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 A Story You Told 


archived:  31 March 2020 
tagged:  Writing 

Canceled my physical therapy appointments for the foreseeable future. Just not a good time to be a human outside of the house. I have a follow up with my surgeon next week and I don't know how I'm going to proceed there. I'll have to call his office and ask what they recommend.

And speaking of recommendations...  we should all be wearing (non-surgical, don't be a dick and compromise already limited supplies for healthcare workers) masks  It would appear I need to 1) learn to sew, 2) procure a sewing maching, and 3) procure supplies for said sewing machine. Woof. I'm researching patterns and machines. Maybe I'll just buy one of those handheld sewing machines for like $20? Idk

I don't really know what to do with myself today. I mean, I should do thesis work but I'm kind of off-kilter cos I canceled my PT and I dunno. This is and the fact that UNMC is  putting up surge tents  and I need to go buy bread but I don't want to go out without a face mask (I'll probably just wear a scarf around my face in the meantime) and it's just a lot. I don't mind the social distancing. I think that's part of my problem. Aside from not going to work nothing in my life has changed, and so I haven't felt it in the way more social people have. It's weird. I've also been playing the Cassandra for so long that I feel like I've been in the shit for so long that it's become an abstraction.

Anyway I have 4 options today: play Animal Crossing all damn day (tempting). Read a book (probably more worthwhile). Work on music (this will make spouse happy and also I like doing it). work on my thesis (most important and holy fuck do I not want to AT ALL).

I'm gonna go ply my trades in AC for a bit and then settle into a book, I think.

Stay safe. Wash your hands.

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 Wasn't Easy 


archived:  30 March 2020 
tagged:  Writing 

Welp I got the keyboards finished on all of the tracks for the album we are going to be putting out. BUT. We're going to be releasing a 7" first, so I have one song to put keyboards to on there before anything else. (I already have keyboards done for one of the two songs that are going to be on the 7".) THEN is the part I'm most worried about: MOUTH WORDS. I haven't written anything resembling poetry in...23 years. And my poetry was BAD because I was a teenager and of course it was. Ah well. Time to get back on that horse.

Other things: I have reached that point in social distancing where having to interact with anyone at all, for any reason, is driving me fucking bonkers. Just kidding, I always feel that way when I'm around anyone for too much time at a go without reprieve. Like, even being around my spouse and MiL is DRAINING because I apparently require at least 8 waking hours alone a day. Or if I have to spend time around you I need it to be in no more than hour-long chunks, MAX. This is true even if I go on vacation, although new environs do make it easier for me to spend extended time around folks because the novelty of the experience IS a thing that I like to share, specifically with the spouse. Not really so much anyone else.

I joke with my friends in group texts that I was built for this Covid-19 situation interpersonally and I am actually 1000000000000000% not joking. I HATE being around people. Like, when I was 8 my mom babysat a good friend of mine. And I told that friend one day that I'd rather be alone and I closed my bedroom door in her face. *shrug emoji* I also get really irritated when people spend Too Much Time on my Animal Crossing island. Visit my store and then GTFO plz.

I do feel somewhat bad because I know I'm being bad at comiserating with my extroverted friends and peers but like, they never give a shit if I'm uncomfortable having to Go Out and Do Things as a condition of our friendship so I guess I don't feel entirely bad. But at least prior to SOCIAL DISTANCING I got to make the choice. But getting to make the choice also means I get to be villified for not participating in social garbage. So whatever. I can talk both sides of this for hours.

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 Equal to What They're Fleeing 


archived:  27 March 2020 
tagged:  Writing 

I am proud to say that I completed the keyboards on one of the songs that is going to be on our (my spouse and my) upcoming album. I'm going to start working on another. I'll be pretty stoked if I can pull of finishing 2 songs in one day. Once I finish all of these vocal melodies I will move on to writing lyrics and recording vocals. Here's to me finding my confidence, because I am painfully shy about both of these things.

My Animal Crossing resident center upgraded building is going in right in front of my museum. In hindsight my placement was really silly. But I haven't played an AC game before and didn't really know what to anticipate. Oh well. Eventually I'll be able to move it. My house is looking god damned adorable which makes me happy. I'm gonna try to stay up and catch some dang spiders today. Also gonna try to not get bit. Lol

Not a whole lot going on. My country is still a fucking disaster with no plan and I'm trying to fucking socially distance myself from this ever-expanding shitshow. So working on music and AC are attempts at that. I AM still listening to Democracy Now!, Intercepted, Deconstructed, RadioLab, and Why Is This Happening?, but it still feels less god damned awful than the firehose of CNN's constantly updated live feeds.

Not a whole lot else to say. I was going to take a Xanax this morning, but my choice to settle into a rotation of a couple of hours of AC followed by a couple of hours of writing music is doing wonders for my mental health. Next week I am going to apply this to my degree work. It's all about finding a balance, and at least at this outset it seems to be working okay.

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 Anywhere in the World 


archived:  26 March 2020 
tagged:  Writing 

Got my ass wrist kicked at physical therapy today. I got to use this really cool machine that is basically a giant resistance magnet that my therapist put different doo-dads into to have me practice moving my wrist in a bunch of different ways. I'm mostly doing great, but we figured out today that my pronation of my wrist is not too great, especially if I tuck my elbow toward my side. I'd been working so hard on supination that I hadn't considered doing the reverse. Whoops! Gonna work on that between now and my next appointment next week. Gonna get this damn thing back in working order so I can start working out again. I'll have 6 damn months between now and when I (hopefully) go back to work; that's a lot of time to build in a really good habit/routine in my day.

I'm still fail-boating at doing my degree work. Trying to decide whether to just call this week a fucking wash. Next week should be much more settled. I have such a hard time starting stuff at non-start intervals. Like MONDAY means start. If I try to start on a WEDNESDAY I'm fucking incapable. Idk it's ridiculous. But I also need to provide myself space to be a little bit ridiculous. Stuff is completely sideways right now. Giving myself a breath isn't bad, right?

Here's now I know I'm mentally not as okay as I think that I am:

I woke up at 1:53 am this morning because my phone buzzed. My sleep!panic brain thought it was an Amber Alert style warning that we were going into an actual lockdown. I did not go back to sleep.

And it's not that I'm afraid of a lockdown; it's that I'm afraid we won't. This is NECESSARY to keep us all safe, and it's not going to fucking happen and THAT is the source of my anxiety. I need things to be getting done. And it's just not. And being in such a tenuous state of affairs just compounds my already precarious ability to just buckle down and get shit done.

I'm trying. I'm trying so hard. But all I want to do is bury myself in Animal Crossing: New Horizons until this is all over.

And I need to be more present with my spouse to help finish our record and I'm failing in that area, too. Woof I feel like I'm made of failure right now. It's so hard. I've taken 3 Xanax this week. Normally I take 2 a month, max. I gotta figure out something. Maybe I'll go ride our stationary bike until my brain fog clears. I did manage to nip a pernicious bit of coding that was making my background disappear. Turns out background images like to be anchored. I feel that on an emotional level.

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 Failure to Respond 


archived:  25 March 2020 
tagged:  Writing 

I went in to work this morning to gather personal items. This was not a full clean out, just a quick sweep for anything we may have missed at the earlier date. It was weird. My personal workspace is satellite to the main building, so I didn't even have to go into work itself, which was soothing because honestly it does make me a little nervous to consider going in, even tho only custodial and higher ups have even had access since March 12th. Somehow it just feels more precarious than a grocery store. Probably because it's so deserted.

I didn't get around to any classwork today because of the whole "we're gonna let you in the building" thing and it completely threw me off my plan for the day. I need to build in better resilience for dealing with how little things fuck up my entire day. I don't understand why my brain is like this, I just know it's been like this foever and it's completely ridiculous. Success isn't something that happens only when a preset schedule is met exactly. FFS, brain.

I am NOT going to talk about politics. It makes me physically ill.

I did talk a lot about the new  Animal Crossing  game, so much so that I moved it over to its own  entry  in the consume section of the site.

Other things today...

We went for a walk and I did my civic duty and called in a gas leak. It had already been reported, but better to have too many notifications than to have a building explode, and a bunch of folks end up in the hospital, especially in the time of Covid-19. We snagged some items we were low on and pretty much everyone practiced their social distancing and that is good.

I have an emergency remote meeting for work in a bit over an hour so my complaints about this day being fucked for getting doctoral work done has reached a conclusion where at least it's partly not my fault that nothing got done. Today is just too bananas.

Anyway I'm gonna work on music with the spouse after the meeting and who knows, maybe in the next couple of weeks we'll have an album out! (This is different than my solo  corporate//astrology , cos yes, I have 2 music projects.)

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 Under Control 


archived:  24 March 2020 
tagged:  Writing 

How time flies when you're off work because of a pandemic and then Animal Crossing New Horizons comes out. If the rest of the world's economy burns, Nintendo will come out stronger than ever.

I joke. I want all markets to fail. I want the market destroyed. I want a post-market society. I am stuck in a loop of anxiety about how Agent Orange is going to force people back to work too soon which makes it hard for me to even conceive of doing work and then that inability to focus productively gets winnowed into an implacable desire to play Animal Crossing 28 hours a day. I am starting to practice social distancing of myself from 24/7 news, because it is killing me as much as any virus.

Anyway, so that is, in a weird nutshell, how I accidentally didn't update here for more than a week. I'm healthy. Spouse is healthy. Live-in Parent-in-Law is healthy, and she's the one we worry about most. But we've been very homebound and stocked up on plenty of food and non-comestibles. I'm not going to order food online because I think it's bullshit to expect a warehouse worker or delivery agent to relentlessly and repeatedly put their lives on the line for my dumb ass. I don't need the guilt of "thousands of Amazon workers infected because they were delivering groceries" on my conscience.

ON THE PLUS SIDE: Wow pollution has decreased a TON in these weeks. It really is phenomenal how quickly the world will come back if we just fucking let it. I'm kind of hoping that a lot of businesses see the financial upside to keeping workers working at home. Save themselves a shit-ton of money on overhead, save the planet a bunch of unnecessary commuting pollution, energy pollution, and just wanton unnecessary energy use. Like, this could be a massive silver lining that I'm trying to cling to in these dire and dark times.

I read 6 books in the opening salvo of our self-imposed quarantine. Right up until ANIMAL CROSSING happened. Whoops.

I think today and tomorrow I'm going to get a daily schedule locked into place. I hate that I need a schedule to be productive, but I NEED to get cracking on my doctorate. I really only need to write 2.5 chapters, and then I need to get my measurement tools (surveys) approved by ye olde workplace. I could, conceivably, have a lot of this knocked out by the second half of April. I just need to get my shit together. I am still getting up around 4:30 every morning. I'm just trying to decide if I'd rather work from like 6 to noon or noon to 6. Either of those would include a break halfway through, unless I hit a good jag. But I think 6 hours of solid work is a good chunk of time. I'm leaning toward the morning so that I can spend the rest of the day relaxing and doing things like working on music, playing video games, and reading more books. I already know that once I start indulging in leisure early in the morning that it's impossible to get my brain back on track to get to work afterward.

Well that seems settled then. Work in the morning. Living for the afternoons and evenings. I'll be damned but  illeism  works. Tho I do recognize that I don't speak in the third person on here, but seeing it written out decouples me from myself in much the same way. So yeah. Tomorrow I will start being a wonderfully productive person. (With a dose of Xanax sleep tonight to quell the anxiety I can already feel rising in lockstep with the looming reality of actually getting to work.)

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 Brighten the Lines 


archived:  16 March 2020 
tagged:  Writing 

I have been doing my due diligence and spouse and I spent the entire weekend indoors. No walks (to be fair it snowed like 3" (7.5 cm) and it was cold. But also no random trips to our "usual spots" out of boredom. Just laid low, worked on our music project, and read A LOT. I'm halfway through the third book in the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemison, and I only just started the entire thing Thursday. I forgot what it is to enjoy reading. Now I don't want to do anything else.

I am doing my best to NOT turn on cable news today. I have a vested interest in watching teevee because one more case of community transmission means I'm out of work for 6-8 weeks. And I would prefer to hear it in the moment than second hand from someone in my social circle. I also just crave information. I've been accurate in every "prediction" (read: hypothesis based on the actual facts of the matter) every step along the way because I've been sussing the firehose every second of every day. Most people don't have the dual skillset of insatiable criticism and a solid background in immunological biology, and so I try to disseminate the information after I filter it the best I can. I mean, it's to a social circle of like 10, but still. That I am a conduit is integral to who I am. And I am loathe to allow misinformation where I can correct it.

In non-Covid-19 related news I am still feeling blah about working on my thesis defense. Okay so somewhat Covid-19 related, cos I feel like until I know that I do or do not have 6-8 weeks opening up in the future I just cannot focus on anything else. I will probably take a Xanax tonight to sleep, if just to clear up some of this brain fog. FUCK. I need to get this refilled. I hope the waiving of refill requirements will extend to a technically controlled substance. Welp, calling my doc will get added to the ol' to-do list today. Damn but everything reaally does revolve around this disaster.

I'm feeling so much regret for not having the opportunity to tell the folks in my charge at work how bad it was going to get, but the corner we turned happened mid-spring recess and that evaporated my opportunity. It doesn't make it hurt any less tho. Bleh.

I'm gonna go read and then get ready to Venture Out. I have a physical therapy appointment, and I need to snag cat food and litter. We have plenty of food and non-comeestibles, but I need to shore up on the fuzzball front.

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 Something to Watch 


archived:  13 March 2020 
tagged:  Writing 

Well I'm out of work for one week for sure now thanks to my country's inability to have a functioning government in the face of a massive pandemic. I am predicting I won't be back at work again for a very very long time. We'll see. This provides me with a lot of time to get my doctoral work caught up, so that's good. Silver liningggggggggggg. I rescued my plants from my workplace because we're not allowed in after today at close of business, which is fucking insane. I have a LOT of plants at home now. So there's that.

Driving around the city is so fucking weird. We went to Barnes & Noble yesterday and it was a ghost town. We're just trying to find ways to make sure we're occupied at home as things get worse but I guess everyone has started hunkering down way before we have. Driving to PT this morning for my arm, the roads were so empty. Like, folks were out and about, but there wasn't traffic, and it was 8:30 am. Fucking bananananananas.

I'm sitting here with a cat on my chest waiting for that orange idiot to get on the news and say something else absolutely full of lies right before the weekend. I hope the stock market crashes. I'm poor. I want those plutocrat fucks to feel it.

I can't think of anything else of note. My physical therapy is going well. My PT person says I'm making progress even if it doesn't feel like it. Since work is on hiatus next week it was easy to schedule my next two sessions at my leisure. I could get used to this.

One thing to add: I am not making light of the situation. If my work had stayed open that would have been disastrous. I am so so so privileged to be in the position I'm in with my position and my salary protections. I only hope that folks in more tenuous situations get provided with the flexibility and support that they need.

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 Social Distancing 


archived:  12 March 2020 
tagged:  Writing 

Well the world is a wild-ass place. Or a terrible place. Stuff with Covid-19 is a disaster. All because of a bunch of megalomaniacs who refuse to care about anything but $$. So business as usual.

I was supposed to do doctoral work all week and I just cannot get my head into it at all. Which is bad. Like really bad. I don't know how to fix it. Okay that's not entirely true. I can just force myself to get to work. But I'm so DISTRACTED by how wretched everything is right now. A lot because my work (and so many others') is on a knife's edge. Who knows if I'll even be going back to work on Monday, and if I don't, what the hell they'll expect from me. My particular workplace has a lot of mitigating circumstances that other places around me don't. I am extremely lucky that I am unionized and salaried and my pay is guaranteed no matter what happens. My spouse does not have that guarantee. Doubly lucky that I'm the primary breadwinner. If his work goes Very South at least I can cover the bills. Mostly. We will have to dump some non-essentials. And make some serious calls about what we consider essential and non-essential.

Physical therapy is kicking my ass. I have to practice "dart thrower's" movement, which hurts a lot, so it makes sense that that is where I need to focus my attention. I will say that laying in bed and typing hurts less today than it did earlier this week. I do all my flexes and stretches every day. I desperately want to get back to daily yoga and work outs, but I can't do that until 1) I get cleared for weight-bearing exercises for my arm, and 2) I get my mobility back. And 2 takes precedence over 1, so I work and work on my flexes and stretches.

Music work is going well on the project that spouse and I used to do with friends. We're doing it ourselves now because everyone is super unreliable. I don't understand how young folks get anything done when they won't commit to anything (said the woman avoiding her very necessary and important doctoral work), but like seriously when I commit to a thing I follow through. That's important to me. It is frustrating that it's not important to anyone else. *shrug*

Anyway anyway anyway I finished Cyteen, so let me go write about it.

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 Render 


archived:  09 March 2020 
tagged:  Writing 

Okay so it turns out that laying in bed and typing on my Surface is super painful but also I need to limber up my wrist so fuck it, we're doing it live.

The AdNauseam add-on makes neocities run so slow and I don't understand why. There is nothing to block here and knowing that I even disabled it for this site and still it is bleh. Oh well, I am not going to delete the add-on so I guess I need to just suck it up.

I got my nails re-dipped today. I went to my favored bougie nail place today and I was bummed because their color selection kind of super sucks BUT everyone there is super nice and they do such quality work and the price is the same so why would I go to the less-nice places? I also like that the owner of the nail shop actually works there. I don't trust owners who don't also do the work. Those people are always greedy assholes.

I have this grinding, clicking thing going on with my wrist that I didn't used to have before and it's making me crotchety. Everything is irrritating the hell out of me. I hope that fucking covid makes me have to stay home like all those lucky corporate fuckers on the coasts. No mention of all the wage-workers who haveto go to work no matter what or lese they'll lose their job or their housing or both. The only thing mentioned consistently in the news in the States is the fucking stock market. Good riddance, I hope it bottoms out. I am poor af, and a public employee. These motherfuckers can fucking rot.

Welp didn't mean for this to be a downer but here we are. I finished Cyteen but my wrist hurts too much from writing this to do a review. I'll write one tomorrow. We're also almost caught up on Avenue 5, which is fucking PHENOMENAL. Highly recommend if you're into absurdist satire.

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 Fighting 


archived:  05 March 2020 
tagged:  Writing 

I don't know how the last week got awy from me. I mean I do. It's a high stakes time at work and I'm exhausted and I've had to do something every damn day after work this week. Today I get a haircut. I'm also skressed because next week I have to buckle down like whoa and get a ton of work done for my doctorate and I'm dreading trying to get back into that groove.

On the flip side of that torment is the fact that DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME IS FINALLY BACK THIS WEEKEND. I want it to never leave again. Nothing makes me feel as good as ALL SUNLIGHT ALL THE TIME makes me feel. I should start planning my garden for this year. I think working in the garden will be a good way to work on my making my wrist more functional. I am doing all of my physical therapy exercises, but I am pretty sure doing something a bit more concentrated on something tat is actually productive in a more tangible sense will be a good thing.

I also want to get back into bujo which is stupid because I know that's just my brain wanting to distract me from things I need to do. I suppose the upside is that I haven't felt the urge to do anything since I broke my fucking arm, so at least I'm feeling capable enough to seek distraction. For what that's worth.

I am trying to decide if I want to build archive-type pages to limit pages to 10 or 20 entries but uuuuuuuuuuugh that would require a fair amount of infrastructure that I don't feel like working back into my tags and legitimate archive page. Maybe I'll do an archive page per month. That would be much easier to fix. I dunno, it's something to think about.

The weather has been extremely nice this week. Like too nice but hey gloabl warming so whatever. We've gone on lots of walks and just spent time together and it's nice. Being outside is so good, everyone should do it.

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