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so tired and sad

need to find something to make happy

post fic chapter! then comint! then happy!

too tired and sad to post fic chapter after the effort of dragging myself through writing it

(it’s good though! it’s good! i did it! it’s even been proofread! i just. need. to finish reading it over one time and then get the formatting done and then post it!)

no posty = no comint = so tired and sad

I am hoping that by writing this all out I can explain to my idiot brain how stupid all of this is but it’s sort of not working but i tried! i did spend all day not getting this done so hopefully tomorrow i can actually get this done. This is so dumb.

I’m just so tired.

(yes it’s the next bit of golden towers you know i have another bit of peace-tied almost ready too and then i also have literally this whole other story almost entirely written and i just can’t fuckign finish so welcome to hell) (Your picture was not posted)

monday

Nov. 1st, 2021 05:25 am
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well, i’m back home in buffalo.

MM, DF, the kids, and my dude went out trick-or-treating. I sat in the front hallway and handed out candy to an assortment of adorable children. Most of them were middle schoolers, awkward and crack-voiced and remembering to say thank-you with varying degrees of success. A few of them complimented my costume.

The resident kids came home and were so excited to hand out candy, but mostly everyone had already finished trick-or-treating, as it was well after dark and it’s still kind of covid-y out. So I went out and trick-or-treated them so they gave me a bag of candy, and then they bestowed one apiece on each other, and then one for all the other adults present, and that was that, we’d used up all the candy, and we turned out the light. I loaded everything into my car and drove home.

Got home after 9:30, and the cat was delighted to zoom around the house about it. I had an Amazon package– I know, I know, but I needed some things and Amazon’s the only place to easily get them– and so I looked at what I’d bought and the cat jumped into and out of the box. And then I collapsed into bed.

Slept somewhat poorly, as the cat needed me to hold her at all times. Me gone for a week, and then Dude gone overnight too, was a lot for her. Also I wake up when she sits on my head, so I did and kept petting her, which only encouraged her.

This morning I had to leave before sunrise, and I couldn’t find my clothes, and I don’t have much by way of food in the house– I brought meat and vegetables from the farm, it being cool enough that the ice packs in my cooler could keep everything cold overnight, but I don’t have like. Lunch. That sort of thing. So it was icky getting ready for work this morning.

And now I’m at work but I don’t wanna. It’s my own fault I didn’t take any time for myself at home but Halloween comes but once a year and I hadn’t seen the DF/MM family in quite some time. And that’s just. How it goes. Alas.

We’ll see how I do this week, maybe I’ll be able to get stuff done. At least I haven’t woken up with vertigo like last time after I pushed myself this hard. And I hope the sun won’t have gone down yet when I go home, that’s the part of this time of year that’s hardest.

I am utterly filled with a desire not to be at this job anymore but I can console myself that I’m certain I feel like that about literally every job so there’s no real solution for it.

The thing I’m excited to go home and do (besides nap) is that I want to learn whittling, and I have a bunch of collected wood scraps in the car, and I bought myself woodcarving Dremel heads on Amazon, and I bought myself cutproof gloves too, and I have some knives and I want to see if i can make these blocks of wood be shaped like other blocks of wood and I’m excited by the concept and I don’t want to sit in a windowless office desperately trying to make numbers be other numbers on the Internet for eight hours, I want to be in my house and make blocks of wood be other blocks of wood. There’s no justice in this world. (Your picture was not posted)

dead phone

Oct. 25th, 2021 05:25 am
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argh i cracked my phone screen in august but somehow yesterday i killed it. i’d been sawing things in the tiny house, and as part of that i cut up a bunch of offcuts into manageable learn-to-whittle chunks, and at the end i tossed those into a discarded paper ace hardware bag, and threw my phone into my belt pocket, and then carried a heavy armload of stuff back to the house– put tools away in the workshop, hauled the wood to my car, got into the house, pulled out my phone to look at it and it wouldn’t turn on.

Eventually I got it to respond and the screen was like– in a gradient. I mustve put pressure on the cracked screen somehow while carrying armloads of stuff.

So it’s dead. I have it tethered to my computer so I can check texts there as long as it stays alive enough for the pairing not to drop out, but. I can’t actually see anything on the screen, the phone itself is dead.

I ordered a new one but it won’t arrive until Friday, so I’m having it shipped to my house rather than here. So I have no phone for the week.

So far I’ve lost my mind trying to use the timer, flashlight, and of course the twitchy check-for-dopamine phone reflexes are driving me insane.

And then in the midst of that, somehow I misplaced my Kindle. It had been sitting on the kitchen table with my phone, and I said to myself, better put that on the bedside table so I don’t lose it, and I do remember it arriving there but now that I think back, maybe I’d done that earlier in the day, and then kiddo had made me read to her again, and so I’d retrieved it from the bedside table and put it on the kitchen table instead, and then– where did I put it from the table?

It is a black hole and there is no memory there. I very clearly was not recording what I did as I did it. Three adults and a child have searched this house to no avail. When my Kindle is unavailable I read to the kid from my phone. The last ditch is that you can load up Kindle books in the browser so now I have to do that, and boy it is not ergonomic.

Anyway. Mom came by in the evening for dinner, and I confessed that I’ve been under so much stress and this phone thing feels like the last straw, and she was like “wait why are you stressed?” and I just did not know what to even say to that, Mom, all of us have been under a great deal of strain with Dad dying suddenly, do you think you are the only person who is having trouble? and also the global pandemic? and maybe I’ve deliberately chosen to drive across the state every weekend but i’ve been doing it nonstop since April and I’m really tired? and it turns out I really don’t know how to talk to my mother about myself so I just sort of shrugged.

She then pointed out that it’s the tenth anniversary of my uncle dying rather suddenly, so we drank to him, and I survived the evening, but now it’s Monday and I’ve realized I have no clock in my room, my phone is for that.

I don’t know how I’m gonna survive the week, I have a timer running basically constantly and I just– checking in with the friends in my phone is how I survive my day. So I’m just in a kind of state of overwhelm and that’s how it’s gotta be, alas. (Your picture was not posted)

ten

Oct. 12th, 2021 10:25 pm
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today was about ten hours on my feet and i feel vaguely astonished that i had absolutely no pain from my hip through the whole thing. amazing!

the downside is that i’m in so much pain from my sinuses and chest that i sort of don’t care about my hip, so.

i’m procrastinating going to sleep because lying down hurts. i only have sudafed, i don’t have the guaifenisin or dextromethorphan i rely on to keep chest colds from turning into bronchitis. i should’ve gone and bought some today, but, again, ten hours’ work. really no time.

and then it was too much trouble to get takeout for dinner, so i made fried rice, and my sister fried a steak. hard to explain but. i mean we can’t get food delivered, so someone has to go pick up takeout, and it’s. it’s just so much work to go get food. it’s literally always easier to cook something.

anyway. no hip pain. i’ll take it. but i don’t know how i’m going to sleep. maybe i can sleep sitting up. lying down gives me violent coughing fits, and like. no thanks.

yes i wore a mask all day. no it’s not covid, there’s no fever and i can smell and taste…. well not fine, but acceptably.

ugh. anyway. blergh. (Your picture was not posted)

frazzle

Sep. 8th, 2021 09:25 am
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instead of whining about my guts i was originally planning to make some sort of deep point about using humor in fiction to make more brutally-incisive points, like you can’t be that savage if it’s all dark all the time you have to make people laugh to open up for the really insightful stuff, but. then i never got my shit together.

also i had planned? at some point? to update? a chapter of something? but i literally cannot stay focused for long enough to do it, pray for me, i’m really having Troubles this week.

BUT. I leveraged the sheer power of a Discord server to get me to buy shoes since I need fucking shoes and the shoes arrived yesterday, early!!! so I am wearing rose gold birkenstocks and it is amazing how good the arch support is in these things.

ALSO I have gotten a lot of writing done I think but I don’t actually know, including a fuckload of torturing Iorveth in backstory, so I don’t know where the fuck any of this is going but boy is it going.

also i have been doing a lot of worldbuilding about dragons don’t @ me i do what i want (Your picture was not posted)

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i was so busy on Friday I didn’t even post an apology about it. it’s been, well, kind of a stressful week. though i should state for the record that the week before last i was absolutely tormented with heartburn for days on end and this week just past, i did not experience even a moment of it even eating tomatoes for every meal and not sleeping well. so that’s a baffling reality i need to prod at some point; is it true that the stress here is somehow less upsetting to my stomach than the stress back home? if so that is a sad statement about how my body and brain work, i tell you what.

anyway.

i am rather close to updates on both stories but not quite there. p r e s u m a b l y this upcoming week is vacation so i should have time to sit around and write but i have no idea if that’ll really be the case, so i can’t promise anything, but fingers crossed.

(It will also be my birthday and the one thing i had resolved to do for that was finally commission art since i’ve been whining about wanting to do that for literal months now but did I? NO i have made zero progress on figuring out what to ask for. I did not realize I would have such a huge mental block about it. I can even think of several moments, now, that I would want illustrated, but I can’t– make the connection– of how to– leap from the concept to actually doing a thing where I. Do it. Anyway. IDK. If I could identify the block I’d work around it but I don’t anticipate suddenly coming up with the time and focus to do that anytime soon, so this is not likely to happen but it was an idea!)

ANYWAY here is a snippet to make up for lack of update. from Sparrow, cw panic attack/PTSD dissociative episode.

“Morvran,” Cirilla said, sounding alarmed. “Morvran?”

Luliana didn’t understand what had gone wrong. Voorhis was dead-still, like a statue; his eyes weren’t focused on anything. He was barely even moving to breathe; after a moment Luliana realized the faint twitch of his movement was his heartbeat, moving his body ever so slightly.

“It’s like he’s not there,” Luliana said, horrified. “What’s happened?”

Cirilla stood up, careful not to scrape the chair. She looked– angry, and Luliana didn’t understand. “Emhyr happened to him,” she said, her jaw set in anger.

“What?” Luliana slipped to her feet in alarm, laying aside her pen carefully. “I don’t understand.”

“Stay with him,” Cirilla said grimly. “I have to go commit regicide.”

“What,” Luliana said, and to her horror, Cirilla turned around and vanished. “No!” she exclaimed, but she was too late. “Ah fuck.” (Your picture was not posted)

a grump

Aug. 13th, 2021 04:20 pm
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i'm posting this here because i don't know where else to vent.
it's not exactly tumblr drama.
it's. me-drama. IDK.
just, whining )

yeah

Apr. 23rd, 2021 06:27 pm
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The fucking cat woke me at 3am and I rolled around trying to go back to sleep for an hour but have given up and am working on my writing and oh no i am not doing great at it.

i am so far from finishing anything at all, anything i can publish at all, and i am sad about that, like a lot sad. but. i poured like 12k into a thing that was refusing to cohere, and i got a wonderful person to beta-read it and they were like yup that’s because it’s broken, and i am like this is great now i will fix it, but alas, i am too stupid to fix it, it does not say what i want and i don’t know how to make it actually say what i want, so that’s demoralizing.

until i finish that one, i can’t really begin to work on the other one, because they have to fit together. The other-other one I could probably knock out but while it stands alone, it shouldn’t, so I should wait and re-work it once I have the first one done. but that means there’s another 6k just sitting there unusable, for now. And I did write a fairly good chunk of the bit after the Eskel Sequel, but for pacing and timeline reasons I need to have there be rather a lot more story beforehand, and it doesn’t have to be a lot but it’s got to hold up and it can’t be put in afterward, so that’s another 6k sitting there unusable for now.

and i spent yesterday doing math i’m not qualified to do, and it’s for a project i’m excited about but at this point now i’m feeling like the whole thing is going to be so much money and time and effort and all for just– me because i want to? that seems like a terrible idea, it’s only me, i can only feel good about projects i do for other people and i can’t bear the thought of other people working on a thing for me and yet i can’t do this without a shitload of help and that’s not like. how i operate, as a person.

BUT anyway

this was going to be a snippet post but as it happens it’s going to be a snippet of a different work entirely. so i should put it in separately. so this is just whining. so i should just delete it because there’s no purpose to it. argh. whatever man this is a journal and if i don’t say what i’m doing then later when i read back over this time period i’ll be like it’s weird that i wasn’t publishing anything what was i doing who knows.

anyway my Achievement this week was that when I inadvertently tripped over my own math trauma and gave myself what I think might have been almost a panic attack at my sister’s kitchen table I managed to swallow that shit back down and I don’t think anyone noticed I’d been crying so I get a gold fucking medal. But it’s been about 14 hours since that and I’m still feeling like I’m made of fucking bone china and I’m sick of this shit. (Your picture was not posted)

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Am currently really struggling through what I think is kind of an RSD thing, so that’s a bummer– IDK if it’s rejection-sensitive dysphoria or just having a bad time (unspecified), but I’m just straight up not having a good time bro.

Part of it is that I applied for a different job (shh, don’t fuss, don’t tell the camera store, I probably won’t get it)– if I’m making minimum anyway, then the world is wide open of other jobs that will pay me minimum, and while it’s not that I’m wild about working from home, something I could do both while in Buffalo and while at the farm would do a great deal to steady out my income over the year, which Dude does tend to give me shit about). And that meant looking at my resume, which was depressing– I’ve been terrible at, and miserable at, every job I’ve ever had, according to my jerkbrain (which let’s be fair is probably correct in this matter), so that’s. Upsetting.

As part of this I looked up contact info for a place I volunteered, at which I’d asked to be considered for a position if one came available– I need references, and have worked at my current position 12 years, and if I don’t want them to know I’m job-hunting (I don’t want them to know, it will probably come to nothing and I don’t want them getting so upset with me I have to leave, if I haven’t anything else lined up, which I probably don’t!) I can’t use anyone there, and boy if you go back more than 12 years whomst among my professional contacts would even still know who I was???– and while I was there I noticed, well. They have a job posting. For the position I wanted. I’m not qualified, likely, they’re not wrong, I’m not actually good at the job, it just extra-stung to know I’m only good enough to do that job if I do it for free.

(So then that spirals into– I’ve never been freely given a raise, you know. Every raise I’ve ever had in my life was either mandated by the structure of the company, or mandated by the state in the form of minimum wage increases, and one time precisely I managed to kick up a huge fuss at current job and bully them into giving me another quarter an hour but I was guilted over that for fully five years afterward and never asked again. I’m not a good employee! I’ve never been good at a single job I’ve ever had!)

Sigh. I feel like I was born at the wrong time. The only thing I can do is either what I’m told in the moment, or write novels, and there’s not a living to be earned in writing novels anymore, not with the current state of publishing. I don’t regret not trying to go pro at that; mostly everyone I know who’s tried has been miserable and not earned a living that way despite being possibly more talented than I. I tried to do freelance writing for a while but I hate writing articles, website copy, all of that– none of it is remotely interesting and I’d rather be bartending.

(OK I was good at bartending, and I got good tips, but it was physically draining and emotionally exhausting and I don’t think I could do it anymore. Well, especially not given gestures broadly all this nonsense.)

I feel like I’ve been in a holding pattern for five, six, seven years now? Trying to figure out how to balance the volunteer stuff with earning enough money to pull my weight in my household, and trying to squeeze in enough time to still be able to write– because that’s the thing, I have to write, and it’d be fantastic if I could do it for money but whether it earns money or not I need to have time do it because if I don’t I lose my freaking mind and it’s a slow death. I’ve learned it’s better to give up all other hobbies and keep writing than to try anything else, if I want to stay alive and functioning.

Anyway. Sorry, I just felt like maybe writing it down would defang it some. (Your picture was not posted)

burnt

Feb. 18th, 2021 06:27 am
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I’m so tired and burnt-out. I’m gonna try to be funny while I complain, that’s what I do– that’s the point of complaining– you get all het-up and yelly about what’s wrong, and it’s funny, and you all yell together about how terrible everything is, and if you’re lucky you can coin a really hilarious phrase to describe it and then that catchphrase can go on to be a thing you can yell in high-stress moments in the future and the people who were there for the earlier stress can yell it back and it can be a whole thing, an heirloom of thine house etcetera, but sometimes you feel a little, well, tired, and you feel like…. why all the heirlooms of mine house gotta be hilarious ways of describing terrible things? i want something good once in a while, you know?

anyway I’m feeling very tired and burnt-out and frazzled and like I have no attention span and can’t focus. The current straw breaking my back is that they raised the minimum wage in New York again, yay, but my company owners are in Pennsylvania, where they haven’t raised the minimum wage since like 1992 or something, and so every year when NY’s goes up, they illegally pay us at our old rates for the first pay period and we have to chase them down and ask them to pay us the difference that we’re now legally-entitled to, and I get that this is an innocent enough thing to happen but it’s all just a big slappy reminder that even though many of us have worked here for literal decades the owners will only ever pay us the least they’re legally obliged to.

Anyway they said they’d put the difference in the next paycheck, and it didn’t come, and now we’re on the third paycheck of the year and i squinted at mine and it was for 72 hours, and I’m pretty sure I worked 72 hours, but I don’t have access to the report the register generates of employee hours– but I do have access to the clock-in-and-out data, and long story short I finally did the math and they owe me 3.58 hours, and also I’ve now discovered that they round down to the nearest half hour when they pay us, which was something I’d been carefully not paying attention to, and it’s just all. Well it’s all tiring.

They insist they paid me the extra in this past paycheck. I double-checked my math; I worked 77.8 hours in two weeks because I took a day off after doing slightly over-long shifts all week to try to get shit done, and they subtract half an hour per eight for lunches, which puts me at 72.8, and then they round down, so it’s 72.5, that’s what I got paid for.

The other employees may not mind as much because they’re all working short hours so they can get the bonus unemployment money that’s going around currently, and that’s great (that’s a flat $300 regardless of what you earn so if you’re a high earner that fucking sucks for you, but for us on minimum that’s pretty damn good), but they’re all able to do this without falling behind because I’m the only part-timer doing 40-hour weeks. And it’s best this way, otherwise the bosses would’ve had to fire somebody entirely and this way they can hang onto people to hire back once, presumably, business goes back to normal. But it sucks because I’d be earning more on unemployment. Whatever! I don’t specifically need the money. But I feel shit-upon, which is really not what I need. I’ve been coming in four hours before the store opens so I can be out of the way, and it’s exhausting to leave the house so early.

On the other hand, if I get home early in the afternoon, I have time to work out and cook dinner. I went in extra-early yesterday because on Tuesday I’d come home and collapsed into bed and when I woke at 5:30pm dude was mad I hadn’t made dinner because he was tired too. (”Fine!” he said, when I woke, groggy, “I’ll come up with something!” and then started making beef stew, which apparently only I have ever made in our 18 years together because he had no idea that stews take 1-2 hours to simmer at the bare minimum if you don’t use the pressure cooker which also apparently he’d never observed me do the half a dozen times I’ve made stew since we got the pressure cooker? Anyway he made pan-fried catfish with great drama once I pointed out that the dish I’ve made at least once a month for 18 years needs to be cooked and wouldn’t be done in 20 minutes so starting it when we were both ravenous wasn’t a fantastic idea.) I’m sorry me traveling away for the weekend and coming back tired is so inconvenient for you, sir, I was at home trying to help my family work out the logistics of dealing with my late father’s belongings? this was not like some kind of fun gallivanting expedition? we do not have those in our lives anymore? anyway. He says he’s Extra Tired this week and is just So Out Of It so apparently that’s my problem. So I went in 45 minutes earlier than my usual early-start time, so I could come home, work out (my hips bother me if I don’t do this regularly and they’re starting to bother me and no I cannot put that off another day if I want to walk), and then make dinner, and have it ready by 5:30 because when you wake up at 5am your body clock tends to shift early!

But that’s the downside– when I rush out super early and come home super early, it’s very hard not to look like a total lazy loafer when it’s 3pm and you’re flat-out on the couch staring at the ceiling because you just worked 9 hours and you’re fried.

Anyway. I’d say “ah we just need a weekend out” but. where. no. not restful. anyway i feel like vacations are a fake idea.

I wanted to get takeout sushi to celebrate Rush Limbaugh’s death but I’d gone in early so I’d have time to get dinner started, so it seemed stupid not to do it, so I did it. But maybe tonight. All I want is a bucket of salmon. And a bottle of champagne. I’ll do without the hot tub. (Your picture was not posted)

sigh

Jan. 19th, 2021 10:27 am
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i looked it up and minimum wage is going up for upstate NY this year.

I’ve been at this job since 2007, and I’d started just above minimum, and by throwing holy tantrums I’d managed to get myself a couple of raises, but these minimum wage increases have now caught up to those, and now every year they surpass them, and every year I get my first paycheck and it’s at last year’s minimum wage rate and we have to call the boss, who lives in PA where they haven’t increased the minimum wage in ten years or more, and we have to tell him he’s underpaying all of us, and after some kerfuffle I get my raise and now I’m making minimum again.

At this point I’m the only one who knows how to do everything I know how to do, and if I left they’d be screwed, but. Minimum wage, and if they could pay me less, they would.

It doesn’t entirely matter; Dude makes four or five times what I make, and even though he’s long since paid back all the money I spent getting him through his last year of college and paying off his car and all, he still figures we’re even and don’t need to keep track. Which is a huge privilege.

It just makes me think, you know, I’ve hung onto this job because they’re willing to let me work whenever, provided I stay within a range of availability, and the job’s not hard and is in some ways satisfying.

But really. They’re paying me the least they legally can. I could go out and get any other job and make this much, or more. Why do I bother? It’s basically charity, on my part, to keep coming in, with the decade of experience I now have, and the bachelor’s degree they’ve never cared about (it was supposed to be a temporary summer job in ‘07 while I lined up some other things…. ha).

Anyway.

I could be making more money right now if they laid me off and let me collect unemployment. Mostly what I’m doing is filling in and doing the work of the other employees who’ve cut their hours down so they can collect the unemployment bonus. I don’t mind, but it does sort of sting. You know what I could do if I were being paid to stay home? Well, we know what I did do, I went and taught MM’s kids how to read.

Anyway.

I shouldn’t complain; the fact that I don’t need to worry about money is an incredible privilege, and one I can only have because I’ve had such incredible fortune in finding a stable relationship with a reliable person. I can’t afford not to work at all, but as long as I’m earning something it doesn’t matter that much.

If only they could afford to pay me even a token amount at the farm, I’d walk out of this place and never come back. But they really can’t. So I’ll stay on there as a seasonal volunteer, and keep schlepping back across the state to put in some hours for minimum, here, because I have to come back here to see my dude anyway. It’s a holding-pattern of a life, but it is what it is. (Your picture was not posted)

keys

Feb. 14th, 2020 03:12 pm
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Ugh so weirdly my copy of the key fob for my dude’s car hasn’t been working. this doesn’t matter, you can open the door with a key, except that the ignition has nowhere to put a key in. it’s the kind where you press a button? if your keyfob’s battery is dead, but live enough to blink the light letting you know it’s being pressed, but dead silently somehow, then you can’t move his fucking car out of the driveway where it’s blocking yours in the morning as the students are starting to show up to the school across the street and will park your street solid in like two more minutes and the fucking car won’t fucking start and it’s 20 degrees and you’re out there barefoot in pajamas trying to just MOVE the CAR and ARGH what the FUCK

so anyway, I’d left my keyfob behind while I went to the farm, for him to troubleshoot. And yeah, despite it appearing to work and lighting up when pressed, the battery was dead. Also despite me basically never using it, and he uses his every day and the battery died like two weeks ago. Because clearly, with this thing, it must constantly be active in order for the car’s ignition to recognize it, so the battery runs down equally quickly whether you’re driving every day or it’s sitting in a drawer. oh, modern life! 

So yesterday I put the fob back onto my keychain, which is a series of many small rings (my house, dude’s mom’s house, my mom’s house, my sister’s apartment, my BFF’s house, three keys to my work front door and offices, my huge car fob, dude’s huge car fob) connected by what used to be a nice carabiner but then I loaned it to Dude and he lost it, so now it’s this wimpy shitty little carabiner that doesn’t always close right.

And I went out, and I was brushing my car off and rolled my ankle off the edge of our driveway, which was invisible in the snow. So I fell, landed on my hands and one knee. I had my keys in my hand.

I got into my car and realized the carabiner was broken. My office keys had fallen off, but they were in my lap, so I retrieved them, and started my car, and drove away. I got to work and realized Dude’s key fob had fallen off too and I didn’t have it, not in my lap, not on the car floor. So I asked him to look in the driveway before the snow got deeper (or he drove over it on his way out, which was the most likely).

He found his fob and my keychain knife (I have a super nice tiny folding knife I use mostly for opening boxes), and brought them inside.

Hours later, when I got home, after a day in which it snowed all day, I discovered that my house key had also fallen off my keychain. I had no way to get into my house. Clearly, Dude had not found it. He gets home later than me.

I had to spend ten minutes scuffling through all the snow at the edges of the driveway, at the front of where my car had been, along the in-between spots, with my hands and feet, to find my house key, which was in the center of the driveway.

I found it about three minutes before Dude got home, but at least I have it now.

It’s the most me story ever, that is basically how I live my life most of the time. Sigh. 

ah fuck

Feb. 13th, 2020 02:12 pm
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I just got plotbunnied for what to do about the weird consent issues with Yennefer and the djinn. featuring my middle-aged Jaskier. fuck. 

on the downside, it’s more writing and i wasn’t going to take this long a break from original stuff. (i got feedback on the novella and it was. Real mixed. Sigh. Mostly what I expected but like. No simple answers, there: the real answer is that i have to write the novel. Which I have failed at, over and over again, for fifteen years now. Oh, seventeen years. Even better.)

But. On the upside, probably threesomes, which like. How do I resist that???

And people have been so dang nice about the Witcher stuff I’ve posted. Comments, reblogs, feedback, happy squee. How do I push all that aside to slave away on something I feel compelled to tell but which clearly does not feel compelled to be told? And then I could publish it, for what? To sell it for money? Listen I’ve looked into what authors make and it’ll be like, if I’m lucky I’ll eventually earn enough in royalties to have paid myself something like a quarter of minimum wage for having written it. Yes, it’d be something entirely new and different and I’d be able to bring this thing into the world and finally share it, but it’ll be so much work, and not that many people will eventually read it, most likely. And authors don’t really get paid, so it’s not like my tiny audience paying money for it will somehow do anything other than complicate my taxes and give me some weird little veneer of respectability that won’t make a lick of difference to anyone who matters. (I am not even contemplating trying to shop for an agent because I know my ADHD ass is not even remotely capable of dealing with that; it’d be selfpub or it sits in a drawer, so.)

Or I can write fanfic and get feedback. 

Sigh. So, I guess I’m pumped for weird threesomes.
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I absolutely hyperfocused and wikipedia-spiraled at work today except it wasn’t wikipedia, it was some bizarre website about Norse history, and it was only after I’d been reading article after article that I manually truncated the URL to find out what the fuck I was binging on and discovered it was the personal website of some weeaboo only for Viking stuff kinda guy, but it had really good cited sources and a ton of original photography and research on it, and anyway. I also watched a bunch of videos on turf building construction.

No, I’m not going to build a Viking longhouse to replace the yurt, but only because I don’t fancy trying to figure out what kind of turf would be suitable in this ecosystem. 

And no I’m not going to write a novel about Vikings but I am absolutely going to write a fantasy novel loosely based on the colonization of Iceland only set, like, in the future. Adding it to the list. 

I also finished editing and posting all the Iceland photos but I opted to make a comprehensive album that contains all the photos and therefore it’s not actually like… artistic merit like I usually do for photo selection, so there are some stunners but there are also like videos of the back of an airplane seat and stuff. I tried to make them chronological, that was my concession to logic. I’m just going to post a few of the highlights one at a time on Instagram probably.

I have done all of the cooking this week but at least dude has done several of the dishes? 

I’ve seen posts about chore charts going around and I’m seriously contemplating getting one. Not just because so much of the shit I do is absolutely invisible to him, but also because I think surely he must do more around the house than I realize, and if we put it on a chart I wouldn’t feel so miserably alone in what feels like my single-handed attempt not to live like an animal all the time.

I need to buy myself a new dayplanner to replace the one I had actually been intermittently using for ten months when it caught fire. I still have its charred corpse shedding cinders onto the back porch carpet, I’ll have to steel myself and discard it soon but I want to look and see if there’s anything left but I can’t bring myself to so it’s just ashes everywhere. Sigh. (Yes, I found identifiable charred pages in the wreckage and salvaged them but that was really mostly just self-torturing of me.)

I’ve never used a dayplanner past March before, but it almost feels like a judgement against me to have this happen to it that one time. 
(That’s not true, I had a dayplanner in Scotland, and lost it on a train, along with every bit of journaling I’d done about my first romantic relationship, and that was just really sad, and it took me a few years to try to pick up the habit again and by then I’d forgotten how that sort of thing works.)

sigh

Jan. 9th, 2020 03:16 pm
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So part of the joy for me of going on vacations is taking photographs. It’s been more of a chore lately, I’m having trouble making myself take photos the way I used to as a teenager, but still, I love having them to look back on. Everyday life too, which is why I sometimes dutifully sling my camera around my neck and lug it all over the place and only sometimes remember to take the lens cap off and snap anything. The doing is less exciting than it used to be, the reviewing remains pleasant. (Though, the more I know about photography, the more resigned I am to the fact that I’m not actually, like, talented, but I know from all my hobbies that talent is basically zero percent of anything you actually do. There’s practice and skill but literally like 95% of any thing is actually fucking doing the thing, and that’s harder than you’d think.)

Anyway. It was hard to take photos in Iceland because 1) it was dark most of the time, 2) I was struggling with a sore hip for large portions of the walking around early in the trip, 3) it was bad weather and I didn’t dare get the good camera out, and finally 4) I spent literally half of our waking hours driving a car, which did not allow me to operate a camera.

The thing is, Dude took over Camera Duty, and that was sweet of him, but what that means is that with dead-eyed grimness he pointed his point-and-shoot through the window and literally nonstop took photographs. He does not particularly care for photography, and has occasionally taken fun documentation-style snapshots of things, but this is like. it was breathtaking scenery, which is worth photographing but judiciously, right? Like you’ve got to wait for a good angle, and set up a shot, and take a few snaps, check your light and framing, zoom in or out and change your settings, then try again, right?

No he just jammed his arm against the windshield and nonstop took photos.

I get that he was trying to make it up to me, that I wouldn’t get to do this thing I enjoyed because I had to drive the car, but now, guess what?

I have to spend hours going through the literal thousands of grim joyless photos he took and try to winnow out maybe half a dozen that are worthy as keepsake snapshots.  They’re going to need color adjustment and probably judicious cropping to get the horizon horizontal, and there are going to be fifteen of any given subject, and most of them are going to have motion blur but you can’t tell that from a thumbnail so I’m going to have to load them all and look at them one by one.

So I get to spend hours being reminded that I didn’t get to take any of the artsy photos I wanted to take (in hopes of maybe printing and framing a few), while simultaneously wading through this well-intentioned monument to something he was miserable the whole time he was doing. like, that’s the other thing. Every single fucking time I, trapped in this small car in a hazardous circumstance it was taking a great deal of skill to navigate, pointed out some landscape feature and said “ooh look at that!” he interpreted it as a command to attempt to photograph it whether he felt he had the skill or opportunity or not. And I was like, “Dear, I am trying to have a conversation with you and enjoy this experience,” and he was like “I can’t get a good photo of that :( I’m a worthless person :(” and let me tell you that was far more exhausting than driving the fucking car through the fucking snowdrifts.

(Also I’d assumed he had looked up what to do if we spun out or went off a cliff or whatever, and only afterward discovered no, he had done no such thing and if we’d been in an accident I’d’ve had to try to figure it out. I had brought extreme cold weather emergency gear, but he had not, so it would definitely have been me trying to push the car. Listen kids, don’t ever trust a man no matter how many hours of research he says he’s done.)

Anyhow. I’m not like, mad, and it went the way it did and that’s fine, and we were there to have experiences not take photos, I just sort of wish his way of helping me hadn’t resulted in quite so much work for me. But that’s ok. We’re over it now and are going to just go on and do the work, because that is how we live in this world.
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I got one of them headaches where it’s behind your eye, and I’m writing it down because I always forget about stuff like this until it recurs and then I’m like “wait didn’t I… I don’t remember” so.

This started yesterday afternoon with my left eye feeling really dry, like I needed eyedrops, but I don’t have any so I didn’t do anything about it, and just kept the eye closed a bunch, but over the course of the evening it got worse and by dinner it was like, my whole head, on that side, and the bathroom lights while I brushed my teeth were torture. I slept fine but this morning it just hurts behind my eye. I’ve finally take some ibuprofen but I’m not super hopeful. It’s just weird that it felt like it was dry eye to begin with, and then morphed into whatever this was!!

It’s not too bad, I just really wish Bill had brought in that lamp like he said he was gonna so we could turn off the overhead lights. I brought in two lamps and that’s not enough for the whole room. The overhead fluorescents normally don’t bother me but today they’re sort of like death. Ugh. 

Bummer! 

Also today’s the day where we’re going to start getting messages to explain how we’ve ruined Christmas. I think we should keep a tally of how many Christmases we ruin each year. Downstairs they’ve been getting them all along– our main printing guy actually got into an altercation with a customer, and then one of my former coworkers, the one who used to torment me at the old store (one of several, but this one was actually insane, like heavily-medicated and occasionally institutionalized, which i say not as like, a knock against her, but as an explanation that when i’m like oh she was nuts i really mean, no, she was, she’d sometimes get convinced various of us had done things we hadn’t and so on, and mostly she tried to keep her shit under control but sometimes she did not, and so she hurt me quite a bit over a period of time)– well, she was visiting the store to buy her Christmas cards here, and she dove right in, and then came upstairs and i realized I’m still sort of traumatized about the shit she used to do, so that was fun! I sat at my desk like a pinned insect and smiled blankly and didn’t quite look at her and was Extremely Awkward, and thought about how funny it was that she was involved in a customer altercation here, when that was her specialty at the old store. (She no longer works for the company and I assume has herself better-managed, since she’s got three little kids now and by all accounts they’re doing fine. I’m glad, just. Do that over there and we’ll keep our lives heavily separate. That is Fine.)

Man oh man this ibuprofen could start working any minute and that’d be keen. I have low hopes though.
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sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “2 day shipping”

Oh what the FUCK. Make up a plausible date and call that dumbass town clerk back and demand THEY fix it. I dunno if it’ll work but they have the record of the original form and access to the bureaucracy, so they have more ability than they’ve used and they goddamn owe you.

I looked back in my call log and found when I called them. It was Sept 3rd. I was on the phone for literally one minute and twenty-seven seconds. But of course, I did not record the call, because why would I do that? Also how would I do that? I do not have the means to do that because as a regular, law-abiding person who works in retail and agriculture, I have no reason to have such precautions in place, and don’t even know how I’d go about doing them; I have instead, as a member of society, simply lived my life by trusting that people meant what they said, and behaving accordingly, and apparently I am in the wrong for that.

Here is my Instagram Stories-annotated screenshot of the call log. 

So I called and the town clerk’s office hours start at 9:30 so I’ll call back then.

I rehearsed what I was going to say in the car on the way to work and devolved into screaming both times, so hopefully that’s out of my system, because screaming at them isn’t going to help. But WHY DID THEY LIE TO ME. That’s what it boils down to, I did what the law said and what the cop said and what the document said, and then I called them and did what they said then, and they were LYING that they were going to do their job.

I DM’d Dude’s best bud who is a lawyer on Twitter, since that’s the most reliable contact info I have for him, and he said well, next time I guess send things certified mail, you’ve got no recourse but to call them and try to find out what the deal is. He did helpfully point out that the notice is not that my license is *already* suspended, but rather that it is *about* to be, so at least I have that going for me. 

I slept basically not at all, last night, and I’m so mad about all of this I can’t think straight, and there’s just no way to handle it, I have to go on about my business, and know, deep down, fundamentally, that I am a member of a society that depends on people to do their jobs and those people are under no real obligation to actually do their fucking jobs and none of it actually means fucking anything and it could all get so much worse at any single moment and I have no recourse. 
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So Amazon has killed Black Friday by having their Prime 2-Day Shipping be a thing for so long. People are now used to the idea that if you want to order a thing, you just go online, and then you get it in two days.

So this morning we had three times as many orders as we’d had on Cyber Monday, which is fine because we can still get things out, but it’s a little annoying because if we make any error, there’ll be no time to fix it before Christmas. 

Here’s the hitch: Amazon can’t actually get you shit in two days now. Most of their Prime stuff is three or four days by now. We sell stuff on Prime– it’s a program called Fulfillment By Amazon where we ship it in to their warehouses ahead of time, and then they sell it, and pay us once it ships. 

Some of those orders have now been pending for a week, up to two in one case. (That one shipped on Saturday, finally.) (They don’t pay us until they ship them.) Customers are ordering that shit as Prime, and it’s sitting in their warehouse. 

Anyhow, it’s kind of funny, in a dark bleak way; I’ve been working in online sales for six or seven years now, and have watched Black Friday/Cyber Monday slip into meaninglessness during that time.

I came home to a notice that my driver’s license has been suspended. I don’t even remember when it was, now, but over the summer sometime, I had a taillight out while I was driving on the Thruway, and I got one of those tickets where you just have to mail in a thing to prove you fixed it within 24 hours? So I did? But i forgot to keep a copy for myself, and kicked myself over it. And then I got a notice that I still had to appear in court, but it’s 200 miles away. So I called them. I don’t even remember what fucking month this was, now. Anyway, I called, and got the town clerk’s office, and the lady there looked at the court docket, and was like oh right, you did get your form in. It’s fine, you don’t have to come in! And I said, Will I get anything in writing to that effect? And she said no, but don’t worry about it.

Well joke’s on fucking me, isn’t it! I now have no way of proving any of this, and I don’t even remember what fucking month it was, but if I get pulled over now for any reason I will be thrown in fucking jail and believe me, I’ve had it happen before and I know they don’t mess around, they don’t care that it’s not warranted and you didn’t do anything wrong, you are A Criminal And A Scofflaw and they’ll take your glasses and make you sit for hours before you can call anybody.

So the moral of the story is, always get everything in writing and don’t ever, ever assume anyone’s competent at their fucking job.

I don’t even know where to begin to fix this, and it’s at minimum a $70 fine to get my license reinstated, and now I will absolutely have to drive to fucking Canajoharie at some point, and I am incandescently furious and also utterly without recourse.

validate me

Dec. 7th, 2019 02:13 am
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it is the busiest week of my stupid office job which is full of stupid and i hate it and am not fulfilled by it and also it pays me basically minimum wage despite me having been there for fully half of my adult life at this point and yet

AND YET

i have also made dinner every night this week except for monday, out of things we had in the house since we have not gone grocery shopping, and i’ve made good dinner mind you, never the same thing twice, always ready before 7pm except for banjo lesson night when actually it was ready by 7 we just weren’t home yet, thank you instant pot, and i have done three loads of laundry already this weekend even though it is friday evening (one of them has already hung to dry!), and i have moreover made drinks and done yet more dishes, i have done the dishes six times this week.

(Dude has taken the week off, from everything but work, and he’s been home early three days this week, and has spent his time sitting on the couch while i cooked him dinner and made drinks, and that’s his prerogative, he did not ask me to make him dinner, but god damn. Someone just appreciate me for a second please.)

(Also he hasn’t given me his laundry, despite me having begun laundry at 7am today, and I know he’s going to just dump a bunch of stuff into the basket like, just after I do the last load that would naturally accommodate that specific set of garments. (I have already done three out of the six loads I anticipate needing to do this weekend, and I sort pretty specifically, so.) Argh. I don’t mind doing all the household laundry, because I have a sort of OCD-adjacent compulsion about it, but. Come the fuck on.)

I need to be more chill about things. It’s just driving me nuts because I know he won’t begin to touch the mountain of dishes that have been building up despite my sporadic small efforts in between everything else until tomorrow morning approximately two hours after I have become ravenously hungry, whereupon he will spend like an hour and a half to do the pile of dishes, and only then will he contemplate defrosting something to cook it. It will be 2pm before we eat breakfast, and he will not be ready to begin the day afterward until approximately time for bed. 

VALIDATE ME I AM NOT A HOPELESS WRETCH AT HOUSEWORK

also validate my extremely grumpy feelings that if you wanted a housewife you shouldn’t be expecting me to work fulltime outside the home, you motherfucker.

(Also: what a genius am I not to have reproduced? can you imagine if there were kids here too? oh my fucking god.)
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i love giving gifts, i love receiving gifts.

i hate buying things, and i’m bad at making things it turns out, i think i can do it and then i’m fucking terrible at it. 

my family sends out these disorganized email chains that have everyone’s wish lists on them, but several members literally never contribute a list anywhere and so you have to guess, and then Mom and Dad just instantly buy literally every item on the wishlists for the children, and then my middle-little sister who is actually organized has also additionally spoken to the various mothers and sussed out what their children need and then buys that, and so you’re left either buying random shit for children you don’t see that much who don’t need anything, or just not getting them anything, and they never particularly complain but you remember being a kid and vaguely noticing which adults gave shitty boring presents. and sometimes you go like five years and just don’t get anyone christmas gifts, and that’s fine nobody complains but it’s shitty and then you don’t want to accept presents even though you love getting presents. 

and now it’s already the second week of December and I’ve just now caught on that I don’t know what the fuck I’m buying for anyone. I made and submitted a wishlist of my own during the first week of November and have long since forgotten what’s on there, and feel vaguely guilty because what justification do I have in demanding gifts when I’m shitty at buying them for anyone else?

Listen I’ve tried taking care of this in the summer. Just, figuring out what I’m buying/making for everyone, and going ahead, and finishing up by September. Guess what happened? Forgot what the presents were and where I’d put them by November, and come Christmas, had nothing to send out. I keep finding those gifts in various places in my house and usually I don’t remember who they were even for in the first place. So that’s right out, I’m too fucking stupid to shop early, and there’s nothing for it but to lose my shit during the second week of December every year. 

(I’ve long since given up on Dude’s family. It’s his problem, and the fact that he’s fallen down on it literally every year for fifteen years is not my problem. Sorry bro, I don’t have the fucking time for that. Have I bought his mother a birthday present once in seventeen years? No because he doesn’t know when her birthday is, or won’t tell me, I’m not actually sure which. Could not be more clearly not my problem if there were a legal contract stating so.)

Once in a great while I manage to go in on a present with somebody. That’s great, I just hand over cash and they put my name on the tag. Fan fucking tastic. 

God I’m so cranky this morning. Sorry. Part of it is that I was so proud of myself for being organized about my library books last night and then I got home and sat down to renew the one single book I’d kept that I’d been meaning to read and was about to finally dive into, and there’s a hold on it so I can’t renew it, so now I’ve got to scramble and figure out a way to get it dropped back off today urgently. UGH. Why can’t they show you there are holds on things before you try to renew them??? I was waiting to do the renewing until I knew which ones I was done with and dropping off. 

SIGH I am just a MARTYR to LINEAR TIME.

Also I slept funny and my neck keeps “crunching” when I move my head so there’s that. 

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