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State of the Hiatus: Week Two
It's Tuesday again!
Honestly these updates have become just routine enough that I wonder if they're monotonous for people other than me, hah. My life feels very, same shit different day, and that could be annoying but at the same time, I like hearing those sorts of updates from friends? Even if it's just, "life sucks work sucks but it was a nice day and I petted a dog in the park," that is the kind of news that I want.
For starters: I'm finally getting antsy about my hiatus! Last time I honestly just... Enjoyed the reduced stress of not being bombarded with horrible political news and petty fandom drama and other stuff I really cannot consume at such high volume and when two weeks were up, I did not want to come back to twitter. This time, I have a little bit of that same "ugh I am not ready to be blasted with information overload again" feeling, but I also... Miss my friends. There are folks who won't check their email or who haven't given me any contact besides twitter who I've thought about while I've been hiatus-ing and I miss them and I want to check in on everyone!!
But I also really do want to try harder to limit my twitter use. Last time I felt ridiculous thinking of giving myself a set time and duration for which I'd open and check twitter (in part because I know that if I gave myself a limit of "20 minutes" I'd feel compelled to use the full time, even if it was more time than I need) but this time, I'm a little tempted. I want to be able to send people messages throughout the day when I think of them because I know that if I wait until "9:45 pm, my 30-minute twitter window" or whatever, I will have forgotten all the little "thinking of you!" messages I meant to send. But I also feel sooooo much better when I'm not opening this app fifty times a day and letting it rule my life.
(we will ignore the fact that if I have someone's phone number, I will turn on my phone a dozen times a day to send those people obnoxious texts. It's not different, but also, it's a little different.)
One of my other goals of my hiatus, besides getting out of that "I had a thought! I need to grab my phone and share it!" mentality was to start reading published novels again. It took me a week to get to that point but last Monday I started reading Before We Visit the Goddess and it was soooooo nice. It's a book about three generations of women growing up between India and the United States and like, the positive and negative things we pass down between generations and what we have to do to break or remake those cycles.
I'm really fed up with Literature which is written by white (cishet) men and/or which is about white, cishet romance, so part of what I want to do in reading more is just... Read books and authors which Aren't That. I want to read more books that are written by or about women, and more books that are about relationships BETWEEN women. I want to read things that are outside my personal experience but grounded in our actual physical reality. As much as I love fantasy and science fiction, sometimes you need a little broadening of your natural horizons.
I finished my first book on... Tuesday night or Wednesday morning? And after that I read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (also about a relationship between two women and their lives as women, also something that hecked me right up constantly), which I finished Friday morning. I'm currently reading The Pearl That Broke Its Shell (about a girl in Afghanistan who lives as a bacha posh, like a boy, until she is of marriageable age, which parallels the experience of her great-grandmother years before her) and it's a good ~200 pages longer than my previous two books and will therefore probably take me a bit longer to read, but... It's really interesting, and I'm enjoying it, and I'm really satisfied with my novel choices of "books that are about women, and the relationships between women, and where any romance is just a practical reality of life rather than an idealized focus."
The final thing I meant to accomplish with my hiatus was resuming my habit of keeping a personal journal and updating it daily, because I fell out of it at the very end of January with how stressed out I was getting. It took me until yesterday to find the bandwidth to do it and like... I'm a little bit surprised, but also not surprised. I thought I would cave sooner without the void of twitter to vomit my every thought into, but I think I kind of just... Needed a break from doing that thought-vomiting in any form. It wasn't until yesterday that I finally missed it enough and needed it enough to write some thought-vomit just for myself.
It feels kind of premature to judge whether I'll stick with it again, but I did it for a bit over a month the first time and it was... Good, generally. The mental snag I kind of hit was the same thing I opened this entry with: past a point, it feels really monotonous. With that journal in particular my goal is to have a record for myself of my daily life, so it feels important to note whether things that happen almost every day, or every Wednesday, or with whatever usual regularity, did in fact happen, but doing that becomes tedious. I almost want to come up with some sort of shorthand so I can have that information for myself, but not waste time belaboring it, and spend my time only on writing about unique things I actually WANT to remember, rather than routine ones I feel duty-bound not to forget.
Other stuff that's happened in the past week...
I went to my emergency dentist appointment on Tuesday! They were able to fix my tooth but I'm pretty cranky about it because as it turns out, I'd had a root canal on it years in the past. I know we paid a disgusting amount on dental work years ago but like... My old dentist was incredibly condescending and abrasive with me and tended not to explain what she was doing or to give me any say in it, it was pretty much just "there's a problem, we will fix it, it will cost you (horrifying sum)." So the new dentist I found is muuuuuch nicer and actually explained what he was doing, and he was really surprised they hadn't done a crown along with the root canal, and said that this is the reason my tooth broke; it likely would not have, if there had been a crown done to protect it.
So now I have a temporary crown, and three weeks from the appointment I have another follow-up appointment to put on a permanent crown. It is almost definitely going to cost a sickening amount of money even though I do technically have dental insurance, because dental insurance is BULLSHIT, but it is what it is. My new, much more appreciated dentist will also do a cleaning when I go back so, that's nice.
On Friday there was a horrible wind storm! Public schools in Montgomery, Frederick, and Prince George's county were all closed, along with the federal government, so I stayed the fuck home. Then our power got knocked out, and didn't come back on for almost a full 24 hours. In light of that, one of my housemates decided we should go to Bonchon's for Korean fried chicken and see Black Panther, which was an excellent decision. I was very happy to eat warm food and to see a movie which I enjoyed a lot, and it was nice to do something with all three of my housemates, since we haven't gone out anywhere in kind of a long time.
I feel like the three of them do a lot more stuff together than with all four of us, but on the other hand... I honestly have a lot more local friends than any of them do, or at least, I can make plans to see mine much more often. I'm generally happy with this, but I still feel vaguely guilty sometimes because rather than it feeling like I'm being excluded, I feel like I'm avoiding them and being cold to them and it's not really on purpose, it's just how often what I want to do lines up with what they want to do. Which is fine.
On Saturday Janet should have been working but took the day off and hung out at our house and it was nice because we did a big order for sushi from the place I like and like... I know I am a terrible mooch but Jules treated us all to Bonchon's and me to sushi and honestly, with how much I frequently hate food, nothing makes me feel more content and warm than someone else buying me food.
It was just! A very good weekend!! I'm still trying to get my shit together enough to like... Keep my house clean and to do basic chores regularly, and I did nooooot do much of that this weekend, but I'll manage. The bathroom can wait a little bit longer. I even finally started working on my lapras afghan again, I weaved in the five million ends and did five rows (TWO MORE and I'll be done with the widest part of the square and will start decreases!) so I just... Feel good and productive, even if there is (as always) a lot more to do.
For the most part I feel good about myself and the things I'm trying to accomplish, but like, when you're mentally ill you're never gonna not be mentally ill and it sucks that even while making progress I can feel really listless and hopeless and just... Like I have to push myself so hard just to make these small gains. I felt really shitty on Sunday and that's usually my Designated Chore Day but instead it became my designated "lying on my face and feeling bad about myself until 4pm" day and... That sucks, but sometimes you just gotta accept that things suck, I guess.
Although! Other small accomplishments this week include: finally getting back into my Montgomery county library account to pay off my fine and re-activate my library card, which means I can use the MCPL digital lending library again! Nothing makes me happier than having access to the FCPL and MCPL collection because it also means twice the holds and twice the checked out books at one time. I am a creature of simple pleasures and one of those is: hoarding the fuck out of books.
And speaking of books, my tennis doujinshi order is shipping to the US today! As I'd kind of anticipated, buying a metric ass-ton of books means they are VERY HEAVY and require expensive EMS shipping and my wallet is crying a little but I'm sssssso excited for my tennis books!!
I also finally put together an order from adagio teas, something which has taken no less than a half-dozen tries because if there's a way to make an account without first placing an order, I can't find it. So every time I'd try to buy something I'd waffle over it for too long, adagio would empty my cart because I don't have an account and can't use the wishlists or favorites features to organize my intended tea purchases, and then when my cart would empty itself, I'd shrug and decide to try again later. I have been trying to buy tea from this goddamn company for almost a year and a half. And finally. I have made a decision.
This is ridiculous but I am a ridiculous person and it's fine, I hope my new tea is delicious.
I think this is? All of my updates?? Life is hard but sometimes it can be good and I am just (tenimyu voice) doing my best.
(Samy showed me versions of the shitenhoji and fudomine Prince of Tennis stageplays and it was... So nice... To watch tenimyu with Samy, Samy loves tennis so fucking much and it's always really nice to do BORDERLINE ANYTHING with someone who pure-heartedly loves what they're doing with you.)
Most likely I will return to twitter tonight, briefly, even though my intention was to return Wednesday morning. I have decided this is a fair compromise, because I really will try to have only Designated Nighttime Twitter Use and that means it may as well be now, since morning is out.
I will see twitter friends in the twittersphere!
Honestly these updates have become just routine enough that I wonder if they're monotonous for people other than me, hah. My life feels very, same shit different day, and that could be annoying but at the same time, I like hearing those sorts of updates from friends? Even if it's just, "life sucks work sucks but it was a nice day and I petted a dog in the park," that is the kind of news that I want.
For starters: I'm finally getting antsy about my hiatus! Last time I honestly just... Enjoyed the reduced stress of not being bombarded with horrible political news and petty fandom drama and other stuff I really cannot consume at such high volume and when two weeks were up, I did not want to come back to twitter. This time, I have a little bit of that same "ugh I am not ready to be blasted with information overload again" feeling, but I also... Miss my friends. There are folks who won't check their email or who haven't given me any contact besides twitter who I've thought about while I've been hiatus-ing and I miss them and I want to check in on everyone!!
But I also really do want to try harder to limit my twitter use. Last time I felt ridiculous thinking of giving myself a set time and duration for which I'd open and check twitter (in part because I know that if I gave myself a limit of "20 minutes" I'd feel compelled to use the full time, even if it was more time than I need) but this time, I'm a little tempted. I want to be able to send people messages throughout the day when I think of them because I know that if I wait until "9:45 pm, my 30-minute twitter window" or whatever, I will have forgotten all the little "thinking of you!" messages I meant to send. But I also feel sooooo much better when I'm not opening this app fifty times a day and letting it rule my life.
(we will ignore the fact that if I have someone's phone number, I will turn on my phone a dozen times a day to send those people obnoxious texts. It's not different, but also, it's a little different.)
One of my other goals of my hiatus, besides getting out of that "I had a thought! I need to grab my phone and share it!" mentality was to start reading published novels again. It took me a week to get to that point but last Monday I started reading Before We Visit the Goddess and it was soooooo nice. It's a book about three generations of women growing up between India and the United States and like, the positive and negative things we pass down between generations and what we have to do to break or remake those cycles.
I'm really fed up with Literature which is written by white (cishet) men and/or which is about white, cishet romance, so part of what I want to do in reading more is just... Read books and authors which Aren't That. I want to read more books that are written by or about women, and more books that are about relationships BETWEEN women. I want to read things that are outside my personal experience but grounded in our actual physical reality. As much as I love fantasy and science fiction, sometimes you need a little broadening of your natural horizons.
I finished my first book on... Tuesday night or Wednesday morning? And after that I read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (also about a relationship between two women and their lives as women, also something that hecked me right up constantly), which I finished Friday morning. I'm currently reading The Pearl That Broke Its Shell (about a girl in Afghanistan who lives as a bacha posh, like a boy, until she is of marriageable age, which parallels the experience of her great-grandmother years before her) and it's a good ~200 pages longer than my previous two books and will therefore probably take me a bit longer to read, but... It's really interesting, and I'm enjoying it, and I'm really satisfied with my novel choices of "books that are about women, and the relationships between women, and where any romance is just a practical reality of life rather than an idealized focus."
The final thing I meant to accomplish with my hiatus was resuming my habit of keeping a personal journal and updating it daily, because I fell out of it at the very end of January with how stressed out I was getting. It took me until yesterday to find the bandwidth to do it and like... I'm a little bit surprised, but also not surprised. I thought I would cave sooner without the void of twitter to vomit my every thought into, but I think I kind of just... Needed a break from doing that thought-vomiting in any form. It wasn't until yesterday that I finally missed it enough and needed it enough to write some thought-vomit just for myself.
It feels kind of premature to judge whether I'll stick with it again, but I did it for a bit over a month the first time and it was... Good, generally. The mental snag I kind of hit was the same thing I opened this entry with: past a point, it feels really monotonous. With that journal in particular my goal is to have a record for myself of my daily life, so it feels important to note whether things that happen almost every day, or every Wednesday, or with whatever usual regularity, did in fact happen, but doing that becomes tedious. I almost want to come up with some sort of shorthand so I can have that information for myself, but not waste time belaboring it, and spend my time only on writing about unique things I actually WANT to remember, rather than routine ones I feel duty-bound not to forget.
Other stuff that's happened in the past week...
I went to my emergency dentist appointment on Tuesday! They were able to fix my tooth but I'm pretty cranky about it because as it turns out, I'd had a root canal on it years in the past. I know we paid a disgusting amount on dental work years ago but like... My old dentist was incredibly condescending and abrasive with me and tended not to explain what she was doing or to give me any say in it, it was pretty much just "there's a problem, we will fix it, it will cost you (horrifying sum)." So the new dentist I found is muuuuuch nicer and actually explained what he was doing, and he was really surprised they hadn't done a crown along with the root canal, and said that this is the reason my tooth broke; it likely would not have, if there had been a crown done to protect it.
So now I have a temporary crown, and three weeks from the appointment I have another follow-up appointment to put on a permanent crown. It is almost definitely going to cost a sickening amount of money even though I do technically have dental insurance, because dental insurance is BULLSHIT, but it is what it is. My new, much more appreciated dentist will also do a cleaning when I go back so, that's nice.
On Friday there was a horrible wind storm! Public schools in Montgomery, Frederick, and Prince George's county were all closed, along with the federal government, so I stayed the fuck home. Then our power got knocked out, and didn't come back on for almost a full 24 hours. In light of that, one of my housemates decided we should go to Bonchon's for Korean fried chicken and see Black Panther, which was an excellent decision. I was very happy to eat warm food and to see a movie which I enjoyed a lot, and it was nice to do something with all three of my housemates, since we haven't gone out anywhere in kind of a long time.
I feel like the three of them do a lot more stuff together than with all four of us, but on the other hand... I honestly have a lot more local friends than any of them do, or at least, I can make plans to see mine much more often. I'm generally happy with this, but I still feel vaguely guilty sometimes because rather than it feeling like I'm being excluded, I feel like I'm avoiding them and being cold to them and it's not really on purpose, it's just how often what I want to do lines up with what they want to do. Which is fine.
On Saturday Janet should have been working but took the day off and hung out at our house and it was nice because we did a big order for sushi from the place I like and like... I know I am a terrible mooch but Jules treated us all to Bonchon's and me to sushi and honestly, with how much I frequently hate food, nothing makes me feel more content and warm than someone else buying me food.
It was just! A very good weekend!! I'm still trying to get my shit together enough to like... Keep my house clean and to do basic chores regularly, and I did nooooot do much of that this weekend, but I'll manage. The bathroom can wait a little bit longer. I even finally started working on my lapras afghan again, I weaved in the five million ends and did five rows (TWO MORE and I'll be done with the widest part of the square and will start decreases!) so I just... Feel good and productive, even if there is (as always) a lot more to do.
For the most part I feel good about myself and the things I'm trying to accomplish, but like, when you're mentally ill you're never gonna not be mentally ill and it sucks that even while making progress I can feel really listless and hopeless and just... Like I have to push myself so hard just to make these small gains. I felt really shitty on Sunday and that's usually my Designated Chore Day but instead it became my designated "lying on my face and feeling bad about myself until 4pm" day and... That sucks, but sometimes you just gotta accept that things suck, I guess.
Although! Other small accomplishments this week include: finally getting back into my Montgomery county library account to pay off my fine and re-activate my library card, which means I can use the MCPL digital lending library again! Nothing makes me happier than having access to the FCPL and MCPL collection because it also means twice the holds and twice the checked out books at one time. I am a creature of simple pleasures and one of those is: hoarding the fuck out of books.
And speaking of books, my tennis doujinshi order is shipping to the US today! As I'd kind of anticipated, buying a metric ass-ton of books means they are VERY HEAVY and require expensive EMS shipping and my wallet is crying a little but I'm sssssso excited for my tennis books!!
I also finally put together an order from adagio teas, something which has taken no less than a half-dozen tries because if there's a way to make an account without first placing an order, I can't find it. So every time I'd try to buy something I'd waffle over it for too long, adagio would empty my cart because I don't have an account and can't use the wishlists or favorites features to organize my intended tea purchases, and then when my cart would empty itself, I'd shrug and decide to try again later. I have been trying to buy tea from this goddamn company for almost a year and a half. And finally. I have made a decision.
This is ridiculous but I am a ridiculous person and it's fine, I hope my new tea is delicious.
I think this is? All of my updates?? Life is hard but sometimes it can be good and I am just (tenimyu voice) doing my best.
(Samy showed me versions of the shitenhoji and fudomine Prince of Tennis stageplays and it was... So nice... To watch tenimyu with Samy, Samy loves tennis so fucking much and it's always really nice to do BORDERLINE ANYTHING with someone who pure-heartedly loves what they're doing with you.)
Most likely I will return to twitter tonight, briefly, even though my intention was to return Wednesday morning. I have decided this is a fair compromise, because I really will try to have only Designated Nighttime Twitter Use and that means it may as well be now, since morning is out.
I will see twitter friends in the twittersphere!