It took about two full weeks of my normal work schedule, but my burnout and related exhaustion have come roaring back. It certainly doesn’t help that I’ve been struggling to sleep due to stress about things going on in the world and the mounting anxiety that there’s something I could be doing that I’m not doing (which, by it’s very nature, is an impossible anxiety to resolve given that I’m already doing as much as I reasonably can and don’t know of anything else I could actually do that’s also useful). There’s just no escaping any of the mounting pressure I’m feeling, at work or at large in the world, and it has left me more brittle than even I expected. I had thought that, between my antidepressants and a week off of work, I’d recovered some of my resilience–my ability to endure–but that does not seem to be the case. Maybe if I was sleeping more, that would still be true. Maybe if I could get away from the stress of it all for more than a few moments here or there, it would still be true. I don’t know. Maybe if I actually got out of bed on time, maybe if I could force myself back into a proper workout routine, maybe if I wasn’t feeling sweaty almost constantly due to the one annoying side effect of my antidepressants… So many maybes and I have no certain answers. I don’t even know if I can get any more certainty than I’ve got, even, since it’s not like there’s much left for me to try in terms of my day-to-day life that won’t definitely make things worse for me.
Continue readingMusing
A Refreshing Breeze As The Winds Of Change Start Slowly Blowing
Last week (the days prior to this being written), Jimmy Kimmel’s show was taken off the air. This is noteworthy because it was a transparent attempt by the owners of the ABC network to appease the current US government, and Trump in particular who has long held a grudge against the late-night host. Kimmel made some innocuous comments about the death of Charlie Kirk, nothing that could be, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as making light of the far-right provocateur/gun-rights activist ‘s death. Despite that, adding to the growing unreality of an already difficult-to-believe week, the administration claimed that this was just one more “liberal” celebrating Kirk’s death and threaten to revoke ABC’s broacasting license if the network didn’t do something about Kimmel. ABC buckled as expected since it is clear that no corporation is going to stand up to Trump, and immediately the public began to mobilize. Calls for a boycott sprang up from several different corners of the internet and various celebrities also began to cry fowl. After all, this is a blatantly unconstitutional act and as clear-cut a violation of our First Amendment rights as any other thing that’s happened in the last two years since Biden’s government began cracking down on protests against the genocide in Palestine. What made it different is that this was something that couldn’t be written off. There was no way to describe this as being anti-semetic somehow, no way for people to open up a harmful “we should debate the rights/existence of this minority” discussion, no way for ANY kind of spin since Kimmel’s remarks were public record and the Trump administration has repeatedly proven that they will lash out at anyone who pisses them off for no reason at all.
Continue readingCracking Cooking With A Crock-Pot
One of my recent domestic chores of late has been trying to get myself set up for slower cooker food preparation. I’ve got plenty of good stovetop recipes that could probably be converted into slow cooker recipes, but I’m also trying to expand my game a bit, mix some variety in, by finding some new recipes I can set up in my crock-pot before work so they’re ready by the time I get home. I want to try my hand at different stuff rather than cycling through the same dozen recipes all the time, but I often don’t have the energy to cook every night or to prepare some kind of big, week-of-leftovers type meal on the weekends, so I’m hoping the convenience of a slow cooker will let me do that without delaying my dinner later than it usually is these days. The problem is, I didn’t grow up in a household that used a slow cooker, so I have zero experience cooking with one other than the pot roast I made for my birthday back in 2024, right before the crock of my crock-pot fell off my kitchen counter and shattered on the floor. I get the basics of course, it’s all there in the generic name (slow cooker), but I also know enough to know that very little water is lost during cooking and that the length of cooking means that various seasonings tend to be extra effective. Since my usual method for seasoning things is by smell, I can’t rely on that for any slow cooker meals since you’re not supposed to uncover it while it’s cooking, it’ll ideally be cooking while I’m at work, and the thin scent of food in a slow cooker doesn’t compare to getting a face full of steam from whatever you’re preparing on the stovetop or in the oven.
Continue readingI’m Tired But Not Sad So I’ll Just Ramble About Why That Is
As I slowly move back towards the kind of heavy labor I was doing at the beginning of this year (though at a slower pace, thankfully), it is nice to know that I am not only more physically capable than I was back then, but that a good night’s rest is more effective than it used to be. From just over a year ago until sometime in the spring, it would take me multiple days of rest to recover from a single day’s exertion and now a single night is enough to recover from feeling physically exhausted. Assuming I get enough sleep, anyway. But also, a year ago, I wasn’t able to sleep for more than a few hours, three or four at most, without waking up with excruciating back pain! I was so tired and pained all the time that it was everything I could do just to keep getting through my days. I descended into a place of fog, exhaustion, misery, and constant trudging persistence while I slowly recovered from years with a worn-out bed, the physical toll of the medication I was taking, and the added weight of not sleeping enough for three months in a row. In fact, I only ever started to recover when I stopped taking that medication and my body was able to start properly repairing itself instead of… well, whatever was going on there. I tell you, there’s nothing like going from needing three to seven days for your muscles to recover from feeling tired to being able to get back up and do more with them after sitting down for a little bit, much less feeling almost all the way better by the next morning. I mean, today was a doozy and I’m going to be feeling it tomorrow, but only enough that it’ll make me do my morning stretches for sure and not leave me in a miserable amount of pain like even half this much effort would have done a year ago.
Continue readingVisions Of The Past In The Reflection Of An Arcade Cabinet
After seven years, my coworkers finally fixed the arcade cabinet one of us designed back in 2017. The computer powering it got bricked in 2018 for reasons still unknown but one of our out-of-town coworkers was in town for a week and decided he’d spend his spare time fixing it up. Now it’s working again and my team has slowly begun to gravitate back towards it. It’s currently running a different version of Galaga than we all used to play, but the few interactions with it have quickly resurrected the ol’ competitive spirit of some of my coworkers in a way that I find mildly frustrating but ultimately not worth my emotional effort. I’ve got much better reasons to be frustrated with them these days and it’s not like I’ve got the time for Galaga anymore. Back when we were all playing it, there were four testers on my team. Now there’s only three and we’re doing more work than ever, so taking even half an hour out of my day to do something simple and fun like play a round or two of Galaga isn’t really something I can afford to do most days. I might have a bit more time on Fridays, given that I’m usually less productive then anyway, but I don’t think I can pursue my old records as much as I used to. I’m not even sure I want to, to be honest. Not just because of my difficulties with my coworkers, but because I’m doing a lot of learning things these days and am very aware that I have a limit. I can only learn so much on any given day–and that’s a lot less than I’d like thanks to how draining work often is–and I’ve got more important stuff to remember than enemy appearance and attack patterns in a game older than I am.
Continue readingUnwelcome Invisibility In The Workplace
I seem to be unable to have a normal week after a vacation, still. Antidepressants and taking time to rest haven’t helped at all with that particular problem. At least this time, it’s a problem I can roll with, to a degree. To a degree. See, I had my usual Wednesday of meetings, but I discovered that there was yet more stuff going on that I didn’t know about and got to witness multiple people assign credit for the work I’d been doing the past three months to my senior coworker. Who, thankfully, spoke up to say he didn’t do it, but it shouldn’t have happened from the beginning considering all the people in that meeting knew about the issue at hand because I told them about. I am also on the record just two weeks prior saying that my senior coworker, due to the timing of his vacations, was relatively uninvolved in the related testing (though I left out that he found the first hint of this problem and promptly dropped the entire thing on my lap rather than continue to work on it himself). But no. Everyone was operating under the assumption that my coworker was the person who knew what was up and had been doing the three-digit number of hours of testing involved. All of which came around and made a pretty fine point as a plausible explanation for why people were being so weird about me working from home and not having some kind of publically available accounting of my work. If everyone assumed that most of the work I’ve been doing was done by my senior coworker, it would explain a lot of stuff going back a few years.
Continue readingThe Griefs Of Immortality And Moving On
At the end of last week, I wrote about the anime Frieren and walked right up to discussing why stories about immortals learning to deal with losing the people who were an important part of their life is of particular interest to me. I actually wrote a couple paragraphs about that, but it didn’t really fit in with talking about the anime in general or the specific parts of it that I found the most engaging while watching it, so I cut them out and morphed them into this blog post. After all, that idea, the core of why those kinds of stories are interesting to me, is what prompted me to write about Frieren and I want to explore the space a bit more than I could while discussing the show itself.
Continue readingClearing A Low Bar With My Birthday Celebration
For most of my life, I haven’t enjoyed my birthday. Once the shine of new toys and celebrations wore off during my childhood (following yet another ruined birthday party) I was mostly only interested in my birthday as the vehicle my parents used to give their children toys. Most of the time, unless we got a gift of money from a relative (this only applied to cash since all checks were deposited in our college saving account), got a reward for good grade, or saved up our allowances, our parents wouldn’t buy us anything unnecessary. They’d take us to the library or to the video rental store (and eventually the video game rental store) once a week each, but we rarely got anything permanently ours outside of our birthdays, Christmas, and the one souvenir we were allowed during family trips that happened to go somewhere that had a gift shop. Which meant that by the time I was eight or nine, birthdays had become just a means of getting new toys and books that I could keep (being able to keep something as my own was a big deal as a kid with three siblings and a “we will buy ‘big’ things for the family but not a specific child” family rule). They stayed that for a few years and, after the month of August was basically ruined for me by a few years of consecutive traumas during the month, stopped being special. I mean, I was so detached from my birthday that I got through all but the last half hour of my eighteenth birthday before I remembered that it was, in fact, my birthday since I was so busy at college with my new friends and my family wasn’t the sort to reach out via phone calls or texts at the time.
Continue readingSummer Days I Can Finally Enjoy As It Comes To An End
After months of constant heat and too-warm mornings, we’ve finally had some days with lower temperatures. Heck, it even dropped into the low fifties overnight, just recently. We’re finally back in the range of what I’d expect for mild Summer weather and I’m only slightly worried that it’s happening in late August rather than September when I’d start to expect days like this [of course, this week, it’s already going back to temperatures in the mid-to-high 70s]. It’s nice, though. To be able to enjoy the breeze without tons of wildfire smoke, to be able to exist outside without sweating, to be able to bask in the warm sun while the cool breeze blows past… I’ve been missing weather like this for a long time. We used to see it more, but now we tend to leap past it, either because Winter ran long and Spring catapulted instantly into Summer or because Summer arrived early and ate what little Spring we might have hoped for, so I’m trying to enjoy it while I can. Not by opening my windows, of course. That would be a disaster for my allergies right now… I’m just trying to get back into the habit of my daily walks now that it’s less punishing to even step foot outside. I’m hoping this weather will stick around for a while, and that it’ll lead into a nice, gentle Fall, but I’m not holding my breath. Nothing about the seasons has been “gentle” in years.
Continue readingHow To Not Have An Opinion About Something On The Internet
Just don’t talk about it!
Now that this… I don’t know, fakeout? is over, I’m here to actually talk about Final Fantasy 14 and my suddenly rampant and runaway focus. I wrote out most of a blog post talking about not having an opinion about something and fell into the ancient trap that is talking about not having an opinion is still having an opinion, so I decided to delete all that but wanted to keep the title and the new opening “paragraph” because, really, this is advice that a lot of people out there need (myself included, clearly!). Thankfully, I managed to avoid contradicting my own advice since pretty much the only thing I think about these days is trying to get into some kind of actual loop in Final Fantasy 14 now that I’ve got the energy to do other stuff and have changed how I’m playing the game. My whole “take a relaxed approach and just do whatever” thing doesn’t really work anymore since my once-forgotten default (relaxed puttering) for that kind of approach is slowly morphing back into “just keep doing stuff without end” and keeping me up way too late at night. I need to create and enforce some structure on myself so I can still do fun things but maybe do them without also staying up past two in the morning–which I need to stop doing so I can actually take advantage of how much more potential energy I’ve got these days rather than my recent usual status of having a willing mind and soul but an incapable-due-to-complete-exhaustion body. Structure and a list of goals has helped with similar problems in the past–though they were coming at this from the other direction, of being so tired that I could barely push myself to do anything–so I’m hoping they’ll help again with my video game time so I can maybe return to getting a decent six hours of sleep most nights.
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