As I sat down to run what I was ninety-five percent certain was going to be the Session 0 of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I had to take a few minutes to put aside the misgivings and constant internal debate about whether or not I was making the right choice. I had spent most of the day already, and a lot of idle time in the weeks leading up to said day, trying to figure out how I felt about returning to a hobby I had so firmly turned my back on just over a year prior. It was a difficult time, back then, as the company that owned my most-played tabletop game tried to destroy the hobby in order to make a little more money, and it wasn’t a decision I’d made lightly. I’d been running some form of D&D game ostensibly weekly (up to four times a week, during the first year and a half of the pandemic), except for a year off after I moved away from my college town to the city in which I still live, since the summer of 2010. There were other gaps in there, but no more than a few months at most. My entire tabletop history had been built around the game and I still felt compelled to turn away, to withhold my money from the company that seemed to be actively trying to drive it into the dirt. I was the sort of person who bought every book as they came out, who owned physical copies and digital copies online, through DNDBeyond, who ran tons of games and could not only run a game reference free, but quickly homebrew up something custom for my players that almost always hit my desired balance of “overpowered but in a way that’s fun for everyone.” And I still cut all ties.
Continue readingMusing
Motivation And The Little Things That Irk You
In my last apartment, I spent a year and a half being woken up way too early during the warmer months by sunlight streaming into my apartment through the blinds on my eastward facing windows. I thought to myself on numerous occasions that I really needed to do something about this fact so I could sleep in late enough to get some proper rest (especially after my insomnia resurgence in January of 2021) and just never did anything about it. I had already put up all the curtains I owned in my bedroom and I couldn’t close the door because I needed the AC from the unit in my living room to reach my bedroom in order to sleep at all, so I didn’t have a ready-made solution I could implement. Eventually, after I was starting to come apart at the seams, I finally did something about it. It took all of an hour, including the forty-five minute trip to and from my local Target to buy curtains and a curtain rod, to solve the problem. I got to sleep in the next morning and went from struggling with how much light was streaking into my apartment to being able to control my environment again in a way that allowed me to priortize my comfort and well-being. Following this event, where I realized I’d been cursing a problem I could easily solve with a little effort, I swore to never let myself be that miserable about something so easy to solve for that long ever again.
Continue readingYou Can Accomplish A Lot In 10 Hours If You Can Focus
Today, after a few days of slowly circling the drain that is worsening burnout, I realized I had to find a way to stay focused despite how tired I’m getting and decided to skip straight to pulling out the big guns. I’ve been putting it off for a while now, since I don’t always enjoy the experience, but there’s no arguing with how effective it is when it comes to keeping me on task and at least marginally focused on fairly straight-foward work. So, rather than deal with the various thoughts swirling around my head about my job, my work hours, how I feel about doing this work, and literally anything else that might normally occupy my mind, I blasted them all away by subjecting myself to the ten-hour version of the He-Man Hey Yeah Yeah video (officially titled “HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA” but no one I know calls it that). I started the video shortly after I started work and have left it running all day, taking my headphones off when I need to be capable of complex thought and leaving them on while conducting rote tasks, doing simpler thought work (like writing this blog), and running the hours and hours of tests I need to do today. So far, I’ve kept my sanity and managed to be more productive than any other day this week, despite being four days into this parade of mounting exhaustion.
Continue readingMaudeline Weather Musings
Winter seems to have passed. The snow will stick around for a while since it is close enough to freezing that the almost two feet of snow will take some time to melt (though most of it might be gone by the time you’re reading this since, at the time I’m writing this, there’s going to be rain between those two moments). The icy roads have turned to slush, the constant chill has been replaced by a heavy blanket of damp, and there’s fog almost every single morning and night (and even during the days sometimes, too, thanks to the heavy cloud cover). It’s officially spring weather and it’s still January. The long range forecast says that we might have a few more days that peak below freezing, but we’ll have even more days in the forties over the same span of time. It was pretty intense, getting all of winter crammed into a two and a half week period of time, but we sure got it all. Icy roads that the city doesn’t clear enough for anything but slow, cautious driving, multiple blizzards, multiple snowstorms that snow just enough to make driving difficult but not enough that the plows come out to clear it up, a plunge into the negatives where it is actually dangerous to be outside for more than a few minutes, and a whole heap of grey, cloudy days that don’t let one iota of sunlight through. All in a two-week period. What a winter this has been, even when it’s barely a month old.
Continue readingSo Much For A Proper Wisconsin Winter
A doom of ice descends upon us all. Probably, anyway. Once it rains next week and melts all of this almost two feet of snow, it will eventually get cold and freeze all of that slush and water. Normally, I’d say something about being terrified of road conditions in weather lik that, but we’ve already got roads of solid ice thanks to the city doing such a shit job at plowing everything but the arterial roadways and the fact that they’re cutting back on salt a huge amount this year. I didn’t expect them to cut back on sanding or gritting the roads as well, too, but here I am slipping and sliding around everywhere because all the salted places didn’t get salted enough to deal with the ice before the sun sets and it all refreezes, so there’s at least a little bit too much ice everywhere and an unsafe amount of it everywhere I drive on a daily basis except the highway. I honestly don’t know what the hell anyone is thinking because this seems incredibly dangerous. I mean, I’m used to seeing cars in ditches during and for a couple days after snow storms. What I don’t expect is to see new cars in ditches every single day for (as of writing this) seven days after the blizzard.
Continue readingGrit In The Gears Of This Capitalist Hell-Machine
Due to a few scheduling issues (thanks to holidays, vacation time, and so on), I actually had a normal work week where I only did approximately eight hour work days. None of them were actually eight hours in total, since I wound up needing to stay late for a couple of those days, but that meant I got to leave early on the last day of the week, so I got to experience what it was like to be home by about five or six, have dinner eaten and cleaned up before seven, and then to have an entire evening to myself after work for the first time in longer than I can remember. Even before my shift to working fifty-hour weeks when I moved over the summer (to account for my change in rent), I was working forty-five to fourty-seven and a half hours every week. I occasionally did a forty-hour week in 2022, but the last time I did them reliably was at some point in 2021 when we were still dealing with pandemic strain on my employer’s finances and I couldn’t work extra hours. I don’t remember when that limitation got removed, but it has probably been around two and a half years, give or take a couple months.
Continue readingThe First Heavy Snowfall Of This Wisconsin Winter
We finally got our first blizzard. It isn’t the first snow that will probably stick around for a month or more (that fell a few days prior) [and all of this turned out to be speaking way too soon since we have rain and temperatures in the high 30s and 40s forecast for a week from now so it probably won’t actually last a month], but we got a decent amount of snow dumped on us and even more whipped around. The winds were so strong that they were picking snow up off the ground to add to the stuff already in the air because it hadn’t hit the ground yet. It was quite a day and I spent it working from home since it started in the early hours of the morning and carried on until an hour or two before midnight. It was quite a pleasant bit of weather to enjoy from the cozy confines of my apartment. I’m luckly enough, at present, to avoid most of the unpleasant bits of winter weather since I don’t have to shovel any sidewalks or driveways, I didn’t have to drive anywhere, and all that took me outside was my own desire to go out in the snow as it fell. A desire I sated mostly by opening my door to my balcony rather than by going downstairs since my landlord has done a pretty poor job of maintaining the sidewalks between the apartment buildings and I didn’t want to mess with slush and ice on top of all that wind. I even discovered the the tree right outside my balcony is the perfect kind of pine tree to hold snow on its branches and gets transformed into a beautiful white statue. As far as wintery days go, this one was aesthetically pleasing to me and went a long way towards redeeming my experience with winter over the last few years.
Continue readingWorking Out My Aches And Pains
Over the last couple months, I’ve been on a new medication that has given me the primary side-effects of drier skin along with more joint and muscle aches. One of the potential side effects is horrible sunburn, so it’s probably for the best that I’ll be doing the majority of this course of medication during the less sunny months of the year, but the losing battle I’m fighting against keeping my skin from drying out and bleeding all the time has me wondering if maybe it’d be better to have waited for the spring when the heat wasn’t on full-blast at work. I mean, the humidity dropping into the single digits in my workplace is rough enough during a normal year and thowing a medication side-effect that is causing my skin to dry out in places it never has before (namely my face, though everywhere else is also drying out worse than it ever has before) has me feeling pretty exhausted most days. Which might also be another side-effect of the medication I’m on, but that’s difficult to say one way or another given my penchant for insomnia and that moving through the stiffness that accompanies the joint aches requires more effort on my part than moving around usually does. Still, given why I’m taking the medication, it’s probably worth it. After all, these side effects are a temporary problem and the medication will hopefully fix a long term issue (and all signs to point to it fixing that issue, so far, even after only two and a half months).
Continue readingSlowly Stepping Away From Social Media
Over my little break from work (which I say a little tongue-in-cheek because 12 consecutive days away from work is the longest break I’ve taken in years other than my trip to Spain which I’m excluding since that was fun but definitely not a break and also because 12 days isn’t really that much of a break considering a third of those days where weekend days and a third of those days were holidays), I stopped using most social media. I pushed myself to log on at least once a day to share my blog posts and would occasionally find myself browising Cohost to see what was going on, but I think I spent maybe a total of an hour on Bluesky, Facebook, and Cohost combined over that period. I’m not saying that I miraculously found my lost ability to focus or that I somehow managed to break free of the grip that social media has on my brain, just that I didn’t really wind up in a position where I felt like checking out social media. The times I did feel like checking it made it abundantly clear to me that social media is only for when I’m bored and tired. If I’m just tired, I’ll usually just keep doing whatever I’m doing since I rarely let being tired stop me from doing things (which, honestly, is probably not super healthy for me given the way it impacts my bedtime). If I was bored, I usually just pushed myself away from wherever I was sitting and found something new to do (since I’ve liberally sprinkled my apartment with various forms of entertainment). Only the two combined could push me to check social media since I didn’t have the willpower to push myself to move on to a new thing and I was too bored with what I was already doing to continue doing it.
Continue readingSuffering At The Hands Of My Parents’ Religious Orthodoxy
As I’ve had plenty of time to myself over the last couple weeks, I’ve been doing some thinking. It has almost been a year since I stopped doing family therapy and was able to make peace with the idea of probably never talking to my parents again. Prior to that moment in late January of 2023, I’d been feeling guilty for cutting them off while they were still paying lip service to the idea of fixing things. Thanks to that incredibly awful two-month period, I was able to confirm that it was just lip service and that neither of them possessed the emotional maturity to recognize their part in the travesty that was my childhood. Since I’ve had enough time to process all that, I’ve been thinking about it again, mostly by way of reviewing in my mind what we talked about and how gaining a better understanding of my parents has or has not changed the way I see some of the events of my past. As I’ve slowly worked through this process (largely deciding that not much needs to change at this time), I’ve found myself thinking that, for all their faults, at least my parents never denied me my humanity. For all they put me through, for all the horrible and wrong things they taught me, at least they never taught me that I was somehow less “human” than other people. However, the more I’ve thought this, the more I’ve started to wonder if this is actually true, or if it is only technically true because they never explicitly used those words or tried to teach that specific lesson.
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