After a few sessions without much in the way of stuff to work on, my physical therapist and I decided to change our appointment schedule to every-other-week (starting with a three-week skip due to scheduling issues). Since I stopped taking that medication that was making me physically miserable, I’ve had fewer and fewer problems that I’ve needed to work on with my physical therapist. At this point, as I’m coming up on two months off the medication, I’m still dealing with some lingering stuff, but most of what I’ve got going on is due to the physical demands of my job and the somewhat uneven muscle usage those demands result in. Other than stretches and starting up my exercise routine in earnest again, there’s not much to do for now. Thus the every-other-week appointments. We’ll let some time pass, see if getting back into my exercise routine helps fix my lingering problems, and then hopefully either end our appointments or set me up with a better workout and stretching routine and THEN end our appointments. Either way, I suspect I’m less than half a dozen appointments from being done. Which is great, let me tell you. I still remember just how awful last fall was, even if a lot of those days blur together in my memory, and no matter how tired or sore I feel nowadays, I can take comfort in knowing that it will pass in a couple days if I stretch and get enough sleep. And destress a bit. I’m still struggling with that part, but I always have so I doubt I’m going to fix it any time soon.
Continue readingReflection
Catching Bugs On The Weekend: Then And Now
Last weekend, on a Saturday (the first of February, 2025, for anyone reading this disconnected from when I’m posting it), I woke up after barely five hours of sleep to the calming tones of my alarm and hauled myself out of bed so I could go to work. I had to work for at least a few hours that day, thanks to someone else’s fuckup (or, to hear them tell it, me not being able to properly anticipate that they would take my testing equipment without a word to me), so I hauled my way through my morning routine as I did something I hadn’t done in about fifteen years. It was difficult and I did not enjoy needing to cut myself short on sleep in order to go into the office to do work that I’d have had ample time to do if someone else hadn’t messed up my week so horribly. As I went through the motions, prepared my coffee, and made myself ready to stop at the pharmacy on my way in, I had the strangest feeling that something was missing from my morning. I eventually figured it out as I got into my car to drive away, since the feeling eventually grew into the faintest echoes of a song I would know anywhere from its opening notes alone. It was a bit of music that had once featured prominently in some of my more recent playlists as a calming instrumental piece but that I’d recently moved away from, as I shifted into new playlists that better matched how I’ve felt this past year and am feeling today, which made it easy enough to reclaim. It was the National Park theme from Pokémon: SoulSilver (or just Silver).
Continue readingI’m Not Always Making Progress, But I’m At Least Not Getting Worse Again…
Another week (mostly) down the tubes and another update on how I’m doing. Physically, anyway. And a little mentally and emotionally, of course. That’s part of it these days, given that the reason I’ve stopped making much progress in physical therapy is that I’m exhausted from work and stressed beyond my ability to easily handle. Turns out that having your entire week knocked off course by someone else’s fuckup really sucks. To put it briefly, since I’m writing this late, one of my coworkers took crucial parts of my testing apparatus without telling me, rendering it incapable of being used for the testing I originally built it for. When I found out and confronted him, I was told to just build up my gear again and fix up the testing setup that he’d dismantled and only barely begun to put back together again in a “nice” way (despite me telling him a couple days prior that I was going to need it that week and that “working” was better than “pretty”). Which means that my plans to leave work “early” to play video games with my friends got thrown to the side so I could spent seven hours fixing what he’d messed up so I could run my goddamn twenty-minute test to verify that the latest version of the software, that the developer had put out that day, was good to go so that we’d have time for fixes and more testing if it WASN’T fine. I spent most of Wednesday apoplectic about that and had the rest of the week completely disrupted by this eight hours of work and software updating I wound up needing to do outside of my already busy plans for the week.
Continue readingA Late Night Mission Statement: Why I Write
I’ll be honest. I’m writing this at midnight the night before it’s supposed to get posted. I had a poem planned for today, but I haven’t had the time or energy to do a proper recording of myself reading it, so I don’t want to post it yet. I want to give it, and myself, time to breathe so I’m not cramming out subpar work just so I can have something ready to go. Getting anything done right now (this blog post included) is a struggle because I worked twelve hours today and the only reason I didn’t work a longer day was because I had to go to a doctor appointment this morning. I also worked fourteen hours on Wednesday (which isn’t yesterday anymore, since I started writing this after midnight), so I didn’t even start my day feeling any kind of fresh. I’m worn out and worn down by the stress and effort of the last few days, which is probably why I’ve written and deleted several partial and complete opening paragraphs. None of them felt right. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff on my mind as the world continues to devolve, as horrible things happen to people, and only the rich shitheads seem to be getting anything positive out of this state of affairs, but it’s difficult to put any of that into words that feel worth writing here and now, at my desk as I’m fighting the urge to sleep.
Continue readingReflecting Along The Road To Recovery
Well, since I’m writing this a day later than usual (on the 17th instead of the 16th), I’ve now made it through two increasingly demanding weeks at work. I got through my first exhausted weekend, started this week feeling fresh, and immediately pushed my limits as far as they could go every day I could. I spent four days doing a huge amount of testing, recruited anyone who was willing to help me, and made it through about fifty percent of the testing I needed in about a week. I also completely exhausted myself such that, despite sleeping pretty decently last night (thanks to choosing to work less and sleep more the morning I wrote this), I’m ready to fall asleep at my desk. I even forced myself to take a day off testing, to rest my poor hands, my give my aching body a break, and to focus on denying my ever-present desire to be horizontal rather than any amount of vertical, but I’m still struggling to stay conscious and alert today any time I’m not actively doing something and half of the rest of the time. It’s a nice exhaustion, though. I feel sleepy and ready for rest rather than uncomfortable and in pain like I was for most of last year. I can be still and the lingering pains will cease or I can move and stretch and feel my body loosen up. Truly, it is a remarkable thing to be recovering after so much time of just being miserable.
Continue readingFighting Phantasmal Guilt As I Wait For My Turn In The Climate Disaster Zone
Most of the time, I feel pretty happy living in the Midwest. I may not seem like the sort, especially if you’ve been reading my blog over the last two rather miserable years of my life, but I really try to count my blessings, so to speak, and appreciate what I’ve got when I can. This week (last week, as you’re reading this), I’m feeling more grateful than ever to be living in the Midwest. While we’re not entirely immune to climate change and related disasters, we’re fairly insulated from them. I mean, tornado season is growing longer, strange weather patters are becoming more common, the weather bounces from one extreme to the other as polar winds fight unseasonably warm weather from the south, and all the while local infrastructure struggles to keep up with the varying demands places on it. We’re FAR from immune, especially as droughts worsen and wildfires become more common (I fully expect to see a fire tornado sometime in my life thanks to the confluence of living in tornado and prairie fire territory), but it will (probably) be a few years yet before any of the city-destroying mass disasters show up for my part of southern Wisconsin. So, from the comfort of my workplace and home, I’m watched with mounting horror as LA has burned. I still avoid the news most of the time and I’m not one to go look for videos of horrible stuff on the internet, but looking through Bluesky has proved to be a pretty effective window into recent natural disasters, which has me once again questioning the place that social media has in my life. And, you know, thinking about climate change.
Continue readingMy Year In Haiku: 2024
Time for my now-traditional post with a sampling of the journaling Haiku I wrote over the course of last year! This is my third year in a row doing one of these posts, so I feel confident calling it a tradition now. As usual, each of these haiku is titled with the date it represents in my journal, which means you’ll see a few with the same name. These similarly-titled haiku are not necessarily thematically linked, but they sometimes are. The point of journaling in haiku format is to force myself to really focus on what I’m feeling, how I’m feeling it, and what all comes with those feelings, so I try to avoid writing multiple Haiku as that kind of defeats the purpose of thinking it all through until I can express it in three short lines of text. But the human condition is rarely that concise and while I love giving myself unnecessary restrictions and rules to follow, I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes rules are meant to be broken and sometimes coloring outside the lines can serve to highlight the moment of deviation as an intentional and important choice.
So here’s a bunch of notes from last year. I’ll warn you now, it was not a great year for me. 2023 was the “most” year I’ve had in my life, maybe, but 2024 is the one where I’ve been the most miserable, which feels like it really says something if you know my personal history… I spent most of it dealing with some amount of constant pain, had a period of sleeplessness that mirrored my teenaged insomnia burst (which I often refer to as the grey/cloudy period of my life), and had such a significant reduction in my personal spoons that I could barely make myself reach out to talk with my friends online. Everything was a struggle at the best of times, thanks to the pain and other side effects of the medication I was on, and yet it was also the most physically demanding year I’ve had at work so far. I tried to avoid picking only the miserable, unhappy haiku, but avoiding all of them would have meant not doing a year-in-review post. So, with that important bit of context in mind (and absolutely no additional context since that’s kind of the subtextual point of these haiku: personal emotional expression devoid of full context), here is what last year looked like in my journal.
Continue readingA New Type Of Going Home For The Holidays
As scattered and ever-too-short as it was, it was nice to spend the holidays with family this year. I think, between finally making peace with my decision to separate from most of my biological family, processing all the emotions from that, and doing the work to start creating new habits and routines in my own life, this was the first time the holidays have felt “good” since… I genuinely don’t even know. And they weren’t even all good! I burned the shit out of my hand on Christmas Day! I overextended myself cleaning and cooking for my two siblings’ visit the weekend after Christmas! I even had to deal with the dwindling pain of a medication course that seems to have taken almost fourteen months for me to discover that it wouldn’t have any lasting effect beyond what happened in the first two months. It wasn’t a great holiday, but I’m already looking back on it fondly, which is a significant change from literally every other holiday season I’ve ever experienced where I immediately tried to forget it. I really enjoyed seeing my chosen family–the couple whose wedding I was in back in 2023–and my two remaining biological family members. I got to see friends on New Year’s Eve, meet some people I’d only ever talked to online, attend my first New Year’s Eve party in half a decade (I hadn’t gone to one since 2018 since I was feeling ill and emotionally exhausted after my first holidays away from my biological family in 2019 and then, well, because Covid for the rest of them), and got to have a great hour and a half chat with a friend after I picked her up from the airport. It was a great time, even if I’m incredibly bummed out that the demands of my work life and my careful recovery from the aforementioned medication I’m no longer taking mean that I won’t be spending much time physically around people until sometime in March at the earliest. I’m just glad I got to see so many people I care about.
Continue readingLooking Ahead At 2025
I’ll be honest: my main goal for 2025 is to make sure that all of the people I know and love are still breathing at the end of it. With the way the world is turning, bureaucracy’s inertia or not, I’m mostly concerned that people I know and care about will be targeted for simply living their lives as their most authentic selves. Pretty much everything I have in mind for the rest of this incredibly fresh year is geared toward doing what I can to make that happen. It isn’t much, given the relative imbalance of myself and the systems that might be leveraged against them (and, of course, the inability to shield anyone from the random misfortunes of the world), but I will be doing what I can. Effective activism is often a subtle thing in this day and age, especially compared to the performative stuff that fills social media. I’m not going on diatribes about what I’ll do to anyone who hurts my friends, but I am calling my senators. I’m calling my state and federal government representatives. I’m doing what I can to directly support people in dangerous positions with direct financial contributions, at least when I can afford them. It never feels like enough, it is rarely lauded, and it almost never feels even remotely effective, but at least it beats sitting on the internet, joining the chorus of voices who say they will kill/die for those being targeted but can’t be bothered to try organizing locally.
Continue readingFarewell, Sweet Cohost
Today, the day this blog post is going up, is the last blog post I will be sharing before Cohost goes read-only. I’m sure I’ll have at least a little more to say over there that will be unique to Cohost and written the day-of, but I wanted to carve out a little space on my blog to say a final farewell. After all, as I’ve said in the past (just two weeks ago, actually, though the experience of that time felt much longer than the calendar says it was), Cohost was my new home on the internet and I will sorely miss it. There really aren’t a lot of places on the internet that aren’t focused on the numbers. Even this place has a numerical metric that I can’t help but constantly look at… It was a place to just exist without any kind of ambition or motive. I could go there, read posts, occasionally comment, learn something new, and find something that piqued my interest. I don’t know if I’m ever going to push myself to invest in a website as much as I tried to push myself to invest in Cohost (something that started tapering off over the past year due to work stress and then seeing the writing on the wall with the mid-Spring funding scare that presaged Cohost’s eventual shuttering), but I think I’m done looking for a “home” on the internet. I will probably still look for community, of course, but I think it is time to acknowledge that the current state of the internet is incredibly toxic to most people’s well-being and perhaps mine in particular. Cohost wasn’t perfect, of course, but it was a much nicer place to be than any other website I’ve visited regularly and miles beyond any other social media site. I’ll keep my blog going, of course, since I’m too stubborn to ever given up something valuable that isn’t also harmful to me, but I think I’m going to try to make some spare time and save a little energy for finding a way to make a social home offline.
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