Month: January 2015

I’m getting distracted by the buzzing my desk lamp makes. It’s not a consistent buzzing, which I think would be easier to ignore; instead, it’s something that comes and goes, seemingly at random. I’ll be working away and then all of a sudden, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. When I work, I tend to do so in silence — I can’t really concentrate on what I’m writing when music’s playing, unless I’m out somewhere (and even then, not entirely) — so it’s a noticeable sound, enough that part of my brain starts thinking wait what is that I don’t like it why is it doing that oh God make it stop over and over again.

The answer, I know, would be to swap the light out for one that doesn’t make any noise — or, perhaps, find out what makes the buzzing in the first place and get it fixed — and yet, I don’t, of course. Instead, I leave it there and get annoyed by it, like I’ve left the solar-powered toy on my shelves (a gift from friends) even though, everytime it gets sunny, it starts click click clicking. Without intending to, I’m accidentally allowing my office to become filled with things that distract me from work. Whether this is a commentary on my level of interest in work or not, of course, remains to be seen. (It probably is.)

There’s something about the need to start the week in something resembling — not good spirits, necessarily, but a frame of mind that suggests that you’re ready to tackle everything that lies ahead. For some reason (I suspect it’s the new Wait What podcast that I spent the weekend editing and putting together show notes for; I’m still putting those show notes together), this isn’t one of those weeks — I feel stuck behind already. It makes me feel anxious, ridiculously so, and as if I’m already playing catch-up even though everything’s barely started. If this is a glimpse at the week ahead, I’m not looking forward to it.

It’s not quite running away to join the circus, but last night’s dream involved my having agreed (pre-dream, of course, because this would never have happened had I been conscious of it) to participate in some kind of onstage hypnotism demonstration. The demonstration itself didn’t happen in the dream; instead, it was all about the dread of anticipation and waiting to go out in front of an audience, and thinking too much about the audience themselves — their expectations and my resultant performance anxiety.

That this dream happened the night after I spent hours editing a podcast and thinking too much about the reception it would receive does not escape me. Apparently, my subconscious doesn’t try too hard, sometimes.

One of the lessons I’m learning late about my job is the need to let go; I write for a number of sites daily, which means that whatever psychic slate recording victories or defeats is essentially wiped clean each and every day. You wrote a great piece that got a lot of traffic and was extremely popular? Great, but that was yesterday, what you gonna do for us today? so to speak. I’ve always understood that in terms of doing well — that is, that you can’t rest on any laurels on the Internet — but, until recently, have struggled with it when I have shitty days.

I’m not sure what happened to make me realize that the clock gets reset after a bad day same as a good one, but it’s something I’ve really started to take to heart recently. Didn’t write enough, wasn’t funny enough or interesting enough? It doesn’t matter, I’ll have a chance to do better tomorrow. It’s something I’m still trying to be okay with, and unsure if I’m succeeding at, this whole shaking it off thing. Maybe 2015 should be a year when I try to make Taylor Swift my animal totem.

I am breaking my own (entirely arbitrary, self-imposed) rules today, writing work before writing this; the reasons for that speak more to my workload for the day — I have, thanks to both scheduling issues and my brain simply slowing down when I really didn’t need it to on Wednesday,  too much work to finish up today to feel comfortable with, and so wanted to get some of it off my plate as quickly as possible when I woke up — than any failure of my willpower, but sure, let’s call it that as well.

Nonetheless, I feel guilty for not writing something here first today, no matter how relieved I may be to have one essay out the way already. These daily posts here, whatever they are (A diary, I guess? Daily pointless ramblings seem to fit into that description), were a promise I made to myself to write something that wasn’t for work every day, no matter how silly or dashed off. I realized at the end of last year that, while I was writing more than ever before — in December, it was around 4000-5000 words every weekday — it was all for publication, and all for work. I felt like I needed to reclaim something for myself. Even though no-one’s reading — and that’s not a veiled request for people to comment if they are reading, I don’t want to know! — it feels nice to have somewhere to ramble, with no rules.

Well, two rules: to do it first thing every morning, and to do it every morning. I’ve broken the first of those today; I hope I don’t break the second until the year is over, at least.

My Kindle Fire temporarily died last night, reminding me that our relationship with technology is a close, and probably unhealthy, one. I was reading PDFs for work while helping Kate prepare dinner, and at some point, it decided to go from showing me Lee and Kirby’s early Fantastic Four to showing me a giant question mark and a message that announced that the Kindle couldn’t boot and maybe I should restore everything to factory settings.

My response to this latter message was to start lying to myself, internally comforting my worries by thinking things like “It’s okay, I can just restore the Kindle and don’t really need all the information that’s on there, it’ll be a hassle to add all the passwords and everything, but no big deal” over and over again, instead of the more honest oh God this is a disaster, I love my Kindle, please don’t die on me Kindle please don’t. Perhaps the deity of personal tech heard the latter, more true, monologue, because despite what the screen said, the Kindle eventually rebooted and worked fine, all by itself. Consider it a near-death experience that makes me think that I should really consider backing up data more often.