I am struggling to make it through my “normal” work weeks these days. Fifty hours of work was once the norm I lived under but now I can barely make it through a ten hour day. I know how bad that sounds, but working 50-hour weeks was my devil’s bargain for living alone in this expensive modern era. It was the thing that gave me the hope that I’d be able to pay off my student loans “early” (which feels dumb to say considering it has been thirteen years since I graduated college as of the second weekend of May). It is what has enabled me to live with the rising cost of a not-shitty apartment and my unceasing eleven-hundred-dollars-a-month student loan payments (which have finally begun to snowball thanks to paying off one loan with a particularly large quarterly bonus last year). I have depended on it for five years and counting, and I don’t know how I’m going to keep it up anymore. I’d have to move someplace much cheaper if I stopped. I’d have to trim back what few luxuries I allow myself like decent coffee, fresh chicken (that I then freeze, sure, but it’s still better than the already frozen stuff I used to buy), and enough vegetables that I sometime don’t eat them all before they go bad. And the “expensive” frozen pizzas instead of the cheap, crappy ones. But I am so burned out and tired that I can’t really force myself to keep this pace up most weeks and I’m not sure if failing to work that much is me recognizing I need rest more than I need money, or if this is a drawn-out breakdown due to overwork, stress, and isolation combining into the most gnarly, horrible burnout I’ve ever experienced.
Continue readingBurnout
Struggling To Maintain A Healthy Entertainment Diet
Consuming new media, by reading or watching or playing or listening or whatever, is an important part of any creative person’s life. You need new input, after all, to avoid stagnating. Something fresh to liven up your mind and shake the cobwebs from your soul. The Oatmeal, of fart joke and semi-inspiring illustrated essay fame, called it “breathing in.” A whole host of other creative types have likened it to feeding your creative body/soul. I like to think of it as enrichment in my enclosure since I often feel like a zoo animal these days, pacing around my apartment as one of the last observers of the horrible illness still looming over the world no matter how hard everyone tries to ignore it, and wishing I could be free again. I struggle to keep up a healthy diet of new media, though. It’s difficult to be in the right frame of mind for something new all the time. I’m often too tired to invest myself in anything and while I do plenty of new-to-me stuff, playing a different combat class in Final Fantasy 14 doesn’t really count, nor does something Pokopia because while both are fun and stimulating, neither really feels “new” or really gives me much to think about when I’m not playing them. And not everything needs to give me that, but I really do benefit from having something new and interesting to chew on. Right now, most of that is coming in the form of Dorohedoro Season 2 and my slow rewatch of Frieren as I meander my way toward Season 2 of that. And also Trigun: Stargaze. I also have a pile of books and movies to watch, other shows on my to-watch list, and a host of unplayed video games. I just… have a difficult time overcoming the inertia of my established habits and tend to just fall back into those when I’m too tired to really figure out what I want to do.
Continue readingChased Into A New Day By Last Week’s Problems
This past weekend (as I’m writing this, anyway) was just long enough for my exhausted mind to forget everything that was going on at work. Unfortunately for me, what was going on was investigating a bevy of bugs I’d found and all of them were waiting for me when I got in on my Monday morning. As was one of the German software developers I work with (the one I get along with better, thankfully). I then proceeded to spend seven hours on the phone with him, some of them testing and some of them just shooting the shit while we waited for the very slow test (that was supposed to be much faster) showed whether or not we’d managed to eliminate the bug by changing on of over a dozen variables. It was time-consuming and exhausting work, and honestly some of the most exacting testing I’ve done in a while since the project I’ve been working on for a while now is more of a “does it feel alright? Cool, next thing” type project than a “change dozens of tiny variables one at a time and review the results of a repeated action with each set of variables, all of which must be recorded for historical purposes and further investigation by my developer coworkers. It has left me drained even after getting a couple decent nights of sleep, moreso even than I felt the week prior when I was dead on my feet from not sleeping enough at all. Mostly because the busy afternoon wrapped up with me returning to my desk to find that a recently departed (for the day, not from this mortal coil) coworker had set up a meeting for us to learn about how other departments us AI testing tools.
Continue readingSifting Through The Ashes: Micro Versus Macro Plotting
As I’ve been to busy to really do much active preparation for this tabletop campaign (which isn’t great considering that I’m writing this two days before our next session and I need to be ready to facilitate a game of Sanctuary), I’ve been trying to keep my momentum going by working through whatever plot I might put together for the two discrete chunks of the later campaign that I can foresee. I’ve got the outline of it locked in already, and I won’t be getting TOO specific since I need to leave room for adaptation, player input, and micro-plots, but I really need to start lining up some of the more important details. Especially for the first chunk of the campaign since that’s going to be a bit more locked-in than the second chunk by its very nature. I also need to produce a map for it as well, since that kind of location-based visual will be important for a while. It won’t be unimportant later, but it will be more important earlier to help ground everything we’ve got going on. After that, I need to generate a bunch of names, some proper nouns, work out how to incorporate a few fun little details from our games thus far, and then organize it all in some way that I can reliably use and won’t completely forget about. I’ve made plenty of GM reference documents in the past, but none in quite a while and I’ve never done anything of the sort while this burned out and tired, so I’ve got my work cut out for me.
Continue readingExhaustion Is Interfering With My FF14 Plans
It’s been a rough week. Had a mid-week Final Fantasy 14 roleplay wrestling event in the middle of the week (and I’m behind on my blog posts, so this is written less than a week ahead) and that coming so soon after the last one (which was on the Saturday prior) left me with little evening space for much else. Doubly-so considering how sick I’ve felt the last couple days, how worn out I am from work and not feeling well, and how much of a struggle work has been despite having a long weekend just prior to it. I’ve been so tired that I haven’t had the energy to do much in-game other than what my friends are doing and I’ve barely managed even that. I probably should be more focused on the homework tasks I’ve assigned myself in the hopes of having my relic weapon ready to go when the new expansion drops in just under three weeks (as of writing this and two as of posting it), but I just have not had the energy in me to push forward on the grind. Heck, I haven’t even played much of anything else, either. I’ve just… messed around a bit in Pokopia and spun my wheels on an alt in Final Fantasy 14. And now, even as I try to think about doing the work I genuinely want to do in order to progress on my relic weapon, I find myself wanting to just… not do it. I don’t even want to do the video editing I’ve got lined up from that last wrestling show, despite how much I’ve come to enjoy it. I just… don’t have the focus right now.
Continue readingEternal Internal Conflict Over How To Feel About… Everything, I Guess
A lot of my favorite stories and bits of wisdom shared therein tend to revolve around the idea that we, ultimately, are the ones who choose our mood and outlook. From the “I choose joy” speech by Merle Highchurch in The Adventure Zone’s first season to “life does not have to be a perpetual conflict” from the excellent webcomic Little Tiny Things, and all throughout the lexicon of stories from varies points of my life, the idea that we are the one who gets to set the tone and timbre of our response and attitude towards the world is one that appeals deeply to me. It’s one I believe in, with a degree of faith that I’ve rarely managed to muster for anything else except my days of devout Catholicism (when I didn’t know there was anything else out there). A comparison I make because I’m not sure it’s true and it’s definitely not a pearl of wisdom I am living by. As you’ve probably seen by the weekly posts on my blog, I tend to react strongly to the world around me. My emotional state is often dictated by the situations I’m in and the events that occur around me. I have little emotional… inertia, let’s say. I will cry at the drop of a hat if you tell me the hat dropped because it couldn’t stay on a head no matter how much it wanted to. I will get incandescently angry if I see someone mistreated. Whatever mood a room takes will bleed into me no matter how else I’m feeling. I rarely feel like I am in control of my emotions these days, despite how skilled I was at emotional control earlier in my life.
Continue readingCursing What I Once Would Have Called A Blessing
Today, I returned from a very long weekend. Five whole days off in a row, thanks to a combination of a holiday and two days of PTO to give myself as much of a break as I can (barely) afford to. I took it because I was unceremoniously told early in the week that my assistance was not needed and rather than wait around until that inevitably proved to be false (as it always has been), I decided to take some time off and let my coworkers deal with their own problems for once. I was right, of course. They realized they needed me a couple hours later, but my vacation time was already submitted and I wasn’t going to rescind it, so they were shit out of luck. Especially because my PTO meant I wasn’t going to do even a minute of overtime on any day last week and wound up leaving quite early both days. It was really nice. It felt great to leave the building while the sun was still up, while the air was still warm, and while there was still enough of an evening left for me to feel like I could do more than one thing before I was forced to give in to my overwhelming exhuastion. It was nice to sleep in as late as I wanted five days in a row. I didn’t sleep for less than seven hours even once in all of that and got about eight hours three times in that period. It was an unprecedented amount of rest. And was largely spoiled by a bad bout of tonsil stones that kept me feeling like I was choking when I tried to sleep last night and then further spoiled by coming in to work and realizing that a five day weekend wasn’t enough to fix my burnout.
Continue readingIncreasingly Bitter Reflections Of An Exhausted Mind
Work has been hitting me on all fronts lately. It has routinely achieved the burnout trifecta of inducing mental, emotional and physical exhaustion in me on a day-to-day basis for the last month (all of March, really) and it does not look to be letting up any time soon. Hopefully my latest email to my landlord results in me getting the answers I need so I can make a decision there [it did], about whether or not to stay at my current apartment [I’m going to, but I’m mad about it]. It would be nice to be able to put that particular issue to bed so I can focus on literally anything else (having a place to live kinda takes precedence). The next highest priority thing would be to find a new job if I can, since this one is killing me a little bit faster than entropy does, on average, and I’d really like to no longer have such a drain on my existence be such a significant part of my day-to-day. I am so tired after everything happening this week that I’m practically falling asleep as I write this. Well, a bit more than practically, actually. Just briefly dozed off there. I haven’t been sleeping super well, either, which has made me all the more susceptible to the exhaustion work has been bringing to bear. Every single aspect of my job that is incredibly exhausting has come up just this past week, too: pysical labor testing, repetitive testing, complex testing, my coworkers being unreliable, my coworkers leaving me to do all the work, my boss being unreasonable about something dumb, pro “AI” conversations, and on and on and on… It’s enough to make me want to lay down on my office floor face-first amd weep into the too-thin carpet.
Continue readingA Busy Weekend Is Enough To Wipe Me Out
I had a busy weekend. Not the busiest I’ve ever been, but I had stuff going on every day since Wednesday (of the week before I wrote this) on top of a being incredibly busy at work every day, and it has wiped me out. Only thing making today doable is that I’m working from home due to a blizzard. If I had to be around people and at least pretend to be nice and social, I would probably have lost it before the day was even half over. It is weeks like the one that just ended that remind me just burned out I still am. After all, it was busy but not horribly so. I still had time for fun stuff and social activities. I didn’t sleep as much as I’d have liked to, but I got enough. I shouldn’t be this tired. I shouldn’t be feeling like I need a vacation to recover from five semi-busy and mentally engaging days. And yet here I am, tired as well and wondering if one day of rest is going to be enough as I cycle through various tasks, trying to find something that keeps me engaged long enough for me to make any real progress while my mind wanders and I consider what it would be like to not have a giant list of stuff that needs doing and problems that need solving. I miss the days when I could just exist. When I didn’t have to chose between getting low-quality rest and burning more energy to get something done so that I can hopefully get better rest at some unknown point in the future when all the things on my mind that are stressing me out are finally done. I do not know when those days will return again, but it surely won’t be for a while.
Continue readingPracticing Radical Acceptance Of The Fact That I Should Stop Radically Accepting Things
Today–a random day because I fell behind in blog post writing–I read a post on bluesky by Taco Bell Quarterly, (self-described as “The World’s Most Prestigious Literary Magazine. Unaffiliated with Daddy Taco. We publish the boundaries of cease and desist.”) that plainly stated the truth that most writers face: “You’re not going to make any money doing this and no one is going to read it, so you must hope for a secret third thing to happen“. This, no matter how many people might wish to deny it or refuse to except it, is the truth of being a writer in this day and age. Whatever that third thing is, though, is up to you, and the replies to this post were full of people giving voice, in varying degrees of sincerity, to what that third thing is for them. Most (ignoring all the people who missed the point by trying to get around thing two by saying “someone reading it and enjoying it”) of them fall into pretty standard categories such as “spite,” “to have done the thing,” or “because I need to,” but the one that I keep thinking about is someone quoting the post and asking the respondants “At what point does ‘artist dies penniless’ stop feeling like the artist in question just wasn’t sufficiently zen?” Because that’s the side of this that doesn’t get considered enough, you know? We’re all so ready to find reasons to write other than getting paid or making a living or being able to support ourselves, and it’s a good thing that we do that since finding our own purpose is more likely to play out positively than trying to make a living at it, but it’s still worth thinking about the fact that we’re essentially papering over a massive, systemic issue with acceptance and inner strength.
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