Between therapy, not sleeping well last night (I was actually in bed on time for once, I just couldn’t fall asleep and then I kept waking up throughout the night), and the general events of the last two weeks, I just do not have the energy for much today. I finished Sea of Stars and want to write about it, but the thought of even starting on that post (by copying over the relevant bits of a discussion I had with someone about the game) have me feeling so exhausted that I’d rather lay down on the dirty floor of my office and not move for a week than try to parse through all the pieces of that largely one-sided discussion (my mistake for engaging with someone without checking if they were up for in-depth critical analysis). I mean, hell, I can’t decide what I’m doing to do for dinner and tonight’s grocery night, which means I could guiltlessly cop out by ordering Chinese food from the local place since I’ll be getting home late. Nothing like buying a bunch of food and then not eating any of it. Sure, it’s because I’m exhausted from a long day of work and then going grocery shopping afterwards, but it still feels weird to do. Plus, as much as I enjoy getting takeout from the local Chinese restaurant, I tend not sleep as well after eating it. Seems like eating something else might be the better choice in order to address my exhaustion, but that will take a degree of effort that picking up my dinner would not.
Continue readingStress
I Feel So Relieved Already
Just one week later, not even seven full days getting my mole removed, and I’m already wondering what I was worried about. Sure, I’m still in the active wound-care stage of things, but I’m notably less self-conscious of the bandage stuck to my face than I ever was of my mole, and that’s even with the bandage feeling way more noticeable than the mole ever was. It just bothers me so much less. Honestly, the only gripe I’ve got about this whole process is how I have to shave every single day. I learned the hard way that more than a day’s worth of facial hair growth makes the bandages fall off much more quickly. Most of the other gripes I’ve had (such as how bad the wound looked) either faded away in the first few days or I’ve learned how to counter them. For instance, I might still be unable to bite into large things (like an apple), but I’ve gone back to drinking as usual and gotten the hang of eating various more easily bitten foods without making a mess or accidentally putting pressure on my wound. It has all become fairly routine at this point and while I’m definitely eager to get to the point where I don’t have something stuck to my face twenty-four hours a day, I’m honestly just happy to not have the mole anymore.
Continue readingA Feeling Of Relief 32 Years In The Making
After a lifetime of wanting it and a few weeks of dreading the impending appointment, I’ve finally gotten the mole removed from my face. As of writing this, I am sitting in my office, wondering how much my face is going to hurt once the acetaminophen wears off [turns out not at all, which is nice] as I try to carefully sip some water without stretching my upper lip too much or getting the bandage wet. As it turns out, I do not have a metal straw (despite definitely getting one with the bottle and straw brush set I bought last year), so I’ve had to practice at delicately pouring liquids into my mouth with little involvement from my upper lip. I don’t know if you think about it that much (I certainly didn’t prior to today), but being able to shift your lips around is a rather fundamental part of drinking things. Sure, since I have fairly full lips, I can press things to my mouth and use the pressure as a means of creating a liquid-proof seal, but that’s kind of painful at the best of times and does absolutely nothing for me right now because of where the bandage sits. To drink something without wetting my upper lip, I have to not only change the angle at which I normally hold my cup as I drink (a less horizontal angle than I’d normally like, which requires that I risk inhaling my beverage with every slurp), but I have to carefully wrap my lip over the rim so that I can only come into contact with my drink via the inside of my lip. Learning to do that was annoying, but I’ve gotten quite good at it now. Mostly thanks to repition. I drink a lot every day, so I’ve had plenty of opportunities to get a handle on things.
Continue readingI Overextended Myself Once Again
I wound up staying up until about 2am Friday morning, since I only finished building my character and all that in Baldur’s Gate 3 at about 11:30 Thursday night. It took a long time to download and I had a D&D game I was playing in during the earlier hours of the evening, so I was faced with either going to bed without playing BG3 or staying up a bit to play just the intro. I chose the latter, which turned into playing for about two hours. That, plus a bit of research I did following my introduction to Gale is what informed last Friday’s post since I wrote that during work breaks in my morning and then finished it between chores Saturday morning. I was pretty busy for pretty much the entire day and evening, so I had to get pretty focused with my topic for Friday. It’s not like I had any extra time to play more or do more research about the game that day, nor have I had much since then.
Continue readingI Miss Pretending To Be Someone Else
I’ve been so busy lately that I’ve hardly had the time or energy for doing anything after work other than settling down in front of my TV and not moving again until it’s time to go to bed. I had plans to start putting a puzzle together or maybe work on a Lego set at some point this week (in an effort to spend some time away from screens and take a break from books. The book break isn’t because they’re bad or they’re twisting my mind in some way (though doing a massive binge of The Dresden Files has definitely influenced my recent dreams, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post), but because I’m spending too much time hunched over things or folded up in chairs. I need some activities that let me sprawl. Or, I thought I’d need them since I planned to get a full week of daily workouts in this week. Instead, I’ve done zero workouts, stuggled to get to sleep on time, and all the energy I have for any given day has been consumed by work as I juggle projects, prepare for a company event (that has happened by the time this goes up), and attempts to sort through my feelings about a whole range of stuff.
Continue readingGrief Taken Nightmare Form Has Invaded My Dreams Of Late
I’ve had a weird and entirely discomforting thing happen a few times over the last couple months. While having fairly normal dreams (and the word “normal” is doing a lot of work here because I tend to either not remember my dreams, feel them so strongly that the emotions from them color my entire day, or have horrible nightmares), a cast of charactes from a past dream have invaded and changed the very nature of the dream they arrive in. You see, a few months back, in late April, I had a dream about defeating a horrible warlock. It was a pretty typical fantasy story dream, with a cast of adventurers on my team as we did stuff I don’t remember that eventually culminated in taking down an evil spellcaster who was trying to perform some kind of ritual that would give him some kind of ascendant power (I’m pretty sure it was immortality). This warlock had a crew of misfit-type underlings that we were mostly able to bypass as we went in for the kill. As I struck the head from this vile sorcerer, the mooks we’d bypassed swore undying revenge on me, specifically, but I woke up pretty much right after that so I didn’t think much of it.
Continue readingThe Improbable Spider-Man and The Case of the Incredibly Stressed Author
When I finished Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and wanted to relax with an older, more simple favorite, I decided to replay Spider-Man: Remastered. Since I bought a PS5 just a couple months ago and opted not to transfer my save files, I wanted to make sure I had a finished file on my console before the sequel comes out (well, besides Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which I bought and am excited to play once I’m finished with SM:R). I figured this would be a great opportunity for it, since I also wanted to catch up on my podcasts a bit and the storytelling of the game isn’t strong enough that I feel terribly compelled to follow it on a replay. Plus, I love Spider-Man. I’m a big fan and I’ve always enjoyed swinging around New York in every Spider-Man game I’ve ever played. For the most part, I’m having a great time. I’m much better at fighting enemies than I was the first time I played it (so much so that I can’t even comprehend why I used to struggle in battles since now I can handle everything with ease unless I’m going for style points and focus too much on gimmicks rather than effective combat strategy), so the main source of mild frustration I used to feel is now entirely gone. However, I have a new one and it’s odd because I think it is pointing to a change in my gaming preferences rather than a change in games as a whole.
Continue readingNo New Chapter This Week
Maybe I should just make the “every other week” schedule thing permanent. I’ve fallen into that pattern these last few weeks, so it would be a bit of a relief if I removed that pressure from my shoulders. That said, I’ve also fallen into the habit of not working out in the morning and not getting out of bed until eight in the morning on work days, so maybe accepting the habits I’ve formed due to stress and on-going exhaustion isn’t a good idea. Maybe I should keep trying to fix my habits and regain full control of my life. I really think getting my sleep and waking cycles into a more healthy pattern will help with all the other stuff since this constant lack of sleep is my primary source of exhaustion these days. Not my only one, unfortunately, but being able to remove this source should make everything else manageable. After all, it’s not like I don’t want to write. It’s not like I’m not interested in finishing this story. I want to do it, I’m just either too busy with work or too absolutely exhausted to push myself to do more than a couple lines of story writing at a time.
So yeah, no new chapter this week but there should be one for next week. I’m going to keep trying for weekly updates, but I guess we’ll just have to see if I can swing it.
One Week Of Rest Later. Sorta.
I am officially one week into dropping streaming and specifically not replacing it with other projects. I have actually done my best to rest, even if I wound up spending an entire weekend busy and emotionally exhausted from a variety of frustrations, some disappointment (which has only contributed to my emotional exhaustion because I spent the time and energy to emotionally process it), and a very Midwestern party. I have not entirely succeeded in resting over this past week, since my sleep schedule is still royally messed up, but I actually had the energy to write two long blog posts and most of a chapter of Infrared Isolation (which will be going up the weekend after this post does, meaning I’ll have skipped another Saturday update) yesterday. It felt great to be able to work on something and actually have the mental fortitude to focus on it for more than a few minutes at a time. Which I mostly lost between yesterday and today because I was up too late playing a game (Cassette Beasts is great and I’ll eventually be writing about it), but that will hopefully be mostly fixed if I can actually get some sleep for once.
Continue readingSkipping Another Week
There’s no Infrared Isolation post today. While my rest is having a positive effect, it is not an instantaneous one, nor is it swift. It is a slow process that will hopefully bear fruit in coming weeks. The chapter for next week is already written and sent off to my editor, so it will be good to go for next week. Since I finished that early, I’ve even already started work on the next chapter (by which I mean I renamed the document, moved some things around, and reviewed the old chapter that is being rewritten into Chapter 25). If I manage to actually get more work done on it this weekend, between my various other activities, that will be even better. I don’t know if I’m quite that recovered, though. Just because writing during the week has gotten easier doesn’t mean that I’m quite ready to start spending time on the weekends working on writing projects. Especially this weekend, with my last two days of preparation for my new tabletop campaign and my on-going attempts to not mess up my sleep schedule all over again. I’m a bit more hopeful than I used to be, though. Now, recovery and a return to my old, non-exhausted way of living actually seems possible. Only time will tell, though.