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 readingexhaustion
We’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 readingWork/Life Balance Means Spending 12 Hours At Work, Right?
As I mentioned in Tuesday’s post, work has been staggeringly busy. I haven’t even had time to think about my organization project this past week since every single day has been over eleven hours of constant effort and focus. Well, not every day. I had one short day, since my friends where getting married and I wouldn’t miss that for anything, but that was the day that turned my “one long day to make up for one short day” plan for this week into my “every day is a long day since there’s so much that needs doing now, if not sooner” reality. Turns out something we thought wasn’t working for one specific reason actually wasn’t working for an unknown reason, which we know because I proved that the specific reason wasn’t actually at fault. Turns out the assumptions I’ve based my last three months of work on were incorrect, actually. Turns out everything we’ve been doing to “fix” the problem actually only hid it. And, as it turns out, the problem is likely more wide-spread than we thought it was but an incidental quirk of the hardware involved might have hidden it in most cases. As of yet, we still don’t know for certain what the cause is. I have some strong suspicions and a theory I’ve been able to back up a bit, but there are still problems with that theory that I haven’t figured out yet. I will continue to work on this problem all day, every day (well, I don’t expect to come in on the weekends, so hopefully only every work day) until we’ve figured it out and then, finally, we can lay this thing to rest.
Continue readingNational Novel Writing Month Update: One Week Later
Well, it’s been rough. I was INCREDIBLY optimistic about the course this month would take and I think I hit my primary daily writing target only once so far, let alone my daily secondary target of getting enough words to exclude my blog posts from my daily writing totals. I’ve been so busy with work and then so burned out from how busy I was that I when I finally go home and eat dinner, I’ve only got enough time and energy to spend an hour listlessly trying to write before shuffling off to bed. Even the weekend wasn’t much better since all the exhaustion I’d been putting off since I couldn’t afford to feel tired during my incredibly busy work days came crashing back down on me. I did almost nothing but play Spider-Man (the PS4 one, since I never finished the DLC) the entire time. I did eventually finish a blog post and do my laundry, but I was so wiped out that writing the post took three times longer than it should have and I didn’t even fold my clean laundry. What little energy I had for stuff beyond all that was spent on doing my dishes, a little bit of cooking, and taking care of things like paying my bills and other such unfortunate necessities. It has been rough mentally, emotionally, and physically these past few days, and even now that it seems like the worst has passed (though it remains to be seen if this will stay true since it’s not like I anticipated the horrible, frantic, and exhausting week I’ve had since the month began) I am barely staying on my feet as I struggle to remain functional despite the exhaustion.
Continue readingThe Write Way To End An Exhausting Day
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years is that, sometimes, pushing yourself a little bit harder than you think you should, taking one more step after you decided you’ve given up for the day, or just convincing yourself that even just a little bit is better than nothing at all… All of that can make the difference between peace of mind and feeling like you’ve failed. I worked for twelve hours today [wrote this on a Wednesday, rather than my usual one-week-ahead, which really only matters to me since I worked 7.5 hours on the 31st and then 12 every work day since then]. I spent the entire thing running around, chasing down a problem, and trying to run herd on a group of people who were placed at my disposal to help figure something out. I ended the day barely on my feet at a quart to nine in the evening, so mentally and physically exhausted that I had to take a break between walking to my car and driving it to the restaurant where I’d made my takeout order. I was done. I had barely enough energy for a shower and to climb the stairs from my main floor to the second floor where I’d planned to eat my dinner at half past nine, watch a little anime, and then play video games until exhaustion overwhelmed me. I had done enough. Even I couldn’t have asked more of myself than I’d already done, because I not only did everything I expected to do, but everything that came up along the way.
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 readingThe Wearing Down Continues
Every so often, I just have one of those days where I forget to take time for lunch and wind up clocking out, turning to grab my bag, and noticing my lunch is still sitting on my desk where I left it when I got into work that morning. Today was one of those days. When I got in to work, I went to my desk, unpacked my bag, and then left to go check on the test I’d left running overnight. Three hours later, at twelve thirty, I returned to my desk for the first time. I left seconds later and didn’t come back for another hour. After typing up a quick message, I left again and didn’t go back for another two hours. When I stepped away to go get some files off my testing laptop, I got swept up in a “let’s go have a meeting at the local ice cream parlor” event and didn’t get back to my desk until almost five. So all I had to eat today, before I came home and ate dinner, was my fiber supplement, a Nutri-Grain bar, my daily coffee, and a scoop of rainbow sherbet at the ice cream parlor. All despite running around so much that I felt like a disgusting, sweaty mess before I’d even gone on my daily walk, much less worked several more hours and gone on a 4-mile round trip bike ride to a nearby ice cream parlor. And I was so tired by the first time I realized I’d never eaten lunch at 3pm that I just wasn’t hungry anymore.
Continue readingSoul-Grinding Exhaustion And Emotional Moderation
I have come out the other side of my flu shot. I had an incredibly awful pair of days where I felt like all my joints were solidifying (the usual stiffness and body aches I expected from my flu shot were made much worse by the low-pressure front that decided to hang over the area for the entire time I was recovering). I did not have much opportunity to rest since I had to be in the office to at least set up the tests that were on my to-do list for this week. While I was able to go home on Tuesday after I’d set everything up since my coworkers were willing to keep an eye on it for me, I had to be in the office all day on Wednesday to monitor the next test myself and set up the subsequent run when that test inevitably failed. At least I was able to get enough data for the developers to figure out the problem and fix it. Now I just need to keep the test running and hope no new problem crop up, which is pretty easy work since it requires enough of my attention that I can’t really do a whole lot else but not so much that I have to look at it constantly. I can read stuff, do some research, write a blog post, or try to figure out if the last email I got was an actual scam (or a test scam by my employer’s IT department to help train employees on how to identify email scams) while I occasionally glance over at the readout I’ve set up. Every so often, I have to walk over to do a few things, but it’s really easy to divide my attention outside of those more active moments.
Continue readingThe First Step Is Sleeping. After That, Everything’s Doable.
It finally happened. I finally had people over to just hang out. Took three and a half months, but it finally happened. They weren’t my first house guests, since I’ve hosted an in-person tabletop game day for a Pathfinder 2e one-shot (that became at least a two-shot) and had a friend stay the night just a couple weeks ago, but they were the first people I had over with the express purpose of just occupying my space with me. It was really nice. We didn’t do much, other than hang out, go pick up pizza, and then idly watch the first two thirds of the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring while we made idle chitchat, ate our food, and did stuff on our phones. Exactly the kind of chill, no expectations, no greater purpose type of hanging out I’ve been wanting. Now all I gotta do is make it happen again! Hopefully in less than three and a half months. It’ll probably be easier, what with the impending winter, but you can never know for certain. Some winters, people will just hole up in their homes and avoid leaving it for anything other than necessity. Some winters, people can’t wait to escape their homes for any reason at all. You never know until it’s happening.
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