I’m taking another couple days off. I wasn’t going to, originally, but then I hurt my ankle on Thursday and kinda missed out on the chance to do all the cleaning and everything I meant to frontload on my weekend, so now I’m taking some extra days off of writing so I’ve got one less thing to worry about for a little bit. Back on Wednesday.
Rest
Burnout And Fridays Off
I’ve been taking Fridays off of work lately. I probably shouldn’t, what with rising costs, but I’ve been so burned out that I needed to. Three weeks in a row, I was so worn out by Friday morning that I couldn’t make myself get out of bed on time or I slept through my alarms or felt so awful that I went back to sleep until I stopped feeling bad. It’s not great, to be quite honest. I really do need the money from my weekly overtime if I’m going to survive the upcoming financial crisis (in whatever form it takes) and while I haven’t spent vacation time to take my days off so far, I really need to find a more sustainable way to get through my weeks without entirely burning out by the end of Thursday. Work is demanding, sure, but I’ve also been taking a lot of burdens on myself that I don’t really need to, so maybe I need to dial it back there, or maybe I need to make sure my free time is spent better, in a way that is more rejuvenating or enriching. I really hope it’s the latter because I don’t want to do less stuff and I feel kind of like I’m on the hook for all of it anyway, considering it’s all commitments I’ve made. I could take breaks if I need to, I’m sure no one would begrudge me a week off, but I worry about the precedent that would set for myself. And that taking the time off wouldn’t actually fix things, only let me recover from them, since that means I’d be right back in the shit again the instant I went back to doing things. Work certainly isn’t going to slow down. It’s going to speed up, if anything…
Continue readingWild Weather As Summer Nears
We’ve had a lot of ups and downs lately, weather-wise. Nothing quite as severe as earlier this Spring (which makes me think we’re due for something nasty soon), but a lot more leaping between the mid-70s and the 30s. So far, I’ve managed to avoid getting incredibly sick as a result of a temperature leap like that, but I’ve had a few close calls and only a bounty of rest and some extra days off have been able to keep a full-blown illness at bay. I’ve had two close calls, where I felt it coming on, but I was able to sleep both of them off. While my apartment was cold as hell, too, since each time arrived on the tail-end of a temperature peak, as it dwindled to its valley, which meant I got that good “mountain of blankets” sleep. In theory, anyway. I’m so tired and worn out that I genuinely can no longer tell when I feel this way because of tiredness versus when I feel this way from being worn down. And while the generally cooler weather we’ve been having is helping with that, I do wish it would settle one way or another so I could commit to a season and no longer have such achey joints every day or two, as the pressure rises and falls in front of whatever severe weather we get. Which has had a larger variety of late than the nigh-constant storms of a few weeks ago. Fire watch, severe gusts, pollution, and so one. Lots of the uncommon stuff on top of a pretty hefty looking storm currently slated to arrive early next week (though we’ll see if it ever shows up, given how rapidly things appear to change anywhere I can find a weather forecast these days).
Continue readingRest Day
Still dealing with a lot so even now I’m going to take another day to skip a blog post so I don’t get buried further than I currently am. It’s a lot to keep up with, between work and personal obligations, and trying to do work over the weekend to catch up kinda defeats the point of resting. So another skip, a small delay, and maybe I can dig myself out of this hole a little bit today.
Rest Day
I’ve been really worn out, to the degree of starting to feel sick, so I’m taking a day off of just about everything, including blog posts, so I can get some more rest. There’ll be a new post on Monday, but this is all I’ve got for today.
Today Is Patch Day And I’m Stuck At Work
It’s not actually Final Fantasty 14’s patch day. Well, you might be reading this on patch day, but I’m writing this ahead of patch day and my frustration with needing to work when I could be playing whatever new, exciting content is available has reached bad through time and left me feeling grumpy and frustrated before I’ve even been denied access by my busy work schedule. So annoying is it that time has violated causality and I am preemptively upset about events not yet come to pass! Which, to be honest, is because it’s quite easy to anticipate how busy I’m going to be next week and how much I’ll want to play the new patch despite being stuck at work for ten hours a day (eleven, if I include my commute), which means I probably won’t make much progress through any of what it has to offer unless I stay up late every night. I am trying very hard to break that habit, and that is more important than playing this game, but I am still frustrated that I can’t really take it easy during the release week for this patch because of all my work obligations and my need for overtime (since I haven’t gotten much at all so far this year). The decision I must make is clear, I’m just… I’m just annoyed about it. I’ve been excited about where the story is going, and all the new features they’re adding for months now and I’ve been too burned out to get myself stable enough to take a light week. So I must work and figure out if I’m going to take off friday for the May Day protest thing going on (still trying to figure out if it’s legit and a part of any of my existing networks).
Continue readingDrawn-Out Breakdown Or Recognition Of My Need For Rest
I am struggling to make it through my “normal” work weeks these days. Fifty hours of work was once the norm I lived under but now I can barely make it through a ten hour day. I know how bad that sounds, but working 50-hour weeks was my devil’s bargain for living alone in this expensive modern era. It was the thing that gave me the hope that I’d be able to pay off my student loans “early” (which feels dumb to say considering it has been thirteen years since I graduated college as of the second weekend of May). It is what has enabled me to live with the rising cost of a not-shitty apartment and my unceasing eleven-hundred-dollars-a-month student loan payments (which have finally begun to snowball thanks to paying off one loan with a particularly large quarterly bonus last year). I have depended on it for five years and counting, and I don’t know how I’m going to keep it up anymore. I’d have to move someplace much cheaper if I stopped. I’d have to trim back what few luxuries I allow myself like decent coffee, fresh chicken (that I then freeze, sure, but it’s still better than the already frozen stuff I used to buy), and enough vegetables that I sometime don’t eat them all before they go bad. And the “expensive” frozen pizzas instead of the cheap, crappy ones. But I am so burned out and tired that I can’t really force myself to keep this pace up most weeks and I’m not sure if failing to work that much is me recognizing I need rest more than I need money, or if this is a drawn-out breakdown due to overwork, stress, and isolation combining into the most gnarly, horrible burnout I’ve ever experienced.
Continue readingCursing What I Once Would Have Called A Blessing
Today, I returned from a very long weekend. Five whole days off in a row, thanks to a combination of a holiday and two days of PTO to give myself as much of a break as I can (barely) afford to. I took it because I was unceremoniously told early in the week that my assistance was not needed and rather than wait around until that inevitably proved to be false (as it always has been), I decided to take some time off and let my coworkers deal with their own problems for once. I was right, of course. They realized they needed me a couple hours later, but my vacation time was already submitted and I wasn’t going to rescind it, so they were shit out of luck. Especially because my PTO meant I wasn’t going to do even a minute of overtime on any day last week and wound up leaving quite early both days. It was really nice. It felt great to leave the building while the sun was still up, while the air was still warm, and while there was still enough of an evening left for me to feel like I could do more than one thing before I was forced to give in to my overwhelming exhuastion. It was nice to sleep in as late as I wanted five days in a row. I didn’t sleep for less than seven hours even once in all of that and got about eight hours three times in that period. It was an unprecedented amount of rest. And was largely spoiled by a bad bout of tonsil stones that kept me feeling like I was choking when I tried to sleep last night and then further spoiled by coming in to work and realizing that a five day weekend wasn’t enough to fix my burnout.
Continue readingTaking A Couple Days Off
I am taking a little break. Got a holiday at work on Friday the 3rd (love a “non-christian” workplace that still somehow manages to only observe christian holidays) and took off an extra day to keep myself from working too hard and burning out. I need the rest slightly more than I need the money, so I’m going all-in and am going to spend my time doing some fun little video editing projects. Maybe I’ll share some of that eventually, but right now I’ve carefully avoided crossing the streams between my writing and meatspace identity and my digital identity in Final Fantasy 14, and the videos would eventually just give it away, I’m sure. Or at least provide enough of a trail that someone could follow it from one place to another. Right now, I appreciate the distance even if I also desperately want to show off the cool work I’ve been doing. I’m not amazing at the video editing thing yet, but I’m getting pretty good at cutting and pasting things into an interesting and cohesive shape, such that some people don’t even realize I’ve done it. Which is most of editing footage. Special effects are their own thing. Which I will spend my days off learning about! It’ll be fun!
Instability Makes For Poor Resting Conditions
Well, I got one decent night of sleep. Went to bed at my usual weekend time, fell asleep right away, and slept for a solid eight before I got up on my own and started my day. One night isn’t a lot, but it’s better than nothing and it hopefully signals the approaching end of this period of insomnia. I didn’t sleep as much the following night, but then I was up late editing videos for the absolutely smashing opening to this year’s Cross Realm Wrestling (the Final Fantasy 14 roleplaying wrestling league I’m recording and editing events for) season. That was a choice, as was waking up after not enough time so I could spend time with my siblings, so I’ve only got myself to blame for that one. Last night’s relatively sleeplessness, though, was back to good ol’ insomnia. I sometimes wonder if I have trouble falling asleep at night because I spend so much of my day struggling to stay awake, but that thought is really depressing so I try not to spend too much time on it. I mean, it’d make sense, you know? I’m constantly struggling to stay awake and putting a lot of effort into not falling asleep during the day, so maybe I’m just training myself to not fall asleep easily. Which fits last night’s sleeplessness really well. Lot of dozing off and then twitching awake, lots of shifting my legs to try to find a comfortable position without any pain for me to focus on. And a lot of desperate thinking of topics I can’t remember as my brain just fires off thought after thought so my brain can’t truly wind down. If that’s not at least a part of my sleep issues, I’d be genuinely quite surprised.
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