I took a day off this week. I spent all day Sunday convincing myself to spend one single day’s worth of PTO so that I could have an extra day added to my weekend. It was actually incredibly difficult and I only fully committed to my choice when it was one in the morning and I still wasn’t asleep. I just couldn’t imagine trying to do a day of work, much less one of my ten or eleven hour days of work, on so little sleep, so I submitted a PTO request, notified my boss, and changed my alarm time so that I’d wake up with just enough time to work out before my late-morning therapy appointment. I also had another appointment, to get some blood work done as part of monitoring a medication I’m taking, so it made sense to just take the day off, get some rest, and then, as a result of taking the PTO, force myself to work a week of normal, eight-hour days. Part of forcing myself to stick to those normal work days is the fact that I wouldn’t get paid for any overtime I worked until I passed the forty hour mark with non-PTO hours and doing so would also pretty much make taking a PTO day pointless since working those extra hours would negate whatever rest I got. So I’ve done my best to work eight hours days since then and mostly failed because this week wound up being so much busier than I expected, but at least I can just leave early on Friday come hell or high water.
Continue readingStress
Late-Winter Depression Posting
Thanks to a bit of foresight at the outset of my current surge of depression, I switched up my therapy schedule so that I’m seeing my therapist every week for the time being. I had no way of knowing during that first week that it would last this long, but I already knew that this surge felt different than most and managed to push myself through the lethargic, unfeeling haze to ask for something I felt I needed. Which, you know, is impressive on its own, considering how difficult I find it to ask people for something I want or to assert my right to take up space when I’m at my best, let alone when I’m doing this poorly (even if, in this case, I’m not really asking for a favor from my therapist so much as offering to exchange money for a service more frequently that I usually do). Still, I was able to anticipate a need before it came up and take the steps required to get that need met, all despite the overburdening press of this current bout of depression. While these sessions haven’t exactly helped me get through this extended wave of depression (there’s a reason I used to compare my experience of depression to being caught in a storm at sea with only a raft and that’s because it rose and fell in waves without me ever being able to get away from it), they have helped me figure out what combinations of influences, events, and various life factors probably contributed to it. Unfortunately, knowing why I’m currently incredibly depressed isn’t super helpful when there’s nothing I can do about it.
Continue readingUsing Kirby Music As An Antidepressant
My latest musical obsession (when I’m not subjecting myself to the 10-hour version of the “He-Man Hey Yeah Yeah” song), is a pair of videos by a music compilation channel on YouTube. The first one, appropriately titled “30 minutes of kirby music to make you feel better” is a collection of bright and cheerful tracks from a variety of Kirby games, classic and current (though it leaves out some of the latest games to avoid the litigious arm of Nintendo), that absolutely lives up to its name. The second one is the sequel to that first, wonderful video, titled “45 minutes of kirby music to make you feel even better” which also absolutely lives up to its name. There’s a lot of familiar tracks in this second one, showcasing songs by the same name that had been updated or changed for newer games, along with a collection of new ones as well. The channel can get away with these videos because it is not monetized and exists solely to create these compilations of video game music according to a central theme. There are a lot of channels out there like this one, but this one takes it all a little step further. Rather than just posting a static image, there’s a little animation of Kirby wearing headphones and bopping along to the music on the first one and, on the second one, fifteen minutes of bright and happy comments from the first video showcasing just how warmly this collection of music was received. The bright and cheerful music the compiler chose for these videos is enhanced by the cheerful and friendly nature of the comments they selected for this video and, for the most part (more so than any other video I’ve ever seen on YouTube), further enhanced by the bright and cheerful comments below the video.
Continue readingMid-Winter Depression Posting
Content Warning: I’m pretty depressed right now. I’m not, like, despairing or anything, but I’m pretty miserable and this post is about that. Best avoid it if you’re not up for reading about someone else’s experiences with depression.
Continue readingGrit In The Gears Of This Capitalist Hell-Machine
Due to a few scheduling issues (thanks to holidays, vacation time, and so on), I actually had a normal work week where I only did approximately eight hour work days. None of them were actually eight hours in total, since I wound up needing to stay late for a couple of those days, but that meant I got to leave early on the last day of the week, so I got to experience what it was like to be home by about five or six, have dinner eaten and cleaned up before seven, and then to have an entire evening to myself after work for the first time in longer than I can remember. Even before my shift to working fifty-hour weeks when I moved over the summer (to account for my change in rent), I was working forty-five to fourty-seven and a half hours every week. I occasionally did a forty-hour week in 2022, but the last time I did them reliably was at some point in 2021 when we were still dealing with pandemic strain on my employer’s finances and I couldn’t work extra hours. I don’t remember when that limitation got removed, but it has probably been around two and a half years, give or take a couple months.
Continue readingHiding From All The “Year In Review” Messages I’m Being Sent
It seems like everything has a “your year in review!” thing these days. Sure, I get it as far as Spotify is concerned, since they’re all about music and basically stealing from musicians, and having all of that data is a great way to generate some buzz and attention to your platform, even though they share the data before the year is over and don’t include your entire year’s worth of listening. Nintendo started doing the same thing, but with video games, showing the number of games you played and how much you played them. My podcatcher app (Podcast Addict) doesn’t have one, but it does compile your stats in a menu somewhere so you can look any time you want rather than needing to wait for the end of the year. Amazon has one, if you use any of its media services. Barnes and Noble even sent me some kind of email about it that I instantly deleted. I don’t want to know how much money I spent on books this year since I know precisely how many books I actually read and the disparity would probably make me sad, especially after I was finally able to get myself back into a place where the quiet I needed for reading was within my grasp again. Honestly, the only services that don’t seem to do this kind of year-end review are social media companies, which I really appreciate since I would hate to see just how much I posted and how little interaction I got.
Continue readingThis Might Be The Burnout Talking, But I’m Incredibly Frustrated With Stuff At Work
Today (specifically the day I’m writing this, not the day you’re reading this), I’m whiling away my afternoon as I mostly just keep plates spinning at work. We’re rapidly approaching the holiday season and not a lot is getting done since the office will be closed a week from now. It’ll only be closed for the holidays for a few work days, but that’s already more than we usually get, so everyone’s really feeling a proglonged version of the “friday afternoon” complaceny that tends to hit the office. No one expects much to happen and those of us who are still trying to get things done are pretty much out of luck. So, instead of getting anything done that I had planned to do today (since some of the stuff I needed to do any of that work is officially eight days past due), I’m just trying to keep people from forgetting stuff that I need them to do. It’s boring work, comprised of a lot of writing down lists and looking through my emails and chat messages for the latest updates, but it’s pretty much all I can do right now that is still going to help me complete all my high-priority work before the holidays. Hopefully, anyway. I’m only in the office for four days next week and then I’ll be gone from the office for twelve (total days, not work days, unfortunately), so my window to get anything done before 2024 rolls around is rapidly shrinking [and has officially closed, thanks to holiday delays stretching from US Thanksgiving to the beginning of 2024, so none of that stuff will actually get done this year].
Continue readingI’ll Be Home For The Holidays
The holidays are here. Some are already happening and some are swiftly approaching and yet I have no idea what I’m going to do this year. Since I went no-contact with my entire family except my younger siblings, I’ve celebrated with two of them, observed it via discord calls during the start of the pandemic, joined my local friends’ family at their house, and then spent it with those same friends who had to cancel their travel plans due to the nasty weather. I thought I might travel to visit some friends (the ones on the east coast that I’ve drived to visit twice this year) but the thought of going anywhere far away fills me with preemptive exhaustion so severe I had to take a fifteen minute break from what I was doing when I idly considered doing another pair of one thousand mile drives. Sure, I’ve got my longest break from work in years thanks to some extra holidays my employer gave all the US employees and a few days of PTO I have to spend before January nineth (a whole twelve consecutive days), but I REALLY need to take some time to myself. I’m incredibly burned out and I could really use some actual rest. Sure, I’d love to see my friends and I’m sure I’d have a great time visiting them, but it would probably not be terribly restful, regardless of whether I drove or flew. Not to mention it’s a bit late in the year to be making plans like that.
Continue readingThe End Of National Novel Writing Month 2023
Well, National Novel Writing Month is basically over at this point. Sure, there’s still a bit over a day and a half left before it ends and I’m certain there are plenty of people working their butts off to wrap their goal up in whatever time they’ve got left (I used to be a regular member of this club), but I’m pretty much done. I’ve got all the time I need to finish and, depending on when you’re reading this, I might have already finished. I was just over three thousand words away from being doing when I started writing this blog post and that’s an achievable amount of writing for a day where I’ve suddenly got more time than I expected because, say, a Dungeons and Dragons game I was planning to play in got canceled just two hours before it was supposed to happen. So now I’ve got all kinds of time and while I might use some of it to run an errand, make myself a nice dinner, or finish a normal day’s writing early so I can enjoy some time to myself, I might also just push through the end of this month’s goal so I can stop writing it down as something to do on my to-do list.
Continue readingWe’re Halfway Through National Novel Writing Month
Well, now I’m two weeks into National Novel Writing Month and while my work days aren’t as incredibly hectic and busy as they were during the first week and a half of November, the rest of my life has picked up the slack. I’ve been preparing to host two of my siblings and two friends of one of those siblings, plus we’ve had a bunch of more solidly cold weather come through, so I spent all of last weekend doing some projects around my apartment to weather-proof my bedroom door so I can keep that space cold and warm up the rest of my apartment for my guests. I mean, I also enjoy a warm apartment, but my tolerance for the cold is much higher and my preferred apartment temperature is much lower than most people I’ve met. I just really enjoy being under blankets and I’m much too warm for that unless my environment is in the low sixties. Which, you know, is much lower than the upper-sixties and low seventies that I know most people prefer, at least in terms of the experience of the temperature. So I cut and put down some carpet remnants to insulate the floor and help protect my downstairs neighbors from the sound of extra feet (I walk incredibly quietly for someone my size, so I was putting this task off until I actually had other people around), put up some weather stripping around my bedroom door, and really just strained the muscles of my lower back. Apparently, I’ve gotten too old to be crawling around on the floor with reckless abandon like I was while cutting the carpet to fit around the support beam for my staircase and tightly to the door frame at my bedroom door (so it could fit under the door in order to block all the air that used to pass through that gap).
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