Laughter Through Tears

My mother has been planning a big family trip to NYC since about last fall. It was supposed to be in March, and it was supposed to be for her birthday (which is in January). But in February, she and my father both got very sick (and I was sick, as well). We had to put off the trip, much to the disappointment of everyone involved. We rescheduled to September, during the holidays, to allow the working members of the family to get as much time off as possible.

We're flying tonight.

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I'll be super busy through the weekend since our Pesach tradition includes not just the Seder itself but a holiday meal the following afternoon, too. I'm making the meat for the Seder this year, too, so it'll be a busy time.

So I decided to take Thursday and Sunday as chill days, to get some rest. More mental rest than physical, really. Today I did almost nothing all day. Ate takeout for lunch. Took a very long shower and did some personal grooming rituals. Packed my nice clothes so I can spend the night at my parents' house. I even packed my makeup bag, although we'll see tomorrow whether I really feel like taking the trouble to do my makeup.

Though I'd better double-check that I remembered to pack a mirror.

I have not yet made a post for the new year on DW, so Happy New Year and may 2022 treat us all kindly.

I am ostensibly supposed to be working on a new year's post for my WP blog, right now.

Right now, big important things are happening with my IRL family. We're entering into a necessary period of uncertainty, and all of us are dealing with our anxieties in different ways. One of the ways I'm dealing with mine is by how I adjust my two-week schedule. I've lately gotten into the habit of setting a loose work schedule for my writing in chunks of two weeks, and I anticipate lacking focus for the work, while events are happening around me. I also may have less material time, if my family needs me to e.g. cook or help with chores.

Events will unfold as they will, and I have no control over them. I've really prepared as much as I reasonably can. And in the end, this is a good change, it's just this transition period that is obscurely stressful and uncertain. Most likely, everything will turn out more or less okay.

And while I attempt to parse my feelings on the subject (with the help of my therapist), I am also signing up for purimgifts (as I do almost every year), and worldbuildingex (for the last round, unless it's inherited by different mods). Being able to focus my energies outside of myself is another way to manage my bad overthinking habit. And I even know exactly what I want to nominate for PG, this year.

My birthday was Saturday, and we had a small celebration for just the immediate family on Friday. I got some presents and lots of leftovers (only polished them off yesterday). It was a nice evening, and I had a productive week following. Watched the new Emma. Tried watching the Nimue show and found it unbearable. I watched the new Tales of Arcadia last week and was, honestly, a little disappointed.

Writing is going well. Everything is as normal as the new normal can allow. Thirty six is a lot like thirty five.

This is the end of week 4, as I count it.

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I'm getting by. I'm okay, really.

Writing badly set back by the cold that laid me down from Sunday through Tuesday. And on Thursday I discovered that my mother will be away for a long weekend, and I'm needed at home. Not much writing over the weekend, although I've got a couple of fics in progress.

I did get a lot of reading done, lately. I finished the third and fourth Murderbot books. I read a KJ Charles magpie romance. Then I read one of Seanen Macguire's Wayward Children books. There was a giveaway on Tor for one of the ones I don't have, but obviously the book club is N.America only, so I missed out on that. Finished the book late last night, and then this morning I was trying to figure out what to read next.

I'm thinking of starting in on Maurice Broaddus's Pimp My Airship. But first I'm watching the third John Wick movie with my family.

April is gone, and if I'm truly honest with myself, I'm surprised I managed to do as much as I did with it. I wrote a total of about 21K words this month, including about 7K of Blue Rose. Given I only started the actual first draft in March, and that the total for the first act is around 9K and change, that's not half bad. I had set myself a goal of 15K words for the month of April but that proved unrealistic.

It was a busy month. Holidays ate up time with family things, there was the yearly Pesach convention, things like that always throw off my routine and make it hard to keep a schedule. Then there were family issues and I needed to be very available for that, which also didn't do wonders for my personal morale. Things are calming down a little but that mainly means I have to kick myself into higher gear in terms of fixing my own life up.

May is the month when I start to get my shit together. My shit's been untogether since about December, for reference.

Started Pilates again this month too, and I've been therapizing aggressively. Objectively I'm in a miles better place than I was even a month or two ago, let alone last winter. It's hard to see because work means clarity and clarity means seeing everything that still needs to be done. Laundry, reviews for my blog, money matters, work. Everything. I try not to get overwhelmed.

I am doing well. Just not so well that I don't need to keep reminding myself of it. Not so well that I can feel how well I'm doing without deep qualitative analysis. Just feel an uncomplicated emotion and sit with it for a while. That turns out to be the hardest thing.

My head hurts because I didn't sleep enough (thanks Obama Skyrim) and my eyes hurt because I did an eye exam. Not an EOG, one of the ones with no electrodes. But still, like half an hour of flashing lights and my eyes tearing up. I want to rest my eyes, but I don't want to sleep because it'll prevent me from resetting my night sleep to a semi-reasonable manageable time-frame.

The problem is, literally every source of entertainment I use involves white light screens and eye strain. Goddamn.

For some reason, eye exams tend to put me in a bizarre frame of mind. ( Weird emotional stuff. )

Anyway, embodiment issues.

I have the whole week off and I was planning on doing some social stuff and whole hell of a lot of writing. I may twine a bit. I... also may write a meta piece about Skyrim. Which I would then post here, and not on Tumblr. I'm not gonna lock it, but I'd probably want it to be linked either selectively or not at all. The last thing I want is to open a meta essay with "rules of engagement" so to speak, but I'm fraught and my energy for conflict is nonexistent.

Anyway, Passover, yeah. Favorite holiday. Best time of year. Totally worth the lack of bread, and ~50% of my other favorite foods.

I'm gonna go lie down before I hurt myself.

I got back home from Jerusalem much later than I had planned because my parents had a cool houseguest. Consequently the morning was a lost cause but I dedicated much of the afternoon to sweeping and mopping the whole apartment. This is my least favorite house chore, both because it always leaves me tired, sweaty and gross-feeling, and because the apartment gets really nasty if I don't do it often enough. But I'm starting my first week at the new job with a clean floor and fresh linen, which seems auspicious.

Of course as a consequence of not waking up at my own place, and then later the mad rush of neatening and cleaning, I forgot to each a sensibly timed lunch. Now I'm going through a whole progress of figuring out what I can eat and where it can be acquired. I really wish I'd had the good sense to get more supplies for winter-style cooking. Not that I'd break open a bag of red lentils or pearl barley right now. But sooner or later I need to adjust to having foodable foods at home, and for the winter that's really the best stuff.

I wanted to do writing today but probably I will only do TV: How to Get Away with Murder, Haven, and probably/maybe The Flash.

I am trying to both write and feel good about things.

Things I am doing: morning words on 750words have treated me pretty well. stack Exchange has also been pretty good to me, especially writes.SE. Actual words on paper have not gone well, but I've been trying to put together plots and thinking about meta and characterization. I want to know how far I can stretch a character like Aya, who has no canonical backstory. I might have to cave and make a canon for her, IDK.

Staying with my sister went surprisingly okay. I have also succeeded in meeting a friend after work, so that's three evenings this week that I spent with company, rather than sitting in my living room. Paging through Tumblr and playing Sunless Sea. And not writing. Yesterday I worked the morning, which was a bit annoying. Next Friday is family birthday, and the one after that is friend birthday.

And the Friday following is Dragon*Con OMG.

During free hours at work, I've been studying up on HTML 5 canvas element, trying to make a dynamically generated family tree. Between JavaScript and DOM, I've succeeded in creating an interface that allows adding named nodes and creating edges between them. If I backed it with Rails and MySQL I bet I could produce a half-decent shipping chart generator.

Games I need to review on Dreamwidth, because I have too much to say for Tumblr to be sufficient: Sunless Sea, Unrest, Broken Age. Meta essays I need to write: magic, power and nobility in secondary world fantasy.