A Week in Vignettes

An image of Cookie Monster sitting in a chair in front of shelves of books from the Monsterpiece Theater segment for Sesame Street.

A show of class and distinction.

This week was a roller coaster. A roller coaster that mostly went down but managed to also get really close to feeling like the shuttle loop in Rollercoaster Tycoon set so that it just launched the riders off the end of the track.

In order to try and capture it, I present to you A Series of Dramatic Vignettes. Getting all Masterpiece Theater up in here.

Monday: In Which Permissions are Needed to Have Self-Worth

Continue reading

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Median Possum

Three rough pencil sketches of possums.

Not an awesome possum week, but not the worst. Much like these sketches. (They were good casual practice, and were technically done more than a week ago shhhhh)

This last week was a mixed bag, per usual. Continue reading

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Making the Grade: Accountability 2024 Check-In for Jan and Feb

A stuffed dragon holding a pencil, writing on a habit tracker.

It’s finally time to do the habit accountability post! Oh how exciting. What a time to be alive!

*cough*

Anyway.

The last couple months have been a mixed bag, as months within reality tend to be. Continue reading

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Interviews

An image of Stephen Colbert interviewing Jon Stewart on The Colbert Report. Colbert is grinning and Stewart is laughing into his hand.

They were, sadly, not nearly as comedic or loose as this one. Source

This last week was an odd mix of important stuff surrounded by directionlessness. More specifically, interviews with nothing I really had to do outside of them.

I managed to feel better enough by Tuesday I was prepped to do the interviews I had scheduled. I decided to just let the interviews be my one big thing on any given day and tried to make myself rest. I think it worked well enough, though being cooped up inside all day and unproductive wasn’t great for my mental health. Thankfully as of yesterday I’m officially in the clear and no longer have pneumonia!

I’m going to try and talk a little about the interviews, but I’ll have to keep things pretty general. Not because I got to learn awesome trade secrets, but because it’s super easy to find this site when searching online for me and I don’t want to piss anyone off right now. I mean, I’m sure I’m basically unhireable based on something else I’ve said in the past on here, and I hate the idea of an employer looking at a potential employee’s personal out-of-work stuff and making hiring decisions based on that. Alas, for the moment that’s how the game is played, and right now I should probably play my hand a little more carefully than I usually do. Continue reading

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Functional Lungs are for Chumps

A still of Keanu Reeves from Johnny Mnemonic. He's tapping the side of his head with two fingers, and looks roughed up and a little crazed.

This doesn’t have a lot to do with the post. I just saw Johnny Mnemonic for the first time this week. And the vibe seems to match the post’s title. Source.

Pardon the interruption to our regular service. When I first thought about writing a post this week, I was going to say I just tended to leave my week post until too last-minute and didn’t want to do another checking-the-box style one like last time. However, my energy levels have been really unreliable lately. Continue reading

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Checking The Box

A screenshot of the game Valheim. The player character is looking at a baby boar named "Piggy."

Hooray for cute baby creatures in games! One of the few good moments this week!

There’s less than 30 minutes left for this week, so you’re getting a very simple blog post so I can check that box in the habit tracker! This is the high quality content you crave.

This last week was something of a mental health shitshow anyway. Which means not too much to report beyond my brain going “aughblaahoiewhg.” I’m still waiting to get things resolved with the hiring process I’m in the middle of right now. I sent a check-in email on Friday, so I’m hoping I’ll hear back in the next couple days and at least get an idea of what’s going on and/or how much longer things will take before I hear either way.

I also played a good bit of Valheim, and dusted off my solo game/world. Which is how I discovered how to make boar farming work (sort of) and produce adorable baby boar. And that’s not nothing.

See y’all next week. 🙂

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Work in Progress

A rough sketch of a reindeer with a bit of shading. Very obviously unfinished.

This one’s proving to be a lot more work than the mouse. Rude.

Not too much to report this week, at least not while dashing this off between RPG sessions on a very busy Sunday.

Still waiting on hearing back about the library job. I clarified/added a couple of references to my list and they let me know on Monday they were reaching out to those new folks. I’m hoping with those they’ll get enough responses to do whatever final evaluation(s) they’re going to do so the process can move forward. I’m officially flat broke so not knowing if I should be looking for other jobs or not is becoming increasingly stressful.

The big end of month accountability post is for next week, but on the whole this week didn’t go fantastic. I’m falling off of some habits due to stress and general tiredness and I need to get myself back in the game. I did manage to work on art this week, and you can see the WIP above. I’m at the point where I’m having a tricky time finalizing the general shapes of the figure. I started venturing into doing a little shading so I can have a better feel of the forms to help me check proportions. I am going to have to get rid of a lot of the line work at some point here to have the fur texture of the shading flow properly, if I want to go into that much detail. It’s currently the plan to render the fur, but I might end up burned out on this particular drawing before then and go for something more simple. We’ll see.

On the entertainment side of things, I’m continuing my way through X-Files and enjoying myself. I finished Bioshock 2 last week, and played a little bit of Horizon: Zero Dawn. Some of my friends from my last job and I played Valheim together on Thursday, and it’s going to become a recurring thing, which I’m very happy about. Oh, and I saw Metropolis last night at the Seattle Symphony, which is a wild way to watch it for the first time. What a wonderful and weird-ass film.

My cough finally went away, too! I was able to go to boxing on Thursday, and it was joyful to be back even if it kicked my ass.

I grappled with some * ~ * feelings * ~ * the last several days, but I don’t think there’s a good or productive way to write about them here. Let’s just say they didn’t help my mood, but so it goes.

If you’re in the Seattle area, I hope you managed to stay dry the last few days. Wherever you are, I hope you’re able to stay comfortable and safe and, ideally, happy. See y’all next week.

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Hurry Up and Wait

A green iguana asleep on a colorful towel.

Lizards are much more chill about these things.

I’m currently engaged in everyone’s favorite game, “hurry up and wait.”

I’m supposed to hear back about a job interview this week, to determine whether I’m going to progress in the selection process or wash out. It’s for a good job where the pay might be a little tight, but workable, that would help me advance my career. Y’know, ideal stuff. The sort of ideal that means I haven’t wanted to risk getting too far with any other potential job.

It’s put me in a bit of a bind. I’ve luckily been able to talk to a couple recruiting/temp agencies in the meantime and not get far enough to worry about making a choice, and I’ve been very clear with them I can’t accept anything until I hear back about this job. Still, I haven’t been able to look for work that might help me pay the bills at the end of the month, something that could start right away and get a pay period in before the rent’s due. Think construction labor or certain service industry gigs. Where the interview and onboarding process are fast and you get started right away. Not that I’d be guaranteed to get that sort of job so quickly. Far from it. Things are tight out there right now for a lot of people, and there’s a lot of competition. But I haven’t felt able to try.

I was talking to my psychiatrist last week, and she’s the one who used “hurry up and wait” when I described how I was needing to wait two weeks from the interview to hear back. I hadn’t thought of it that way before that point, because I very much understand that interview processes take time and I knew I was one of the earliest interviews based on the possible time slots I was offered. At this point it’s feeling more and more true, though, as the days tick down towards the end of the month and I feel like I can’t make any big moves. Not that I’m sure what move to make.

It made me think about patience. As a kid, my mom would tell me I had a tendency to be impatient. I’m not sure I 100% agree with that assessment, but I digress. As an adult, I’ve been told I have bottomless patience. It’s a double-edged sword. I’m good at being on hold. I’m good at working my way through bureaucracies and complicated procedures. I know in many cases everyone is doing their best, but people make mistakes or need breaks or I don’t know the whole truth behind how everything works, so it might take longer than I think it will and I stay patient. I do my best to be understanding and kind, to hear people out and understand, and to keep in mind that not everyone thinks or behaves like I do, and I should be patient and accepting of them as they are.

This leads to the other edge of the sword. (insert a joke about the tip here.) This patience can make me a doormat. I’ll give people more grace than I should, waiting too long before I push back to properly set boundaries. I can give the impression I don’t have needs, or that my needs don’t matter because clearly it’s not bad enough for me to say something so it’s fine, right?

It’s caused friction in my life (I guess I’m a doormat with grip strips). I once was at a party and was ready to head home for the night, and told the person I was driving home as much. Half an hour later (what felt like the longest half hour of my life due to exhaustion), it seemed like they hadn’t been saying their goodbyes and they ended up in my area of the party again. Leaving was brought up again, and I was told that I “should have been more forceful” when expressing my desire to leave the first time if I wanted to actually get going. I thought (and still think) that’s pretty bullshit, but I doubled-down on being patient and tried to take it as a lesson for communicating with this person in the future, doing my best to smother my irritation and anger in the process.[1]

Not my best moment.

Again, the patience has had a lot of benefits, too. It’s not all doormat incidents. The thing is, when you’re the person who supposedly has infinite patience, it becomes incredibly hard for people to tell when you’re running out of it. It becomes hard to be the one to tell other people you’ve run out of it. In my case, you try to find reserves far longer than is healthy. You run out of mana and cast from hit points, so to speak.

I wonder at which point my patience hurts more than it helps. At this rate, it feels like I’m never going to swing back towards having less patience enough to ever find the answer.

I did notice one person I’m impatient with constantly, though: myself. There’s so much I want to do and achieve, and I get angry at myself for not having gotten any closer already. The worst part is, there’s no upside. Some people are able to use that impatience to drive themselves hard and improve quickly. In my case it’s more like shifting to too high a gear while traveling uphill in an attempt to go faster. Instead of ascending, you just stall out.

I’m feeling stalled out right now, both externally (job hunt) and internally (oh god so many things). Patience and impatience, coming together like matter and antimatter to blow up in my face and leave a void of nothingness behind.

Hurrying up and waiting.

~ * ~ * ~

[1] This ended up being an example of a larger negative pattern with how I communicated with this person, which I think is the core of what eventually caused that relationship to fall apart. Good times.

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Week Wrap-up: The Wrappening

A pencil sketch of a mouse in a mostly-realistic style.

To my former drawing teacher: I tried to push the values! I only had a #2 pencil to work with. D:

Not going to do a full-on accountability check-in this week, just a general review of the week. I figure I’ll do the nuts-and-bolts accountability thing once a month, which strikes me as a good pace while still allowing me to write about other things.

I thought I’d talk about what I was playing, reading, and otherwise doing this week.

Playing

I’ve been getting close to finishing Horizon: Zero Dawn, so of course I got distracted and went off to play Bioshock 2 after reading enough TV Tropes about the series to want to play it. It’s been sucking up way too much of my time, but thankfully for its eating of my hours I believe the game is rather short. I’m about 10 or so hours into it and I think I’ve passed the halfway point of the single-player. I plan on playing the Minerva’s Den DLC, too, as I apparently bought it at some point. I think that’s only supposed to be 6 hours long, something like that.

I’d like to try a full review of it once I’m done, but so far Bioshock 2 is…fine. I’m enjoying myself well enough, and I do like Rapture as a setting. However this game isn’t as impressive as the first one, and doesn’t immerse me as well in the world. Many spaces feel more cramped than the original Bioshock, and Rapture loses its feeling of grandiosity as a result. The characters also aren’t quite as compelling. There’s been a few times where I can tell I’m supposed to feel betrayed, angry, etc. by a given character, but because it’s all based on backstory I only half-know about from the in-game sources, there’s not enough context there for the emotion to spark. The difficulty is also out of whack for me. I think I’m getting better, but TV Tropes is like “it’s a breeze” and that has…not been the case for me. It doesn’t help that stealth doesn’t work well as a playstyle, which makes sense given I’m playing a Big Daddy stomping around in an enormous diving suit but deprives me of the sorts of tactics I tend to be the best at.

Watching

I’ve gotten sucked into the X-Files, of all things. It’s a bit of a problem because I’ll keep watching when I should be doing other things. The writing seems to take a dive whenever psychic powers come up, but overall it’s solid and very enjoyable to watch. I can see why everyone was so hung up on the Scully/Mulder chemistry, because daaaaamn.

The guest stars are a treat, too. From a baby Seth Green to Don S. Davis to Bradley Whitford, it’s something of a constant “hey, it’s that guy!” for people I’ve seen in other 90s-00s shows.

I find the now-dated technology very charming. Tape-based answering machines, people not having cell phones, faxes, old MS-DOS (or Win 3.1) computers, all that good stuff. Makes me nostalgic for a world before constant emails, internet access, and always having a phone in your pocket. Especially because I never had the potential downside of being eaten by a mutant because I didn’t have my phone to call for help.

Reading

I finished The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss this week. Well, except for the author’s note. I’ll try to get through that tonight.

It’s very charming. I love Bast as a character in the other Kingkiller Chronicles books and getting some more insight into his day-to-day and the town as a whole made the world feel more real. Getting more details about what a creature such as him gets up to in a small town gave him depth, and Rothfuss being able to make real dramatic stakes that tap into Bast’s abilities while keeping the scope so limited was impressive.

I’m almost positive I read the original story, The Lightning Tree, a zillion years ago, but reading this I clearly didn’t remember any of the details so the overarching plot was novel and fresh. So that was nice, after reading the apologetic foreword where Rothfuss explains that it’s “just’ a rewrite of that short story and not something new.

The art by Nate Taylor is gorgeous, too. Great pen work.

Other

Other stuff! Let’s see here.

New habits/resolutions didn’t go well this week. My cough has stuck around, though it finally seems to be improving. I did test it and it isn’t covid, so that’s good. I also think I exacerbated it by going on a walk on a cold night to get my steps in, though. Oops. I’m ready for it to be over. It messed up my ability to work out, though I got a few in. It also made me rest overmuch, I think. Too much of an excuse to not do things I probably should have done anyway (albeit going slower to account for the cough).

Mental health wasn’t in a great spot, either, and I ended up feeling very directionless. I definitely wasted some days and many many hours on distractions. I need to figure out how to self-structure better. It’s been a struggle all throughout my unemployed time and it seems to be getting worse, which is incredibly frustrating.

I did talk to a few recruiters this last week, and I hear back from an interview in the next few days, so fingers crossed.

I managed some decent-ish art, too, as you can see above. I’m really much much better working from reference, my other sketch pages are embarrassingly bad. I can’t seem to make the jump yet to drawing what’s in my head. I know it’s a skill I need to build, but it’s frustrating all the same.

~ * ~ * ~

That’s it for this week. I’m hoping the upcoming week will be better. Maybe I’ll even get the blog post in before Sunday! An enby can dream.

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2024 Accountability Check-Ins: Week 1

A green iguana perched on top of a small humidifier.

Here, have a picture of Jabberwocky getting up to MISCHIEF a few weeks ago. (She really shouldn’t climb on that…)

I know, you were all sitting on the edge of your seat, wondering if I’d manage to post for the first week of the year after saying “hey I want to post once a week this year.” Well, fear not, here I am!

I was thinking of doing a full on accountability breakdown of my first week, but it’s also late, I have a few more things to do tonight, and I am trying to get my sleep schedule back to a more normal place. So here’s the summary:

  • New habits going well, but not perfect. Missed some days.
  • Blew doing WTBBL work this week, hope to do better next week
  • Exercise derailed/changed by picking up a cough on Tuesday, I think from the cold air irritating my throat on my run. Still have said cough, but have managed to do at least a little something exercise-wise most days.
  • Also applied for 5 jobs and had a job interview, which aren’t tracked habits but seem like a good thing to note
  • I wrote 6k of pre-writing/outline for the novel I’m working on and regularly working on that felt amazing

And that’s it for now! Keeping it short, for once. 🙂

P.S. Will definitely do a more detailed accountability post at some point, either for weekly posts in the future or maybe once a month so it doesn’t overwhelm other content here.

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