Well, National Novel Writing Month is basically over at this point. Sure, there’s still a bit over a day and a half left before it ends and I’m certain there are plenty of people working their butts off to wrap their goal up in whatever time they’ve got left (I used to be a regular member of this club), but I’m pretty much done. I’ve got all the time I need to finish and, depending on when you’re reading this, I might have already finished. I was just over three thousand words away from being doing when I started writing this blog post and that’s an achievable amount of writing for a day where I’ve suddenly got more time than I expected because, say, a Dungeons and Dragons game I was planning to play in got canceled just two hours before it was supposed to happen. So now I’ve got all kinds of time and while I might use some of it to run an errand, make myself a nice dinner, or finish a normal day’s writing early so I can enjoy some time to myself, I might also just push through the end of this month’s goal so I can stop writing it down as something to do on my to-do list.
Continue readingBurnout
The Drudgery Of My Job Is A Metaphor For My Life
Yesterday (well, yesterday from the day I wrote this a bit over a week and a half ago because of holiday blog displacement and me trying to bank some writing before I’m hosting people), I spent two hours turning a hefty box full of various electrical components on and off. My calculations tell me that I did it approximately eight hundred times in those two hours, using a total of four different combinations of powering up and down steps. I was trying to get it to burn out since we’ve been getting reports of issues in the field with this particular box of electronics burning itself out when users are turning it on in the morning. While this did not make a lot of sense to us, given how hard we hit these things in the lab during the course of developing them and then testing them, we figured it was worth looking into. By which I mean the engineers and my manager figured it was worth looking into and the other testers figured it was worth me testing because, now that my urgent project is done, I don’t have anything that needs to be done yesterday while all the other testers are still working on that schedule.
Continue readingRiding The Coattails Of One Very Productive Day As NaNoWriMo Wraps Its Third Week
Well, it’s almost midnight the day before this post is due to go up and I’m only now writing it because I forgot, until this very moment, that I still needed to actually write something for tomorrow/today. Good thing I decided to do a little writing to end my very long, very busy, very social, and very fun day. I am exhausted and really considered just going to bed. I was certainly tired enough an hour an a half ago to consider doing it right then. Now, my kitchen is clean, my apartment is mostly clean, and I’m sitting tucked away in my closet-turned-office to do my daily writing because my siblings are bedding down for the night and I don’t want to keep them up with my light or my noise. Which, thanks to a really over-the-top day last Friday, I only have to do just over a thousand words to make my count. I’d really love to double down and insist that I only include words on my actual NaNoWriMo project, to keep the “Infrared Isolation Chapters” train rolling along, but I’m now twenty-two days into the month and I think maybe a fifth of my total word count for this month is for writing that isn’t going up on my blog. Which, on one hand, really just goes to show me how much writing I do most months. On the other hand, though, it really isn’t in the spirit of National Novel Writing Month.
Continue readingWe’re Halfway Through National Novel Writing Month
Well, now I’m two weeks into National Novel Writing Month and while my work days aren’t as incredibly hectic and busy as they were during the first week and a half of November, the rest of my life has picked up the slack. I’ve been preparing to host two of my siblings and two friends of one of those siblings, plus we’ve had a bunch of more solidly cold weather come through, so I spent all of last weekend doing some projects around my apartment to weather-proof my bedroom door so I can keep that space cold and warm up the rest of my apartment for my guests. I mean, I also enjoy a warm apartment, but my tolerance for the cold is much higher and my preferred apartment temperature is much lower than most people I’ve met. I just really enjoy being under blankets and I’m much too warm for that unless my environment is in the low sixties. Which, you know, is much lower than the upper-sixties and low seventies that I know most people prefer, at least in terms of the experience of the temperature. So I cut and put down some carpet remnants to insulate the floor and help protect my downstairs neighbors from the sound of extra feet (I walk incredibly quietly for someone my size, so I was putting this task off until I actually had other people around), put up some weather stripping around my bedroom door, and really just strained the muscles of my lower back. Apparently, I’ve gotten too old to be crawling around on the floor with reckless abandon like I was while cutting the carpet to fit around the support beam for my staircase and tightly to the door frame at my bedroom door (so it could fit under the door in order to block all the air that used to pass through that gap).
Continue readingI Fell Into A Burnout String That’s Dire
I am writing this on the sixth day of November and I am already so incredibly burned out that I’m considering taking time away from work already. Well, not “already” since I haven’t had much time away from work in about a year that wasn’t set aside for a specific purpose. The holidays last winter, visiting a friend/interviewing for a job that I didn’t get, going to Spain, my friends’ wedding, my move, and then labor day weekend (which wound up being preparations for my grandmother’s passing)… All the time I’ve taken away from work has been specifically for an event of some kind or to deal with some kind of major life stress. I haven’t had a proper do-nothing, restful vacation since Thanksgiving of 2022 and that barely counts since I was preparing myself for family therapy with my sister and parents. The last time I took a vacation and didn’t have something horrible, stressful, or upsetting happen immediately afterwards was when I went to a cabin with my friends and siblings for most of a week in the summer of 2022. Which only counts because the stressful thing that happened after that was something I’d mostly gotten used to dealing with (my eye problems flaring up). I really need a proper rest and I really hope I can get one this Thanksgiving. Next week, as you’re reading this.
Continue readingLosing Context And Burning Out
I was talking to a friend the other day about everything going on in our lives right now and she remarked that it seems like everyone is going through a lot these days. I responded that it seemed true that everyone seems to be having a rough year and that no one who I talked to regularly wasn’t having a difficult time at some point in the last month. As I’ve thought about this conversation further, I’ve added in my on-going thoughts about how long it has been since I last felt at peace for more than a single day. Because, if you think about it, the last eight years have been full of fairly dramatic moments, events, and entire years, to the point that it now feels difficult to properly contextualize anything outside the scale of my day-to-day life. Plus, since stuff is happening relentlessly, there’s no opportunity for anyone to take a break, make some space, and try to recontextualize things, there really isn’t a way to fix this problem in a way that doesn’t contribute to the on-going problem of being constantly overwhelmed. I mean, the last quarter of my life includes Trump’s presidency, all the crimes related to that, the 2020 election, all the crimes related to THAT, the complete enshitification of pretty much the entire internet (though I’d say this marks just the conclusion of that process since it began far earlier than 2015), the various police murders of people they were arresting or just encountering in the course of their state-sponsored violence (which has going on for much longer than the past 8 years but feels like it’s been getting worse), all the mass shootings (which have been going on most of my life and seem to only be getting worse), and so much more.
Continue readingI Overextended Myself Once Again
I wound up staying up until about 2am Friday morning, since I only finished building my character and all that in Baldur’s Gate 3 at about 11:30 Thursday night. It took a long time to download and I had a D&D game I was playing in during the earlier hours of the evening, so I was faced with either going to bed without playing BG3 or staying up a bit to play just the intro. I chose the latter, which turned into playing for about two hours. That, plus a bit of research I did following my introduction to Gale is what informed last Friday’s post since I wrote that during work breaks in my morning and then finished it between chores Saturday morning. I was pretty busy for pretty much the entire day and evening, so I had to get pretty focused with my topic for Friday. It’s not like I had any extra time to play more or do more research about the game that day, nor have I had much since then.
Continue readingThe Nature of Rest and My Need for Proximity
I write a lot on here about my levels of stress, of anxiety, of exhaustion, and how difficult it is for me to deal with them in a healthy manner. I often say that I’m bad at resting or I’m not sure how to rest and recover when it comes to mental and emotional drain. One of the things I typically leave out (ultimately, anyway, since I’m pretty sure half-explanations of what is going to be the topic of this blog post are my most-deleted writing on this blog) is that I know of ways for me to get rest. I know of things that soothe me when I can’t seem to unwind or relax. The main problem is that they’re difficult for me to access in ways that keep them soothing or in sufficient quantities that I can actually recover enough that my progress doesn’t vanish the instant something stressful happens. I’ve written before about my need to escape civilization, to get far away from cities and noise and the humdrum of my daily life (I call it “Tree Time” in my head, since I associate this with being in heavily forested areas). What I havent written about is that probably the most restful or soothing thing I can do is connect with other people.
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 readingBurnout Extinguished My Enthusiasm
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom comes out in two days and I’m too tired to be excited about it. Sure, I know I’ll have a blast playing it, but I’m too worn down to feel anything but base acknowledgment of what this impending moment means. I’ve been waiting for this game for six years, ever since I beat Breath of the Wild for the first time and knew there had to be more based on the DLC announcements and the rumors swirling around it. After all, if they had so many great ideas for what else they could do with the game via DLC, then it stood to reason that they’d make another one. Now, six years after that thought entered my head, I only feel more tired when I think about it.
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