Another week (mostly) down the tubes and another update on how I’m doing. Physically, anyway. And a little mentally and emotionally, of course. That’s part of it these days, given that the reason I’ve stopped making much progress in physical therapy is that I’m exhausted from work and stressed beyond my ability to easily handle. Turns out that having your entire week knocked off course by someone else’s fuckup really sucks. To put it briefly, since I’m writing this late, one of my coworkers took crucial parts of my testing apparatus without telling me, rendering it incapable of being used for the testing I originally built it for. When I found out and confronted him, I was told to just build up my gear again and fix up the testing setup that he’d dismantled and only barely begun to put back together again in a “nice” way (despite me telling him a couple days prior that I was going to need it that week and that “working” was better than “pretty”). Which means that my plans to leave work “early” to play video games with my friends got thrown to the side so I could spent seven hours fixing what he’d messed up so I could run my goddamn twenty-minute test to verify that the latest version of the software, that the developer had put out that day, was good to go so that we’d have time for fixes and more testing if it WASN’T fine. I spent most of Wednesday apoplectic about that and had the rest of the week completely disrupted by this eight hours of work and software updating I wound up needing to do outside of my already busy plans for the week.
Continue readingexhaustion
A Late Night Mission Statement: Why I Write
I’ll be honest. I’m writing this at midnight the night before it’s supposed to get posted. I had a poem planned for today, but I haven’t had the time or energy to do a proper recording of myself reading it, so I don’t want to post it yet. I want to give it, and myself, time to breathe so I’m not cramming out subpar work just so I can have something ready to go. Getting anything done right now (this blog post included) is a struggle because I worked twelve hours today and the only reason I didn’t work a longer day was because I had to go to a doctor appointment this morning. I also worked fourteen hours on Wednesday (which isn’t yesterday anymore, since I started writing this after midnight), so I didn’t even start my day feeling any kind of fresh. I’m worn out and worn down by the stress and effort of the last few days, which is probably why I’ve written and deleted several partial and complete opening paragraphs. None of them felt right. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff on my mind as the world continues to devolve, as horrible things happen to people, and only the rich shitheads seem to be getting anything positive out of this state of affairs, but it’s difficult to put any of that into words that feel worth writing here and now, at my desk as I’m fighting the urge to sleep.
Continue readingReflecting Along The Road To Recovery
Well, since I’m writing this a day later than usual (on the 17th instead of the 16th), I’ve now made it through two increasingly demanding weeks at work. I got through my first exhausted weekend, started this week feeling fresh, and immediately pushed my limits as far as they could go every day I could. I spent four days doing a huge amount of testing, recruited anyone who was willing to help me, and made it through about fifty percent of the testing I needed in about a week. I also completely exhausted myself such that, despite sleeping pretty decently last night (thanks to choosing to work less and sleep more the morning I wrote this), I’m ready to fall asleep at my desk. I even forced myself to take a day off testing, to rest my poor hands, my give my aching body a break, and to focus on denying my ever-present desire to be horizontal rather than any amount of vertical, but I’m still struggling to stay conscious and alert today any time I’m not actively doing something and half of the rest of the time. It’s a nice exhaustion, though. I feel sleepy and ready for rest rather than uncomfortable and in pain like I was for most of last year. I can be still and the lingering pains will cease or I can move and stretch and feel my body loosen up. Truly, it is a remarkable thing to be recovering after so much time of just being miserable.
Continue readingI Now Have Proof That I’m Doing Better
So, I’m most of the way through my first week back in the office after my vacation and had my first physical therapy appointment since I started feeling better. While I’m definitely feeling a little strain from being back at work and being physically active again for the first time in a couple weeks, I had a remarkably different experience during my physical therapy appointment. Not only did I do enormously better on all the physical assessments than I did in my last appointment (a month ago), my therapist was so positive about my recovery that we put aside all the stuff we’d been working on in past appointments to address another problem I’ve had on and off for years. It was great to feel like things were finally working out for me after spending so much time in pain and feeling like I just wasn’t making any progress. I will probably go back to doing some kind of exercises once my recovery from that medication I was taking is finished, but it will probably be much more focused on taking care of my body and building good workout habits than on trying to fix my back. The more time that passes, the more it seems like that problem was tied directly to the side effects of the medication I was on and less on swapping mattresses. I mean, swapping mattresses was definitely a part of the issue, but I think that I’d have gotten through that relatively quickly on my own if I hadn’t been taking the joint and muscle pain and stiffness suite of medications. In retrospect, it feels almost kind of silly to think about how worried I was that all that pain and discomfort was a permanent problem.
Continue readingSigns Of Improvement
Well, my first day of work is done and while I feel like I’m way more tired than I should be from what felt like a relatively light day of work (compared to two weeks ago, I barely did anything), I’m not feeling as completely exhausted as I used to. I’ve actually recovered a bit from how tired I was when I finished the moderate labor portion of my day, which is the first time that has happened in months. Maybe more than half a year. That was the worst part of the medication I was on. Because my physical recovery period was so long, any tiring work meant that I’d still feel tired from it for at least a week. Now, today, I’m already feeling like I might be up for the household labor I’d planned for my evening back when I was feeling ambitious yesterday. I mean, it’s only folding laundry and maybe unloading the dishwasher, but I remember a time not that long ago when even those labors were beyond me on all but my best days after work. It’s good to finally be feeling better, even if now I have to keep pumping the brakes to make sure I don’t wind up pushing myself too hard during my continued recovery period. I have to make sure I pace myself and work out patterns and habits I can maintain over the next two incredibly demanding months. So, to that end, my plan for the rest of this week (last week, as you’re reading this) is to get back into the swing of things at work, stepping up my effort every day a little bit at a time. Then, next week, I’ll be doing that and trying to get in my morning workouts again. Or my evening physical therapy workouts, whichever the day demands. And then after that… Well, maybe I’ll go about trying to fix my sleep schedule. Who knows. If I can get the first two things down, I feel like anything will be within my grasp.
Continue readingOne Last Check-In Before The End Of 2024
Today, (the day I’m writing this, which is the 23rd of December), I had to run into the office for a little bit. There was a test I’d left running of the weekend that I needed to shut down, collect the data from, and then clear out of the test chamber. It’s a shared resource, you see, and while there’s a good chance that no one else is going to be using it in the next two weeks (no one has reserved it as of the last time I checked, a few days ago), it would not do for me to leave all that crap there in case someone else wanted to sneak a little testing in during a historically quiet time at our employer. So I went in the early afternoon, wrapped up my test and put everything away, and then left the building. Took all of half an hour, plus fifteen minutes for adjusting my time card to reflect the fact that I’d shown up and worked for forty-five minutes rather than spent a full day’s worth of vacation time. In, work, and out. Still, in that short amount of time, I still managed to run into every single one of my coworkers who was still working at that point, have a couple conversations about the project I’m working on, and get sidetracked for a few minutes as one of them tried to shove good intentions under my fingernails. It wasn’t that bad, but it was a bit annoying to be trying to quickly finish something and leave only to get bogged down in conversation. Typical, but annoying. Once I was done with it, though, I’d hoped to be able to finally relax only to still feel just as tense and keyed-up as I felt this morning while I procrastinated going to work.
Continue readingI’ve Decided To Take Another Day Off
I honestly haven’t rested much yet, between my day of going into work a week ago, holiday stuff, burning the shit out of my hand while making Christmas dinner, and then hosting my siblings, so I’m just going to take another day off. I’m gonna try to actually rest and get my head out of the weird funk I’m in as I’m writing this. I’ll have a new post tomorrow, to do one final check-in before the end of 2024, and then no new post on Wednesday the 1st. Starting on the 2nd snd carrying forward, I’ll be back to my usual “every work day” blog posts and, if I can ever get my feet under me properly, some new Saturday posts in the future. Not any time soon, though. Typing is a more laborious activity than usual on account of burning the shit out of my hand. It’s been a couple days, and it’s not horrific or anything, but it kinda aches unpleasantly, to the extend that I’m not even holding video gsme controllers with it. Just sort of literalized my burnout with thisnhand injury… So, maybe someday, but definitely not in January. The month hasn’t even started and its off to a rough start.
Two Months Of Physical Therapy Later, I’m Mostly Sleeping Better
I’m about two and a half months into my physical therapy and sleep recovery efforts now. As I’m writing this (a while ago, actually, but I’ve done a more thorough editing pass to get it up-to-date), I’ve finally hit a point where I was able to sleep for seven consecutive hours. Which isn’t as much as I’d like, of course, but it’s nearly double what I was getting back in September and early October, when things were at their worst. Also, while I’m still waking up due to pain and soreness, I can now go do a few stretches and then go back to sleep for another two or three hours. Or least I could back when I was getting a maximum of six hours of sleep at a stretch. I’ll have spent the last few weekends trying (with mixed results) to get as much sleep as possible since the week before US Thanksgiving (the second-to-last week of November) was physically draining in a way I haven’t experienced in years, as was the week after US Thanksgiving, but that was very clearly due to work stress in a way that the aforementioned week wasn’t. I managed to get several nights of quality sleep while I was away from work, but I’ve still been dozing off at my desk every single day so it clearly wasn’t enough (or wasn’t of sufficient quality) to make me actually feel rested. As it turns out, since there is an unfortunate intermingling of issues I’m dealing with, I’ve hit the upper-limit on how much sleep I can get and the worsening of those intermingling issues has actually started to cut down on how much sleep I can get, thanks to the once-again-worsening back, shoulder, and now general joint pain I’ve got going on.
Continue readingNovember Without A Writing Project
Today is the first day of November. The eighth, as you’re reading this, I guess [it got bumped due to election bullshit]. Normally, I’d be deep in my feelings about my writing challenge for the year or how I had to set it aside due to personal issues happening in my life. This year, though, is different. I’ve already written about how National Novel Writing Month has compromised their integrity in a number of unforgivable ways since the start of 2023’s NaNoWriMo, so I’m not going to rehash everything in too much detail, but suffice it to say that they sold out to Large Language Model garbage (still masquerading as “AI”), decried pushback against allowed generated text by saying that not allowing it would be classicist and ableist, doubled-down, and then fell apart as people withdraw from supporting the organization. All of which is terrible but doesn’t come close to the harm done that came to light in 2023–NaNoWriMo hadn’t been protecting its youngest writers, allowing them to be groomed by people who were representing the organization in location-based chats and writing groups, not doing anything about it until the community blew up about it in the middle of November that year. Both of these events were real shitshows, to put it lightly, and a lot of people, myself, included, have sworn off participating in any future NaNoWriMo events. I stand by the decision, of course, but I do find myself missing the excitement and distraction the yearly writing challenge usually brings me. I wasn’t aware of how much I relied on it to buoy my spirits as fall and its attendant early nights come crashing down on the Midwest.
Continue readingTaking A Day Off: The Ups And Downs
You might think that, given how much I’ve been struggling to sleep and how I’m still fairly recently returned to the land of full consciousness and awareness after more than a month of forgetfulness and grey fog, I would take it easier on myself at work or even make use of my ample time off to cut myself some slack at work rather than continue to push myself to do as many fifty-hour work weeks as I can physically handle. You would be wrong, unfortunately, since my whole fifty-hour schedule exists for a multitude of reasons, only some of which have to do with the demands of my job. Sure, there’s tons of work to do and I currently need a bit more time every day to do the same amount of work that I used to do in shorter weeks, but I also need to cover my rent, buy groceries, and pay my bills as a single adult living alone. It’s expensive to do that in my city and in this modern era. I can’t tell you how many times my coworkers have expressed shock at how my monthly rent payments are higher than their mortgages because I stopped counting years ago when it became spiritually exhausting to hear that common refrain. So, in order to have any kind of comfort and to live in a space that won’t make me feel trapped and miserable constantly, I work longer weeks and have to carefully ration the weeks when I don’t get my ten hours of overtime since they inevitably result in a significant drop in income. It’s usually better to take full weeks off than partial ones since I won’t be getting overtime anyway, unless the day(s) off in question is a holiday, so I can actually get an extended rest. After all, if I’m not going to be able to get overtime for the rest of my days (I’d merely avoid the need to spend paid time off for taking a day away from work), what does it matter to me, financially, if I’ve worked some or all of the days in that week?
Continue reading