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 readingexhaustion
I Ran Out of Time, So Have A Parody Called “If I Had 1,000,000 Hours”
I didn’t have time to write anything for today (Monday’s blog post will be a pretty good explanation as to why), so I made a quick little parody of The Barenaked Ladies’ “If I Had A Million Dollars” (original lyrics and format provided by genuis.com). Feel free to hum it to yourself or just read my lyrics instead of the song’s while you listen to it. Or don’t. I’m not your boss. I’m just incredibly tired and decided I’d rather have something dumb in place than nothing. So please, enjoy this dumb parody I wrote of an incredibly basic song.
Continue readingI Miss Pretending To Be Someone Else
I’ve been so busy lately that I’ve hardly had the time or energy for doing anything after work other than settling down in front of my TV and not moving again until it’s time to go to bed. I had plans to start putting a puzzle together or maybe work on a Lego set at some point this week (in an effort to spend some time away from screens and take a break from books. The book break isn’t because they’re bad or they’re twisting my mind in some way (though doing a massive binge of The Dresden Files has definitely influenced my recent dreams, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post), but because I’m spending too much time hunched over things or folded up in chairs. I need some activities that let me sprawl. Or, I thought I’d need them since I planned to get a full week of daily workouts in this week. Instead, I’ve done zero workouts, stuggled to get to sleep on time, and all the energy I have for any given day has been consumed by work as I juggle projects, prepare for a company event (that has happened by the time this goes up), and attempts to sort through my feelings about a whole range of stuff.
Continue readingOne Week Of Rest Later. Sorta.
I am officially one week into dropping streaming and specifically not replacing it with other projects. I have actually done my best to rest, even if I wound up spending an entire weekend busy and emotionally exhausted from a variety of frustrations, some disappointment (which has only contributed to my emotional exhaustion because I spent the time and energy to emotionally process it), and a very Midwestern party. I have not entirely succeeded in resting over this past week, since my sleep schedule is still royally messed up, but I actually had the energy to write two long blog posts and most of a chapter of Infrared Isolation (which will be going up the weekend after this post does, meaning I’ll have skipped another Saturday update) yesterday. It felt great to be able to work on something and actually have the mental fortitude to focus on it for more than a few minutes at a time. Which I mostly lost between yesterday and today because I was up too late playing a game (Cassette Beasts is great and I’ll eventually be writing about it), but that will hopefully be mostly fixed if I can actually get some sleep for once.
Continue readingTurns Out I Have Limits. I Know, I’m Shocked Too.
I’ve been trying to treat my recent period of rest and recovery like every other one I’ve gone through in the past few years. I’ve taken some time to do nothing, found something that interests me to work on, and slowly pushed myself back into doing things the instant I no longer felt exhausted. Unfortunately for me, the last eight months are not like any other period of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever had as much go on in an eight month period of time. I can’t even really call that period good or bad, though I can say that the negative parts of it make it probably the second worst period of my life. The positive parts don’t really make up for that so much as exist alongside it. A lot of really great stuff has also happened in that time, after all, and none of it cancels out the bad stuff. That’s not how life works. I have had a lot going on and it has worn me thin in more ways than anything but the prolonged abuse and neglect of my childhood can compare to. I feel so out of sorts that I’m not even sure how I should be feeling. All of which means that my usual methods of recovery and moving on aren’t going to cut it. Nothing I’ve experienced in the past is really going to help with right now and I’m only just now beginning to realize that treating the last eight months like any normal period of stress in my life is only going to make things worse.
Continue readingNo New Infrared Isolation Chapter This Week
I’ve been struggling to write, lately. For some reason, I’ve been feeling emotionally drained and all the work I’m doing takes more effort than usual. Almost like I’m consumed with other matters and unable to properly focus on resting, let alone my work. There’s no new Infrared Isolation chapter this week, but there will be one next week. Who knows what will happen the week after that. I’ve got a lot on my mind these days and it’s difficult to push through it all long enough to make any progress on creative writing, so each new sentence feels like pulling teeth. Just maintaining this blog is enough to finish exhausting me after a day of work, lately… I hope this stress will end someday. I hope things will get better. I’m prepared for them to get worse, though, since I’d rather be surprised by improvement than degredation.
Anyway, happy Saturday and I hope you’re doing alright. I’ll be fine. I just need to spend more time resting and processing stuff for now. See you next week for Chapter 23.
Today Was A Grey, Smokey Day Inside and Out
Content Warning for a long, metaphor-rich discussion of my experience of depression.
Continue readingPlanning My Rest Around My Exhaustion
I finished unpacking over the weekend. I still have some cleaning to do, and there’s plenty more stuff that will get done in time such as hanging lights, putting up art, figuring out if I need more rugs, and deciding what to do with my balcony. All of that is work that will take weeks and isn’t really a part of unpacking. It sort of is, in the case of the art and lights, since I packed those up for my move, but none of them are things that I feel inclined to do immediately the way I felt the need to empty boxes and get things situated. In short, I’m done with my immediate grind and while there is work to be done on the horizon, none of it needs to be done today or tomorrow or even this week. Now, finally, after an exhausting four weeks, everything is done and I can finally rest. And I’m finally out of obligations for the year, so hopefully I can actually get some this time.
Continue readingNo New Chapter of Infrared Isolation This Week
Between my total exhaustion and my editor being sick, there will be no new chapter of Infrared Isolation this week. Despite my exhaustion, I’ve kept writing, so there WILL be a new chapter next week. I just need to give my editor time to rest up before she reviews it and myself more time to rest up before I try to crunch out another one. Rest is important.
Unpacking My Thoughts On Unpacking
The slow, arduous process of unpacking is taking me so much longer than I thought it would. It probably doesn’t help matters that I’ve been largely confined to working between the time I’m finished with work (sometime at or after 6pm) and before “quiet hours” start in my apartment at 9pm. Sure, I could keep working after that, but I refuse to be the noisy upstairs nieghbor that I tried to escape. I will not be bumping and thumping around my apartment until all hours of the night. Sure, I can sometimes find something quiet to do, like last night’s folding laundry and unpacking clothes, but I also have to contend with the continued exhaustion from my packing and moving. It’s not like my rest is any good when I finally collapse onto my bed for the night since the mental residue of my life being disturbed prevents me from falling asleep easily. Plus, the most relaxing thing I’ve done all week was go to a friends’ for 2 hours to attempt to play D&D where we wound up just shooting the shit for the whole two hours. After which, I went home and continued to unpack.
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