Bad Friday, okay Saturday

Yesterday turned out horrible, and I got nothing done. (this is not quite true: I showered, and I finished reading Howl's Moving Castle, and I somehow managed to get 10/15 points on my dailies, but honestly, that's really just showing how baseline easy it should be for me to be getting 15/15 every damn day.)

But, as so often happens when I have a really shit day and do nothing but play video games the entire fucking day (whyyyyy), today has at least been a little bit better? If nothing else, I am in fact grounded from playing video games until I actually accomplish the short and reasonable todo list I had for yesterday and didn't do. This is annoying because then I find myself at loose brain ends and I have to force myself to just sit there and _be bored_ until I can come up with a non-video game concept of what to do.

I hate it so much. I hate how fucky and burnt-out my brain is that it's not actually easy to do this. Or I mean, it's plenty easy to come up with ideas, it's just the next thing to impossible to actually...do any of them. I could do grading! I have managed to do two out of eight gradings, and I am writing my words like six hours earlier than I normally do just to avoid doing another one. Earlier I laid on the floor for a minute or two to the same ends.

(Strictly speaking I am not grounded from reading books, but I don't necessarily want to go do that as my alternative, both because I am trying so hard to catch up on some actual productive shit and because I just...don't want to?)

I am listening to music. That's helping a lot with all the things, it was the one saving grace of yesterday that one big chunk of the not doing things was actually just spent watching a whole heap of YouTube videos. Going through all of ThingsWithWings's vids (soooo good!) and a whole bunch of the CKD dance vids (they're that group that _everyone_ has been linking to their Somebody I Used To Know choreography, which, to be clear, is phenomenal). That was good, and the listening to music part of it was very good.

I fucked up my music library --not catestrophically, although I have a little bit of renaming work that has to happen at some point, and I've lost all my playlists. Also Quod Libet keeps panicking about the very concept so if I try to open the playlist browser, it freezes up. Sigh. I genuinely didn't lose much --I haven't had proper playlist space since getting Melody, in 2020. But it's irritating that I can't make the player work properly. Maybe the right answer is a full reinstall?

Anyways, the upside is all my music is on my little external HD now, instead of my regular in-laptop drive. This is an important accomplishment because by "all my music" I mean "somewhere in the realm of 80GB". I haven't yet committed enough to [back up and] delete all the music from Melody but that's gonna happen soon, and then hopefully she'll work better in general?

Anyways. I probably have other things to babble about, but I should go do another grading instead. I hate this so much. Blah.

~Sor
MOOP!

Oh fine, I can be happy sometimes too

Hm.

I have completed 5/8 grading (with *much* whining, but I've done them), and done and put away three loads of laundry, and then I ate dinner with the fam and washed a whole heap of dishes and forced Austin to watch the really good CDK "Somebody That I Used to Know" that is absolutely as good as everyone says it is, and then we watched a bunch more good dance videos --CDK, some west coast swing, Fred and Ginger, P!nk.

And I feel pretty happy right now. Listening to music and kinda bopping along while putting away my laundry helped. Calories almost certainly helped. Spending the evening with one of my sweeties, and being bold enough to say out loud "I'm doing pretty shit, can you help me" which is not a thing I am designed to say.

Mostly, the way this actually works is figuring out how I can help my partners get things done, and then sometimes borrowing that time to do my own things as well. So earlier he had a nice cozy nap (while I was grading and wrote earlier post) and now he is studying for the peal he's calling tomorrow (while I write these words and do more grading). Helping other people do things is possible --it's The Purpose, after all. Receiving help to do my things is a lot fucking harder and this is rubbing up uncomfortable against the therapy shit I'm working on and I don't love it.

Listening to a lot of music (and watching people dance for some of it) is really good too. I've had music playing pretty much since we arrived home from bells. During naptime it was an all-Alexs-on-Accordians funtimes (Atlantic Dreams by Alex Sturbaum and Homecoming by Alex Cumming, on combo shuffle) and then Fretless. By now we've just...turned it into "whatever the fuck shuffle pulls from the 14k songs in this library". Anyways, as always, not listening to music is a blues clue¹ so it's probably good that I'm reversing that trend.

(I love my housemates dearly, but they are much less a "music always please" people. I don't really know where I got the habit --my mom doesn't like constant background music either. It is something I adore though, and if I ever wind up in a house of my own --a thing I don't want, mind, I love my family and our current situation-- I will have to invest some money in proper music infrastructure. Just give me kitchen tunes, yanno?)

Anyways, I'm briefly happy, and that feels notable enough to write down. Three more things to grade and maybe I'll even get them done this weekend. (lol no, I have a peal attempt tomorrow, I'll be lucky to do anything else at all.)

~Sor
MOOP!

1: This is such a fucking annoyingly twee thing to say, but it's also so succinct and useful. Anyways, what do *you* call your signifiers that the depression and brainbad are getting severe again?