It's been a bit since I've checked in with everyone.
About a week after my last post I found out that I'd been moved back to day shift at work. Through a miscommunication I found this out the hard way, which is to say right after logging in one evening my boss wanted to know where I'd been all day. Long story short, I used the entire week to slowly wind my sleep schedule back to normal, getting up an hour earlier and going to bed an hour earlier every day until I was back on day shift. It didn't …
The inherent instability of working night shift aside, I've been pretty busy straightening up my life by straightening up my usual environment. Therapy cleaning, if you will.
To avoid recapping the last couple of years, after my mom died I shipped a large number of shipping crates of stuff (paperwork, research, data storage, and a large volume of family pictures dating back several decades). All of that stuff had to go somewhere, so much of it was stacked up in my office, where I spend much of my time because I work from home these days. Now and then in …
Somehow it's turned into one of those really busy months, where I've been working on stuff more than anything else. Thing is, most of it isn't really worth talking about; not yet, anyway. Lifestyle maintenance is like that. It's not glamorous, interesting, or even all that fun, but it still has to get done, if only for the sake of one's mental health.
For starters, I've been trying to free up some room in my office (where I spend most of my days, if only because of my day job). Talking to someone a week or two ago about home …
I find myself asking that question a lot these days.
Another question I've been asking myself a lot is, what the hell am I going to write in this post? I've tried a few things in the days leading up to this (timed) post, and to be honest they all, upon rereading, sound like I'm some combination of coming apart at the seams, in dire need of a vacation in which I do not get sick, in need of therapy (which, to be fair, I am), and sleeping like I did in high school (which is to say, not sleeping …
"Well, my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle."
--Mal Reynolds, Firefly
I've been relying heavily upon timed posts these last few weeks because my mental health has been forcing me to choose between being able to get essential stuff done (read: work) and, well, anything else. Come the end of the (work) day, all I have the compute cycles to do is goof off with a side of doomscrolling (because when I don't I get blindsided by The Next Damned Thing). Mostly, seeing the world operate on Covid Standard Time is disheartening and the …
I'm still here. Still alive. No timed post this time.
Tired as hell because my work/life balance has gone to hell in a handbasket. I think over a year of covid has finally started to affect the rest of us. I don't think anybody's head is still in the game anymore.
I've been working too many late nighters and it's really messed with my head. I took a couple of days off (before I started writing this post) to recuperate. Sleeping in felt kind of strange but I probably needed it. I've been taking time to read actual dead …
Once again it is the end of year crunch at work and we're all scrambling to get things done before holiday break. That we even get a holiday break is something that I'm still not quite used to, though I'm certainly not going to complain about it, either. I spent most of the week pulling almost all nighters and cursing specific ways of getting things done that aren't anything like what anyone else does. Oh, well. So it goes. Everybody does it differently, nobody does it right.
Covid-19 cases still going up around the country. Plagues do that. Of course …
Chatting every couple of weeks with my therapist for the last couple of years, the topic of ADD, attention deficit disorder keeps coming up. As in, she suspects that I have it, and has suspected it for a long time. Always needing to keep my hands busy, traveling with a couple of books and hopping in between them every couple of chapters, an inability to concentrate for long periods of time when I want to... the whole shebangabang. About a month ago she finally suggested that we try to do something about it. So, she prescribed me a 30 day …
This isn't easy for me to write because it involves my mental health. So, if it's not your bag feel free to skip this post.
Helping my mom since her cancer diagnosis has left me in this peculiar state where I don't actually know what I'm feeling. I call it "running on wires," as in, the silicon I'm connected to is running me, and the organics are off doing... something, maybe. My therapist calls it alexithymia, and reading about it that's as good a word for it as any.
I've been fighting with clinical depression for most of my life …
Long time readers are probably wondering where I've been lately. The answer is kind of long and is worth a post all on its own. The short version of the story is, work's been eating me alive lately. This is our busiest time of year and it's been all hands on deck for a couple of weeks now. In point of fact, last week was our quarterly all-hands meeting, where everybody on my team was flown into town for a solid week of meetings. All day, every day. Most of my visible activity lately took the form of parts of …
