It has been a long time since I was last struck by inspiration. Most of the time, when an idea “comes to me,” it’s the result of me chewing something over in the back of my mind for a long time before coming up with whatever thought or idea will form the center of what thing I’m going to produce. Poetry, short stories, a novel draft, all these blog posts… None of them are the result of inspiration even if I’ve often claimed to have been “inspired” by something. Even those times, I came up with an idea after thinking about some media or idea for a while. Which might sound a lot like inspiration, but I would define inspiration as something external that plops a fully-formed idea into your head. All of my “inspired by” ideas are a result of my internal processing coming up with an idea based on thinking about something else. It feels like quite a thin hair to split, which is why I haven’t written about this before and am somewhat hesitant to write about it not (mostly because it doesn’t much matter to me which side of the split hair you’re on since it’s all a part of the writing process and the only person the precise definition of this stuff matters to is the person doing the defining as a part of their process). Still, this feeling of actual, true inspiration is rare enough that I feel compelled to say something about it now that I’ve been on the receiving end of it for the first time since I set up an online D&D campaign back in 2019.
Continue readingMusing
Burnout By Any Other Name Would Ache As Much
I am happy to report that I made it through a whole weekend without discovering some new wild and unprecedented thing happening in the world. Perhaps because I avoided social media as much as possible and have avoided going to look for what I might have missed, but perhaps because nothing significant and unprecedented happened! Maybe it was a normal weekend! Like any other! Just a totally average weekend that included the start of the summer Olympics as France showed off what it brings to the world. Which I didn’t watch, but heard was absolutely wild. I plan to go watch it at some point (even though I don’t really care much about the Olympic sporting events themselves) since the pageantry of it all seems incredible, but I avoided at the time so I could spend the entire weekend trying to recover from how absolutely exhausting and draining last week was. Which, of course, means that I got into work today and all of that resting immediately flew out the window, leaving me more burned out and stressed than I was last week. It is difficult to be the source of truth and knowledge for a project that a lot of people have strong opinions on when said people decide to insert themselves into said project and voice their opinions without asking to be caught up on where the project is at. It is a particularly futile brand of frustrating to spend an entire day explaining to people that you did, in fact, think of all the obvious things they’re suggesting, that you have returned to the basics multiple times, that you’ve done all the easy troubleshooting they suggested, and that your data is actually as conclusive as you’re saying even if they don’t understand it. Literally spent five hours today on that kind of work and made it exactly one iota of a step further than I was last week because of how much stuff I had to do so my coworkers could “just see it happen” themselves.
Continue readingThree Years Of Blog Posts
It has been (almost exactly) three years since I started posting to this blog again. The first post officially went up on August 4th, 2021, but I’d begun writing posts the week prior, setting up my “write the posts one week ahead of them going up” plan so I could focus on my editing skills and the delayed gratification of working ahead of my deadline rather than right up to it. Now, it is three years later and though I’ve down to five posts a week and am not posting any more creative writing work (poems, stories, etc) on my WordPress .com page since those fuckers are still willing to sell my data without compensating me (using a setting that is on by default, the absolute worst way they could put in a setting for this shit), I’m still going strong. I’ll admit I’m struggling to keep these posts written a week ahead of time, but I can mostly keep it up and the days I fall behind aren’t really a big deal since that’s usually a result of me being so busy that my brain was too tired to actually participate in writing something. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to write moderately interesting blog posts without using your brain, but nothing good has ever come from it for me. Better to take breaks and rest without recrimination than to try and fail to produce something even modestly interesting. Which is a lesson I’ve only just learned over the course of these past three years, actually, so clearly this version of the whole blogging thing is working out pretty well for me.
Continue readingThe Slow, Grinding Burnout Of Constantly Finding Problems
One day deeper into the week, one more day of fruitless work on a project I can’t talk about behind me. I’m not as upset about everything as I was yesterday, though I’m still a little upset and frustrated, but now I’m feeling extra worn down because we’re still unable to figure out why things aren’t working the way we want them to and how nothing we do that improves those results makes any kind of sense. It has everyone stumped and while we have been able to make slowly improving progress over the past two months, we haven’t really fixed things yet. It is exhausting to work on, mentally and emotionally, because we’re just beating out heads against a problem, and it is exhausting physically because any proposals about different methodology or improvements require a decent amount of heavy labor from me. This work has become every kind of exhausting and I can feel myself less and less able to spring back from it with every passing day. Sure, nothing I’m doing is wrong or a failure or anything like that, but it sure feels like a failure when I’ve been working on a problem this long and this consistently but haven’t been able to figure anything out. Sure, my job is to collect data and tell people that things are wrong, but I clearly understand the problems and how they play out better than everyone else (as my repeated explanations prove almost daily) so it feels like some part of the solution is my responsibility. Regardless of whether that is right or wrong, it is how I feel and these repeated days of zero progress despite my efforts have me feeling incredibly drained.
Continue readingVenting What Steam I Can From Work Frustrations
Today has been shitty and exhausting. Not the usual kind of shitty where it’s mostly my depression, my despair at the world in general, or me needlessly spiraling over some unlikely anxiety, nor is i shitty in the sudden-crisis-at-work kind of way. No, today, I got to spend four hours doing manual labor I can’t talk to anyone about to test a project I can’t talk about in any level of specificity while being watched by a bunch of people who frequently ignored my advice and all but shouted me down when I suggested that something they were worried about wasn’t actually a problem based on the hundreds of hours of experience I’ve gotten with the product at the heart of this project. I had to spend ten minutes enduring their nattering and catastrophizing about how what they observed could be the source of all these problems we’ve been trying to solve for months now before I could prove myself correct (that it was an optical illusion caused by their point of view and multi-directional movement of the thing I was moving around). I wasn’t going to let them interrupt my data collection to do the unnecessary thing they wanted to do, since that would require dismantling the current test, doing an entirely different test, setting my current test back up again, and then calibrating the measuring tools again. It took me all of a minute to prove they were wrong when I finally set their test up in a much faster and easier way than they thought it had to be done. As I moved to continue testing following their reluctant agreement that I was correct, one of them said “and now we’re never going to hear the end of it.” That really soured my mood, which is worth remarking since I wasn’t in a great mood already based on the whole “hours of manual labor while those coworkers stood around and wrote down numbers or pressed buttons” thing.
Continue readingEverything Is Too Much All The Time
Well, the day my last post about living in unprecedented times went up, all I could do was sigh miserably as I felt today’s post come bubbling out of the stress from, once again, a weekend of wild shit. Mostly one wild event since everything kind of pales in comparison, but some of “smaller” stuff bears mentioning anyway. Sure, as time passes and more of what was going on behind the scenes emerges into the light of day, it looks like President Biden’s decision to step aside from the US Presidential Race was a calculated move that could have some positive effects [which seems to become more and more clear with each passing day], but I really don’t know that there’s any world in which changing horses mid-race will do anything but ultimately hinder the jockey’s attempts to win. Maybe in a few weeks or months, I’ll be walking all this back and crowing about the easy victory of (presumably ) President Harris, but that seems like too good of a future to be true. Sure, Vice President Harris might win against Trump (I doubt there has been a more detestable presidential nominee from a major party in US History than Trump in 2024), but I bet the next three and a half months are going to be exhausting. I mean, it has been only a little over twenty-four hours since the announcement and I’ve already gotten more campaign solicitation text messages, emails, and phone calls than I’ve gotten in the calendar year up to this point (I’ve unsubscribing and blocking zealously for the past three years). I would really love it if things could calm down for a bit, you know? I’d love one of those “nothing” decades.
Continue readingOne Week Into Pursuing Stability Amidst The Chaos Via New Routines
I’m now one full week into my new stress management process and while I do not care for how much time I have to spend thinking about and planning things (despite loving to do both of those activities), I really love being done with dinner and evening chores by nine every night. Prior to this week, I’d sometimes not get home and through with dinner until ten or even eleven. It was rough, to feel like I needed to cram at least some amount of relaxing into my evenings after dinner when I’d still be finishing up at the time I should be starting to prepare for bed, but this past week has been free of that. Which isn’t to say that I’ve gone to bed at a good time every night this week. I’ve had two nights this week where I was just too stressed and anxious to relax enough to even think about going to bed at my normal time, but I think those have more to do with some emotional stuff going on in the background rather than anything to do with my new routine. What I have gotten every single night is the realization that I have enough time for at least two activities before I should start getting ready for bed, even after doing some extra chores around my apartment. It makes it a lot easier to sign off for the night when you don’t feel like you’re desperately trying to cram something into the tail end of your day so you didn’t spend the whole thing dreading work, going to work, working, and then being so exhausted from work that it took you an hour to make dinner. It’s really nice to be able to just walk into my kitchen, spend five to thirty minutes sorting out my dinner, eat it, and then get on with the rest of my evening, even on days when I had to work until eight.
Continue readingSocial Media In The Year 2024
Using any and all social media feels like crap these days. Very little of it is interesting or particularly engaging. I’ve made little traction with making new friends on places that aren’t Twitter (still not going to call it the new thing) and most of the sites I’m on look like they’re speed-running the whole rise and fall of every social media site from the last two decades. One is struggling to remain afloat as they adhere to their values over what sometimes seems like good sense or reasonable planning (which is a criticism, but I mostly like when they do this so it’s difficult to really fault them for it outside of one or two specific instances where they probably should have seen a problem coming) and another is being filled to the brim with people who will just tell you that you’re wrong, without any evidence, about everything from your own life events, basic facts about the world, and your expressed emotions.
Continue readingReeling From A Wild Weekend
This is sort of going up a week late (which is fine, because there’s exactly nothing I can do about any of this in any kind of active sense and keeping my mouth shut in the moment is probably for the best given how many people are absolutely fine with exposing themselves to potential issues in the future by speaking aloud some potentially illegal things (or at least some things that could make them a target should the worst happen)), but what a fucking wild weekend we had. Nothing quite like a former president who is currently running for president getting shot at while he’s giving a campaign speech. Nothing like spending a weekend watching the political party of calls for violence, virulent hate, and increasing violent rhetoric decide to flip the script and blame their rivals for supposedly creating a world in which a hateful bigot gets shot at by another hateful bigot. Nothing quite like watching most of the internet and media either move on from an assassination attempt incredibly quickly or spend an unbearable amount of time luxuriating in the dunks (internet) or endless punditry (media) of the presidential candidate who was shot at and the hateful bigot in the audience who died. Just completely unprecedented times. Genuinely, the only part of this that is playing out exactly as it always does is the fact that this latest instance of gun violence will do absolutely nothing to change gun laws in my country of birth. The United States of America is pretty dang fucked. Not, like, in a hopeless “we’re fully in fascism” kind of way. We’re not there yet. Just in the “shit is so wild that everything just seems normal now” and “guns are more valuable than human lives in the US” kind of ways. Which, you know, are pretty fucked up.
Continue readingStress Management Via New Grocery Days And Ordering Things Online
Today, the day I am writing this, is the first Friday that is also a full grocery day since I sat down during my vacation to figure out how to better align my weeks to reduce the burnout effects of working the long hours I do at the pace I do. I, unfortunately, did not come up with any miracle solutions, but I did have a few ideas that would hopefully reduce the stress I was feeling from week to week before my vacation WITHOUT getting takeout or delivery multiple times a week. And, hopefully, without eating garbage frozen food all the time. Or, in some cases, eating a mix of garbage frozen food and well-prepared good food. For example, I’m making myself some delicious pasta sauce this weekend but, instead of doing all the work of making chicken parmesan, I’m just buying some frozen breaded chicken patties to toss in the oven with some sauce and cheese on top. And buying ravioli and tortellini so I can have some fun variety in my meals while still only really needing to do laborious cooking once (boiling water for noodles is only slightly more difficult than making a frozen pizza). This is the goal, after all: to produce a variety of tasty and at least moderately healthy meals for less money than it would take to eat out frequently but more money than my bare-bones frozen food, pizza, and boxed meals diet that I usually turn to when I need to avoid takeout. In a different living situation (aka, with one or more roommates or a partner), it would be less difficult to make sure I got enough variety in my diet to avoid getting takeout just for a change, but I live alone and modern life isn’t made for single people to maintain a household on their own, so I’m stuck trying to make do with the time and energy I’ve got during these increasingly busy months.
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