It has been almost a month since I ran a TTRPG session. I’ve been so exhausted that I just haven’t had the energy to plan sessions or do even a modicum of prep work, let alone actually spend the significant chunk of time and energy required to hold the session. I keep going into each new week feeling marginally better at most, so putting in the effort to run a game would leave me in even worse condition. Love of the game isn’t enough to make it happen, as much as I’d like to pretend it was, and thankfully my players have all been very understanding. I’m just coming out of my third skipped weekend in a row, still exhausted, and wondering when I’ll eventually have recovered from this burnout. In the past, when things would get this bad for me, I’d do a work from home day or two so I’d be able to sleep in later, rest more during the day, and spend a day working in comfort rather than having to exist in the constantly draining and uncomfortable environment of my office. I’m pretty good at masking so I doubt any of my coworkers know this, but the environment I work in can be very stressful and overstimulating in a way that saps me of all my energy pretty quickly, and the insistence by my boss that I spend less time in my office and more time being visible by working in the lab is only making it worse. I can’t escape the noise outside my office. I have to wear my mask (literal N95 and metaphorical over-emotive-pretense-of-neurotypicality) while I’m out there. I have to constantly watch where my coworkers are so they don’t sneak up on me and clap me on the shoulder heavily enough that I have to restrain my fight-response. It’s not great!
Continue readingMusing
Casual Nightmares Of Modern Capitalism In The US
One of the most frustrating parts of the era of capitalism we currently live in (at least in the US, since I think that the specific combination of problems turning into this particular disastrous megazord of malpractice is unique to the country of my birth) is that there are lots of companies out there that will just lie to you or attempt to defraud you because most people won’t put up a fight. It’s the same pattern of behavior that scammers follow, except it’s insurance agencies or medical suppliers so people tend to trust them more readily which means they have a much higher rate of success than scammers do. It is insurance companies denying your claims after the fact or attempting to prevent coverage altogether. It is the dubious practice of sending summaries of charges that look exactly like bills but aren’t actually bills. It is companies giving you the “post insurance” price for something you’re ordering but then you getting hit for so much more because it turns out that insurance only covers that much once you’ve reached your yearly out-of-pocket maximum. Or, in the case that prompted this furious reflection, a company somehow signing you up for automatic resupply on some medical supplies you ordered without you being involved, shipping an entire order without notifying you, and then sending you bills that don’t actually list anything but the words “medical supplies” on several lines, each with their own inexplicably different price. I’ve cleared up the problem, supposedly, but it was a frustrating experience that ate up an evening and most of a morning to get it resolved and even then I’m not entirely sure that things have actually settled given that any trust I had in this company (which wasn’t much) is completely shot.
Continue readingCold Comfort As The World Slowly Burns
While a large amount of my life feelings like a blazing dumpster fire inside a burning apartment at the center of a city that was recently transported into hell (specifically the firey kind of hell), there are a few things I can take some amount of comfort in. Like being able to afford living my life, even if sometimes that feels less true than it used to. Or having enough food to eat. Friends to play games with. Final Fantasy 14. All kinds of stuff, really. A lot of which is just finding the silver lining in my current moment, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Better to appreciate what I’ve got when I’ve got it rather than find myself wishing for when times were better and cursing myself for not appreciating them when I had the chance. Plus, I can still recognize that all of the products marketed as “AI” are absolute garbage and that all these LLMs are just really powerful and confident autocomplete algorithms with no ability to truly “understand” anything. It’s very comforting to know that, especially as more and more news reports come out about people having breaks with reality as a result of the tripe they’ve been fed by their emotional support “AI.” It’s not great that they’re an increasingly huge part of daily life and that more and more corporations are starting to move from “please use our garbage generator” to “you HAVE to use our garbage generator,” but at least I haven’t fallen for this spiel yet.
Continue readingThe Other Side Of My Burnout
There’s nothing quite like being stuck in what amounts to a burning bag of shit left on the world’s porch. At least, that’s what it feels like to be a resident of the US these days. I’m not proud of it, every reasonable person hates it and is right to do so, the US government seems intent only on malicious destruction that has the potential to spiral out of control, and no one is going to come out of this without also smelling like shit. Our goose isn’t cooked or anything like that. Things aren’t irrevocably broken yet. They are irrevocably changed, though. Whatever survives this period of awfulness is going to have to find a path forward where none has yet been made. Any attempts to “go back to how things used to be” will only cause things to get worse. The only way forward is through significant change. Exactly what that looks like or how that would work… I don’t know. The whole idea of things changing for the better feels so foreign to me at this point that I’m not sure I can actually imagine what that kind of future would look like. All my conceptions of things being better are just images of the past, glimpsed through a heady filter of nostalgia and a genuine lack of awareness of how the world worked before I knew how to see it working. Who’s to say what positive change would look like this days, following the destruction of so much of the good parts of the US–such that they were–and this process can’t even be described as breaking a bone again in order to set it properly. It feels very “conspiracy theorist” to say it, but it’s difficult not to be aware of how the US is finally breaking along lines that have been slowly chiseled deeper and deeper over the last fifty years.
Continue readingWorking Out My Workout Routine
The main thing I’ve been doing to combat how awful I feel lately is to put more and more effort towards my exercise routine. I’ve let it slip almost completely over the course of this year due to the bodily pain and exhaustion I’ve been dealing with and I’ve been struggling to get back into it thanks to how burned out I feel and how much I’m struggling to adjust to waking up an hour earlier every work day. I can barely get myself out of bed in the morning, still, let alone push myself to get out of bed immediately when my alarm goes off at ass o’clock in the morning and then go do my morning workout routine. Especially because I know it’s going to be miserable for the first few weeks of actually doing that. I’m out of shape and the general aches and pains of every day life aren’t going to help. Working out will, fortunately, help with those. It might even help with the neck tension and pain I’ve been dealing with, assuming I can work on my neck and shoulder muscles without straining myself–that would have the opposite effect of what I’m aiming for. I want to feel better, not worse. Which is why I started working out as extensively as I do in the first place.
Continue readingThe Worst My Burnout Has Ever Been Continues To Get Worse
The past few weeks of banging my head against the same problem at work (on top of everything else going on the last few months) has burned me out worse than ever. I really wish I could say this and, with ANY degree of confidence, tack on that this was as bad as it could get, but I keep finding new depths. For instance, I spent the whole weekend resting and don’t feel any better going into work today than I did leaving work at the end of last week. Well, I mean, I feel a little better, but only because I’ve yet to work the full day since I’m writing this in the morning instead of the evening. That hardly counts in the face of how utterly exhausted I feel every moment of every day [how right I was… Evening came around and left me feeling worse than I did before the weekend]. Whatever rest I’d gotten this past spring was largely undone by how things have been going at work, between a lack of project clarity, the loss of trust in my coworkers, and my boss being so weird and evasive about things. There’s no way any amount of feeling well-rested could have survived that particular gauntlet, much less the gauntlet the last three weeks have been as my coworker dumped a problem on my lap and then dipped out of the office for several days, so it is hardly surprising that I’m feeling worse than ever. I just didn’t expect it to go from being a largely mental and emotional problem to a physical one as well. I thought I could just stay quietly miserable in my head and suffer through things until I managed to get a new job or pay off enough of my loans that I didn’t need to work as much anymore. Turns out that I was wrong.
Continue readingA Brewing Storm Hangs On The Horizon
As I stand at my desk, looking at the distant reflection of color that is all I can see of the outside world from the part of my employer’s building I work in, I can’t help but think of last year’s torrential storms and the hour and a half I spent stuck in a bathroom, waiting for the tornado warnings to clear. The storm now distending the sky, wrapping it unevenly in darkness long before the sun is due to set, will not be as fierce as the storm last year that left me without power and anxious about something entirely new after I finally made it home between tornado warnings. Even if the weather reports can no longer be trusted as much as they once could, I’ve spent my life watching for storms of all kinds. I know when one is coming by the way the air feels on my skin, by how the temperature and pressure change, by how the wind blows and the various layers of clouds move relative to each other. I studied a lot of meteorology as a child, with the same fervor as I once studied trains and Richard Scarry’s books, but only because I once got surprised while hiding from my family in the woods by a torrential storm. Sure, the science of it all was interesting, as were the remote and–in my eyes–exciting places such science got done, but I was looking for practical lessons and I learned them well enough that they serve me still. I can’t tell exactly when the storm will happen, but I can tell that it will and how bad it will be.
Continue readingDreaming Through It
For the past few years, I’ve been dealing with an increasing number of dreams. For a lot of my life, I didn’t really dream much aside from a few repeats. I had one when I was younger about being swallowed by a blanket that showed up every time I got sick (our family called this specific blanket “the sick blanket” since, as little kids, we got bundled cosily into it when we weren’t feeling well), a weird warped-perspective dream about being a tiny dot that couldn’t move around my parents house every time I got sick after I was ten or eleven, and some weird tons-of-armies-fighting-a-giant-war dreams that were basically my imaginary play games given life and ridiculous scale by my sleeping mind. I’m sure I had other dreams from time to time, but I really didn’t have many and it was only in high school that I realized that most people dream much more frequently. These days, though I still don’t dream often, I now have about as many dreams a month as I used to have in a year. Generally speaking, they’re a much wider variety these days, having replaced the old “got stuck in high school as an adult somehow” anxiety dreams of my college years and early twenties with a much greater breadth of mental fiction. Unfortunately, this uptick in dreams coincides with me starting to finally process the trauma of my childhood and so most of my dreams since then have a dual attachment to my present and something I’m working through or have mostly worked through from my past. It’s kind of exhausting, to be frank, but I try to stay focused on it being a good sign that my mind is actively healing from the stuff I went through as a child.
Continue readingRepetition Is The Key To My Job Security
One thing I’m known for amongst many of my oldest friends is being willing to repeatedly tackle a problem. I will bang my head against a wall until it caves or I do. I’m not one to feel particularly bad about failing at something, nor do I tend to spend a lot of time caught up in self-recrimination. I’ll take a moment to assess what happened and what I could try differently and then get right back to it. I’ve got my limits, of course. I won’t keep tackling a problem I know I can’t solve and I’ll eventually give up for at least a while to rest if I’m feeling particuarly worn out by my efforts, but my limits for this kind of repetition and effort are much more expansive than most people I run into. This is one of the qualities that has made me a good software tester. Unlike a lot of my peers who will write up what they saw and move on if they can’t reproduce the issue quickly, I will (when the situation calls for it) dig in and keep messing with things until I either figure it out or I feel like I’ve done my due diligence. This is an ever-moving goal, unfortunately, but it’s still something I and my coworkers have come to count on. If there’s ever a tricky little bug with a lot of finicky details and no clear cause, I will usually be sent in to figure it out because I will just keep trying stuff without letting it wear me down. It’s worked so well in the past that everyone on my team knows me for this quality at this point, for better or for worse. They can always count on me to do whatever needs doing in as exacting detail as it needs (if not maybe a little too exacting sometimes).
Continue readingWrapping Up Fruits Basket
At far too late at night (an admittedly subjective time), I finished Fruits Basket with my friend. We started Season 2 a few weeks ago, but got caught up in it as the second season came to a close and wound up watching the last season of it in about a week as we crammed it all in before she and her husband would be entirely unavaiable due to traveling for a wedding. I was desperate to finish watching it, swept up in the story as I was, and she was willing to sacrifice sleep to share one of her favorite stories with me, so we burned the candle at both ends and now I’m at a loss for what to do with myself once again. Less so than with Final Fantasy 14, but, unlike Final Fantasy 14, I still find myself thinking “I can’t wait to watch more Fruits Basket” and then remembering that there’s no more for me to watch and getting utterly devastated as a result. I wouldn’t really compare the two since one is a video game that took me 1100 hours to get to the end of the first major story arc that has completely reshaped the way I spend my free time every single day and the other was a 60-some episode anime that took a few months to watch only because we took a bunch of time away after my friends went to Japan for their honeymoon and I got super caught up in Final Fantasy 14’s story line (which didn’t leave much room for anything else, especially during a period when I was so emotionally exhausted even before dealing with the emotional complexity of Final Fantasy’s story). Feeling at a loss after Final Fantasy 14’s story is a result of not just storytelling but the end of something I’ve been doing for half a year, but the feeling following Fruits Basket is entirely due to the strength of the storytelling, the memorability of the characters, and the uncompromising manner in which the truth of the characters is laid out by the end of the show.
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