Category Archives: Diary

I spent about twenty minutes today following a thread of memories through my inbox to locate the many, many different mailing lists I was on that I did not realise, I had long since stopped reading.

I mean, we all have it in our heads that ‘spam’ is terrible and bad, and I know that, but for some reason I had, over time, slowly accumulated about ten different mailing lists, for different services I did actually use, and in the process created my own little menu of spam to ignore.

I got my booster shot today.

Not today today, today when I write this. You’re not reading this for ages, which is a thing I do in part to help build a buffer, and avoid blog posts all bunching up around times when I’m productive, but also so, very pointedly, you are never dealing with the me who wrote the blog post you just read except in the rare case of Kenny Rogers dying. Which is a weird one but don’t expect it to happen again, I don’t think Kenny Rogers can die twice.

I do this in part for the emotional control it offers me, and to make sure I don’t shoot from the hip too readily. Everything has had a chance to cool. Plus that means when I do say something really emotionally revealing, like about fucking Lilo and Stitch, nobody notices.

Anyway, I got my booster shot today.

Hey, it’s my birthday! If you’re into wishlists, I have a Steam Wishlist and Gift Hero wishlist. I don’t know how useful that is to you, I don’t mind if you don’t want to get me anything, I don’t think you should. My birthday is just a day, and I don’t expect to get cool toys out of it, and I don’t think you owe me anything.

But.

but.

If you want to get me something, and you don’t want to spend any money today (good!), then I’d appreciate it if you could do me a favour and bring me a link to something you want me to look at, and add to that a short description of why you want me to look at it.

Yeah, do some of my research and discovery for me.

Hey, you know, back in November, when I mentioned ‘oh yeah, my keyboard broke?’

Turns out yeah, that sucks!

It’s been a weird time, when a single major tech disruption can just knock everything I would normally do in a day out. I can’t sit down and play board or card games without a computer right now, because nobody’s prepared for it. That meant when my keyboard broke – my one button failed – I then went to clean it, and try to get it to work, only to find that the nest of hair and fur inside my keyboard was now making interactions I didn’t want to see happen happen.

I pulled off the buttons, I cleaned them, I put them back, and then it started to spray out twenty character chains every time I opened a text field, which suggested that it was not just that a button stopped working but that perhaps my keyboard was broken.

That led to me considering: Do I want to fix this keyboard?

Turns out I’m an adult?

I don’t like that. It seems in appropriate, and honestly, I think it was a bad idea. At some point civilisation decided that I was responsible for killing Applebees, and having a functional awareness of the different characters in MASK and how their toys weren’t the same scale as GI Joe, which were the same scale as C.O.R.P.S toys wasn’t actually a disqualifying criteria for that full-time adulting thing. But I don’t have any spaces where I can be fourteen years old, eat fuit gummi and play videogames, so instead, I make do with trying to manage my day to day with as reasonable a facsimile of being an adult as I can.

There’s stuff I’m not good at.

You know that mental image you have of yourself as like, independent and not subject to your surroundings? Like, how we all have it in our heads that yeah, sure, I know my experiences and memories shape me a bit, but that’s not all of it. That’s not the whole thing, right?

Anyway, last year I changed my life because we bought a new fridge.

I am at the point in my life where I am no longer living with a second hand thing that was bought from a store that specialised in refurbishing whitegoods and that worked pretty well for the space we had. I wrote about this fridge once, about how the light didn’t work, and that never landed in my brain as the default.

This fridge lived in an alcove in our kitchen, and it was, as far as I could tell, pretty much the right size for it. But Fox, sick of a variety of problems with it, and wanting something to improve its efficiency, dedicated some of our money to buying it.

It’s wild that I feel ashamed for admitting that. That we bought a fridge. That somehow in this time of our lives, when remote work is something I can do and she can do well that we were able to save money and now, when I talk about things like labor and valuing people’s work and joining a union and being poor as a kid, I’m going to have someone go yeah but you bought a fridge.

Anyway, this fridge has changed a lot of my day.

The fridge has room for a large tank of water, and two bottles. It also has a water dispenser in the door, meaning at any given time the most convenient thing to do, if I want a drink, is to have a bit of water. Not a lot, because completely filling a glass is annoying. Result? I’m drinking more water. Also, the schedule of refilling the water each night before I go to bed means that I’m keeping the sink clear, and that means more dishes put in the washer before bed, rather than ‘ah, I’ll do it in the morning.

The crisper drawer is bigger and higher and closer to my eye level. I no longer have to tilt down to look into it. I no longer have to worry about if I already have too much of a head of lettuce, and therefore, I can’t buy another one, meaning that there are times when I may want lettuce and I can’t have any, just because of the modest logistics of a small crisper drawer.

The freezer is large, but has drawers. This means that it’s very effective got a large purchase of food that can then be frozen for long durations and thawed at meal times. This is making me plan ahead for meals more, because it’s not wasted effort.

This single piece of household infrastructure has made a bunch of stuff in my life tangibly easier and therefore, as a result, better for the way I want to live my life and it’s because we did the tremendously middle-class thing of getting a good appliance.

It feels weird to stare at it and think about the impact. Like surely this wasn’t the barrier to doing these things.

Right?

Surely.

Something that I still have difficulty processing is writing in summer, in that particular little period between Christmas day and New Years, and then, as an Australian, kiiiinda for the bulk of January because hey look over there, Invasion Day is right around the corner. Like, for the past few years now, Summer has been the season when I am, largely, off work. It is the time when the holidays land, so after a bunch of extremely high-impact days of associating the fuck out with people, I am largely, not under a lot of pressure.

Look it’s late, I’m up, I can’t sleep because I made a stupid mistake of listening to the Cat Empire song Miserere too close to bedtime, don’t fucking at me.

But.

It is also bin night.

For those not familiar, here in Australia, we have weekly and biweekly pickup of our garbage, which we keep outside the house in bins that have wheels on them for easy arrangement at the kerbside. The garbage trucks typically come by a reasonably early hour in the morning, which means if you want to make sure your trash is collected, you get it out on the kerb the night before.

I live in a block of houses that share a driveway, and that has certain rules. One of them is to keep the noise down after a certain time of night.

Now.

This is a problem.

The problem isn’t the requirement, it’s very reasonable. The problem is that this semester, that bin night has fallen on my latest work day. So I will get my work done, finish work, make dinner, then clean up after dinner and recover and have a little breather and oh woops it’s after the time to make noise. And that can be a problem if you’re trying to put things into the bin.

For kitchen waste, with soft garbage that goes into a plastic bag, then that plastic bag goes into the garbage bin, it’s easy. Just lower it in. But for recycling it’s a lot trickier, with a recycling bin that is both larger to encourage its use. It being larger means that it’s harder to put things in it and have them reach the bottom and they make a big echoey noise as things land in it. Plus, recycling is the bulk of our waste, so we want to make sure we don’t miss a recycling night (they’re biweekly instead of weekly).

Tonight, I didn’t put the bins out on time.

What followed is that when I realised the problem, I had two options. One, I give up, accept that it was going to be a rough week without room in the recycling bin, or I find a way to do it quietly. And like a big idiot, I did exactly that.

This involved carrying the bins – which are wheeled – a few steps at a time – to a location away from the houses, so that they didn’t make noise as I wheeled them over the driveway work. This also involved then walking all the recycling I have out that far as well, to place it in the bin, out by the street. This was also done at night, in the cold and quiet, while holding my breath to make sure I didn’t make excessive noise.

There’s no spoiler or important point here, I just thought ‘oh, hey, that would work, wouldn’t it?’ and then I tried it and it worked? And that’s kind of okay?

I haven’t written anything in the past few days.

This is a lie.

I haven’t, in the past few days, moved many things from the drafts folder of this blog’s content management system (CMS) to the scheduled folder. That means there’s a number that goes down every night that hasn’t gone up. It has failed to maintain stasis. I have been good this year about scheduling ahead and making sure that every day, another chunk of writing gets done.

I’ve watched a bunch of Brandon Sanderson lectures on writing sci-fi and fantasy lately. He talks about writing in terms of hours? I find that interesting, because my work isn’t currently very contained. If a student contacts me at any given moment, it seems easy and free to just respond immediately, but this means that I’m functionally on call 24/7. For me, I instead have a simpler rule: I write a thing every day.

It doesn’t have to be big or small, it just has to be something that seizes me about the blog. Something I want to talk about, something I feel I have the pull or energy to. If I don’t have that energy, I instead spend time going through my calendar that I use to organise the blog, and put down notes of things to write later, or ideas I may want to follow up on.

This year, the articles have been big. They’re an average of about a thousand words, and that means any modestly short article, like a 500 word article, is being tipped out by a twelve hundreder.

But I didn’t write anything in the past few days.

I did record video, video that should be going up soon. It had Fox involved.

I recorded a stack of micropodcasts for Patreon, which should be going up soon.

I wrote part of four different articles that aren’t going up, and I don’t know when they will go up.

Right now I am writing this, because this is what seizes me. The strange feeling of knowing that I have written, and wanting to say I haven’t done nothing, even though nobody is saying I do nothing. Wanting to push that number from going too low, like I have a broom in my hand and I can keep back the tide with it.

I really like having this blog to structure things, and part of keeping it from controlling me – because hey, did you know for me it’s marking season right now? – is being willing to use some days to phone it the fuck in.

The funny thing about this post is that I wrote it… like a month ago. But here I am, actually today, on November the 9th, working on updating, and adding to this post, because I also have not done much writing this month. And that, though, that I expected, that I in fact planned for. Because the funny thing is, I know that late October and early November is the marking period, and this year the marking has been even moreso.

Odds are good if you know me, you may think ‘are you still marking?’ because the past like, three weeks have been ‘sorry, I’m busy.’ And that’s true.

But this is what the backlog is for, too. It’s for accounting for the times when I literally won’t be able to write, and need to make sure I have a plan for that.

I stay up late a lot these days, which I don’t actually want to do. It’s not always an anxiety thing, it’s not always a social thing. I mean this month I had a friend contact me to say ‘look I had a real bad day at therapy and I’m just coming down from how I coped can you keep me company,’ and the bad day at therapy had been a week ago, and that means I’m up at four in the morning taking care of someone.

But sometimes it’s a much more insidious thing where I  don’t want to go to bed until I feel like I’d done something for the blog. Managing work and life is a meaningfully difficult balance, and that means that someitmes, work is going to get done on days that are fruitful and work is going to get missed on days that are not. Still, there’s a sort of passive, droning ‘fell asleep on the couch’ kind of anxiety that can come from not wanting to admit that I’m done for the day, get up and go to bed.

As I write this, it is December. Yep, December, 2020. The aliens hadn’t arrived yet and beards weren’t yet illegal. But I write this as I have done all the easy hit goals for the blog today, and despite the fact today featured two long shopping trips, numerous social events and a bunch of graphic design work, I’m sitting here thinking: I haven’t done enough to go to bed yet.

And so, I am therefore putting this little wad of anxiety at my own productivity into a ball, stuffing it into the bottom of a pipe and then shooting it off into the future. I am doing so by writing about the only thing I can think of to write about that I can write about in this hazy, muzzy fog of tiredness, and I am doing so with the full knowledge that by the time I get around to seeing this on the schedule next year that I will probably forget how mediocre the post was.

It is okay, from time to time, to give yourself some easy ones.

In case you didn’t know, I sleep on a waterbed. Well, prior to these past few days, I slept on a waterbed. Fairer to say that my default sleeping arrangements, typically, were that of a waterbed, and right now as I write this, but well before you read it, I sleep on an air mattress.