as “celebration.” I mean, sure, to most people, it’s probably just an excuse to get outside, light some probably-illegal fireworks, and grill up some food, nothing more. There aren’t a lot of mandated days-off for most people and this one, a rare time where most people don’t work that overlaps with when kids will be free to do whatever they like, is in a prime part of the year for vacations and just getting out in the sun. I can see people just taking it as a day off and not digging too deeply into what it means to have an annual patriotism festival, but I can’t get these thoughts out of my head. Especially now. Especially with the current government. ESPECIALLY given the secret police, the ever-concerning rise of more and more overt fascism, and how the party nominally positioned to offer resistance is failing to do much of anything one could charitably describe as “meaningful.” I can’t stop thinking about it at least a little bit.
Continue readingSweating The Summer Heat
Thankfully, all of the weather prediction services were more-or-less right about the end of last week’s heatwave. Unfortunately, as I mused at the time, the official end of the heatwave took only it’s obscenely high temperatures. The otherwise toasty high temperatures and still kinda high low temperatures have stuck around, always overshooting the day-to-day forecasts so that every single day winds up hotter, more humid, and much less comfortable than expected. It has made occupying space in my apartment a bit more tricky than usual because even something as innocuous as making dinner can put a lot of heat in my apartment that my AC unit just can’t handle on top of the day-to-day heat of summer and sunshine. I don’t remember my AC unit struggling this much in the past, but it’s certainly possible that it is genuinely working less well now than it used to. I’ve had old AC units die on me in apartments before and I know that the more heavily they’re used, the faster they wear out and the layout of my current apartment demands heavy use if I’m going to actually control the temperature in any space other than right next to my AC unit. All of which amounts to me starting to sweat most days when I’m in my office, playing games on my computer. Maybe I should spend less time in my office where there’s no good airflow and two large heat generators in a small space (me and my computer), but it’s difficult to imagine that my upstairs room where all my entertainment stuff is located will be much better when I can feel the heat swamp me every time I move around that room.
Continue readingThe Endless Road To Recovery
It has been over a year since I went from “struggling” to “barely getting by” in terms of my personal health. A year ago, I was on vacation with my siblings and struggling to get enough sleep due to back pain from a mix of how a medicaiton I was taking messed with my joints and how my old, worn-out mattress had negatively impacted my back (which had only become apparent when I was trying to sleep on a not-horrible mattress). Things pretty much only got worse from then until mid-October, where they slowly reached a degree of stasis they stayed at until early January. Since early January, my physical and mental health have been variably up and down as I’ve dealt with more new medications, physically intensive work at my job, long days, too-short nights, and a general feeling of isolation that has left me wondering why I even bother with all of this stuff. I’ve written more posts about how I’m slowly improving than I care to count and this one was initially going to be no different. Things are improving, sure. I’m feeling a bit less tired than usual and while I’m more uncomfortable than ever as a result of the high temperatures and trying to change a sleep schedule I’ve more-or-less maintained for most of my life (at least two decades), I do think things are getting better. I don’t know if they’ll stay that way, if they’ll improve further, or if something else will crop up that has me feeling worse again, but I can’t help but feel like I’m trying to climb some kind of trick staircase that has me constantly feeling like I’m moving forward while I never actually get any further from the bottom.
Continue readingSlow-Cooked Considerations
After what has turned into three horrible, sweaty days, the heat wave is ending. It has not ended yet, but the wisdom of the remaining pieces of the US national weather prediction aparatus have declared that, by the time I’ve gotten my necessary groceries and made my way home, it will be over. My two sleepless, restless nights will not be joined by a third and the ruddy, glistening sheen of sweat I’ve taken to wearing in the place of my normal mistless pallor will finally take its leave. Even now, as I type this, all my weather apps and services cry out that the worst has passed. “All will be well,” they say, “With a fifty percent chance of severe thunderstorms and a constant overnight temperature not much lower than last night’s.” My office is muggy, made so by the water I’m constantly drinking to feed the stirring air that whicks all perspiration from my skin to compliment the moisture that made making its way through the heavy filters and cooling processes of the building’s HVAC system that leaves this place a dry husk devoid of comfort in the winter and my little thermometer’s delcaration that it is only seventy-six degrees in my litle rectangle does little to comfort me as a result. After all, what does the number mean to me when the only way for me to stop sweating is to sit in my chair and refrain from any kind of movement? What’s the point of knowing the temperature when even the movement of standing up to examine the digital readout is enough to pop tiny beads of just-drunk water on my forehead, upper lip, and forearms? It is hot, it cannot be denied, and I do not need a thermometer to tell me that.
Continue readingI Got Sick A Week Ago Due To Someone Else’s Failure
Well, I can now say that I have caught and survived E. Coli (and that I’m writing this the day before it goes up since I’m super behind on blog posts for what should be obvious reasons). I got extremely lucky that my entire case was incredibly “mild” and that I only missed four days of work for what amounted to bad food poisoning, so I’m saying this extremely gratefully. To my understanding, based on the results from my urgent care trip and the messages I exchanged with my practitioner afterwards, the only way I could have gotten more lucky than I was would be by not getting it in the first place. Anyway, I got to interact with the modern public health aperatus on a state and federal level, spend time digging through my trash for what I suspected was the culprit, and spend three solid days consuming a single can of soup, a handful of pretzels, and maybe a gallon of gatorade (I didn’t exactly track the specific amount I drank) on top of at least a gallon of water every day. It was quite an experience and not one I’m keen to repeat, so I’ll no longer be taking “pre-washed” vegetables at face value for the foreseeable future. As far as I can tell, I got it from some bagged salad I bought and now I’m never buying another bagged salad again (though this is the strongest suspect in my mind, it is not the only one, unfortunately). Fresh vegetables only, from now on, so I can thoroughly wash them. Which probably means I won’t be doing any more salads like that since I don’t want salad enough to make my own. It was a different question when I could buy a mix to toss with some extras thrown in, but that life is behind me now.
Continue readingLooking For A Silver Lining Amidst The Smoke-Filled Sky
While I’m still pretty bitter about my new work schedule and wakeup time, I’ve begun trying to find a positive spin I put on it for myself. This isn’t working super well since I know I’m lying to myself about it, but at least my attempts to find silver linings are working out a bit better. The primary silver lining I’ve found as of my second consecutive day of this crap is that I’ll now be getting off work at a time where I can more easily participate in group Final Fantasy 14 activities. This is especially relevant almost immediately because today, the day I’m writing this, marks the first instance of a weekly even I helped to schedule. Last week, on a saturday, my FC (Free Company, which is the FF14 version of player guilds) wound up getting a group together to do one of the “exploration zones” for the expansion I’d just finished. Since we planned this activity out ahead of time, I was all ready to go when the event started and had a pretty good time playing around with my friends. It was fun, even if I didn’t really know what was going on since I had to skip the cutscenes in order to not hold everything up for all the players who had already done that stuff, and we wound up getting such a large group together that someone said we should try to make it a weekly event. Since there was already a different weekly event for doing the latest “exploration zone” (which was recently released and is still very new content) and a lot of chat back and forth about when it was going to happen, I decided to just set up a poll and let everyone pick what time worked best for them. Which turned out to be Thursdays, the one day each week that I’d previously reserved as my “get to work whenever and work super late to make up for any short days” day.
Continue readingWaking Up On The Wrong Side Of Dawn
For almost… Probably two decades as of this year, actually, I’ve been getting up at six in the morning for work. Or, you know, whatever counts as work. That’s when I needed to get up in high school in order to get there on time, regardless of how I was getting there. In college, I almost always had a class at eight in the morning and, for a couple years, had an opening shift at the tech support desk in the library. Even on the days my class schedule was different, I still got up at more or less the same time unless it was specifically a day off or that was at the end of the week and didn’t have an 8am class. After I graduated, it was just easier to keep that same schedule going. I kept it going without issue until the pandemic rolled around. 2020 killed my ability to easily get up at the same time every morning and turned me from an easy early-riser who was always in bed and asleep by midnight into the current cluster-fuck of a sleep schedule I’m unfortunately maintaining to this day. For a while there in 2020 and 2021, I was waking up at whatever time every other week since I was only working every-other-week at my job and struggled to maintain a consistent time on the weeks I had work. I eventually got that under control again, around the time I started having insomnia issues and needed to structure my sleep better, and maintained that until last year. Then, last year, thanks to all the pain I was and how it ruined my ability to sleep last fall, I started letting myself sleep in a bit more so I could make sure to always get at least four hours of sleep. While I would let myself move my alarm time as much as I felt I needed, the default time that I always returned to was six. Always. Now, though, after some more developments at work along the same frustrating lines as the last ones, I’m throwing decades of history aside and setting my alarm an hour earlier. I’ve already had one miserable morning up an hour earlier as of writing this and I’ll have another five at minimum by the time you read this, so hopefully I’ll know if it’s working by then.
Continue reading