Over the weekend, I made some alterations to my cell service plan and added one of my younger siblings to it. Since they wanted a new phone, I had to upgrade my plan and that, unfortunately, meant that the way that I understood cell phone service plans no longer applied. Instead of just “adding a line” to my existing plan and paying a reduced fee for the additonal line, I basically set up a copy of the plan I upgraded to for my sibling. A complete duplicate of all benefits, fees, costs, and everything. I’m still saving a bit of money thanks to adding them, but I’d have saved the same amount of money just changing my plan from what it was to what it is now, a thing I only put off as long as I did because it wouldn’t save me that much money and I simply did not want to think about it. But, years after my initial offer, as they’ve grown further from our parents, my sibling wanted to leave our parents’ phone plan and join mine, so I had to think about it. And am still thinking about since it will take a while for all of that to settle out (as coverage changes, plans update, new numbers/lines become accessible, and so on), which has gotten me thinking about the role that (cell) phone service plays in our lives. After all, when I was young and learning to use the phone, cell phones weren’t as common as they are now. Cell phones became common while I was in high school and smart phones rose to the fore while I was in college, so I’ve gone from having access to an old rotary phone in my parents’ garage to having a front row seat for the rise of voicemail and then the ultimate takeover of smart phones.
Continue readingMusing
Family Like An Open Wound
A bit over a week before writing this, I got a chunk of skin taken off by a thing I was working on at work. A ratchet slipped and my hand banged into a hard metal edge in a way that gouged me pretty deeply. The wound was about the size of a dime (which is a bit less concerning when I tell you that my fingers are at least as wide as a quarter) and I spent the three days after that taking special care of it. I wanted to keep the wound clean while I continued to work and to keep it from getting irritated by coming into contact with anything. Once I was through the work week, though, and just spending time in my apartment, I stopped covering it and let it air out a bit. Now, a bit over a week later, it mostly doesn’t hurt. There’s still some tightness when the heat of my office dries out my hands, there’s the occasional twinge of pain if I bump it into anything, and there’s the dull ache of it every time I was my hands. It’s healing well, it looks much less horrible than it was, but a closer inspection reveals the true depth of the wound, as does running my hand or fingertips over it. So while it mostly doesn’t hurt, every so often, I am reminded of the severity of this injury and am inflicted with the full pain of the injury all over again (I never realized how much I use that knuckle for tapping things until doing that shot a lance of pain deep into my finger and arm). Which is kind of like the experience of cutting off contact with my biological family, just compressed down into seven days instead of seven years.
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 readingThe First Heavy Winter Weather Appears On The Cusp Of Spring
So, after a rather underwhelming winter of cold, grey, bland days, we finally get a proper winter storm. A blizzard, as they’re calling it. Up to almost a foot of snow, a heavy layer of ice, some amount of sleet, and heavy winds. A recipe for a nasty bit of weather that I’m kind of excited for and kind of dreading. It’ll be cold enough after the storm that everything is going to freeze up and anyone caught out in it will be in danger. Given that the winter has so far been mild enough to still see people panhandling, I really hope they all have some place warm, safe and sheltered to hide during this. At the same time, I’m kind of excited at the idea of being able to work from home because of the weather. After how crazy busy and exhausting this week has been, I could really use a bit of quiet and peace while I work. I’ve got my first session of my new campaign tonight (the night I’m writing this–this is also why I’ve got no “dev log” for this week, since nothing has happened yet and I haven’t done any further prep) and I’m so tired I’m considering cancelling it (I won’t) just to get a bit of rest. And work on editing this past week’s wrestling event. Wednesday shows really throw me off. All of which is to say that I feel more than a little conflicted and guilty about this upcoming storm because I definitely want it to happen but it runs a real risk of killing power in the area and whoever is forced to go out in that weather is running quite a risk to themselves.
Continue readingLiteral Blood, Sweat, And Tears
I’ve spent the last few days donating small bits of my fingers to the project I’m doing at work thanks to a mix of unlucky incidents and things slipping as I’ve been applying force. It’s made for an increasingly rough time given how many of my fingers I’ve had to bandage, how often I have to wash my hands, and how I keep needing to reapply those bandages in order to keep my (this makes most of them sound worse than they are) open wounds from getting dirt in them. When it was one finger, it was easy to make sure that one wasn’t involved in everything going on so I wouldn’t injure it again. Now that it’s half my fingers (and mostly knuckles at that), I don’t really have a choice other than to continue risking my digits. Which also makes it sound worse than it is. Most of the danger is just, say, a wrench on a bolt slipping or the nut suddenly coming loose, which causes my hand to lurch into a hard metal surface that refuses to let my hands go without taking a souvenir. Some of it is decidedly worse than that and not something I’m going to share on a public blog post due to the nature of my work and the incidents. All of which means that now I have a very deep appreciate for bandages and how “waterproof” doesn’t also mean “soap-proof.”
Continue readingDaylight Saving Time Strikes Again
Once again, time has shifted. All the clocks I’ve been ignoring for months are correct once again (or just a couple minutes off instead of an hour and a couple minutes off). The sun rises later, it sets later, and everyone is struggling to adjust our perceived notions of time to fit the new path the sun is charting through the various hours of our days. It is not a pleasant experience. It is even less pleasant of an experience when you are awake for it as I was this weekend. Turns out that having a lot going on does not mix well with the bevy of negative feelings I’ve been struggling with lately and it creates a degree of dissastifaction that makes it difficult to fall asleep. So I did not get a lot of sleep that night (nor did I get much sleep last night as my soul casts about for something to feel about anything other than the constant grinding negativity in all its various little flavors) and now I’m struggling to deal with waking up “earlier” than usual even as I struggle to fall asleep at a currently reasonable hour much less one that used to be earlier than it currently is. My entire sleep schedule and sense of time is already messed up from months of not sleeping well, so throwing an hour shift into the mix is just making it work. I really hope I can get this sorted out sooner rather than later since I’m not sure how much more of this I can take…
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.
Continue readingEmotionally Beaten Black And Blue
I had a busy weekend. A wrestling event in Final Fantasy 14 Friday evening followed pretty immediately by editing the recordings, a few hours of sleep before I had to be awake and aware for roleplaying, catching up completely on Trigun Stargaze, hanging out with my usual Saturday crew, the absolute inability to sleep until around 4am, up again in time for plans that fell apart pretty much immediately since everyone else no-showed, a long couple hours of dealing with my frustrations, the start of a tabletop campaign, and then an evening of lingering frustration capped with, once again, the inability to fall asleep until the wee hours of the morning. Which is why I took a day off. It’s going to absolutely scuttle the roll I was on in terms of my income, but I was so exhausted and bent-out-of-shape by everything that I needed the time to resettle myself. Time that grew from one day to two days to two and a half days. Turns out that mixing a dose of frustration that is slow to leave into the tulmult of my unsettled life only exacerbated the problem. Which, you know, isn’t entirely on the frustration or exhaustion from a busy weekend. I’ve made very little progress on any of the larger problems I’m facing and that has entirely ruined my resilience to the point that things which wouldn’t normally be a big deal become one. I really need to get some of this stuff resolved so I can get any kind of feeling of control back in my life, so I can maybe stop feeling like cracked glass, emotionally speaking, but that remains easier said than done.
Continue readingAn Apt But Unwelcome Metaphor
There is this expression I first encountered in playing Magic The Gathering (which is probably used in a lot of card games, but I don’t really play many card games so I’ve got no idea) that I wish more people were familiar with so I could actually use it as much, and in as wide a variety of situations, as it pops into my mind. Sure, the explicit meaning of “top-decking” is that you’re using whatever you draw from your deck as you draw it, but the actual meaning behind that says a lot more. You see, when you’re playing one of these card games, you are generally using a deck built around a specific function or theme. You’ve assembled cards to enable types of play to help you win and the rest of your deck is usually built to get those cards into your hands or to respond to other types of play so you have the time you need to get a winning combination in place. So, when you’re top-decking, what that usually means is that you’re out of options, you’ve done everything within your power at the moment, and all you can do is respond in the moment with whatever comes into your hand. You have no ability to respond to other players’ actions and all you can do for the future is hope that you eventually draw something you need or that will get you what you need. Which is how living my life feels a lot of the time.
Continue readingInstability Makes For Poor Resting Conditions
Well, I got one decent night of sleep. Went to bed at my usual weekend time, fell asleep right away, and slept for a solid eight before I got up on my own and started my day. One night isn’t a lot, but it’s better than nothing and it hopefully signals the approaching end of this period of insomnia. I didn’t sleep as much the following night, but then I was up late editing videos for the absolutely smashing opening to this year’s Cross Realm Wrestling (the Final Fantasy 14 roleplaying wrestling league I’m recording and editing events for) season. That was a choice, as was waking up after not enough time so I could spend time with my siblings, so I’ve only got myself to blame for that one. Last night’s relatively sleeplessness, though, was back to good ol’ insomnia. I sometimes wonder if I have trouble falling asleep at night because I spend so much of my day struggling to stay awake, but that thought is really depressing so I try not to spend too much time on it. I mean, it’d make sense, you know? I’m constantly struggling to stay awake and putting a lot of effort into not falling asleep during the day, so maybe I’m just training myself to not fall asleep easily. Which fits last night’s sleeplessness really well. Lot of dozing off and then twitching awake, lots of shifting my legs to try to find a comfortable position without any pain for me to focus on. And a lot of desperate thinking of topics I can’t remember as my brain just fires off thought after thought so my brain can’t truly wind down. If that’s not at least a part of my sleep issues, I’d be genuinely quite surprised.
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