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I Wish That We Could Start All Over

January was, I’d decided by the last day of the month, actually the final month of 2019, trying its worst to end us by any means possible. It was the only explanation for how hard the month had become that I’d accept; 2020 was to be a better year, dammit, so the only explanation for January’s weight could be that it had actually been co-opted by last year, infected for a last-minute final attack like in a horror movie. Just when you thought you were safe!

It’s not that any one thing was so terrible, per se — well, the dogs disappearing to California without either warning or goodbye, thanks to my selfish ex-wife; that was — but more a confluence of events: my being sick for so long quietly, before it erupted into proper sickness; a workload that stayed stuck at oppressive, somehow; visiting family, which isn’t terrible for any reason other than the lack of privacy and downtime it affords you. Things like that.

January didn’t try to take me down in one fell swoop, but fought a war of attrition, hacking away at me so that I was so exhausted and just plain done that I’d eagerly give in just for a moment’s peace, not that anything like that was on the menu. All of which, again, felt like 2019’s shitty playbook.

And the thing is, it wasn’t just me. I’d talk to others, send supportive messages to friends and acquaintances who were also having overly turbulent months for a multitude of reasons. January, it seemed, had it in for almost all of us. Perhaps it saw us as sacrificial lambs to get the year started with the appropriate amount of bloodletting.

The month finished with a day in which Britain left the European Union, President Trump got all-but-acquitted in his impeachment trial thanks to some spectacular cowardice on behalf of the Republican Party, and I spent literally hours editing and correcting a transcript of a 42 minute call for work. It felt as clear a sign as any that January 2020 was less a month than an emotional assassin that has been quietly taking us on without a word, trying to wear us out before a final blow.

As far as I’m concerned, the year is actually starting with February this year. We’re all getting a do-over. Let’s hope this month is kinder, as well as shorter.

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Mr. Happy Was Missing

This post, which touches on the nature of blogging and format and intent of writing online in general, got me thinking about headlines and my strained relationship with them.

For anyone paying attention, it’s relatively clear that the headlines to the posts here are, at best, not entirely descriptive to the contents of the posts they’re attached to. Indeed, sometimes they’re not even related, just random phrases that come from song lyrics or something equally transient that happen to be in my head at the time. This is, of course, intentional, but its origins come from my long-standing frustration with headlines in a professional capacity.

In my job, headlines are a must, literally; every post I write has to have a headline, and it has to be a functional headline that exists within the parameters of whatever outlet I’m writing for (and there are oddly different expectations and traditions for each one; a headline is never just a headline). It’s one of my least favorite things about my job.

I say that not only because I like ambiguity and the idea of misdirecting an audience, although I do. I say it because I am very bad at headlines. I always have been. I struggled with them starting with io9 and, although I’ve gotten better at them since — a necessity, given just how difficult I found them back then — it’s never been a thing I’ve shown much aptitude for.

It’s not just that I rankle at the idea of summarizing the story I’ve written in a handful of words — if I could do that, why would I have spent all those words writing it in the first place? — but also that, more often than not, I cannot actually manage to do so in a manner that sounds palatable, never mind attractive. I fight an urge to just headline things, “An Interview With That Guy Who Wrote That Book,” or, “Some News, I Guess.”

My attempts at headlines are often rewritten, and at certain outlets, I’ve come to expect that. I write placeholders, knowing that editors far more skilled than I will come up with better. That’s a dangerous game, though; more than once, stories have run with my placeholders, and I’ve thought, shit, I wish I hadn’t made that joke.

I just realized I’ll need to headline this post. I don’t know what I’ll choose, but I’m sure it’ll perfectly illustrate my point, however obliquely.

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You Know I Can’t Sleep, I Can’t Stop My Brain

I’m sick, again.

I actually think it’s the same sick I’ve had for the last month or so, although Chloe promises me that I’ve been healthier than I remember; nonetheless, there’s been an air of a cold hanging around me since the holidays, something that was both boring and annoying me before this past week underscored just how much I really should have gone to a medical professional some weeks ago, instead of thinking, it’s just a cold or something, I’ll tough it out and be fine.

It strikes me, writing that, how much of that attitude comes from a mindset that belongs to a younger me that honestly could just power through such things far more easily. I’m in my mid-40s now, I shouldn’t need a night of mild terror to make me think a doctor is a good idea. And yet, that’s exactly what happened.

”Mild terror” is overselling it, perhaps. I’d been feeling a little tired, but mostly fine, for the last week or so before chills and nausea descended on me Wednesday evening. It frustrated me but little more — Chloe had a bad cold, and I figured I’d picked up an aftershock or something. A few hours later, though, it felt like something else entirely.

It wasn’t just that I couldn’t sleep that night, nor that I was fevered, with hot and cold flashes mixing with sweat in a manner that was more gross to experience than to read. Nor was it the coughing, constantly, or the accidental snorts of snot when I tried to take in air. Instead, what genuinely scared me was the realization that I was actually, literally, delirious for a number of hours in the middle of everything — obsessed with old pirate ships, time travel and the writing of some story connecting the two that I thankfully can’t remember now but couldn’t stop thinking about then.

The next morning, I went to get checked out, where I discovered that being tested for flu involves having the world’s largest q-tip inserted into the back of your head via your nose (as pleasant as it sounds) and heard the thrilling phrases “I want to send you for a chest x-ray, your oxygen is low, and I think it might be pneumonia” — it isn’t — and “well, if the fever just started last night, you’re definitely infectious for the next three or four days.”

I’m writing this on day three now, lying in bed after an interrupted, coughing-filled night of sleep. I know I’m getting better, but I just wish it could happen that little bit faster. I’m so bored of being sick.

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Anywhere You Look, A Reason To Believe

I’m almost a month into the 2020 Vision experiment, and I’m at the point where I… kind of regret it…? That’s not right, not really; the brief of posting a different image every work day has been something that’s been rewarding in a bunch of ways and has produced a few things I like in retrospect, so saying that I regret it is arguably too strong. But it has far, far more difficult than I’d originally expected.

As I initially conceived, I’d spend half an hour or so every morning before settling down to work to come up with something; it would be an exercise to get my brain going and in a different way than I’d spend the rest of the day, working with visuals instead of with words. In theory, it all made sense — not least because a year of doing the THR newsletter graphics had helped me realize much I enjoyed flexing those muscles, and to what degree it could get my brain nice and loose for writing.

The problem is that reality does not play well with the theory. Which, honestly, I should have expected.

Really, the biggest issue is that I generally have to start work when I start work. When I sit at the desk, I’ve already got a backlog of emails to handle, and usually at least one deadline immediately staring me in the face, so the idea that I have half an hour to noodle feels like a quaint notion a more innocent me, foolishly. What was I thinking…?

Beyond that, there’s the simple fact that I hadn’t considered that, the significant difference between this project and the newsletter graphics was the lack of someone telling me what to do. There’s no headline given to me for this, and some mornings, that feels like the biggest change in the world; I sit there thinking, I have no idea what to do and feel utterly defeated.

I’ve thought about dropping my self-imposed target to three images a week instead of five, or dropping the entire project all together at the end of the month. But I’m not quite there just yet; I want to struggle awhile longer, to see what happens when it switches from a struggle to a routine (if it switches from a struggle to a routine), and what happens when I get over my self-consciousness and let it become the visual diary it was intended to be.

We’ll see what happens next.