I think it’s Saturday. It may not be, and if it turns out that I’m wrong and it’s not Saturday, I won’t be surprised at all, because as bad as my ability to tell what day it is has been damaged by my prolonged period of not going to work, this weird thing where now the boy is on vacation too and my wife is having random four-day weekends is just completely screwing with me.
That cup up there is my coffee cup. There are others like it, but this one is mine. The crayon is included for scale. That coffee cup is so large that it’s actually difficult to hold one-handed; it needs a second handle. It holds an enormous volume of coffee. Sugar is added to it via multiple scoops of the largest spoon we have.
I have lost track of the amount of coffee I’ve consumed this morning and I still do not feel remotely human. I think at some point in the last couple of days, maybe more than one of them, Christmas was celebrated in the homes of various relatives, but most of it is a blur. There is only The Couch for me today, or at least there will be once I decide there has been enough coffee.
So, yeah. If we were having coffee, I doubt I’d be fully cognizant that you were in the room. That kind of morning.
If we were having coffee, we’d be talking Star Wars. There’s little or nothing else to talk about. I’ll be seeing The Force Awakens Friday afternoon– granted, after many people have seen it already (oh, were I just younger; I spent three days waiting in line outside in costume for Phantom Menace tickets, and there were widespread roars of delight when it was reported that the then-fledgling-technology MoviePhone was crashed as hell) but I have a kid now and that means I don’t get to go to late evening shows on weeknights anymore.
But: there are six days until I get to see a new Star Wars movie, and given what Disney plans to do to the franchise this is probably the last time that that feeling will ever get to be special. I’m honestly kind of surprised that there isn’t a trailer ready for Rogue One yet. Six days is a rather convenient number, as there are also six Star Wars movies and I’ll be watching one a day until I see the new one. Hopefully sometime over winter break we’ll be taking the boy to see it; I’m still concerned that it’s going to end up being too scary for him, and that’s one of the few ways in which the film could end up genuinely disappointing me, because I’m really invested in taking my son to see his first movie soon, and that movie needs to be Star Wars.
I’m trying to decide exactly how much I need to be restricting my internet access this week. I haven’t been avoiding spoilers, particularly, but I have decided that I know enough about the movie and don’t really need to know or see any more until I see it. Wanton theorizing with friends is fine, but I don’t want to know any more and so I’ll probably need to be turning the computer off and writing some posts early toward the end of the week.
How about you? You’re going to see the movie, or you wouldn’t be having coffee with me. Any big preparations for Star Wars?
I actually wasn’t going to comment on this initially, but something just hit me: there are a ton of sales jobs available in the area, and I’ve applied for none of them despite a suspicion that I might actually be pretty good at such work. I just accidentally figured out why: after fifteen years of teaching and twelve years of NCLB, one thing I really want is a job where, as much as possible, my evaluation as an employee is based on what I do and not on what other people do. Teachers are probably the best example of that, where just about all that matters to our evaluations now is how people who are not us and who we have no real control over do on tests that we can’t see beforehand and didn’t write. But sales is not far behind– if somebody doesn’t have the money to buy something, chances are that person just isn’t gonna buy it, and talking them into buying it anyway is unethical as hell. Sales is also a little too beholden to the vagaries of the economy than I’d prefer. I hadn’t really made that connection prior to putting this video up, but that’s definitely part of my reticence here.
If we were having coffee, it’s pretty likely that my inner misanthrope (who is not always as “inner” as he should be, let’s be honest here) would be on full display. This has been a flatulent, flabby nothing of a week for me, and I’ve either been lazy as hell after an extremely busy Thanksgiving week and Black Friday weekend or showing symptoms of clinical depression or very possibly both. There’s been a panic attack or two, and oh, I managed to get turned down for like seven different jobs this week. One job turned me down twice! One of the two “nope, not you” emails specifically referenced that they were looking for candidates who more closely fit the job requirements.
The job: mortgage closing agent. The requirements: no experience, associate’s degree. I am deep into a trap here, kids; I am not (on paper) qualified to do anything other than teach, despite being a versatile motherfucker with a ton of different skills who would be perfectly cromulent at a wide variety of different jobs. So most jobs that are roughly equivalent to my current level of responsibility and pay require years of experience doing shit that I know how to do and I am capable of doing but do not have because I’ve been teaching instead. For other jobs, they look at my resume and see someone who is clearly pushing forty if not there already and highly educated to boot (I have two Master’s degrees) and refuse to even talk to me because they assume, hell, I don’t know what they assume, but I’m unclear on the reason why someone would think I couldn’t do a job that asks for no experience and an associate’s degree. The pay was even good! What the hell?
So, yeah. I’m at the point where I really need someone I know to go “hire this guy.” The problem is everyone I know in town is a teacher, and I love y’all but teaching jobs is not what I need right now. I did have one guy recommend me to his boss, and I applied for an open job, and he emailed me about salary requirements, but upon seeing what he was offering and realizing that there was absolutely no way I was going to make it through an interview where I’d need to pretend to be enthusiastic about training people to use insurance software we sort of both mutually declined to interview.
Which is probably desperately stupid on my part, because broke. But that really was a job that I would be likely to flee at the earliest opportunity.
And I haven’t figured out how I get through the part of the job-search process where they contact my current employer and he says “Oh, that guy? We forgot he existed, he hasn’t been at work since September.” And, believe me, I had a couple reminders this week about why.
Sigh.
True fact: Neither of my eyes are actually closed in this picture.
I might change the conversation to beards after a while. I’m growing my winter beard in at the moment, and it entertains me how every time I shave a beard off the next one grows in different. This one– also something that won’t help me during a job interview, I suspect– is coming in Full Hobo, and my current look is not one that’s going to make “no, he’s not diagnosable with depression at all” be a thing people say about me.
It actually looks a lot cleaner than it is in that photo. I’d get the camera closer but then WordPress would probably shut the blog down for obscenity and this is really my only lifeline at the moment. I can’t pull off that mid-twenties pretty guy 5 o’clock shadow look, so my only hope is to let it grow until it’s long enough to not look shabby, and we are in Utter Shabby at the moment.
After all that fun shit if you were still bothering to sit near me I might start discussing stories. I had this weird half-hallucinatory falling asleep process last night– not drug-induced, I promise; this was created by comfy— and I came up with like a dozen new stories to write, several of which I still remember and have dutifully dumped into my Loose Ideas folder in Wunderlist. Other than the #FridayFictioneers piece I got no fiction of any kind written last week, and I’ve legitimately got more on my plate than I can handle at the moment, so it was kind of weird that my brain spent a couple hours tossing “This! And this! And THIS!” at me. Maybe, brain, when I’m sitting in front of a computer websurfing forhours and pretending to write, you let me work on one of those several stories?
Crazy. I know.
No one’s ever having coffee with me again, are they?
Also: I love you guys, but do me a favor and refrain from trying to cheer me up/offering messages of support in comments. My brain is weird. Venting about this shit on my blog is how I deal with it, and heartfelt “It’s going to get better, we promise!” types of messages, for some reason, frequently somehow actually make the depression and anxiety worse, for reasons that are not at all clear to me. Make fun of me. Yell at me for being whiny. Believe it or not, the way my brain works, that’ll actually be BETTER.
Oh, and if you happen to be in northern Indiana and need an employee, maybe tell me that too.
If we were having coffee, it would have to be quick this time around– we have the first of two Thanksgivings today, one of my oldest friends is in town, and I got shit to do this morning, since I didn’t manage to get the kitchen fit for human habitation last night and I still haven’t confirmed that our cord-cut television set can handle the footballing that everyone seems so concerned about this afternoon.
It’s been a good week, short of a fairly major medication-related flare-up yesterday, and while I haven’t gotten as much done on Sunlight as pure wordcount might indicate I’ve been pretty happy with what I’ve created. We’d also spend some time talking about that Syria post, which has picked up three hundred more Facebook shares since I went to bed last night (currently at 1300) and may be actually legitimately going viral now rather than just being Really Damn Popular. As I said yesterday, I’m waiting to see if Reddit gets ahold of it. So far, no, but Facebook is pushing it just fine on its own.
This week’s going to be crazy busy, too, what with Actual Thanksgiving on Thursday (that’ll be my wife’s family) and exhibiting at Starbase Indy on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afterwards. If you happen to live in the Indianapolis area I insist that you come and see me. I also have to spend some time grading tomorrow one way or another; we’re in “Suck it up, buttercup” mode on that right now and it just has to be done.
Another thing that’s happened this week: it’s been a week to get in touch with old professors, find out that they still remember me, and promise to send them copies of Searching for Malumba, which is another thing I need to make sure to do this weekend. I should have ordered more copies of Malumba; with the three I currently have promised to professors (one of whom is going to be at SBI giving a talk, awesomely enough, and doesn’t know she’s getting a book yet) I only have three to actually sell at the convention. Selling out of books is a good problem to have, mind you, but I’d rather have enough stock on hand, and CreateSpace ain’t getting me more on that kind of timeline.
If we were having coffee, I’d probably be doing my level best to drag the conversation out for as long as possible. There’s about a foot of grading in the car, and I didn’t assign any of it and I don’t know what any of it is, so you can probably imagine how excited I am about getting to it as soon as possible.
It’s been a busy few days. We had friends over for dinner Thursday, which meant that I spent the entire day cleaning and prepping and cooking for seven. One of the extra four was another four-year-old, my son’s best friend, and they spent the evening carefully tearing apart my nice clean house, so I’m glad I made sure the place was spotless. We had dinner at my in-laws’ Friday night, and yesterday we went to the zoo and then had dinner over at my parents’ place. What this means is that I haven’t touched Sunlight in a few days. Now, I’m not officially doing NaNoWriMo, so there’s no actual notion of being “behind” to work with here, but I would like to get a lot more writing done in this upcoming week than I did in the previous one.
Also, I managed to get through the week with a minimum of panic-attack related stress. I’m pretty sure I actually pushed one away at one point, too. Which is all good.
I’m pretty sure NaNo would be impossible this month anyway. We’re doing Thanksgiving twice; one of my best friends will be in town all next weekend for the first one, and I’ll be in Indianapolis at a conference the weekend after normal Thanksgiving. There is no earthly way I’m going to get any writing done in Indianapolis. It’s not even worth considering. So that’s at least three if not six days I’m already down. If I end the month halfway through the manuscript (currently targeted at 75K words) I’ll be happy. I should finish up the first major section today at right around the 25% mark, so that’s all good.
You are, hopefully, also playing Fallout 4, so that we might discuss that for a moment too. I’m enjoying the hell out of it although I don’t expect to have a lot of time for it the next few weeks.
The job front is … well, about the same. More on that next week, maybe.
Also, I’ve decided I’m done with Force Awakens footage until I see the movie. I’m not trying to put myself on a spoiler blackout or anything, I just feel like I know enough. I’m still not convinced it’s going to be appropriate for my son, which is kind of disappointing, but I’d love to be wrong.
If we were having coffee, I’d probably be talking about books. I’m thisclose to being finished with the Neal Stephenson book I’ve been pounding away at for what seems like forever but is probably only about a week and a half (checks Goodreads; two weeks on the nose) and once I have it finished I have books by damn near every favorite author I have sitting on the shelf waiting for me. Seriously, check the list: Salman Rushdie, Chuck Wendig, Matt Wallace, Cherie Priest, Seanan McGuire, Tana French, Stephen King, and that’s just the ones I can remember. Plus a couple of books by new authors I’m excited about and some intriguing nonfiction.
My unread shelf may be a little bigger than usual right now.
Seveneves is definitely getting a review in this space, because it’s fantastic and broken in a very interesting way, and I’d probably dance around it without actually spoiling anything because that’s what the review’s for.
I might mention that Fallout 4 comes out this week, and that buying Fallout 4 may well represent the last money I’m allowed to spend on myself in 2015, because as of yesterday I’m on medical leave until January of 2016. Yep, the rest of the semester.
That, uh, might halt the talk about geekery and books and video games. But it means that the Skylights sequel is sure as hell gonna come out on time, because WTF else am I going to have to do with myself? I don’t know how to be on medical leave. I don’t know how to behave, especially since I tend to report damn near every life activity on this here blog and I’m kinda paranoid that somebody’s gonna be all hey did you hear he did this while he was on medical leave is he allowed to do that???
Mental illness is a bitch, y’all, even the kind I have, where I kinda feel like I’m overstating the case by even calling it mental illness, but apparently I’m mentally ill enough that both my family doctor and my therapist signed paperwork stating that I can’t go back to work until we figure the panic attacks and anxiety disorder out, which they expect to take until the middle of January. And yet 90% of the time, I’m fine. It’s just that that other ten percent is fucking awful and rather annoyingly difficult to predict, and it tends to interfere with my ability to reliably teach children.
But yeah. Enough of that; I’m tired of talking about my brain on here. Let’s talk about how Sanctum of the Sphere is free today and how everyone who hasn’t yet should download it. Let’s talk about Dark Souls 2, which I have to somehow put to bed before I start playing Fallout (yeah, right) and how seeing a video about a little game called CounterSpy on Penny Arcade got me to buy it and I’m having more fun playing it than I did Metal Gear Solid V.
Let’s talk about how I keep adding new comic books, and how I’m gonna have to pare that down what with the loss of income, but holy crap guys are comic books good right now.
Anything but my stupid brain. I’m tired of that. And as it turns out, I have plenty of free time for other stuff now.
If we were having coffee I’d be on my third cup of the morning already, because I had two right after getting up. It’s kind of a sleepy, crabby morning around the Siler household this weekend, because Halloween tonight is probably going to be a washout and that’s putting all of us in a bad mood. It’s already raining and the hourly chance of rain for the rest of the day bounces back and forth between seventy and ninety percent. Should I be thanking Hurricane Patricia for this nonsense? Maybe. I know at least one actual meteorologist; maybe she’ll let me know.
Last Halloween, you may remember, we had a blizzard. Tonight, a torrential downpour. I’d rather have the blizzard; at least I got to stand outside in that, and there are few things that I dislike more than being outdoors in the rain. I have no costume and I didn’t carve a pumpkin because my brain fell into this annoying feedback loop where I wanted to come up with something neat and creative and I couldn’t so I just didn’t do it at all.
I am starting to think, after several weeks of these posts, that I am not a very fun person to have coffee with, and I’m kinda tired of that, too. Then again, if I remember right, I started writing these right after my medical bullshit started up and maybe I shouldn’t blame myself for all of it. I’ve been less fun for the people around me, too.
If we were having coffee, I think you’d probably be able to tell that I start work again next week. It occurred to me yesterday that if I made it through my mom’s surgery without an episode, I can probably get through a week of work, but I am noticeably blechy and jumpy at the moment. I need next week to go smoothly, and I need to not end up in the hospital again, and in particular if the hospital thing happens again I need to just start thinking about taking an entire grading period off, because I have no idea what the hell’s going on. For once, I want to go back to work.
I’m tired of writing posts where people feel like they need to wish me well in comments, honestly.
Later today or tomorrow, depending on my mood, I’ll talk about Searching for Malumba‘s launch. The tl;dr version: surprisingly successful! But more details later.
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