This novelty ruler has been in the wrong room in my house for months. Every time I have looked at it, for that entire time, it has annoyed me. Today, I picked it up, carried it through a hallway, my kitchen, my laundry room and the master bathroom and placed it right there, where it belongs, and where it will be used to make sure that all of my books are lined up perfectly.
Months. It took fifteen seconds to move and has annoyed me multiple times per day for months.
But now it is in the right place.
Also, because that wasn’t much of a post, sometimes I say things on more ephemeral websites that I don’t think are completely stupid. With that in mind, I offer you the following screenshot, and invite you to comment on its wisdom or lack thereof, either here or at the original source. I’ve talked about some of these ideas before, but some of them are newer, at least in terms of being expressed by me:
I will freely admit I have not done the math, which may need to be tweaked, but I do genuinely think something like this would work for more accurate, proportional representation. Am I dumb? Call me dumb!
I have believed myself to be entirely neurotypical for my entire life, other than, y’know, the anxiety disorder and occasional crippling depression, so … yeah, maybe this wasn’t the right sentence to start with? But I’ve definitely never thought I had ADHD before. Until this week. My god. It has been a nightmare week in a lot of ways, some of which I’ve talked about and some of which I haven’t, so maybe I’ve earned it, but … ugh. I read nearly 9,000 pages in January according to Storygraph. I don’t think I’ve managed 200 this week. I can’t focus. It’s driving me batshit.
Now, a good chunk of that is Nioh 3, I’m not gonna lie; I’ve put 24 hours into it already since it came out. I knew it was going to eat my life, and eat my life it has. The other thing, though? Have you heard of Redactle? It’s the worst fucking thing ever. Imagine a Wikipedia article, with all the words except maybe the 15 most common English words blanked out. Selected at random. And then the game is you guess words until you get the title of the article. Which might be, like, “Jesus,” or something you’re familiar with, and might be Niamey, the capital city of Niger, or maybe it’ll be Navier-Stokes Equations, which you will somehow solve in 178 words? “Adivasi,” by comparison, took 401.
It’s not … fun, so much as addictive and horrible? But I haven’t done one yet today and I will before I go to bed. Right after I beat this boss. And then maybe I’ll get some sleep before I pick my wife up at the train station tomorrow morning, and hopefully my life more or less returns to normal.
(Thirteen minutes and 235 words for today’s puzzle, btw.)
I am bored and kvetchy and it’s making my anxiety act up something fierce. I actually got quite a lot done today– no big projects, but a ton of little jobs around the house and I got the oil changed on the car– but since the sun went down I’ve turned into a mess, and I can’t concentrate well enough to read.
That part’s the alarming part, honestly. It’s rare that I can’t focus enough to read. I’m watching someone else play a video game while I’m writing this, and I’m starting to think I need to dive back into Skyrim or something like that; I simultaneously need something new to do and am kind of aching for something familiar and comfortable I can just fall into.
I’m also, for the first time in several years, pretty excited (or at least not actively dreading) Christmas, mostly because I feel like I definitely won Christmas this year. I don’t know if other families do this thing, where they’re competitive about who gets each other the best gifts– hell, I don’t know if my family does this thing or if it’s just me– but one way or another it’s me, hi, I won Christmas, it’s me.
Anyway, I’m going to go take down the wallpaper in the library or something.
This has been a massive mess of a mental health day. It started off absolutely wonderfully, with the literal first thing I was greeted with upon turning my phone on being that Dick Cheney had died, but then featured a lunchtime panic attack that led to me calling off for the rest of the afternoon (it was all meetings, not teaching, but still,) getting home all full of piss and vinegar about getting a couple of things done while everyone else was out of the house, then doing none of that, and ending with one of my more unshakable depressive episodes lately, as I sit here watching election returns and dealing with a shitton of possibly-misplaced family and work-related guilt.
Part of me is blaming DST again. It was pitch-black before 6 PM and my mood just fell apart. Seasonal affective disorder is not usually a problem I have, and it’s worth pointing out that my day was shit when the sun was out too, but I’ve had a hard time this week for some reason.
Man, I don’t know if I should blame my phone or the Current Unpleasantness or what, but my powers of concentration have been significantly diminished lately. I may deliberately abandon the “20% of my books this year should be nonfiction” goal because I keep bailing on nonfiction books halfway through, and the novel whose cover up there and whose title I am deliberately not going to use anywhere in this post is an objectively good book— shut up, that’s a thing– and I’m halfway through it and I am suffering, y’all. And it is 100% because this book demands you pay attention to it and I am currently not capable of paying sufficient attention to complicated texts to have any real idea of what’s going on. It’s making me nuts.
I dunno, man. I don’t want to quit this book but I also don’t want to be miserable when I’m reading and it’s not like I can’t pick it up again later. That’s the good thing about books; you put them on the shelf and they stay there for as long as you want them to. They don’t grow legs and walk away. If you have even the slightest interest in juuuuust barely pre-Christian Britain and aren’t currently brain-rotted like me, you should check this book out because you’ll like it. But right now I just don’t have my shit together enough to properly appreciate it. I’m giving it one more day and if something doesn’t click I’m going to put it away and pretend it’s a temporary choice. Again, this is completely on me. I want my brain back, dammit.
I managed to hit a parked car in my own fucking driveway this morning.
We have, for lack of a better word and in the interest of not telling a long story, a Tenant in our house. She’s been here for several months. She parks her car in the driveway every single morning. Because our garage is currently packed full with bullshit, my wife has also been parking in the driveway. I am on Fall Break, as all of you know, and for some reason when I left my house for a doctor’s appointment at 7:50 this morning, the fact that my wife’s car was not in the driveway made my fucking brain short-circuit and I assumed that that meant the other car was not in the driveway either. I realized my terrible mistake about half a second too late, and I don’t know yet how much my fucking idiocy is going to cost me.
To the doctor’s! Where I received a hepatitis B shot (needle #1) and had blood drawn (needle #2) so that my A1C could be tested. It’s 5.7! The diabeetus is officially Controlled! I can go off one of my many medications now!
Seriously, one of these days I’m going to take a picture of the pile of fucking pills I ingest every night. It’s ludicrous.
I also had to fill out the questionnaire about my mental health that I have to fill out every time I go to the doctor since I’m on brain meds. I was honest on the depression scale, but I handed the anxiety scale over to the doctor and told her flat-out that I was lying on it. Why? There’s a fucking election in two weeks, and my anxiety is off the scale but not in a way that adjusting my meds is going to help. We’re gonna leave those alone, and in about two weeks I’m either gonna be fine or I’m gonna need a prescription for fucking strychnine.
I mailed the postcards.
And then I went and got my second tattoo (Needles #3- God, who knows) in two months. My appointment started at 11:00 in the morning and I wasn’t finished until 4:15. My arm fucking hurts— this was easily the most painful tattoo (and the biggest, and the most colorful) I’ve ever had, and you can see from all the open pores at the bottom of the image that my arm isn’t terribly happy with me. Hummingbirds were my mom’s favorites, though, and I absolutely love the design. Griffin Freehling at Enamored Arts, LLC does great work. But holy shit, I need to not spend any more money at all for the rest of my break.
