Words by Frances Rowat
It’s not much god to say it now, but I’ve been busy. Obviously.
Light of my life got me the new Fright Night on DVD on Saturday. Very pleased.
Way way behind on my TV, partly due to lack of Walking Dead and partly due to Steam and partly due to the holiday crunch. I thought is escaped it, and then wham! But I’m making it through.
Best to any and all of you, and see you, at the latest, on the other side
Think I can safely say that’s the longest stretch of quiet since I started this thing, and am really glad that it was still only a three-day silence.
Not getting enough sleep. Work’s coming on, carrying on, I’m getting to start to work on the second stage of the process as well as the first… or the second-and-fourth as well as the first-and-third. Got a bunch of holiday cards written and addressed. Completely failed to get to bed early any of the nights I said I was going to, and did I mention not getting enough sleep? Sleep debt, FTR, is distinctly unfun. I’m running on about 5.5 hours last night, right now, and that’s not the first short night this week.
Lord I’m tired. >.<
Managed to finish a couple of books this weekend; still not at the 83 I wanted to read this year, but getting way closer.
Need to head out soon. Will try and find time to sketch up a couple of posts at work today, sit down and actually type something once I get home. The gap in content… I know this isn’t exactly a daily stop for anyone, but it’s still an embarrassing thing to not get it done, especially when I think I could have had the time if I’d planned better.
If say it was a very busy weekend, but honestly it was just a very sick one. Which naturally cleared up just in time for work Monday. Probably for the best, all told. Paycheques and all that.
Currently hoping to be at work on time despite being stuck in traffic so slow that I could get out and walk faster. Tired. Worrying about the holidays, and not being able to get the people I want to give things the stuff I’d like to get them. It’s a matter of time rather than money, which I guess is good in terms of what it implies overall? That I’m busy, and that I’m not broke.
I just want ten hours of uninterrupted sleep, dammit. It’s not the holidays alone, or work alone, or cleaning, or any one thing. But I just need to stop feeling like I could fall asleep at my desk.
(Going to theatre tomorrow. Horribly horribly afraid I will fall asleep during and incredibly hurt the feelings of person I am going with. Coffee with dinner, I guess…)
It’s probably been said before, but what gets me about buses is the way the segments of the trip are so distinct from each other. You go on the first leg of it, and it doesn’t matter how quickly the trip went our didn’t go; the next leg of it will go on its own schedule. There’s no way to save time, no way to have a quick trip in one part… carry over, I guess?
What would you call that? Granularity?
All of which is a way to say that while I ran out of the house this morning in such a hurry that I had to ask John to feed the cats for me, I am currently on the fourteenth minute of a scheduled ten-minute wait at the highway bus stop, and I would much rather have spent this time at home. Also, I do not have coffee and it’s chilly, so I am a bit grumpy.
Yesterday I was up until four in the morning. And then I was up and functional by eight. Somehow I’m still not tired. Admittedly there was a nap in there, but…
One of the people I write with a fair bit of the time is doing NaNoWriMo. It’s rough going so far (mind, that doesn’t mean much yet), but she’s doing it. I, meanwhile, have written the hundred words of fiction in trip fragments this week.
I mean, it’s just been Hallowe’en; I practically feel guilty about not trying. It’s the time of year for (proper Lovecraft) ghouls and curiously meaningful scratches and shapes standing in the dark in the still of your room and just watching you.
You think.
You can’t see their eyes, after all.
(Oh yes, this is absolutely going to help me get to sleep. Because I needed a chaser after reading a third of the way through the House of Fear anthology. It’s a nice mix; part actual ghosts and part haunted houses (which are subtly different, but I fear I repeat myself), with a side order of the weird.)
Beginning to get sleepy, at least. The nice thing about the phone is that I can post in my room and don’t get distracted by the joys of the internet or the horror of the Sierra Madre. Much easier to lie down and go to sleep if you don’t need to tear yourself away from a computer motor.
(That’s the Sierra Madre from Fallout: New Vegas – Dead Money. Which is a quite well-done little horror story set in a haunted house… one which both corrupts its victims and is inhabited by ghosts, now that I think of it.)
Tomorrow I’ll try and get my books sorted, I suppose. And maybe I’ll hear back about work. The estimated start date just keeps creeping forward; at this point I’d be surprised if anything happened before Monday.
The day gets away from you. Still, for a 40 minute carving job, I am pleased.
I was actually in bed, about ready to turn out the light, when I remembered this.
I almost didn’t get up, but… well. I can live with missing a day (although I find it amusing and a little saddening that I started missing days when I was on vacation at home, rather than on vacation on the road). I don’t like it, but I can live with missing a day. But missing two days, that just seemed like that start of the end.
Was job-hunting today. It didn’t go very well–a lot of positions that require degrees or years of concentrated experience that I don’t have–but I found a few places to apply. I… keep feeling like I need to find some kind of focus, instead of scrabbling just to find the next job as quickly as I can. But I always end up feeling slightly guilty and ashamed when I do that; I’ve learned to see it as something almost prissy, putting aside one job because another might be better.
I need to stop doing that. There are a lot of jobs out there[1]. There is one day every twenty-four hours, and I should try and at least make sure I’m not doing something that grinds me down to where I’m too tired to think about what I’d like to do. I can afford to look, at least.
—
[1] Theoretically. Work with me.
It still feels like Friday. And it’s past 2 a.m. on Saturday morning.
Am home, and since getting home… well, there’s been a lot of late nights and a lot of sleeping in. Until noon, today, in fact.
I don’t like this. I really don’t like the feeling of so much time lost, slipping away. And I’m a bit worried because of how upset I actually was. I’m not sure if it was just the sleeping in and feeling disoriented when I woke up, or being late to take my meds, or what. I mean, I settled down fine for breakfast, but I was really unhappy before then.
I don’t imagine staying up until 2-a.m.-plus today will help either, though.
In other news… well, not much. I’m going to be keeping an eye on my mood, and going back to the job hunt. I made it out to stitch-n-bitch last night, and felt a bit more awkward than usual, but it wore off. And I’m going to set my alarm for tomorrow.
Just about finished catching up on Breaking Bad; the closing music is playing for the end of season four. Brilliant show. Have started watching American Horror Story as well, and am–
Oh.
Oh holy crap.
Okay. Well. Just saw the end-end of the last episode of season four. Walter, you son of a bitch. That’s brilliant. That fits. It’s horrible.
I highly recommend that show, FTR. Check it out, if you haven’t seen it.
It’s odd, I don’t usually think of deadlines as something to live up to.
I also don’t usually think of the day as being over at midnight, but that seems like a possibly specious distinction to work with at the moment, so I’m here again, composing on my phone. I’ve set it to vibrate, which is slightly less annoying than clicking for Sudoku, but I am finding it a bit buzzy for typing.
It’s occurring to me that I have a lot of electronic wafers–little slices of screen and plastic and buttons that exist as ways to get to something else that isn’t exactly tangible. My Kobo. My laptop. This phone.
I say, sometimes, that I love living in the future. Usually I say it when John tells me something new and wonderful about technology or medicine or astronomy. But I think the first time I really noticed was several years ago…
I was watching the realtime map for the London Underground, and some of the stations lit up (means there was a service interruption). I was curious and clicked for details, and it said there’d been an incident on the tracks with a passenger. The timestamp was seven minutes old.
Someone got onto the Tube tracks in London and I found out about it in seven minutes. I can’t walk a mile in seven minutes, and…how far away is London? How many people do I know who’ve never even seen it? And I’m getting news from there in less time than it takes to drink a coffee, unless you really chug it.
(Full disclosure; I am a slow coffee drinker.)
((Fuller disclosure; I had a morbid streak when I was younger, and my second thought upon seeing the map information was “I wonder how far he splashed.” Which is ridiculous, really, I don’t even know that anyone was hurt rather than just being a Gap-hopping twit, but… Oh, the lurid imaginations of youth.))
I think the second time the shrinking of intervening distances really hit me was several years later, when a friend in the UK had forgotten his wallet at work and didn’t have groceries in the house and I ordered him a pizza. Because Internet. You can do a lot with the Internet.
Have noticed a possible downside to composing on the phone; small screen means it’s harder to glance back up at what I said earlier, and easier to ramble very far afield. Will mind that in future. Of course, it’s also easier to not get bogged down in going back and editing yourself, which is something I’ve been hoping to work on for a bit.
Right. Been writing for half an hour, and want to get up early tomorrow. Think I will call it a night.
Writing this from my new phone. Very different feeling from typing on a keyboard; I’m not sure how well I could write fiction on this. Maybe it’ll be different once I get more used to it and the motions become more of a reflex. I’ve never heard of anyone saying that they couldn’t write if they had to type, after all, and I guess this is similar.
Missed the bus this morning–it came a minute early–and John gave me a lift to the Transitway. Confess I was grinning like an idiot over being able to text him from the bus. Currently still playing around; I think the biggest difference between this and a typewriter is the inability to touch-type.
More later. Probably need to decide if those 200 words a day can be in separate posts.