Rushing to get everything into place so I can make money again in Final Fantasy 14 is exhausting. I have so much crap stockpiled that is valuable! That I will work through and make a bunch of gil on! But it is difficult to make the time for that amongst everything else, especially when I was pretty worn out on crafting random junk to sell even before all this drama happened, so it is gathering dust and everyone is clamoring for ways to make money while I’m still trying to get my systems in place so I’m not just buying junk I’ll never use and trying to keep up with my depleting funds by selling the high-value stuff. If I’m not going to benefit from this in any way, I should not constantly deplete myself for the sake of others. Both in terms of energy and my characters’ material wealth. After all, I’m already spending a lot of my character’s potential for income on providing things for the Free Company to make money on, free of charge. The whole thing pretty much only works because I’m not charging for the stuff I am providing. Which is fine. I just need to set limits somewhere or else I’m going to burn out again.
Continue readingStress
Pacing Myself Through The Endless Busyness
I cannot remember the last time I was this busy. I mean, a lot of this is stuff I’ve chosen to do and could technically choose to not do, but I’ve made commitments to myself and other people already and I always follow through on my commitments when possible. Work’s been constantly lately. All the chances for breaks and letting my mind rest are done except for the time it takes for software updates to do their job. That’s the only time during my work day when I can let my mind wander and it’s generally not enough time to do much of anything other than have a stray thought or check my discord notifications. After work, I’ve got errands or chores (especially now that I hit the point where I can’t keep putting things off), some kind of plans usually, and then the endless work of trying to get things up and running in my new Final Fantasy 14 FC so that I can eventually take a break, which it’s own set of almost endless tasks that just need a little time and attention when I can spare them now that all the urgent stuff is done. Plus, of course, my crafting workshops, my desire to play other video games, two episodes of The Sopranos to watch, various podcasts, and whatever other entertainment options I’m forgetting since my time away from work is currently focused on whatever plans I’ve made, recording wrestling shows every week, doing stuff for the FC, and then doing stuff so I don’t wind up hating Final Fantasy 14 because all I do in it is work (which currently means jostling my priority order a bit every day so I can do some of the “fun” work rather than just whatever is most important and/or urgent).
Continue readingReminders Of Past Decisions In The Workplace
Once again, the calendar has rolled around to the midway point in the year and I have gotten information about how my next year of financial life is going to shift. That’s right, it’s raise time. I got a decent raise this year. Objectively not stellar, considering my experience and the work I do and so on, but my employer is not known for paying well and I got pretty much the maximum possible raise I could get without getting promoted as well, which is rather uncommon for someone in the upper half of the pay bracket for my current position. My boss seemed pretty surprised by the numbers, but he might have been goofing around. I literally have no idea if any of the things he said were jokes or genuine. I actively interpreted them as jokes in the moment, because my boss is the kind of guy who will let anything slide as long as he’s got you laughing, but I genuinely can’t tell if they were if maybe he’s a lot less involved in how people get raises than I’ve been lead to believe these past nine years.
Continue readingWork Continues Despite The Horrors
Work’s been hectic lately. While all of the bad stuff in my Final Fantasy 14 guild was happening, my day job was keeping me incredibly busy with bullshit. I got notified within fourty-eight hours of being given new test equipment that it needed to have a essentially eighty hours worth of testing done by the following wednesday. That wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if I hadn’t been getting ready to leave for the day on Friday afternoon. But I stayed, I did some testing, and I put all of my considerable experience and knowledge into figuring out how to cut down on the time between tests. I was able to get it from an hour to half an hour, but even that wasn’t perfect. There was still a hard cap on how much of that I could do in any given day and that was only because it was permissable for the stress of that testing to slightly change the behavior of the thing being tested since I’d be able to start the following morning by checking if the change in behavior was due to wear or due to the heat of the testing equipment.
Continue readingTaking A Break From Almost Everything
I hit a point last night where I just…. couldn’t anymore. Between my two workshops, my raid group farming for wings, the roleplaying wrestling league, and my two dearest friends have their characters get married in-game, I just… don’t have any more. So I spent two hours staring at my computer as I tried to figure out something fun to do last night after logging out, gave up and asked for recommendations, and didn’t get much from that, so I just hung up and… stared into space for a while. I’m so burned out, but even that doesn’t explain the depths I sank to last night (as I’m writing this, but at least a week ago as you’re reading it). Something just caused my depression to spike immensely, to the point of withdrawing from people, and I couldn’t push through it to do anything because even the stuff I normally do to stay occupied during those times felt just as pointless and boring as everything else I considered. So I moved to my couch and started into space for half an hour, intermittently crying as I tried to figure out why I felt so bad and why stuff that I generally liked doing suddenly felt so odious and awful. Because that was the thing. Minutes before this happened, one of my other friends asked how my day was and I told her “good,” but then I’m suddenly crashing and feeling like even doing the small tasks of normal preoccupation in Final Fantasy 14 were going to rip my soul out of my body if I forced myself to do them.
Continue readingTrying To Recapture The Joy In Old Hobbies
Once upon a time, just about four years and change ago, I enjoyed little more than spending some time muttering to myself while listening to a podcast or two and putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It was very fulfilling, incredibly engaging, and a different kind of mentally taxing than literally everything else I was doing at the time. It was mostly refreshing to be quite honest, and while I would definitely make my back, elbows, and shoulders ache with how much I’d hunch over my table to participate in this diversion, it was still a net positive that fell by the wayside when I moved into my current apartment. I still have the table I used, complete with padding I’d place on top of the puzzle so I could keep using the table without needing to carefully move the partially-finished puzzle around, but I just don’t spend much time on that floor of my apartment when it comes to my own entertainment. I should spend more time down there. I should stop committing myself to my upstairs area with my video games and office and start finding ways to be more comfortable in the downstairs area. Clean off the mail couch and vaccuum the chair next to my bird’s cage more often, perhaps. Move some books from my to-be-read pile to somewhere downstairs so I’ve got stuff to read and no longer need to feel like I’m making a choice I must commit to every evening. Dig out those puzzles. Maybe even just build a lego set. Anything to get me out of that office and away from my computer. I really need to stop spending so much time in there.
Continue readingMy Severe Depression Rears Its Head Once Again
I’ve been more depressed than usual for a while now. I don’t know if my antidepressants stopped working or if, maybe, I would be worse off without them. It fades sometimes, for hours or an afternoon or an evening, which makes me think they’re still working, but it always comes back. Maybe my meds are less effective than they used to be. Maybe I’m more depressed than I used to be. The latter stands to reason, given the way the world is going, but the former is an unanswerable question so it is where my mind dwells. I do not know how I’d even begin to figure that out. I doubt that there’s a blood test of some kind my doctor could perform that would tell me and while I expect there is some way of figuring it out via brain chemicals, the actual process of testing my brain chemicals seems like it’s not the sort of thing you do to figure out if your antidepressant’s effect is weakening. And it’s not like I can ask my therapist if I seem more depressed than usual. Of course I seem more depressed than usual! Have you looked outside? Have you follow any amount of news? Why WOULDN’T I feel depressed with all that going on? I can’t even say it’s probably both because either one could have this effect on me by itself! So all I can do is wonder while I interrogate my feelings and continue getting the same “I’m too tired to feel anything” response no matter what.
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 readingChased Into A New Day By Last Week’s Problems
This past weekend (as I’m writing this, anyway) was just long enough for my exhausted mind to forget everything that was going on at work. Unfortunately for me, what was going on was investigating a bevy of bugs I’d found and all of them were waiting for me when I got in on my Monday morning. As was one of the German software developers I work with (the one I get along with better, thankfully). I then proceeded to spend seven hours on the phone with him, some of them testing and some of them just shooting the shit while we waited for the very slow test (that was supposed to be much faster) showed whether or not we’d managed to eliminate the bug by changing on of over a dozen variables. It was time-consuming and exhausting work, and honestly some of the most exacting testing I’ve done in a while since the project I’ve been working on for a while now is more of a “does it feel alright? Cool, next thing” type project than a “change dozens of tiny variables one at a time and review the results of a repeated action with each set of variables, all of which must be recorded for historical purposes and further investigation by my developer coworkers. It has left me drained even after getting a couple decent nights of sleep, moreso even than I felt the week prior when I was dead on my feet from not sleeping enough at all. Mostly because the busy afternoon wrapped up with me returning to my desk to find that a recently departed (for the day, not from this mortal coil) coworker had set up a meeting for us to learn about how other departments us AI testing tools.
Continue readingEternal Internal Conflict Over How To Feel About… Everything, I Guess
A lot of my favorite stories and bits of wisdom shared therein tend to revolve around the idea that we, ultimately, are the ones who choose our mood and outlook. From the “I choose joy” speech by Merle Highchurch in The Adventure Zone’s first season to “life does not have to be a perpetual conflict” from the excellent webcomic Little Tiny Things, and all throughout the lexicon of stories from varies points of my life, the idea that we are the one who gets to set the tone and timbre of our response and attitude towards the world is one that appeals deeply to me. It’s one I believe in, with a degree of faith that I’ve rarely managed to muster for anything else except my days of devout Catholicism (when I didn’t know there was anything else out there). A comparison I make because I’m not sure it’s true and it’s definitely not a pearl of wisdom I am living by. As you’ve probably seen by the weekly posts on my blog, I tend to react strongly to the world around me. My emotional state is often dictated by the situations I’m in and the events that occur around me. I have little emotional… inertia, let’s say. I will cry at the drop of a hat if you tell me the hat dropped because it couldn’t stay on a head no matter how much it wanted to. I will get incandescently angry if I see someone mistreated. Whatever mood a room takes will bleed into me no matter how else I’m feeling. I rarely feel like I am in control of my emotions these days, despite how skilled I was at emotional control earlier in my life.
Continue reading