hmpf

There's still something I utterly don't get about slash in LoM fandom - and it's not the sex, although that still doesn't do anything for me. But I 'get' why the sex might be interesting for people.

( Read more... )

Apparently my iron levels are so low as to almost warrant transfusions right now. My doctor tells me that with an iron level like that, she wouldn't be able to get out of bed, let alone work efficiently, either. She's amazed I went hiking like this.

This may explain a lot. :D

Still going to see a psychiatrist/neurologist tomorrow, though. Can't hurt; and I'm pretty sure I have some... issues there, too.

***

In the category "stress factors I really didn't need": a colleague just reserved all the books that I had our library order for my seminar for a seminar of her own. All of them. Did I mention I haven't even read them yet, nor prepared the first few sessions of my seminar? How am I gonna do that if I have to give all the books (the books the library only ordered because *I* asked them to buy them!) to her now? How can I prepare without books?

Oh, and my seminar starts in less than two weeks. In other words, I'm fucked. Kinda.

Could copy the books before I hand them over, I suppose. But that would take hours - hours that I really need for *reading* them, and deciding what I'm going to do with them in the seminar etc.

Could buy them all, too. But, eeek. So expensive. Also, who knows when they would actually arrive.

Recently, I seem to be even better than usual at pissing people off in vague and bizarre ways. Generally without meaning to. And, to be honest, I'm not even entirely sure if I'm pissing people off so much as perhaps rather causing a kind of "errrrrrrr you're a FREAK, get away from me" type of reaction. I dunno. Anyway, I've had heaps of odd situations recently that I don't quite know how to interpret.

I'd like a neat little rulebook for how to be a socially functional human being. I don't have the instinct.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/06/this-is-why-ill-never-be-adult.html

(Found via a comment on boingboing.)

Minor differences:

I manage the grocery shopping okay.
I manage to feed myself okay, even well, most of the time. (This can break down under pressure, though.)
I manage to keep the flat clean - if not my room. (I've never *tried* to clean the flat every day, though; neither have my flatmates. We do it once a week.)
I don't procrastinate as extremely, or at least haven't been, much, in the past three years or so. What I've done instead, in the past three years, was to focus on one or two big responsibilities at a time (finishing uni, looking for a job, doing my internships) and let everything else go completely to hell. Which, of course, was almost as bad as procrastinating, because it meant entire (crucial!) areas of my life (e.g. everything involving money or bureaucracy, as well as all social contact) would lie barren for months or years.

I've been getting up early in the morning to go to work (even if it wasn't paid work), etc. - and falling asleep at fairly 'normal' times. Now, barely a week into proper unemployed life, I'm already severely insomniac again, and completely unable to get up in the morning. In fact, I've been unable to visit the appropriate agencies because I haven't been able to make myself get up at a time when they're open (which is usually between 8 and 12:30 or so in the morning). It's not the depression often attributed to the unemployed - in fact, I kind of dread finding a job more than being unemployed at the moment, although I do know a job is necessary. My sense of self-worth and so on are not tied to having a job. It's quite simply an inability to submit to a normal diurnal rhythm without some *strong* outside force. As soon as the responsibility for my sleeping pattern lies only with me, with no pressure from an employer to get me out of bed, it decays.

This wouldn't be so bad if it really were the case that I can do everything I want and need to do in a given day at night just as well as in the morning. But of course that isn't true. I want to make jewellery, and that's noisy - so that's something I can only do during normal 'business hours'. Same goes, of course, for all the necessary bureaucratic stuff of daily life, especially unemployed life. There's even the fact that I *like* mornings, I like daylight, and I want to go for walks in the park and so on - and I won't be getting much daylight if I only get up in the afternoon, now that it's autumn. It gets dark early, here.

This is exasperating. I don't know what to do. Can somebody please force me out of bed at, say, 9:30 a.m.? That would be a more than humane time to get up by anyone's standards, yet I can't seem to manage it (and I can't seem to go to sleep before 6 a.m.)

... and ready to dig myself out from under this mountain of guilt etc.

Unfortunately, my laptop just died. *Before* I could transfer three months worth of data back from it to my main computer, of course. That includes all my unanswered mail of the last three months, a significant source of guilt.

*sigh*

Perfectly ruined day.

(Not just a ruined day, really, but let's not go into that.)

This, even more than my acute lack of time, explains my near-complete absence hereabouts. To load a single page I have to hit the refresh button dozens of times. Sometimes it doesn't work at all, often for hours at a time. When it does work, it's as slow as if we were back in 1998, on a 56k modem.

I spend what little spare time I have reading, or watching some of the TV I brought (Terminator, mostly - still haven't quite finished that show). I've finished the lovely Litany of the Long Sun omnibus, and sadly couldn't go on immediately to read the next volume, Epiphany of the Long Sun, as I don't own that yet. Will have to wait for Christmas for that one... I'm reading an omnibus volume of the first three Vlad Taltos books by Steven Brust now - have finished the first two and am a couple of chapters into the third. I wasn't overly engaged by the first two, but it's getting more interesting now with the third. Vlad is about to acquire some more awareness, it seems, and Brust is getting around to drawing us deeper into the social politics of his society. If this is indicative of the way the series will be heading, I may stick around for the next volume. If it had continued like the first two books I probably wouldn't. I've realised that I read books either for character, or for atmosphere/worldbuilding. Either of these is enough to hold my interest, though of course a combination of both is best, but I don't really read for plot. Plot-focused readers would probably find a lot to enjoy in the first two Vlad Taltos books. But for me, the worldbuilding was too thin (basically, standard sword and sorcery type fantasy mixed with mafia tropes), and Vlad as a character wasn't sympathetic or interesting enough. But I think he's getting more depth now, and so is his world.

My busted shoulder is still busted. I should probably finally go and see a doctor about that.

On the plus side, our washing machine may be fixed soonish. And the weather has improved. Sadly, with my busted shoulder, taking photos is somewhat painful.

Here's the skinny: the past three and a half weeks have been mostly exhausting and somewhat demoralising. This is not really my employer's fault. It's mostly my frelling complexes. Anyway, not terribly much fun has been had by me, so far - and what's a lot worse: I don't think I've made a terribly good impression, so far. I have two months to correct that. Hopefully.

Aside from work (which, in itself, could actually be kind of fun, if it weren't for my constant "OMG I'm so crap!!!11" complexes), I'm finding it difficult to live so far outside the city. I live so far out I actually have to take the bus to do my grocery shopping, and the shops close early, so on most days I have to hurry home after work without any detours for sightseeing in this theoretically exciting big city, to do my daily bit of shopping. (I have to go shopping frequently because I really can't store huge amounts of food here, due to lack of space, and also, fresh fruit and veggies and bread really don't store all that well for more than a couple of days. So I'm constantly running out of things, which means frequent trips to the supermarket.) Enjoying the city is further made difficult by 1.) the fact that we work very long hours, so there isn't many hours of daylight left after work, 2.) the weather has been nearly constantly very crappy since I arrived, and 3.) I really have to pick up my pace on getting out job applications, which means: at least four out of five evenings, I spend at the laptop, working on cover letters and the like. So, essentially, I have very, very little spare time that really deserves the name. Most days it's like today: I finish my work for the day just before midnight (or, often, even later), and after that hardly feel capable of doing anything but go to bed. (Of course, today "work" only means household work and job applications. I don't work weekends. Well, I do work tomorrow, but that's voluntary, and an exception.) - Anyway: the take-home lesson of *this* part of the experience is: I shouldn't ever move to the suburbs. I'm not made for that lifestyle. I kinda knew that before, but now I have confirmation.

So. What else is there to write about? John Crowley's novel "Little, Big" really is as good as they say. Got it for my birthday and read it over the last three weeks on the train to work and before going to sleep at night, and enjoyed it immensely. Now, I'm reading Paul Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl", which is also good but so far hasn't captured me as much as "Little, Big" did. I think "Little, Big" may be a book I'll put on my favourites shelf, next to my bed (well, technically, the shelf is part of my bed. And I've been meaning to post about it here, and about what's on it. Maybe when I'm back home.)

Oh, and to get to where I'll work tomorrow, I'll have to walk through this: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Alter_Elbtunnel?uselang=de. Kinda excited about that!

what's next?

I think nature's trying to kill me, this week.

Okay, the earthquake earlier this week wasn't so dangerous. But the heat's hell on my circulation. I get dizzy all the time... The fact that I have crazy amounts of work to do doesn't help. Not that it's really possible to work. I'm permanently sticky with sweat all over (except for those parts of my body where the sweat just *streams* like miniature waterfalls. Typing-while-sticky is *not* fun. My fingers keep sticking to the frelling keyboard. It's frelling annoying. I can handle streaming sweat - it's the stickiness I can't take. I'm seriously thinking about putting wet towels in the fridge to cool them so I can then use them to periodically cool my hands!)

I'd love to live in a flat that *didn't* tend to equalise with the ambient temperature so quickly...

Hey: one more reason to stop Global Warming: save Hmpf from circulatory collapse!