… today was the kind of day where I’m in my room, just after school lets out, when another teacher comes in who needs to vent, and it quickly becomes clear that she doesn’t just need to vent, she needs to be talked off a ledge to some extent, and then while she’s venting, a second teacher comes in to vent, and then a few minutes later a third teacher comes in to vent, and they’re all venting at each other, and okay I kinda had a rough day too, and I don’t mind being everybody’s sounding board, but would y’all mind if I just … went home, and left y’all my room as your private venting space?
No? That would be rude? Well, shit, I guess I’m staying late tonight then.
Dammit.
On the plus side, there was, like, a bomb threat or something called in against all of our middle schools? So maybe everybody will stay home tomorrow.
I haven’t ordered the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC yet.
I … what?
I put something like 130 hours into Elden Ring. My Let’s Play series is a hundred and ten episodes long. I completed every mission I could find, got the Platinum trophy, all of the endings, everything. Played the absolute ever-loving shit out of that game and enjoyed Goddamn near every second of it.
And they’re releasing a lengthy DLC on the 21st, which by all indications is amazing. And I haven’t bought it, I don’t think I’m going to buy it, and I’m not excited about it. Right now I should be planning on staying up late on Thursday night so that I can get started immediately, just like I did with the actual game. I stayed up late to record the demo, for God’s sake.
What the hell is wrong with me?
There’s been a consistent theme in my life over the last several years of this creeping anhedonia, where I just … stop doing things I used to really love doing, or stop enjoying things I used to enjoy. I effectively don’twatch anything any longer. No movies, no TV, nothing streaming. There’s a new season of The Boys, which I’ve enjoyed. Not gonna watch it. The Acolyte? Not gonna watch it. I’m done with Star Wars. I’m done with Marvel. I’m only still buying comic books because my weekly trip to the comic shop is my only reliable in-person interaction with human beings I’m not related to or work with; I can’t stop shopping there unless I move or die. I could literally just come home and put them in a box and never read them and I wouldn’t miss a thing.
You’re never going to catch me complaining about reading, but it’s literally the only thing I do for fun. That’s weird, right? I read books and I write here. Dassit. Those are my hobbies. The honest truth is I think I could sell my PS5 and my Xbox and I wouldn’t miss them. And I’ve been a gamer my entire life.
I don’t fucking get it, and I don’t like it.
(And, to forestall this: Yes, I recognize that I’m basically describing a textbook case of clinical depression here. And while I’m on Effexor, that’s an anti-anxiety med, not an antidepressant, and I don’t think the two overlap much. But I have no other symptoms of depression, including the not exactly minor detail that I’m rarely actually feeling depressed. This is a mental health issue, don’t misunderstand me, but I feel like the most obvious answer is not the right one.)
I tell you what, when you’re someone who tends to write his way through his issues, and you’re realizing that you don’t want to write about the shit that’s currently occupying your mind … that’s a problem.
I alluded the other day to realizing that you’ve grown tired of a long-term hobby, and it’s floated through my head several times recently (and, I think, was also suggested by someone here, although I’m not about to go looking through comments) that if I described what I’ve been like lately to a third party and especially if I didn’t tell them I was talking about myself, they’d describe me as clinically depressed. My anhedonia is through the roof lately; I don’t enjoy much of anything that I used to enjoy, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.
I’ve effectively stopped watching all things that can be watched. I have a probably month-high stack of comic books sitting next to me that I bought and actively don’t want to read. I’m ready to clear all of my superhero memorabilia out of the house, and that’s a lot of stuff. Even video games have been sources of more stress than stress relief yesterday; I’ve been playing Baldur’s GateIII pretty consistently for a few weeks and I had a moment the other day where I realized I was getting tired of it. I’m … maybe a third of the way in? And my backlog is like six or seven games deep right now. If I hadn’t already shut down the YouTube channel (which is another thing I used to enjoy that I’ve stopped doing) I’d have to at this point, just because I can’t fucking finish anything.
I’m still reading, but nothing’s set the world on fire recently. I don’t know what the shit I’m going to do if I lose interest in reading. It’s unimaginable. And, well, y’all can bear witness to the amount of time I’ve spent writing recently. The weird thing is that I don’t feel like I’m unhappy; I just … feel like I don’t really enjoy anything lately. A bunch of perfectly cromulent geek hobbies have been tossed aside in favor of the fucking NYT crossword and Spelling Bee and I refuse to be that person.
I’ve been on brain meds long enough that I’m used to sort of monitoring my mental status from a distance. I’ll get in touch with my doctor if I start feeling like this is getting genuinely alarming, or if my wife comes to me after reading this and says she’s noticed something different. It may just be that I’m finally aging out of my juvenile bullshit; who knows. I just … really miss liking things, that’s all, and I don’t feel like that’s something I do any longer.
I am more or less taking tonight off, but I thought I’d let everyone know that my student from yesterday was back in class today and all appears to be well.
Note that, at least if you’re reading this on desktop, there’s a “pages” link underneath the like button at the bottom of the post. Or you can just click here, I guess.
Friday night I took an Emergency Brain Pill. I wasn’t necessarily having a mental health emergency or anything really close to it, but I basically use these pills when I can’t get my brain to shut off and let me sleep, and what with the God-tier sleep apnea I apparently also have, and having survived my first week in the new building, I figured I was owed a decent night’s sleep. The pill kicked my ass, rendering me a useless, sluggish mess all day Saturday and requiring a three-hour nap in the middle of the afternoon. Then today my son had his Lego Robotics competition, which somehow went from 8:15 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon, and by the end of it the boy was so bored he was in tears.
I have … some issues with how this competition was organized. Nothing I can really yell at anybody about, because there’s only one competition, and they didn’t place high enough to advance to the state-level competition in December, but from what I can tell most of the people involved are okay with that. Regardless, we got home around five and all of us died. I had grading planned for tonight, and fuck that. They can wait a little longer, they’ll be okay.
Sometime in the next couple of days I need to do a book review– the short version is that Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful is magnificent– and think out loud a bit about how grading needs to work in my new building. But this is all I’ve got for tonight, I think.
Today went exactly as I thought it would, as opposed to how I feared it would. Everybody, from the building principal to the security guards to the kids, seemed really nice, and there don’t seem to be any shouty people in my hallway yet, and other than some casual profanity in the hallway I didn’t even see any misbehavior. Learning the LMS system the new district uses is going to crack my skull open, and right now I kind of hate it, and I talked all day so my throat feels like somebody ran an electric mixer in it for a couple of minutes, but other than that? No complaints.
I had a whole bit here about the Speaker of the House but having written half of it, I’ve decided it’s dumb and I need to learn more before I put anything dumb where people can read it. So … yeah. My advice to the Democrats is to listen to people who are smarter than me.
