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 readingReflection
A 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.
Continue readingDwindling Daydreams Of Just Less Work Are All I’ve Got Left At My Day Job
Sometimes, as I’m standing at my desk and sweating while I try to focus on my dumb little tasks on days that I’m feeling particularly frustrated with my job, I let my mind wander through potential futures or alternate timelines. Twelve years ago, when I graduated college, I had very different plans for my life. I’d spent the four years of my college education finding out what I was interested in, what I was good at, and what I cared about, and planned to eventually return to scholastic pursuits so I could earn myself an advanced degree in some kind of writing thing and eventually further that with some kind of further degree focused on medievalism or the development of language or something. I was going to work for a few years, pay off my student loans by the time I was thirty, go back for more education, and spend my life burying myself in my beloved writing and research and education (of myself and then of others). That, of course, didn’t happen, but my dream of living a life of telling stories lasted until pretty recently and now I find myself adrift with no future I’m really working toward beyond being debt-free, no attachments to my present (geographic or occupational) and so I wonder what kind of life I might be living if I hadn’t been shackled by debt or might yet live should I find a way to remove my need to spend most of my time and energy on being a cog in a machine that does not value me.
Continue readingDoing Little Tasks At My Job (Bad) So I Can Go Home And Do Little Tasks In Final Fantasy (Good)
It has been nearly a month since I last wrote about Final Fantasy 14. I started the subsequent expansion not long after my last post (and might have dipped my toes into it just before that post went up), but progress has been pretty slow. It’s not a lack of interest mind you, but perhaps because of an abundance of it. I’ve been consistently putting off certain bits of progress in the main story until my friends could play through them with me, which has sometimes meant needing to wait a day or two to get through the next plot-blocking dungeon or trial. I also took a bunch of time away to level up a class so I could do all of the combat job quest lines simultaneously, and getting something from twenty-ish to seventy is a significant undertaking. I’ve also had a lot of little money-making tasks to pursue, some crafting to do, attempts to update my character’s various glamours, more wrestling events, and so on. I’ve played PLENTY, I just didn’t get back to the Main Scenario Quests until last week on account of all the other stuff I’ve been doing. Even now that I’ve been back at it, the going has been a bit slow as I’ve had to level up additional jobs every night so I can do their quest lines, which means I’ve been poking at the MSQ in small increments here or there every night once that is all done. I also did some raids, took most of a day off Final Fantasy, and gotten back into working all my usual overtime at my job, so I’ve just not been able to bring my focus to bear in the way I’d like to.
Continue readingA Perfect Morning Ruined By Casual Reality
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 readingLooking 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.
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