Spotted on an older apartment building. Damn, my chance to live my dream as a peddler to this one building, dashed! (Honestly, I wonder when that sign was originally put up, given the word choice and the text style. It’s neat!)
I missed last week, it’s true! Terrible. Continue reading
Just some photos taken over the last couple weeks while I’ve been out and about. Life plans are percolating, but not enough time to write about ’em just now.
My friend Jay had an art installation at Mixed Pantry in downtown Seattle! You can check his work out here: https://www.jaystoneking.com/
I’m honestly bracing myself to find out this is some terrible evangelical thing and not just a sassy sticker.
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.
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
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
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
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
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. 🙂
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.
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.
