After what has turned into three horrible, sweaty days, the heat wave is ending. It has not ended yet, but the wisdom of the remaining pieces of the US national weather prediction aparatus have declared that, by the time I’ve gotten my necessary groceries and made my way home, it will be over. My two sleepless, restless nights will not be joined by a third and the ruddy, glistening sheen of sweat I’ve taken to wearing in the place of my normal mistless pallor will finally take its leave. Even now, as I type this, all my weather apps and services cry out that the worst has passed. “All will be well,” they say, “With a fifty percent chance of severe thunderstorms and a constant overnight temperature not much lower than last night’s.” My office is muggy, made so by the water I’m constantly drinking to feed the stirring air that whicks all perspiration from my skin to compliment the moisture that made making its way through the heavy filters and cooling processes of the building’s HVAC system that leaves this place a dry husk devoid of comfort in the winter and my little thermometer’s delcaration that it is only seventy-six degrees in my litle rectangle does little to comfort me as a result. After all, what does the number mean to me when the only way for me to stop sweating is to sit in my chair and refrain from any kind of movement? What’s the point of knowing the temperature when even the movement of standing up to examine the digital readout is enough to pop tiny beads of just-drunk water on my forehead, upper lip, and forearms? It is hot, it cannot be denied, and I do not need a thermometer to tell me that.
Continue readingMusing
I Got Sick A Week Ago Due To Someone Else’s Failure
Well, I can now say that I have caught and survived E. Coli (and that I’m writing this the day before it goes up since I’m super behind on blog posts for what should be obvious reasons). I got extremely lucky that my entire case was incredibly “mild” and that I only missed four days of work for what amounted to bad food poisoning, so I’m saying this extremely gratefully. To my understanding, based on the results from my urgent care trip and the messages I exchanged with my practitioner afterwards, the only way I could have gotten more lucky than I was would be by not getting it in the first place. Anyway, I got to interact with the modern public health aperatus on a state and federal level, spend time digging through my trash for what I suspected was the culprit, and spend three solid days consuming a single can of soup, a handful of pretzels, and maybe a gallon of gatorade (I didn’t exactly track the specific amount I drank) on top of at least a gallon of water every day. It was quite an experience and not one I’m keen to repeat, so I’ll no longer be taking “pre-washed” vegetables at face value for the foreseeable future. As far as I can tell, I got it from some bagged salad I bought and now I’m never buying another bagged salad again (though this is the strongest suspect in my mind, it is not the only one, unfortunately). Fresh vegetables only, from now on, so I can thoroughly wash them. Which probably means I won’t be doing any more salads like that since I don’t want salad enough to make my own. It was a different question when I could buy a mix to toss with some extras thrown in, but that life is behind me now.
Continue readingLooking For A Silver Lining Amidst The Smoke-Filled Sky
While I’m still pretty bitter about my new work schedule and wakeup time, I’ve begun trying to find a positive spin I put on it for myself. This isn’t working super well since I know I’m lying to myself about it, but at least my attempts to find silver linings are working out a bit better. The primary silver lining I’ve found as of my second consecutive day of this crap is that I’ll now be getting off work at a time where I can more easily participate in group Final Fantasy 14 activities. This is especially relevant almost immediately because today, the day I’m writing this, marks the first instance of a weekly even I helped to schedule. Last week, on a saturday, my FC (Free Company, which is the FF14 version of player guilds) wound up getting a group together to do one of the “exploration zones” for the expansion I’d just finished. Since we planned this activity out ahead of time, I was all ready to go when the event started and had a pretty good time playing around with my friends. It was fun, even if I didn’t really know what was going on since I had to skip the cutscenes in order to not hold everything up for all the players who had already done that stuff, and we wound up getting such a large group together that someone said we should try to make it a weekly event. Since there was already a different weekly event for doing the latest “exploration zone” (which was recently released and is still very new content) and a lot of chat back and forth about when it was going to happen, I decided to just set up a poll and let everyone pick what time worked best for them. Which turned out to be Thursdays, the one day each week that I’d previously reserved as my “get to work whenever and work super late to make up for any short days” day.
Continue readingWaking Up On The Wrong Side Of Dawn
For almost… Probably two decades as of this year, actually, I’ve been getting up at six in the morning for work. Or, you know, whatever counts as work. That’s when I needed to get up in high school in order to get there on time, regardless of how I was getting there. In college, I almost always had a class at eight in the morning and, for a couple years, had an opening shift at the tech support desk in the library. Even on the days my class schedule was different, I still got up at more or less the same time unless it was specifically a day off or that was at the end of the week and didn’t have an 8am class. After I graduated, it was just easier to keep that same schedule going. I kept it going without issue until the pandemic rolled around. 2020 killed my ability to easily get up at the same time every morning and turned me from an easy early-riser who was always in bed and asleep by midnight into the current cluster-fuck of a sleep schedule I’m unfortunately maintaining to this day. For a while there in 2020 and 2021, I was waking up at whatever time every other week since I was only working every-other-week at my job and struggled to maintain a consistent time on the weeks I had work. I eventually got that under control again, around the time I started having insomnia issues and needed to structure my sleep better, and maintained that until last year. Then, last year, thanks to all the pain I was and how it ruined my ability to sleep last fall, I started letting myself sleep in a bit more so I could make sure to always get at least four hours of sleep. While I would let myself move my alarm time as much as I felt I needed, the default time that I always returned to was six. Always. Now, though, after some more developments at work along the same frustrating lines as the last ones, I’m throwing decades of history aside and setting my alarm an hour earlier. I’ve already had one miserable morning up an hour earlier as of writing this and I’ll have another five at minimum by the time you read this, so hopefully I’ll know if it’s working by then.
Continue readingAll This Pain Is Getting On My Last (Pinched) Nerve
After finally getting a chance to see my physical therapist today (had to schedule the appointment a few weeks out), I now have an answer about my shoulder problems. Yes. Two problems because I can never just have A problem. No, I have two. A pinched nerve in my neck and some pressure on some of the nerves between my neck and my shoulder. This has, unfortunately, created a situation where I have almost no comfortable positions to put my arm, since I’m dealing with two different sets of symptoms that thankfully don’t have too many conflicting treatment options. I’ve got my new stretches, know what to not do, and have a couple more interventions to intoduce into my day-to-day that will hopefully give me the relief I need to recover from these problems. Especially since now I know why my shoulder would start hurting more over the weekend and how to prevent it in the future. All I gotta do is deal with what will hopefully be the last day of pain (all of the poking, prodding, and stretching I did during my appointment has left my shoulder and neck in rough shape) and then avoid aggravating it too much for a week. Unless the problem is worse than my physical therapist thinks, that should be all I need to get some relief and my next appointment will be a quick check-in before I’m once again cleared to get back to my daily life (with a few new daily interventions to prevent this problem from coming back again in the future).
Continue readingLiving In A Time Of Luxury (I Bought A TV I Didn’t Strictly Need)
After over a decade of resistance, I finally caved and bought a new TV. I’ve had the same old 57-inch TV (you can tell how old it is since they haven’t made anything in that size in forever) since my second apartment in my current city and, until very recently, I never felt an actual need to upgrade. I was never far enough away from my TV that I wanted it larger (and frequently felt that anything larger was too big for comfort). There was nothing wrong with my old TV, so there was no problems I had to put up with. Hell, it was even one of the last few TVs with both component plugs AND no “smart” features, so I had everything I could want in a TV and nothing more! It was a great model! Unfortunately, after splurging on 4K monitors for my computer, it has been difficult to go back to my old, HD TV and enjoy looking at what feels like a fuzzy picture. I’ve been able to not think about it sometimes, but anything that showed up on my monitors was impossible to enjoy on my TV afterwards, thanks to the noticeable drop in quality. Now, though, I’ve fixed that. I bought myself a 4K TV and a pretty decent one at that, thanks to some good sales. It is, unfortunately, a “smart” TV and it is, unfortunately, a bit too big for the space (as it is a 65 inch TV), but it doesn’t have any “AI” features and it’s a workhorse samsung model, so it should hopefully last me another decade unless some of the pixels start dying on me or whatever happens to “Crystal UHD” TVs.
Continue readingDoing My Best To Cope With The Lastest North Midwestern Weather Trend: Wildfire Smoke!
Wildfire season is back once again and my days of enjoying the fresh spring air are over. As are, thankfully, my days of sweating at night because it’s too warm for me to sleep comfortably on my memory foam mattress but not warm enough to turn on the AC. I mean, hell, with the arrival of the warmer days, the winds have shifted and sometimes even a massive cold front that brings the outside temperature down into the 40s doesn’t have enough wind blowing in the right ways to cool my apartent down (my bedroom was in the low seventies, nearly thirty degrees above the outside ambient temperature, and it was miserable). But those days are over now because it’s finally warm enough to turn the AC on and the sudden arrival of wildfire smoke means I peobably shouldn’t be sleeping with my windows open anyway. Gotta let the air filter through my AC unit first, to clean up some of the smoke. Or so I’d say if my AC unit actually had a proper filter and not a tightly-woven wire-mesh “filter” that clogs instantly and yet never actually cleans the air of anything but the largest particles (of which there is an endless supply thanks to my neighborhood trees and my pet bird). Instead of relying on that for another smokey summer, I’ve bought myself four hundred dollars of air purifiers (they were MASSIVELY on sale, so this would have easily been 600-700 bucks worth of air purifiers any other time) and spread them around my apartment.
Continue readingWishing I Could Sail My Own Ship Of Theseus Into The Future
This morning, as I was getting ready for work, I discovered a pile of sleep shirts that I’d forgotten to put away last night after I finished folding my laundry. Absently, barely dressed and still damp from my morning shower, I split the shirts into stacks that would fit in my dresser and moved to tuck them away when I noticed that the shirts I’d split the stack at both probably needed to be thrown out (because the armpit holes had become visible while the shirts were folded). One was a shirt I’ve known for a while I’d need to throw away but have resisted doing so because I really like the graphic on it and there’s no replacing it. The other one was a shirt I’d gotten some years prior, after doing a canoe-marathon-fundraiser event with my father for an organization that maintained a large stretch of the Des Plaines river in Illinois. As I thought about throwing it away, I realized that I would be disposing of a connection to my parents and replacing it with some other shirt that is too stained or holey for regular wear. That thought spiraled out and I realized that, like the proverbial full refreshing of your body via cellular replacement every seven years and the Ship of Theseus that leant it’s name to the paradox, it would not be long before all the connections I had to my parents would be gone. Perhaps this thought was circling my subconscious already since I made myself a big meal the night before using a recipe I’d inherited from my mother, but I’ve thought about little else since it came to mind this morning.
Continue readingA Self-Sustaining Writing Process Might Also Be A Runaway Writing Process
One of the most common but also most useless creativity tips I’ve even been given, given to someone else, or seen literally anywhere is “you just gotta do it!” I’m incredibly guilty of giving that one out, even if I do try to couch it in terms of building discipline and creating a routine you can rely on. It all boils down to “just do the thing!” in the end. It’s not a very good explanation and building it piecemeal via the whole “make time to write every day, and slowly challenge yourself to write more in that time or expand that time so you can create more” is a bit more helpful, but it ultimately doesn’t really do much beyond make you capable of the mechanics of the work you’re doing. Generally, you need some kind of goal or target to inform why you’re creating in the first place since just wanting to create (or to have created) isn’t always enough to push you through the difficulty of forming good creative habits. You need something that speaks to you or that creates drive within you to help you over that hump. Once you’re in the habit, though, it gets a lot easier. Discipline will carry you as long as you maintain it and maintaining it is so much easier than building it. Unfortuantely, you might wind up in a situation like me where you’re maintaining your discipline just to keep your discipline working rather than because you’re trying to make progress towards a specific goal and you wind up writing just because you are in the habit. The habit fuels itself and its own maintenance, even if the larger purpose it once served is no longer there.
Continue readingBurnout And The Joy(lessness) of Creation
I haven’t actually enjoyed writing these blog posts in a long time. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that in any of my posts reflecting on my current burnout or creative process or whatever. I don’t really enjoy doing these. I don’t dislike writing them and I do still get a sense of satisfaction out of writing them, but I haven’t really felt the joy of writing in a while now. I’ve done it because I’ve felt the need, to help figure out what’s going on in my head, and to provide myself with a sense of satisfaction after a day largely devoid of anything resembling that. But I haven’t felt any of the joy or passion I once I did. I’ll be the first to say that it’s better to rely on discipline than passion or inspiration since discipline will never abandon you like passion and inspiration might, but I think it’s worth considering that enough discipline will also enable you to actively harm yourself if you force yourself to keep performing past the point where your body is telling you to stop. I don’t think I’m there yet, but I can’t deny that my burnout hasn’t gotten any better in months or years and that I just don’t really enjoy any of my creative pursuits anymore these days.
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