Laughter Through Tears

Monday through Thursday is the online convention event that's replacing the usual annual fall geek con, Icon, which takes place every year on the week-long holiday. Taking the con online has prompted the organizers to switch to a payment model where a one-time cover price gains the user access to all events, which has allowed me and my brother to make last-minute, stress-free decisions about what to watch. For example, there was a GOH event on Monday that I had thought about attending, but it was quite late at night and I was tired. I ended up watching two events on Monday (not quite back-to-back) and two and a half on Tuesday.

Then I was going to take a break on Wednesday and do some intensive writing on The Flower of Fairmont, which is getting very close to being ready for a demo, but alas. After a migraine on Monday night (surprise!) and a worse migraine late Tuesday night (my fault, for playing too much Skyrim), I was a wreck on Wednesday. Not the worst rebound I've ever had, but I was not good to work. And that's with being at home and having all the resources available to make things easier -- shades down, dimmed screen, low volume. So Wednesday was not the productive day I had hoped for, and the first week of October passed without me making much progress on my writing goals.

I did get some stuff done this week, but much less exciting.

Today I have stuff I need to do around the house, but I am also going to try and write a little. The only event I definitely want to watch is in the evening, so I can just make that my dinner break, instead of TV. Oh, I also started watching the Mars show, and I found it... watchable, I guess? I'm not super into it, but I still enjoy the sciency aspects.

Fairmont is still pretty far from being done, but I'm making progress on chapter 4 of TC. Slower than I'd like, but progress.

The heat has been oppressive for the past week. Like, record-breaking. Can't-write, brain will eat me hot. Sleeping badly. Supposed to dip back down to "only" typical summer heat later this week, but no autumn in sight.

Lately, I've felt like I've plateaued in Pilates, but this morning (after a lousy night's sleep) I had a really good class, and I feel again as though I could break through and keep improving. On the one hand, I draw a significant benefit from accepting the plateau, but on the other hand, breaking through feels great, and honestly? My posture never doesn't need help.

Later in the week, when the pharmacy restocks it, I'll be starting a new med.

It seems like a weird moment in history in which to realize that I am basically happy, but it is what it is.

Not long after quarantine started, I decided that since I wasn't leaving the house more than once a week, and had no appointments or anything like that, it was pointless to force myself to wake up on a schedule more similar to regular work days. I shifted pretty quickly to a 2am-10am sleep schedule, changed the settings on all my productivity apps and so forth, and was doing pretty well. I mean, I had a few sleepless nights and a few mornings where I had a hard time getting out of bed, but nothing like the daily unremitting grind of convincing myself that I want and need to be awake.

This week, as quarantine begins to ease in Israel, I'm starting to get back to all the things I put off when the shit hit the fan. Mainly medical appointments and tests. The tests require making it to the blood lab in the morning, and some of them require being there quite early. So this week I have been trying to start shifting my sleep schedule back to the 12am-8am that it aspirationally was before. Gradually, so that next week I could be able to be up at 7am one morning without feeling too much like a zombie.

It's only been a few days, and a lot of confounding factors have interfered, but I feel like a wrung rag. Enough that I'm wondering what sort of impact it would have if I tried shifting my schedule forward again, but this time permanently.

I mean, I know it would give me issues in the summer, when it's so hot that leaving the house after 9am is physically painful. And I know it would affect me in the winter, if I just gave up on several hours of daylight and started feeling how short the days are. But the feeling of being well-rested, it's not something common enough for me that I can take it lightly. I have to at least consider it.

Migraine.

NaNoWriMo is over and I'm trying to slide back into life. I'm trying to establish a healthy routine. I'm trying to do work-life balance and take care of my health. I have so many things to do but also, I have already done a lot. It's hard sometimes to figure out which one to focus on.

This week has been pretty mentally fuzzy for me. I am trying to gather all my brains together so that I can focus on accomplishing a task today. And tomorrow I'm cooking dinner for the family.

It's been two and a half months since the surgery and I'm recovering. Less tired and weak than I was. Scar is still fairly visible but I'm using the cream I was prescribed so it will probably eventually fade. I'm still on the calcium, but off the vitamin D, and my thyroid is acting up.

Part of me just wants to stay in bed all day. I assume this is partly the season that is to blame. I feel I need to go outside to kickstart my day, otherwise my morning will disappear without anything getting accomplished.

In other news, Crème de la Crème is an excellent game in a school setting. I'm playing it for the second time and enjoying myself a lot.

The mood this week is to constantly remind myself that ( cut for medical stuff )

Why I keep needing to remind myself of this is a question for another, less tired time.

Last night I had the most appalling migraine. Started at the library as I was trying to motivate myself to get some light writing done. Got steadily worse while I knocked out some basic errands and chores. Ended up going to bed early, feeling too ill to even take my meds, and had a very disrupted night of sleep.

Still no writing, either.

I'm considering holing up at my parents' house today in the hopes that it makes a better writing environment. Sometimes just getting up and changing locations helps, and I don't want to spend too much time in coffee shops. Not least because the service in my local ones is pretty fucking bad.

I have so many errands to run this week. I hope I can get my bedroom fixed up and also get some fresh food and such in the house. I desperately need to start taking better care of myself.

My back is still acting up from Pilates and I'm anxious about my Yuletide assignment.

Oh, and I activated my Pillowfort account, I don't remember if I mentioned that or not. Add me there, I'm waiting to see if it takes off.

For now I'm gonna keep substantial content here on DW, where it is relatively stable.

That's all I've got to update before work.

So it turns out that the doctor's appointment that I thought was this week is actually in a month. I marked it down wrong in my calendar and that led to a long and irritating evening roundabout yesterday. But on the whole this week is going okay. My sleep patterns are out of whack, but I'm living.

The XOR writer linked my review on his Facebook, bringing the familiar bump in views. Nothing like I've gotten from a retweet in the past, but still appreciable. And it looks like most people who clicked through also went to my blog's index page, which I suppose is a sort of compliment. Especially since my reviews on the whole lean more on quality than quantity. XOR is the first one I posted this calendar year. Mostly because of the rough winter I had and the inertia that follows, but all the same.

I have to figure out what to try and work on next.

Meanwhile the rest of my writing is going reasonably well. One of my job offers fell through, but the other is still alive and well. And my knee is still a little fucked up, but I mostly don't notice it unless I lean weight directly on it, which is something.

I was so productive yesterday despite waking up pretty late and having trouble getting the morning going. And a random nap at 5:30 in the afternoon. But today I slept even later? And that leaves me in an awkward place where I'm not really sure how to get the day started. Plus I have an important thing this afternoon which I just realized is in only about four hours. Routine is hard. I only got to sleep at about two thirty last night, for no good reason whatsoever, and didn't even have the good sense to feel guilty about it. And I am beyond behind on my schoolwork.

I have a doctor's appointment, both for general checkup and to try and deal with my assorted medication-related issues. Doctor's business is getting complicated again the past few months and it's been seriously messing with the routine I had so carefully cultivated, it's a mess. At least I'm writing and editing and refining ideas, and I have a pretty good idea of how I want to move forward with my creative stuff even if it requires a level of patience that's preternatural for me. I've had a good long think and I'm considering the idea that I might need to narrow my sights creatively, instead of chasing after everything at once. Basically decide whether to focus on pure prose, text games or visual novels.

And ICYMI I finally wrote up my response to a discussion on last year's NaNoWriMo boards, on nonbinary gender representation in fiction and associated tropes. This blog post took a good long while to complete, and I'm really pretty proud of it.