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 readingStress
Grit 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).
Continue readingI Fell Into A Burnout String That’s Dire
I am writing this on the sixth day of November and I am already so incredibly burned out that I’m considering taking time away from work already. Well, not “already” since I haven’t had much time away from work in about a year that wasn’t set aside for a specific purpose. The holidays last winter, visiting a friend/interviewing for a job that I didn’t get, going to Spain, my friends’ wedding, my move, and then labor day weekend (which wound up being preparations for my grandmother’s passing)… All the time I’ve taken away from work has been specifically for an event of some kind or to deal with some kind of major life stress. I haven’t had a proper do-nothing, restful vacation since Thanksgiving of 2022 and that barely counts since I was preparing myself for family therapy with my sister and parents. The last time I took a vacation and didn’t have something horrible, stressful, or upsetting happen immediately afterwards was when I went to a cabin with my friends and siblings for most of a week in the summer of 2022. Which only counts because the stressful thing that happened after that was something I’d mostly gotten used to dealing with (my eye problems flaring up). I really need a proper rest and I really hope I can get one this Thanksgiving. Next week, as you’re reading this.
Continue readingNational Novel Writing Month Update: One Week Later
Well, it’s been rough. I was INCREDIBLY optimistic about the course this month would take and I think I hit my primary daily writing target only once so far, let alone my daily secondary target of getting enough words to exclude my blog posts from my daily writing totals. I’ve been so busy with work and then so burned out from how busy I was that I when I finally go home and eat dinner, I’ve only got enough time and energy to spend an hour listlessly trying to write before shuffling off to bed. Even the weekend wasn’t much better since all the exhaustion I’d been putting off since I couldn’t afford to feel tired during my incredibly busy work days came crashing back down on me. I did almost nothing but play Spider-Man (the PS4 one, since I never finished the DLC) the entire time. I did eventually finish a blog post and do my laundry, but I was so wiped out that writing the post took three times longer than it should have and I didn’t even fold my clean laundry. What little energy I had for stuff beyond all that was spent on doing my dishes, a little bit of cooking, and taking care of things like paying my bills and other such unfortunate necessities. It has been rough mentally, emotionally, and physically these past few days, and even now that it seems like the worst has passed (though it remains to be seen if this will stay true since it’s not like I anticipated the horrible, frantic, and exhausting week I’ve had since the month began) I am barely staying on my feet as I struggle to remain functional despite the exhaustion.
Continue readingNational Novel Writing Month 2023
Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month (Or NaNoWriMo as I’ll be calling it in the rest of the post) and I only just decided I was going to definitely participate yesterday (which, coincidentally, is the day I wrote this post). I’ve been thinking about it for a bit, but not as long as I usually do. Normally, there’s little else on my mind as summer finally begins to fade into fall, but this past year (since it has actually been a year of this life stress and chaos now, despite my desperate attempts to avoid it) has driven most things beyond the immediate day and sometimes week I’m experiencing so far from my mind that I’m beginning to forget what it is like to live any other way. So when my friend asked if I was planning to do NaNoWriMo, it caught me off guard since I did not have an answer prepared and I almost dismissed the question as being hardly relevant right then, despite it being the twenty-first of October, because I’d forgotten how soon the beginning of November was. Still, it’s not like I had to do much to prepare. I’m fairly adept at coming up with writing projects and while I expect to struggle with finding the time I need to do my daily writing since my schedule is already so full, I expect I’ll be able to find enough to write about to fill any words left over should I finish the last twenty-ish chapters of Infrared Isolation before I hit the required fifty thousand words for the month. I mean, the first twenty chapters are over seventy-five thousand words, so I’m really not worried, even if I wind up being a few chapters short of forty-six.
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