After a bunch of temperatures bouncing between the sixties and freezing, the forecast has finally shifted into some proper spring weather. Some looming storms, days rising into the sixties and then falling into the forties overnight, an occasional day or two in the seventies, and some nice windy days. I’m looking forward to the weather continuing to improve, even if I can’t go on my walks at noon anymore because I get sunburn far too easily thanks to one of the medications I’m on (and will hopefully be off in another month or so). It’s nice to not have to run my heat or AC, to be able to leave my windows open all day long, and to be able to go to work in shorts and a t-shirt. And sometimes a zip-up hoodie. But mostly the shorts and t-shirt. Throw in how nice it is to leave work at half past seven in the evening while still having enough sunlight that I don’t need to turn on my headlights during my drive home and I’m honestly pretty happy with the weather. Which, you know, won’t cure my depression or anything, but it’s still nice to have and definitely won’t hurt it. Its a nice little thing to have at the end of what have become incredibly long and exhausting days at work. Turns out that things haven’t really slowed down since a couple weeks ago and while I’m less emotionally and mentally stressed because the sheer volume of Things To Do is lower than it was back then, the physical stress of the labor required to test the project I’m mostly working on has picked up the slack. I wish I got to do this work while getting fresh air and not wearing a mask to protect myself from what one of my coworkers insists is “just some Spring sniffles,” but I’ve found other ways to extract some fun from the work I’m doing.
Continue readingMusing
Well-Intentioned Peer Pressure In The Workplace
This has been an incredibly busy week at work for me. Tomorrow will bring some relief, since I’ve got to leave shortly after noon for an appointment and will be finishing the day by working from home, but the arrival of some of my foreign coworkers for their yearly trip into the main office has upended my usual schedule for my week. Not only do I have extra work to do now that they’re around–taking advantage of being in the same office to get some early feedback on the next version of the software and some early drafts of future features–I was able to figure out a way to get one of my big projects into a state where I could test it and that’s a high enough priority that I’m basically supposed to drop everything to test it the instant the project is testable. Plus, a testing report I wrote weeks and weeks ago wasn’t getting reviewed so my boss announced it was due at the end of this week to light a fire under the asses of the people who were supposed to be reviewing it, so now I have to also get that done this week, including incorporating feedback from my coworkers as soon as possible so that if I need more answers from them, I can actually get them in a timely fashion. Sure, my boss’ declaration worked and I’ve gotten more eyes on my report since he pulled this stunt than I’ve gotten on all of the previous versions of the report combined, but it’s a lot of extra pressure when I’m already swamped. What turns this from something I’d endure into something I’m writing about on my blog is how the team reacted to my decision to stay and keep working when the rest of the team went out to dinner.
Continue readingBasking In The Solar Eclipse
Yesterday was the date of the 2024 Solar Eclipse (the day I wrote this, anyway: it was a week and a day ago as you’re reading this) and I had the opportunity to go outside for half an hour to watch it happen. Despite my love for celestial events and cool space pictures, I was a bit unprepared for it, since I didn’t have the energy to figure out what glasses were safe to use and then acquire a pair but, since I saw it while at work, there were plenty of people around who were more prepared than I and who were willing to share their glasses, specialty scopes, scrabbled together lenses, and goggles. As much fun as the eclipse was (and I LOVE a Celestial Event), it might have been more fun seeing what all the other nerds in the R&D department I work in came up with to view the eclipse using only the stuff they had around their labs. The very nature of our mutual employer meant that we all had high quality stuff to work with and that a lot of people contributing to these handmade objects actually had the knowledge necessary to make them correctly. Despite a rather high number of cobbled-together viewing devices, not a single person reported being ocularly injured. No one at work here was googling “why do my eyes hurt” like so many other people in the US have been since the eclipse. The ingenuity of all these people–coupled with their willingness to share their knowledge, their crafts, and their company–made an already excellent event even better than I could have expected.
Continue readingSpring Weather In Winter And Winter Weather In Spring
I spent my most recent Friday (two Fridays ago from when this gets posted) spring-cleaning my apartment. Which feels a little funny to write today, given the blizzard conditions I drove in last night and the multiple inches of slowly-melting slush that still coat the ground today. A lot of which is only just thawing out from last night’s freeze. We’re solidly in April now and still getting wintery weather, despite much of our actual winter being much closer to what I’d expect of spring around this point in the year. It’s not unheard of for us to get a few late snows (as late as May, sometimes) as spring temperatures fluctuate, but we rarely get snow after we’ve had a day that has broke past seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Yesterday, two days of rain turned into about thirty-six hours of snow and while it only just barely froze while it was falling yesterday, that little bit of ice and tons of slush turned my evening commute from its comfortable fifteen minutes into an hour-long affair. It was horrendous and coming home to a still-clean apartment was only mildly comforting. After all, I had to turn my heat up again and figure out what I was going to do the next day if the roads proved too treacherous to risk (as it turns out, the roads were fine, but getting to them was nearly impossible because my landlord never plowed my parking lot and being in an underground parking garage means contending with a slippery, uphill drive that proved impossible on mornings like today’s). Which wasn’t a huge issue, but it’s still incredibly off-putting to have spent a solid ten hours with my windows open as I cleaned my apartment more thoroughly than I have since before I moved into it and then, just over three days later, see snow blowing in my still-open bedroom window.
Continue readingDon’t Be A Jerk On April Fools’ Day
April Fools’ Day, the day belong to the multiple fools of April, has always been a strange creature in my life. In my youth, it was a day of complex emotions for me. On one hand, my maternal grandfather–the one I was close to and cared about who passed five years ago–was a great lover of practical jokes and provided me with no small amount of delight by introducing all the little practical joke toys one could buy from a magic trick shop (that my grandfather frequented for much his adult life since his love of practical jokes and magic tricks was lifelong and much to the chagrin of my grandmother and their children) to my family. Whoopee cushions, little hand buzzers, flowers that squirt water, pop rocks, and so on. It was always a lot of fun when we’ve visit him around the end of March, usual for some Easter celebration, and he’d pull all these little pranks on his grandkids, none of which ever hurt and were always a delight because we got to keep water tools he used (which always came with instructions on how we could prank our parents at home).
Continue readingLooking Back At The Distant Peaks Of 2023
A year ago today, as I’m writing this, I was frantically double-checking my packing lists, my driving plans, and my flight details. I’d just had one of the most stressful months of my life, as I realized my original flight plans had been messed up, had to scramble to cancel my flights and book a new one in its place, and had to figure out how to change my plans to incorporate a thousand-mile drive into both ends of my first trip overseas. After all, I couldn’t afford to to get a convenient flight from anywhere to where I was going. I could, though, afford to take an extra few days off, drive across the country (there and back again), and sleep in my car (at rest stops, of course) during the long overnight drive. I had already budgeted for work on my car’s breaks, after all, so it was clear that the more affordable option was to spend time rather than money. I have more time than money, most days, so it was a pretty easy calculation to make. I also had to spend hundreds of dollars on new clothes since nothing even remotely nice looking fit me anymore, which made March of 2023 the most expensive month of my life. Even with some hefty student loan payments (ramped up as part of accelerating my repayment plans) and my much increased rent hitting my bank account every month this year, I don’t think I’ve topped out that monumental month of costs. I was stressed, barely getting enough sleep, and had lost some pretty significant chunks of my support network the month before, so I was barely scraping by. Still, I got everything done, didn’t have to spend money I didn’t have, and made it safely to the east coast even on the tiny amount of sleep I’d gotten the week prior. I made it, despite everything.
Continue readingDaylight Saving Time Is Bullshit And Other Monday Thoughts
Daylight Saving Time is back in the US and continues to be some absolute bullshit. My entire rhythm is fucked up. You’d think that, with how messed up my sleep schedule already is, that I’d be a bit less troubled by other disruptions. You’d think wrong. I’m just as susceptible to the disruption of having the sun’s position relative to only my external clocks suddenly change. So, despite getting a decent amount of sleep over the weekend, I’m still starting this week with less than I’d like thanks to having my sleep cut short by an hour on Sunday and then struggling to fall asleep later that same day. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to do some course correction as I go through this week, but I’ve got a lot of potential events on my calendar for this week (mostly in the evenings [and none of which wound up happening]), so there’s no knowing how long its going to take for me to sort this out [the answer was still “all week” though]. After all, a lot of my struggles around getting to bed on time are a result of trying to make some time to enjoy myself or play some video games in the evening and I might be even shorter on that time than usual. Plus, thanks to all those events, I have to make sure I’m getting out of bed on time so I can actually get my usual ten-hour days in before I have to leave work for my evening events, which means my usual release valve of “sleep in a bit” isn’t available until Friday at the earliest and even then I’ll want to avoid being too late to work on Friday since I don’t think I’ll be able to bank any extra time this week to balance out any days that have to end early.
Continue readingA Eulogy To Akira Toriyama: How The Dragon Ball Manga Changed My Life
Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball and so much more, passed away this month. I learned about it last night (on the 7th of March, since I’m writing this on the 8th and you’re reading this on or after the 15th) and have spent the last day reflecting on the impact he had on my life. I don’t really talk about it a whole lot (because it was more than two decades ago and for other reasons that will become apparent soon), but I got into manga, comics, and graphic novels as a whole because of Dragon Ball. Before finding those bright red volumes on the “new” shelf at my local library one day when I’d ridden my bike there for some books to read, my entire conception of comics was confined to the syndicated comics that ran in newspapers, so much so that I didn’t call them comics. I called them “funnies” because they showed up in the “funny pages” of the newspaper. Sure, I’d read tons of picture books as a kid and a few things that rode a fine line between graphic novels and picture books, and sure, I knew what comic books were, but they’d never been a part of my life before I picked up one of the brightly colored books and was transported to a whole new world via a whole new type of story. That moment, that first borrowing of the first Dragon Ball book, was a major inflection point in my life to the degree that I can’t even imagine the person I’d be if I never picked it up. The change wasn’t drastic in the moment, but it laid the groundwork that I’ve built a huge portion of my life on since then.
Continue readingExhaustion As A Side-Effect Is Preventing Me From Overworking Myself
I recently (aka, two days ago after one hell of a delay due to so many convoluted bits of bullshit) changed up the medications I’m taking and have been knocked on my ass more completely by this change than by anything but that time I got the flu back in 2019. I spent an entire day basically immobilized once I discovered that the medication didn’t make me weak, it just SEVERELY limited the amount of energy I had in a day. I literally worked out and then immediately discovered that I was so worn out that I had trouble walking down the stairs. Needless to say, that and another side effect ensured I spent the day working from home as much as I could manage. The other side effect was some stomach stuff, no worse than my lactose intolerance inflicts on me when I fail to manage my dairy intake properly, but the muscle weakness and exhaustion were incredibly defeating. Since then, I’ve been slowly recovering. The stomach issues are mostly gone (though apparently eating more than a couple cashews makes me nauseas now?) but the severe limit on my energy has been slower to depart. I wisely didn’t complete a full workout yesterday, which meant I was able to get through almost an entire day of work before the exhaustion drove me into my chair (which is a problem considering that my desk at work is a standing desk, isn’t adjustable, and my chair is meant for a sitting desk). Today, I managed a full workout and am still standing at the end of the day, but I can feel the exhaustion starting to bear down on me. Literally the only thing making this tolerable is the knowledge that, ultimately, even if these side-effects diminish beyond this point, I can stop taking this medication eventually.
Continue readingThe Creeping Death Of Public Creativity
Blogging–and most creative work, if I’m being honest–feels like an exercise in futility these days. Even putting aside all my doubts about my small audience, my questions about my own motivations for blogging (and the work I have to do in order to make sure that I’m not obsessing over numbers instead of focusing on honing my craft and expressing myself), and the constant grind of fighting against my own mental health and worsening burnout in order to continue creating, I still think the rising theft of creative work would be an existential threat to my public writing. I’d still write privately, of course, no matter what. I’m too much of a storyteller to ever stop telling stories, be it in tabletop games or in my own creative writing, but no part of me needs to post things publicly. I like posting things publicly. I like seeing that people are reading what I’ve written. I like having this level of public accountability. But I absolutely don’t need it. So it is incredibly difficult for me to keep writing posts for this blog as I slowly work on finding an alternative hosting platform and figure out what shape I want my blog to take on that platform. Normally I’d say something like “it would be really easy to ignore this and just carry on,” but it’s actually not easy this time. This time, I can barely make myself focus on my writing for more than a couple minutes at a time and my buffer, a staple of the last two and a half years of writing, has started to slip as I lose the energy and willpower required to push myself to write when I’m feeling worn down.
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