Yesterday’s post was called “On The Other Side Of Sickness” because it was a bit of wishful thinking about the future. I wrote it on a Monday, as I went into work while still unwell, and hoped that, by the time I was editing it, I’d be better. I am not. I’m also a bit behind in blog posts because work has been so busy and I’ve been so cotton-brained and tired that I’m having difficulty focusing. It is truly awful, to feel myself mentally diminished and be unable to do anything about it at all. And yet I must soldier on because there is work to do, money to earn, plates to spin, balls to juggle, and a small legion of crafters and gatherers and combatants to lead into a new Final Fantasy 14 patch (we’re up to six people, as of the night before I wrote the first draft of this). Lots going on and very little rest to be had despite my illness, which definitely hasn’t helped me get over the last bits of this. I’d be tired and unfocused at this point regardless of having a cold, so it’s no wonder that I still feel as loopy as I do. I wish I could say it was all bad choices, but only staying up late last night was a bad choice and it was a bad choice made knowing that I spent the two previous nights unable to fall asleep. Not because of coughing or congestion or anything like that. No, this was because I was too warm or I couldn’t get comfortable or my mind just wouldn’t wind down or I kept jerking awake as I was falling asleep for some reason. I don’t really know what’s got me in such a fuss right now, but I can definitely tell that it’s my anxiety coming at me like it hasn’t in a long time.
Continue readingMusing
On The Otherside Of Sickness
After a year of burnout, physical exhaustion, worsening mental health, and pushing my limits as much as I could, my body gave up on me. I was taken down not by Covid, the flu, or even that time I had E. Coli. It was the common cold that laid me low and while I was able to keep working through most of it, I definitely did not like doing that. Couldn’t even let myself rest while I was so stuffed up I’d go into my bathroom to steam out my sinuses at least twice a day, just to keep things manageable (nothing else was sufficient). Capitalism and modern society demands that, and going into the office today (the day I’m writing this), regardless of whose health it risks, since I am not in such a comfortable position that I can afford to take more days off in-between the holidays (or I could, but then I’d need to work during the holidays). I managed to mitigate the worst of it by putting in a hard day’s work while I was only mildly feverish (or not feverish at all while the acetominophen was working) so I could work from home the subsequent two days, but it was still not great. This is the sickest I’ve been in years. Even that time I got the flu (made more mild by my vaccination) a few years back and spent two days semi-conscious on my couch watching the freely available seasons of Pokemon on Amazon until they somehow turned into the Emperor’s New Groove on repeat was less bad than this. At least that passed [this post is going up on day 14 of me being sick, though now my ears are clogged and my brain’s still a little fuzzy rather than the “standard” cold symptoms I still had when I wrote this]. At least the medicine I had available worked. This cold, though? Nothing really helped for long and my last five days have been an endless cycle of soothing mitigations as I dealt with one symptom at a time until I somehow got a decent couple hours of coherence and decongestion before it all came back.
Continue readingI’ve Had A Lot Of Time To Think Lately
I don’t normally have a bunch of time where I’m not actively engaged in doing something. That’s an active choice I’m making, generally speaking. I’ve spent my whole life managing my anxiety and depression by keeping myself constantly busy with one thing or another so there’s no room in my mind for them to occupy. Music or podcasts while I drive, cook, and do chores. Books or TV while I eat. Video games when I’m free. Endlessly scrolling social media when I need a minute to myself at work. I’m always doing something. It’s not like I’m afraid to spend time thinking. That’s kind of what this blog post is, and my daily journaling haiku habit, but even that isn’t letting my mind be at rest. It’s an active form of thinking, a directed mode of thought. I rarely leave myself the space for my mind to wander wherever it wants since even the usual “wandering” is directed by whatever activity I’m doing. While driving, though, there’s not much else to do. Watching the road, being aware of drivers, and so on takes some of my attention, but when you’re driving a thousand miles in sixteen hours, almost all of it on one long interstate route, you have a lot of time where there’s no cars or trucks near you where you can’t afford to let your eyes wander but your mind is free to stroll about as it pleases. I rarely come out of a long drive with much in the way of clarity so much as ideas to pick at some other time, but this time I woke up the morning after my drive with a thought nestled in my head that had bubbled to the surface as a result of the time I’d spent and coversations I’d had with my friends over the days preceeding the drive.
Continue readingA Week Of Not Rest But Recovery
Last week, to visit friends and family (chosen family) for the US Thanksgiving holiday, I drove just a shade under two thousand miles. It was broken up into two drives of five hundred miles each and one drive of a thousand miles–which came a day earlier than planned. I committed numerous caffeine crimes, ate a lot of junky travel food (and a whole lot of pretzels), gave myself sinus problems due to the elevation changes, and still started my first week back at work before the holidays feeling way more prepared for the long weeks ahead than I’ve felt in a long time. Even that week off for my birthday didn’t have this kind of effect on me and I got WAY more sleep during that week than I did while traveling. Hell, I might have gotten more sleep in half of that week than I did during the entire week of traveling and visiting people that just ended. And yet I feel so much better. Part of that has to do with getting to spend time with two people I don’t get to see and be around nearly enough, and part of it was that, despite the snowy struggles of part of my sixteen-hour drive home last Friday (two Fridays ago as this gets posted), it’s so much more relaxing to do that than to do my job. Which feels like quite a statement. Driving two thousand miles over the course of six days was less taxing than even a quiet week at my job. It stands to reason, though. That took only about thirty-five hours, which is fifteen hours less than a normal work week takes, and I only had to worry about myself and accomplishing my goals rather than a whole bunch of delicate personalities and people who only think you’re working if they see you outside your office (despite all of them having jobs that happen almost exclusively in their office).
Continue readingFinding A New Flavor Of Overstimulation
I wound up taking today off work (the day I wrote this, which is about two weeks before it got posted) because I was just so burned out and exhausted that my body physically refused to operate correctly. Which is a bad state to be in, considering that I have plans to drive about five hundred miles in two days, another five hundred two days after that, and then a thousand in a single day four days after that. I don’t need to be in tip-top physical shape going into all of that, but it would certainly help make the total thirty-two-or-more hours of driving more bearable if I didn’t feel like crap. So I stayed in, played some video games (to wrap up some Final Fantasy 14 stuff before my week away from the game), and had a mostly relaxing day. Unfortunately, it was not entirely relaxing. I found out about an event my favorite wrestling group was doing a literal hour before it was supposed to start and scrambled to reorganize my evening so I could attend the event. It was a lot of fun, but I was not prepared to record and I was not mentally prepared for the shear amount of stuff that was going to be happening. Wrestling events can be a little overwhelming because there’s two chats to watch (the Wrestling chat and the crowd chat), the action to follow, the event’s music to listen to (used to help set the emotional tone for scenes), and usually my recording to monitor (and related camera work). While I wasn’t recording this time, there was a lot more mixing of chats than usual, a lot more attendees, just as much music, and I wound up in a discord voice chat with some people I’ve been getting to know, all of which left my fried and overstimulated after the first two-hour event.
Continue readingAn Embarrassment Of Riches: Figuring Out What To Do With A Second Desktop Computer
Every year, my workplace holds a raffle to give away the computers that the IT department is retiring that are still in good working condition. I’ve participated without fail every year since I joined the company in the hopes of getting one of the actually pretty-decent computers for my personal use or a laptop that will get me through a few years of mobile computer usage (aka, writing) now that my old laptop can’t handle running a word processor on top of the OS. Eigth years in a row, I lost. There’s not a lot of computers and this is a popular program. This year, though, I almost missed it because I’ve been so distracted with other stuff going that I forgot about it completely and only managed to sign up at the last minute because the IT department sent out a message saying that not many people had signed up for the raffle. Since it was simple, thanks to the addition of a digital sign-up form, I filled it out and then promptly forgot about it again. I’ve had enough other stuff going on lately that some little lottery I wasn’t going to win didn’t seem like it was worth the mental space it would take to remember it. Which is why I was so surprised when I got the email congratulating me on winning the drawing. It took a little messaging back and forth for me to be certain this wasn’t some kind of scam or phishing attempt (seriously, both the IT and DevOps teams write their emails and messages like some kind of crappy phishing scam), but I was able to fill out the form and go pick up my brand new, 9-year-old-but-refurbished PC.
Continue readingFamiliar Disappointments Still Sting
Today (the day I wrote this), was the day that tickets for Final Fantasy 14’s Fan Fest went on general sale. I’d signed up for the pre-sale lottery (to get a chance to buy tickets early) but struck out there and then struck out again when I queued for tickets and got assigned the 8000th (and change) spot. I was not able to get tickets. Which, on one hand, is going to save me a bunch of money. On the other hand, I didn’t realize how excited I was about the idea of going to the convention until I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to do it. It was a pretty heavy blow. Much, much heavier than I expected, to the degree that losing out on this opportunity has cast a bit of a pall over my day. After all, I don’t really have a lot of stuff to look forward to, most of the time, so any time one of those things gets taken away, it hits harder than it ought to, and there’s been a lot of it lately. A lot of stuff has not been working out. lately. Siblings cancelling plans, friends getting sick and needing to cancel, missed opportunities, and so on. All I’ve really had that’s dependable is my gaming, work, and the inevitability of bills. It feels silly for this to be hitting me as hard as it has been, to rather completely sidetrack me for multiple hours today, but I have spent a large portion of the last couple years not planning stuff because of how often people flake on me or cancel last minute and I’m probably just a little overly sensitive to this kind of disappointment. I just wanted it to work out, despite all the evidence it wouldn’t, and now I have move on from this. Eventually.
Continue readingHoliday Travel Preparations: Changed Oil And Managed Expectations
I am preparing for a bit of a long car trip. I’ll be driving about two thousand miles, all told, over the course of a week, so I’ve been trying to get some things in order to make this trip happen in a way that isn’t going to destroy me. Primarily, I’ve taken my car in to get serviced. Thankfully, despite passing 111,111 miles just the other day and being almost twelve years old, there’s nothing really wrong with it. An oil change, a new oil filter, and an appointment to change out the weatherproffing seal around the driver’s door for after the holiday. Pretty small stuff, all told, and little enough that the anxiety I’ve been ignoring about needing to replace my car any time soon (which I absolutely cannot afford to do) has faded thanks to its clean bill of health following a full inspection. It is, of course, entirely possible that some significant issue is just one pothole away from bursting this sense of security, but I’ve been going to this mechanic for nearly a decade and they came well reviewed when I first started bringing my car to them. I trust their work and their thoroughness when I asked them to make sure I wouldn’t run into any problems during my holiday travels. I might still need to check the air in the tires since I prefer to put them at a higher pressure than I think they put them at (I like the top of the range of the acceptable tire pressure and they usually only fill them to the bottom), but I did forget to ask about that this time so I wouldn’t hold that against them.
Continue readingThe Story Of Senate Democrats: Turns Out It Was All For Nothing
I am writing this monday morning, between tasks at work as I try to pace myself through a day full of frustration. Last night, a bunch of Democrats capitulated to the latest Republican bullshit as eight of them (none of whom are up for relection next year, “coincidentally”) voted to pass the current Continuing Resolution (which is like a budget except it just kicks the can down the road for a couple months). Forty or so days of a government shutdown causing untold hardship for so many people and they gave up without getting anything other than a promise that there will be a vote on healthcare stuff. All of which ignores just how many people are going to lose healthcare as a result of this CR and makes the suffering of federal employees and low-income households getting food assistance a complete and total waste. There was no reason to shut down the government. The Dems got nothing but an empty promise for a future conversation that will likely have as much benefit as anything the Dems have “done” up to this point. It’s just so galling to see, especially on the tail of such a big blue wave not even a full week before they threw in the towel! The people said they want fighters, officials who stand for something, and the current crop of senators replied by instantly giving up. It was all such a waste. A pointless waste.
Continue readingI’ve Even Stopped Wishing I Could Put An Optimistic Spin On These Posts
It has been a rough… Well, couple of months in particular. Years. Decade. Etc. But the last couple months in particular have been very draining and extra exhausting. Having all of this stuff with my family hanging over me isn’t helpful at the best of times and these are not the best of times. The world looks increasingly awful as fascism continues to rise. Sure, we had a really good set of election results this past week, but we’ve got a long ways to go before anything starts to really change and the actions of various senatorial elected officials have made it pretty clear that this doesn’t change anything in their eyes despite how clear of a call to resist this should have been [I wrote this before they gave up, too, but more on that next week]. I don’t know how it could be any more clear than it is that the people of the US want our elected officials to resist every single one of Trumps moves, heinous or mundane. Throw is increasing work loads, a messed up sleep schedule, and it’s no wonder that I can’t seem to shake the dogged exhaustion I’m feeling. What the hell am I supposed to do about any of that? It’s all I can do to even think about sending a letter back to my aunt, the one who responded in what I’d call a positive manner, let alone write it and manage all of the other stressors that are taking up space in my mind with no relief on the horizon. All I want to do is lay down and surrender to unconsciousness until something has happened to resolve at least one of these things because I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to actually do anything about any of them.
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