Last week (today, as of writing this, I guess, but over a week ago as of this getting posted), I woke up incredibly peacefully. I’d gotten decent sleep and struggled to get out of bed because the temperature was perfect for staying beneath my blankets as I listened to the sound of the rain outside. It was, perhaps, the best morning I’d had in a while, especially because I was able to haul myself out of bed before long and get ready for work without too much of an issue. It was pleasant, that first hour and a half of my morning as I ate breakfast and got ready for work, but it quickly spiraled downhill from there. You see, when I went to go get into my car around half-past-eight, I discovered that my underground parking garage had flooded. Nothing terrible, or disastrous, mind you, but it was at least ankle-deep water that had backed up out of the drain and I don’t have shoes waterproof enough to handle something like that. So, I returned to my apartment and planned to work from home for an hour when I remembered a conversation my boss and I had a couple weeks prior during my yearly review. Apparently, people had been taking notice of how often I worked from home for a couple hours in the morning or how often I was gone part of the morning for doctor appointments–enough that they’d spoken to my boss about it. While my boss understood my reasons and knew I was getting my hours in and my work done, he suggested that I do what I could to cut down on how often it happened at least for a while. I didn’t say much in response because I was processing the fact that my coworkers formed opinions about how often I wasn’t present in the office but chose to speak with our manager about it rather than see if there was any kind of reason for my time away from the office. I didn’t exactly have the bandwidth to bring any of that up yet since I was still reeling from learning this and hadn’t gotten to the point of being able to express why it upset me so much.
Continue readingReflection
Looking For Reassurance As The World Threatens To Crumble Around Us
Despite being a part of the economy of the United States of America, both as a person producing value/wealth for others like a good capitalist cog and as someone whose retirement is largely dependent on it’s health due to the broken way that retirement is set up in the US, I feel a sense of satisfaction every time the stock market loses value. I understand this is the perversity within me making itself known–it is my one source of schadenfreude even though it is far from harmless–to a life mostly spent setting it aside in order to do what I know to be right (for example, I did actually vote in the latest election in Wisconsin despite wanting nothing more than to not vote at all because I was being harassed and hangued at all hours of the day, by phone and mail, about note just voting but how just ANYONE could look up whether or not I voted in any particular election by those messages that always feel more threatening than motivational). I understand that and do not set it aside because, for all the harm it does, it has a greater impact on those so wealthy that their “worth” is tied up in the bullshit confluence of imagined value known as the stock market. It is the only time I get to look at the world and know that while the actual impact on my life is greater than it will ever be on a billionaire’s, at least my changes are measured in four or five digits while a billionaire’s changes are measured in at least double that many digits. Cold comfort, to be sure, given that I’m pretty sure I’m never going to be able to actually retire in the modern sense of the word, but it’s the only comfort I’ve got as my country and economy shake a rattle at a scale beyond my ability to influence.
Continue readingGotta Switch 2 A Different Way Of Economic Planing
Well, we finally got the Switch 2 news that everyone wanted. And a whole lot of news people didn’t want. According to the reactions after the fact, the Switch 2 is far too overpriced, the games are overpriced, and Nintendo has ruined everything! That’s quite a lot of responsibility this one console release has to bear, especially considering that a launch price of $450 is fairly reasonable considering the other consoles on the market. I mean, sure, Nintendo has, historically, been the cheaper option and the underperforming console in general (in regards to the technical specifications, I mean), but I figured it wasn’t going to last forever. Screens are actually really expensive and including one on a console is a pretty pricey part, even if the rest of the console has cheaper parts to make up for it. All of which is to say that I’m not surprised, this is what I expected given the price increase in some of Nintendo’s most recent games, but I was a bit surprised by the lack of anything that made me actually want to acquire one on launch day. I mean, I got the Switch on launch day because of the new Legend of Zelda game that was launching with it and while the Mario Kart game coming out as a launch title for the Switch 2 is interesting enough to make me break my habit of ignoring every new Mario Kart game, I don’t think it’s enough to make me want to go through the hassle of trying to get one on the day of release. A month and a half after that, there’ll be a new 3D Donkey Kong game for the first time in decades and THAT is definitely intriguing, but I’m not sure it’s interesting enough to contend with scalpers, waiting in line for several hours, or endlessly refreshing a webpage in hopes of getting a reservation.
Continue readingEnough For The Endless Present I’m Living In
Despite having about an entire week off–a Tuesday through Monday kind of deal, which unfortunately means I didn’t get to have my desired nine-days-without-work vacation–I’m still not in the shape I wanted to be. I’m still tired, still struggling to feel rested, and while a lot of that can be placed at the feet of the medication I’ve been taking, not all of it can be. I’m still incredibly burned out. A week away from my work responsibilities was helpful, but not enough to recover from over a decade of endlessly pushing myself. Which is why I’m writing this a week after my final day of vacation, in the middle of the afternoon, on the day it was supposed to go up instead of the day I planned to write this. Despite my efforts, I still haven’t been able to rebuild my blog buffer. I just don’t always have the energy for it or the focus required to get through typing out my thoughts without drifting towards social media and the doom spirals that inevitably follow. The world’s in a rough situation these days, not just my particular geographic chunk of it, and it’s difficult to avoid letting my mind wander over towards the various horrors when it wanders I’ve been struggling to find good distractions for when I’m at my desk, working. Maybe I should just double-down on work and stay even more busy than usual, but that doesn’t really work anymore since I’m almost always still struggling with my flagging energy levels.
Continue readingUseless Therapy, Inexact Metaphors, And What A Vacation Can’t Fix
Well, I did it. I woke up on time for my therapy appointment. I was barely coherent and had to spend the first ten minutes of my appointment time drinking an energy drink in order to be cogent enough to get some use out of the session, but then my sessions with this therapist (long story, but this is not my usual therapist) are typically only thirty of our forty-five minute appointments since they’re usually late and we usually wrap up a few minutes early. Which, in this case, means that I wasn’t late and had myself mostly together by the time they showed up. Sessions with this therapist are useful if I can stay focused, but my mind tends to wander once I get talking, so they tend to be really hit or miss. It’s generally fine to wander through topics with a therapist, unless you’re there to talk about something specific. Unfortunately, I’m seeing this therapist for something specific and, because of the way the organization they work for is set up, I see them once every five or six weeks for each of these incredibly short sessions (every other therapist I’ve seen has involved hour-long appointments). I’ve honestly thought about ending these sessions since I’m not sure how beneficial they are these days, but I’m also pretty sure I don’t need LESS therapy in my life. After all, it’s not like things are getting any better in the world. I mean, I spent today’s (the day I’m writing this) entire session talking about the medications I’m on, how I’m handling the stress of living in this day and age, and never quite got around to the stuff I’m seeing them for. I mean, to be fair, I have a LOT of history and given that I see this therapist about nine times a year, I’ve only just sorta mostly gotten through the details of said history, so any tangent I go on to talk about stuff happening in my life today usually requires a few additional tangents in order to provide them with necessary context.
Continue readingI Can Finally Talk About My Work Project (I Just Won’t Do It Here)
Finally, after almost a year and a half of working on this one project, it has been announced and shown to the world. I no longer need to keep the details a secret, I can finally complain about my days with specifics, and I no longer need to keep to myself just how cool and exciting the thing I’ve been working on actually is. As of a week ago (from the day this gets posted, anyway), the product has been shown at the preeminent tradeshow for my particular niche of the tech industry. It was announced the night prior at a special new technology presentation event, but today it is being demonstrated to an entire convention’s worth of poeple, is getting discussed on reddit, has a live website I can finally send people so they can see what I’ve been working on, and so far the response to it seems to be overwhelmingly positive. I’m not at the convention since my employer tries to avoid sending hourly employees on trips (we get paid for travel time and all the time we’d be doing work stuff on the trip, which would be a huge number of hours even compared to my normally extensive workweeks), but I’ve already done a couple hours of tech support for it and, despite the problems my coworkers ran into, the whole thing seems to be running smoothly. Which is, you know, a huge weight off my mind. Throw in that tomorrow is the day my testing documentation is due and I, as of starting to write this, have already sent it off… Well, I’m basically done with the project now. Finally.
Continue readingMaudlin Meanderings On The Imminent Time Change
It’s almost that time of year again, unfortunately. Spring forward, Fall backward. Daylight Saving Time. The good ol’ “confuse your body by altering the time associated with sunrise and sunset” event of now late-Winter. I mean, I’m excited to be able to drive home before it’s fully dark in maybe another week or two, but I’m not looking forward to feeling more tired than usual (if that’s even possible). Nor am I looking forward to how weird driving at sunrise and sunset are going to be for at least a week while everyone else adjusts to the change in the time-to-sunlight ratio in a way that somehow makes them a worse driver. It’s going to be a wild week and I’m going to be going into it with even less sleep than usual, which is a little rough these days considering how absolutely exhausted I am from a combination of burnout and trying a new medication that has me feeling pretty sleepy most days. All that said, I stand to benefit from it a little bit, too. My sleep schedule is usually at its worst during the winter months because I function better during DST than off it since I tend not to sleep through as much of the morning sunlight as I might otherwise. I love a later sunset, after all, and I’m really hoping that I can use this as the impetus to finally fix my sleep schedule. And, you know, for all my clocks to finally be right again (I stopped changing them years ago and now just let them be wrong for three solid months).
Continue readingGetting Tired Of My Favorite Type Of Snack Media
For a pretty significant portion of my life, I was (at the VERY least) receptive to the idea that you sometimes just needed to get back up and try again whenever you failed. I’d grown up on that idea, caught in an inescapable bad living situation through no fault of my own, so it was a sentiment that appealed to me. Even as I got older, my problems changed, and everything stopped being a waiting game until I could finally escape it (like my home growing up), the message still resonated with me. I’m a pretty soft touch, after all. My heart is near the surface and moves easily, so any story about grit and determination and carrying on despite impossible odds could tug on my heart strings. That’s probably why I was pretty receptive to Shonen anime (“shonen” here being a genre of anime classicaly aimed towards young boys, featuring adventure and fighting and easily-digested morality typically dispensed around or within the aforementioned fighting, thereby showing the righteousness of the heroes’ ideals when they emerged victorious from combat against their hated foe) as a whole when I was introduced to it. So much of it features characters that are the living embodiment of “just try again/harder and you’ll eventually succeed!” and I was pretty much always down to watch whatever. Not everything needs to be high art and sometimes fun can be fun and a cheap tug at the heartstrings will play you just as well as a subtle and artful thrum. It never really bothered me, especially considering that I don’t actually watch a lot of anime as a whole, so I never interrogated it.
Continue readingIdle Thoughts About Working From Home
I’ve had a few days where I’ve worked from home lately. One and a half due to weather and one due to a stomach bug that left me mostly fine but unwilling to share bathrooms/run the risk of not being able to find a toilet in time. These are the first days I’ve worked from home in a while and the first ones where I was actually able to work on my highest-priority work while working from home in a year and a half or thereabouts. You see, the project I’ve been working on for that time has necessitated me being in the office. I can’t exactly bring it home with me and, even if I did bring some stuff home, it wouldn’t be terribly useful for all the work I had to do. So, on days that I felt less than stellar, needed some time to myself, needed a mental health break from being around people, or just felt crummy, I still went into the office. That’s the job, you know? Gotta go to where the work is and do the work, at least as long as you’re not sick or contagious or putting yourself (or someone else) in harm’s way by doing so. And I was not, so I went into the office and suffered through a lot of days where I’d have much rather been working from the comfort of my home. Now that I’ve got a bit of a reprieve from that sort of work, though, I’m absolutely working from home every chance I can get.
Continue readingA Lingering Sense Of Danger
I think I might have the most to say about this poem, at least compared to the ones I’ve written, but I don’t really want to tell you what I meant by it. I hope it’s vague enough for you to find your own meaning but also specific enough for you to find mine (but only after you’ve found yours). It’s a tricky thing, creating metaphors, especially when I want it to straddle the line like this one, but I think I did it this time. I’d like it if you told me what you thought about as you read this or what it made you think about after you’d read it or if you thought at all about it ever again. I’d love to hear what others think of this, but I don’t want to voice what I do, at least not beyond what’s in the poem itself, because I don’t want to lock the meaning down to what I was thinking about as I wrote it. Currently, this is the most recent poem in a collection I’m calling “in retrospect” (or at least that’s what I named the folder it is in) that includes all my recent poem posts. I’m sure there will be more poems in the folder eventually, but if I had to pick one to represent them all, it would be this one.
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