I spent most of my weekend streaming and trying to get back into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It wound up working, thanks to me stumbling from what I thought was just exploring something that looked interesting into recruiting a new sage. I sat down at just before midnight on Saturday with the thought to take an hour, work out how much ground I’d maybe need to go over again thanks to playing my first eighty hours without the sensor, and then do my actual best to reinvest myself in my existing save file. The deal I’d made with myself was that if I put in a genuine effort and still couldn’t get myself caught back up in the game, I’d allow myself to start the game over and then spend most of my stream time doing major quests and storyline stuff while my offline gaming would be exploration, shrine hunting, and resource collection. About four and a half hours later, as I blearily looked out my window at the lightening sky while I finally shut my Switch off, I knew I was back in it for good. Being back into the game felt nice enough that I didn’t even mind royally messing up my sleep schedule during what was supposed to be a proper recovery weekend.
Continue readingMusing
Settling In To My New Apartment
I have learned a lot about my apartment over the last week. Between painting, moving, and unpacking, there is little I’ve done since the beginning of the month except pay attention to my apartment, the space it provides, and the way I exist within that space. While the space might have felt empty, generic, and difficult to occupy initially, I’ve come to know it better since then. I have learned many of its quirks, realized a few of my own, and figured out how to best inhabit the space. While all my packing is not yet finished (and does not even feel close, even though I know I should be done by the end of the weekend following the writing of this post), I know how best to use the space I’ve got with the various pieces of furniture I have brought with me. I might shift some of that around, since even my excellent ability to tell how objects can fit within a space is not infallible, but for the most part I feel like I have figured out my space.
Continue readingI’ve Been Too Tired For Anything But Books
As I’ve slowly gotten parts of my new apartment in order and done what I can to create space for myself to relax, I’ve found myself turning back to books more and more. My video games and TV shows are fun, of course, but they have a layer of separation between myself and them. Video games require a certain degree of skill or mechanical separation. You must know how to play the game and think about how to play the game for everything but the most immersive experiences, and even those are frequently broken by reminders that there is a mechanical separation between you and your experience. TV shows and movies lack this interactive layer, but most modern movies require subtitles (at least for me, since I often can’t understand the actors over the sound effects) and there’s always this nagging thought in the back of my mind that this experience has a volume that could intrude on the lives of other. Mostly because of how often other people’s movie experiences have intruded on my life. There is nothing between me and a book.
Continue readingUnpacking My Thoughts On Unpacking
The slow, arduous process of unpacking is taking me so much longer than I thought it would. It probably doesn’t help matters that I’ve been largely confined to working between the time I’m finished with work (sometime at or after 6pm) and before “quiet hours” start in my apartment at 9pm. Sure, I could keep working after that, but I refuse to be the noisy upstairs nieghbor that I tried to escape. I will not be bumping and thumping around my apartment until all hours of the night. Sure, I can sometimes find something quiet to do, like last night’s folding laundry and unpacking clothes, but I also have to contend with the continued exhaustion from my packing and moving. It’s not like my rest is any good when I finally collapse onto my bed for the night since the mental residue of my life being disturbed prevents me from falling asleep easily. Plus, the most relaxing thing I’ve done all week was go to a friends’ for 2 hours to attempt to play D&D where we wound up just shooting the shit for the whole two hours. After which, I went home and continued to unpack.
Continue readingPost-Move Exhaustion Blankets My Mind
I survived my move. As has most of my stuff (so far as I can tell, anyway, about 48 hours after just getting it all into my apartment and then being forced to leave it alone for about 48 hours due to needing to clean out the old place, drive my sister home, and then go to work the day after all that). It was rough, since we had merciless sun in 90 degree (fahrenheit) weather and went from 10am to 4pm, basically. There were plenty of breaks in there and I encouraged everyone to hydrate and rest as needed, but I think several of us wound up with mild heat exhaustion despite my best efforts to keep everyone rested and hydrated (I am one of the people who had it, so clearly I was not pushing people enough). Still, we got it all moved and into my apartment. We then all pretty much collapsed after pushing ourselves to make sure that myself, my sister, and my friend had places to sleep that night. It was a rough evening.
Continue readingShifting Relationships and Rebuilding My Support Network
I was talking to someone about my move (upcoming as I’m writing this but past as this gets posted) and mentioned that I’ve got half a dozen people coming to help me with the move. Their response was appreciation that I had such a robust support system. It wasn’t really a response I was expecting, so I was a bit caught off guard by the shift in the direction the conversation was going and it took me a few moments to respond. I managed to do so graciously and warmly, since that’s what the conversation’s tone and depth called for (and it is true that I love and appreciate the friends and family member who are helping, some of them coming from a few hours’ drive away to lend a hand), but there were a few bitter thoughts that popped up so quickly that I barely caught them before they made it out of my mouth.
Continue readingPlanning My New Apartment
I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to lay everything out at my new apartment. It’s a bit difficult, unfortunately, since I’m not certain where everything might eveb fit. I never saw the exact unit I’m renting (I saw a similar model in a different building) and I have no idea which of the various internet jacks into the apartment will be the one that is active as far as my ISP is concerned. Also, my couch is huge. It can be broken up into smaller pieces, sure, but it’s always a bit weird to use when it is. Most of my stuff fits together in rooms in pretty specific ways, and I’d want to try to keep things that are currently near each other together in the new apartment. I think I have an idea, based on what I’ve seen, that will get it all to fit and I’ve got a lot of really fun ideas on how to lay things out in interesting ways. All of which might be moot since the location of the internet port is going to really dictate where my computer goes and, if I want to improve on my current streaming setup, where my entertainment center will go. I’ll have some ability to work around awkward or difficult origin points for my internet setup, but only to a degree since fifty-foot cables can only do so much for spreading out devices.
Continue readingI’ve Got Moving On The Mind
One of the major upsides to being an orderly person is that packing does not take as much mental effort. Sure, there’s a bunch of stuff I have to figure out if I want to keep it or throw it away, but I don’t really need to organize my stuff. It’s already very organized and I’m just going to be moving it from where it is to a series of boxes and then back out somewhere that at least sort of matches where it currently is. Books will still be on shelves. Games and puzzles will still probably be in a closet somewhere. It’s not like i’m going to change how my books are sorted. Everything that needs to get packed together is already together. Everything that hasn’t moved from where it sits in my closet in the three years I’ve lived in my current apartment is automatically marked for “keep or toss” assessment. I’ve still got all my old boxes, I haven’t added to my collections much (thanks to the austerity I’ve observed over the past three years), and now all I’ve got to do is slowly, carefully pack it all up and set it to the side to be eventually deposited in whatever room winds up being my library/living room/office space.
Continue readingWork Hasn’t Been Horrible, Lately
As hectic, busy, and downright exhausting as work has been recently, I’ve actually been enjoying it more. I don’t know if it’s because I have stuff going on in my evenings again or it’s just because I’ve been working more with people I like who appreciate my thoughts and no longer feel like the work I’m doing doesn’t matter. Well, now that I’ve typed it out, I’m pretty sure it’s the latter. Or, you know, both of them with most of the change in outcome being a result of the latter. Feeling like the work I’m doing matters is kind of a big deal to me because there is little more I hate than feeling like I’m wasting my time and going to work every day at a job that felt like it was wasting my time was really not a happy place for me to be, mentally speaking. I mean, I knew the work I was doing mattered, but there were sure a lot of days that it didn’t feel like it did, no matter how much I reassured myself otherwise.
Continue readingSocial Anxiety And Public Speaking Do Not Mix Well
I do not feel like I’m a particularly strong public speaker. It feels weird to admit that, given how readily I take the Game Master’s chair in gaming groups and how willing I am to expound at length on just about any topic I know well, but it’s true. I dislike being the center of attention and am just better at getting over it in smaller group settings. Plus, if you’re making up a fun pretend world for your friends, you are, by definition, the foremost expert in it, so it’s not like you have to worry about being wrong. I recognize that this sort of improvisational skill is an entirely separate thing from public speaking, as is being a good conversationalist, but I frequently feel like I should be good at all three since I’m better than average at two of them. Also, to be entirely fair to myself, I’ve only done a few bits of public speaking after college (and most of my college experiences barely count since it was just to classes of usually fewer than thirty people) and only one of those was a mild disaster.
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