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State of the Hiatus (Again): Week Four
This will be the final update I write during my hiatus from twitter, isn't that exciting? I've been so antsy about being away; I absolutely will not let myself check it but sometimes I open the app screen on my phone, look at the "+26" notifications next to the twitter icon, and close the app screen again. It's strange because it really does feel like this craving I can't quite squash, but like a craving for shitty junky food that I know I won't actually enjoy once I have it.
It'll be interesting coming back. It always feels weird, but probably this time more than any other. We'll see how it goes.
That all said about the hiatus, I had all these SUPER AWESOME writing and writing-adjacent plans I meant to pursue last week, and then the universe shat all over it.
On Tuesday last I did go home, ride my bike, eat dinner, and head outside to write. I backed up my big bang fic to gdrive one more time, and then my chromebook fucked itself in the most bizarre and frustrating fashion I've ever experienced. My best guess is hardware malfunction, because the keyboard doesn't at all do what it's supposed to. The ctrl, T, and U keys all turn off the machine when pressed. The D key highlights the current line and deletes everything on it. The E key pastes in the same string of nonsense letters every time you touch it. Several other keys did weird stuff, and several more just do nothing when tapped.
With the way chromebooks are made you can't easily replace the keyboard and they're so cheap that, considering how soon I'd be traveling and how much it costs and how long it takes for repairs, I made the fiscally unsound decision to just replace my chromebook. I bought literally the same exact model except newer, paid for the extra warranty, and it came on Thursday.
But I sure did not write after biking on Tuesday, and I didn't stay in DC and write on Wednesday, either.
I was so upset about throwing off my writing schedule that during the two hours my boss was out of the office on Wednesday, I just wrote an entire scene at work. It also ended up POURING DOWN RAIN thunderstorming way worse than I anticipated just as I was getting home from DC, so in hindsight... Pretty happy I did not stay in the city! If I got home a couple hours later I think it would have been even nastier.
Thursday I set up the new chromebook first thing upon getting home from work, because I wanted it to be READY when I'd finished biking and eating. I biked, I showered, I ate, and I did sit in the backyard to write another scene of my fic. I was going to stick to my writing schedule if it kills me!!
Friday the universe was against me again. It wasn't raining HARD, but it was raining on and off all day so when I left work, I walked with my umbrella to the park a few blocks away in order to sit in the pavilion and write. It was honestly really calming and nice to write there, if a bit colder than I may have preferred, and I wrote a scene and a half more before heading home.
I'd hoped to write more in the evening at home but chose instead to binge watch several episodes of Brooklyn 99, become decidedly not sober, and fall asleep in front of the TV by about ten pm. I woke up at four in the morning and transferred myself into my bed but it was... Not a productive evening for writing, to say the least.
It was really chill and relaxing though and after being stressed out all week about my computer breaking, and over spending too much money on a new computer, and about being behind on my writing, I think I earned lying on my face watching TV.
Unfortunately I then proceeded to write nothing on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, probably to the surprise of no one. I really did have hopes for Monday but I ended up with a headache Sunday night and Monday night and wound up going to sleep early.
But life contains more things than just writing at a hellish big bang pace, so! I did otherwise have a nice weekend.
Saturday was the play with my mother, aunt, and my sister (since this play involves music and my sister will only come for musicals). We got sushi before the theater and the restaurant had exciting freshly caught things which I rarely see in sushi restaurants so I just! Had to! ...order the actual single most expensive thing on the menu because hhhhhhh tuna belly and also hhhhhhh salmon belly and also I've never even SEEN YELLOWTAIL BELLY offered anywhere else?? It was, so delicious.
And not actually the most money I've SPENT in a restaurant on sushi before, just the most expensive single ITEM I've ORDERED from a sushi menu before. And it was a sampler so it's fine it's fine it's fine. It was. Wonderful.
The play we went to see, meanwhile, was The Legend of Georgia McBride! It is the story of a young and talented Elvis impersonator and how he falls into becoming a drag queen instead. It was... Such a warm and nice and fun production, and all of the drag numbers were SUPER WELL DONE, Roundhouse is doing a thing where if you've gone once you can buy a ticket for a later show on a discount and I am sincerely REALLY TEMPTED to do that but there's only a week or so left in the run and I don't know if I'll have time to go. It was such a good play I loved it so much.
Afterward it ACTUALLY WASN'T RAINING so sis and mom and I went to the community pool near my dad's and swam for a few hours, then got ice cream. I meant to write in between that and the time my sister chose for us to watch a movie that night but kinda just... Got stressed out about stupid unrelated stuff and wasted the entire block of time, oops.
We watched Hurricane Bianca, a sincerely quite awful movie about a high school science teacher who is fired for being gay and who then chooses to apply for the same position as a woman, in drag, to... Idk prove that he can really do it. It was made by a production team and cast that includes a lot of alumni from RuPaul's Drag Race so even if it was objectively kind of terrible, it was also pretty fun to watch.
Sis and I also watched a chunk of RuPaul's Drag Race on Sunday because the play made me miss it, it's such a ridiculous mess of a show but I have such fun with it.
Sunday I also went driving with dad again! The things he and I feel I need to practice most right now are just, driving on multiple-lane roads where I might need to change lanes and make turns, so I can do those things more smoothly and in a way that will not alarm drivers who have been doing this longer than about three months. It was fun! I wasn't stressed out while we were driving but I do feel like nothing I tried to do went as smoothly as I hoped for the entire first ten minutes and it was frustrating just because none of it was obvious mistakes a la "you should have done X but you chose to do Y." It was all more, I knew exactly what to do and tried to do it and then did a bad job and felt bad about it.
But the longer we drove the less it felt like that, so it was all good in the end. I'd wanted to drive home after dinner but dad was tired and I'm slower than him so he just, drove me home in the end.
And then Monday! Allergy shots with mom! I popped over to Joann's before she came but TOOK TOO LONG and she didn't text me she was on her way like she usually does, so in the end she picked me up from the mall and we went for shots, lmao. Afterward we went swimming at the fitness center in Greenbelt, which was very nice, and then got awful Wendy's fast food, which was nicer than it would've been any other time because I was ravenous.
Sometimes I wonder why I write these entries the way that I do at all.
I really, really need to start keeping my personal daily journal again but I just can't motivate myself to do it. As much as I often get this feeling of "I am too long winded, who is even reading this, who even CARES ABOUT THIS?" I still generally have a sense of purpose in creating my weekly dreamwidth update.
But my daily personal updates just feel so redundant. I basically want to create a form with all the pieces of information I want to be able to look back at a journal to see, so I can paste that in and fill in the blanks and have an efficient record of my life. But this is... Not generally how journaling works, I feel. I think part of the idea is that you pour out all your thoughts as you have them, and that the action serves to help order your mind and clear unnecessary thoughts. And I do think it works! A little bit! I just get bogged down in the details when it's every day.
I also know this is a lot of what I use twitter for and that once a week isn't enough ~clearing out my thoughts~ for my cluttered, overactive brain, but what can you do.
I'm still behind on the big bang and still internally screaming about it. I've mentioned that I started writing with an incomplete outline, right? The ending is planned but there's a whole big chunk of the final part before that which is just a hole. And I filled in part of the hole in the past week, but not all of it. I know what GOES in that space so this is one aspect of the big bang I'm not really stressed about, I just kind of... Need to kick my ass to write it down because not knowing FOR SURE how many scenes my outline is makes it difficult for me to do progress math.
(the prologue is 3 scenes, part one is 12 scenes, part two is 18 scenes, I mentally count part four as 12 scenes even though I have no idea, to mirror part one, and the epilogue is 3 scenes. Which means the entire fic is probably 48 scenes. I have written 19 of them. When I think about how I am still not even halfway done with this monster my brain teakettle screeches for a straight minute in panic, it's great.)
I'm gonna be fine, it's fine, Yrin is going to drag my stupid butt to the finish line, it's fiiiiiine.
In related news, I am flying to Boston again in about two days! I am very excited for this. Yrin is working Friday and I have committed to coming to Harvard with him, setting myself up in a cafe somewhere, and forcing myself to write until Yrin comes to retrieve me. If nothing else, that should help catch me up a little. ;;;;
(and if it doesn't Yrin is probably going to blackmail me into productivity by holding the rest of our plans hostage, I find this kind of beautifully terrible, tbh.)
SO YEAH THAT'S... HOW... LIFE IS GOING. I am excited for my trip and to make more progress on this stupid story and as much as it makes me closed mouth scream I AM SO HAPPY TO BE WRITING IT. It was a good choice to plan just, the most self-indulgent thing I could possibly think of, because I am sincerely enjoying writing every scene that I've done, and I absolutely do like my own writing enough that when I'm done I'm going to read the entire thing back through and just kind of, roll happily in content for my ships which literally no one else would make because they are tiny canoes and I have ridiculous taste.
Life is pretty good, honestly. I'm doing alright.
It'll be interesting coming back. It always feels weird, but probably this time more than any other. We'll see how it goes.
That all said about the hiatus, I had all these SUPER AWESOME writing and writing-adjacent plans I meant to pursue last week, and then the universe shat all over it.
On Tuesday last I did go home, ride my bike, eat dinner, and head outside to write. I backed up my big bang fic to gdrive one more time, and then my chromebook fucked itself in the most bizarre and frustrating fashion I've ever experienced. My best guess is hardware malfunction, because the keyboard doesn't at all do what it's supposed to. The ctrl, T, and U keys all turn off the machine when pressed. The D key highlights the current line and deletes everything on it. The E key pastes in the same string of nonsense letters every time you touch it. Several other keys did weird stuff, and several more just do nothing when tapped.
With the way chromebooks are made you can't easily replace the keyboard and they're so cheap that, considering how soon I'd be traveling and how much it costs and how long it takes for repairs, I made the fiscally unsound decision to just replace my chromebook. I bought literally the same exact model except newer, paid for the extra warranty, and it came on Thursday.
But I sure did not write after biking on Tuesday, and I didn't stay in DC and write on Wednesday, either.
I was so upset about throwing off my writing schedule that during the two hours my boss was out of the office on Wednesday, I just wrote an entire scene at work. It also ended up POURING DOWN RAIN thunderstorming way worse than I anticipated just as I was getting home from DC, so in hindsight... Pretty happy I did not stay in the city! If I got home a couple hours later I think it would have been even nastier.
Thursday I set up the new chromebook first thing upon getting home from work, because I wanted it to be READY when I'd finished biking and eating. I biked, I showered, I ate, and I did sit in the backyard to write another scene of my fic. I was going to stick to my writing schedule if it kills me!!
Friday the universe was against me again. It wasn't raining HARD, but it was raining on and off all day so when I left work, I walked with my umbrella to the park a few blocks away in order to sit in the pavilion and write. It was honestly really calming and nice to write there, if a bit colder than I may have preferred, and I wrote a scene and a half more before heading home.
I'd hoped to write more in the evening at home but chose instead to binge watch several episodes of Brooklyn 99, become decidedly not sober, and fall asleep in front of the TV by about ten pm. I woke up at four in the morning and transferred myself into my bed but it was... Not a productive evening for writing, to say the least.
It was really chill and relaxing though and after being stressed out all week about my computer breaking, and over spending too much money on a new computer, and about being behind on my writing, I think I earned lying on my face watching TV.
Unfortunately I then proceeded to write nothing on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, probably to the surprise of no one. I really did have hopes for Monday but I ended up with a headache Sunday night and Monday night and wound up going to sleep early.
But life contains more things than just writing at a hellish big bang pace, so! I did otherwise have a nice weekend.
Saturday was the play with my mother, aunt, and my sister (since this play involves music and my sister will only come for musicals). We got sushi before the theater and the restaurant had exciting freshly caught things which I rarely see in sushi restaurants so I just! Had to! ...order the actual single most expensive thing on the menu because hhhhhhh tuna belly and also hhhhhhh salmon belly and also I've never even SEEN YELLOWTAIL BELLY offered anywhere else?? It was, so delicious.
And not actually the most money I've SPENT in a restaurant on sushi before, just the most expensive single ITEM I've ORDERED from a sushi menu before. And it was a sampler so it's fine it's fine it's fine. It was. Wonderful.
The play we went to see, meanwhile, was The Legend of Georgia McBride! It is the story of a young and talented Elvis impersonator and how he falls into becoming a drag queen instead. It was... Such a warm and nice and fun production, and all of the drag numbers were SUPER WELL DONE, Roundhouse is doing a thing where if you've gone once you can buy a ticket for a later show on a discount and I am sincerely REALLY TEMPTED to do that but there's only a week or so left in the run and I don't know if I'll have time to go. It was such a good play I loved it so much.
Afterward it ACTUALLY WASN'T RAINING so sis and mom and I went to the community pool near my dad's and swam for a few hours, then got ice cream. I meant to write in between that and the time my sister chose for us to watch a movie that night but kinda just... Got stressed out about stupid unrelated stuff and wasted the entire block of time, oops.
We watched Hurricane Bianca, a sincerely quite awful movie about a high school science teacher who is fired for being gay and who then chooses to apply for the same position as a woman, in drag, to... Idk prove that he can really do it. It was made by a production team and cast that includes a lot of alumni from RuPaul's Drag Race so even if it was objectively kind of terrible, it was also pretty fun to watch.
Sis and I also watched a chunk of RuPaul's Drag Race on Sunday because the play made me miss it, it's such a ridiculous mess of a show but I have such fun with it.
Sunday I also went driving with dad again! The things he and I feel I need to practice most right now are just, driving on multiple-lane roads where I might need to change lanes and make turns, so I can do those things more smoothly and in a way that will not alarm drivers who have been doing this longer than about three months. It was fun! I wasn't stressed out while we were driving but I do feel like nothing I tried to do went as smoothly as I hoped for the entire first ten minutes and it was frustrating just because none of it was obvious mistakes a la "you should have done X but you chose to do Y." It was all more, I knew exactly what to do and tried to do it and then did a bad job and felt bad about it.
But the longer we drove the less it felt like that, so it was all good in the end. I'd wanted to drive home after dinner but dad was tired and I'm slower than him so he just, drove me home in the end.
And then Monday! Allergy shots with mom! I popped over to Joann's before she came but TOOK TOO LONG and she didn't text me she was on her way like she usually does, so in the end she picked me up from the mall and we went for shots, lmao. Afterward we went swimming at the fitness center in Greenbelt, which was very nice, and then got awful Wendy's fast food, which was nicer than it would've been any other time because I was ravenous.
Sometimes I wonder why I write these entries the way that I do at all.
I really, really need to start keeping my personal daily journal again but I just can't motivate myself to do it. As much as I often get this feeling of "I am too long winded, who is even reading this, who even CARES ABOUT THIS?" I still generally have a sense of purpose in creating my weekly dreamwidth update.
But my daily personal updates just feel so redundant. I basically want to create a form with all the pieces of information I want to be able to look back at a journal to see, so I can paste that in and fill in the blanks and have an efficient record of my life. But this is... Not generally how journaling works, I feel. I think part of the idea is that you pour out all your thoughts as you have them, and that the action serves to help order your mind and clear unnecessary thoughts. And I do think it works! A little bit! I just get bogged down in the details when it's every day.
I also know this is a lot of what I use twitter for and that once a week isn't enough ~clearing out my thoughts~ for my cluttered, overactive brain, but what can you do.
I'm still behind on the big bang and still internally screaming about it. I've mentioned that I started writing with an incomplete outline, right? The ending is planned but there's a whole big chunk of the final part before that which is just a hole. And I filled in part of the hole in the past week, but not all of it. I know what GOES in that space so this is one aspect of the big bang I'm not really stressed about, I just kind of... Need to kick my ass to write it down because not knowing FOR SURE how many scenes my outline is makes it difficult for me to do progress math.
(the prologue is 3 scenes, part one is 12 scenes, part two is 18 scenes, I mentally count part four as 12 scenes even though I have no idea, to mirror part one, and the epilogue is 3 scenes. Which means the entire fic is probably 48 scenes. I have written 19 of them. When I think about how I am still not even halfway done with this monster my brain teakettle screeches for a straight minute in panic, it's great.)
I'm gonna be fine, it's fine, Yrin is going to drag my stupid butt to the finish line, it's fiiiiiine.
In related news, I am flying to Boston again in about two days! I am very excited for this. Yrin is working Friday and I have committed to coming to Harvard with him, setting myself up in a cafe somewhere, and forcing myself to write until Yrin comes to retrieve me. If nothing else, that should help catch me up a little. ;;;;
(and if it doesn't Yrin is probably going to blackmail me into productivity by holding the rest of our plans hostage, I find this kind of beautifully terrible, tbh.)
SO YEAH THAT'S... HOW... LIFE IS GOING. I am excited for my trip and to make more progress on this stupid story and as much as it makes me closed mouth scream I AM SO HAPPY TO BE WRITING IT. It was a good choice to plan just, the most self-indulgent thing I could possibly think of, because I am sincerely enjoying writing every scene that I've done, and I absolutely do like my own writing enough that when I'm done I'm going to read the entire thing back through and just kind of, roll happily in content for my ships which literally no one else would make because they are tiny canoes and I have ridiculous taste.
Life is pretty good, honestly. I'm doing alright.