Corner of Bourbon & Division

There's a lot of emphasis put on various practices these days that are meant to lend themselves to being a healthy, functioning person in society, and I am bad at all of them. You're supposed to have a number of personal practices: mindfulness, gratitude, journaling, the works, and I have yet to be able to do any of these things regularly or consistently. I don't consider posting to DW/LJ a journaling practice for myself, because I don't write these entries with a goal of better understanding myself or anything.

I think I'm lacking something fundamental that allows other people to do this. I find breathing/mindfulness/meditation horrendously boring a lot of the time, and even when I try to do it regularly, I inevitably forget after a couple of days, even with alarms set on my phone. The thing with setting alarms is, if I set too many of them to remind me of things, they just become more background noise after a while. 

I've also never had any of the skills that other people seem to have. I can't keep house, I don't enjoy exercise or indeed a lot of other things that most people seem to find enjoyable. I don't cope with stress in socially acceptable ways. Some people compulsively clean, or go for a run, or channel their stress in positive ways. I just overeat or disappear into some storytelling medium (books, movies, video games, television, whatever). Ignoring reality is a lot easier than doing anything about it.

I don't even like people the same way that other people seem to. Many years ago I came to the conclusion that I'm asexual, but recently (somewhere in the past five years, maybe?) I've decided that I have to be aromantic as well, because I don't think I've ever experienced romantic attraction in the way that other people describe it. Have I been romantically involved with people anyway? For sure. But I feel the same intensity of attachment to my friends as I do to my romantic partners, and I don't particularly differentiate between the two.

Anyway, it's 3am on a night shift, so I'm thinking weird thoughts. Usually 3am on night shifts results either in weird thoughts or else in grandiose plans to change everything about my life for the better, usually in the form of new planners or to-do lists, but I think that since I moved I don't have the brain space to create brand new plan to live a perfectly organized life.

So right now I'm just wondering how the hell "normal" people can have their shit together the way they do. It can't be THAT hard if millions of people do it every day without thinking about it, but also I appear to be incapable of getting my shit together in a meaningful way, so it does appear to be pretty hard. I don't know, I just find it all very perplexing.

I've been fighting a headache since I got to work, and although Tylenol is taking the edge off, I am really looking forward to going home in a few hours. I still have two twelve-hour shifts ahead of me this weekend, and I am tired just thinking about it. The longer commute has been a challenge because I've been so sleep-deprived for so long. I'm hoping that, since I have ten days off work starting Monday morning, I'll be able to "catch up" on some sleep and get myself better rested, just in time to be relegated to the cot in the living room for three weeks, but beggars can't be choosers, I guess. 

So, yeah. Apologies for the very disjointed entry. Maybe tomorrow I will have something better and more coherent to say. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

I have one of those twice-weekly reports to write for work tonight, and it's time-consuming and annoying, so I can't spend too long updating this journal just in case work gets busy later and I don't have time to get the report done. I do not want to have to explain that I didn't get my work done because I was blogging. That would look bad. ;)

I probably shouldn't stress too hard about it, because I routinely take, like, five hours or longer at work to update because I keep getting interrupted anyway. So I'm sure I'll get it all done. This report in particular stresses me out because there are no explicit instructions for how to prepare it, but it's somehow still extremely important to get it done exactly right. *headdesk* Also, I only write one once every four months or because it's specifically a night shift duty and my shift partner and I take turns to do it, so I am woefully lacking in practice. Nothing stresses me out more at work than being asked to do something I'm not familiar with AND for which I have no reliable blueprint. It is objectively the worst.

Tonight is my last night shift, and then I am off until my day shifts next weekend. So far no coworkers have agreed to a shift trade, although I am waiting for that one coworker to get back to me tomorrow (he won't be in until 3pm, though, so I won't find out until late in the day if he's accepted the trade). If he says no, which he likely will, because going from an evening shift directly to a 12 hour day shift with no break is goddamned brutal, I will simply have to suck it up and go to work next weekend.

That give me five days this week and four days next week to get everything packed. Normally I would spend the Monday after my night shifts sleeping, but obviously I can't waste all those precious packing hours on something as silly as sleep, so I'm going to take a brief nap when I get home and then get up and start packing. I have asked KK to help me with packing tomorrow because it's a statutory holiday, but I'm not sure how much help she will actually be. Tomorrow being a stat holiday means that I won't be able to go to U-Haul to buy more boxes, because I'm 99% sure they'll be closed for everyday purchases (albeit likely not for van rentals and that sort of thing), and rightly so. Employees deserve their statutory holidays, and should have the day off like everyone else.

So, yeah. I should probably make some aspirational packing goals for this week, so I'll know how hard I failed by the time the weekend rolls around. ;)

Okay. Report writing time! Wish me luck. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Unsurprisingly, my mother has come down with the same symptoms as my father. She's taking her meds and being a good patient and resting a lot and drinking a lot of fluids, and so far seems to be doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances. I spoke to both my parents yesterday evening, and they're both being pretty good about things. My father is always more motivated when my mother's well-being is very obviously on the line. I wish he were able to project that into being more careful the rest of the time, but that's probably too much to hope for. Neither one of them is particularly good at risk assessment or management, alas.

I've been harbouring a headache and a slightly sore throat since yesterday, and I cannot for the life of me tell if it's Covid or if it's just the stress of the week catching up to me combined with the truly terrible air quality at work or the cumulative effect of using the CPAP without the humidifier (because it was way too warm). Am I paranoid? Maybe. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face. KK is going to be picking up fresh Covid tests tomorrow if we can find some, since ours are expired and therefore unreliable. It's been increasingly difficult to find Covid tests in Ottawa in the past couple of years--no one seems to carry them anymore. Shopper's Drug Mart apparently sells individual tests for $7.00 each, which is an absolute rip-off, but I expect nothing less from the Galen Weston Jr. empire. The main reason I don't know if it's Covid is because these symptoms do not at all match my parents' symptoms,  which are mainly extreme fatigue and some gastrointestinal stuff. So headache and slightly sore throat? Who knows?

Work is going by very slowly, partly because of the aforementioned headache. I'm glad it's not busier, though, because I've already made a pretty regrettable mistake this evening which my shift partner caught, luckily enough, and it's been a pain in the ass to fix. I hate making mistakes at work, even though objectively I know that they are unavoidable. It triggers my impostor syndrome like nobody's business. Oops, make that two mistakes. My coworker is saving my bacon tonight. The second mistake was when I was trying to fix the first mistake, and I didn't realize that there was a new SOP for fixing the mistake and I followed an old SOP for fixing the mistake. *lies on the floor*

I am really looking forward to my bed, which I will be in in about four hours if everything goes really well. I got relatively little sleep today, because we got home from KK's endoscopy shortly before noon, and then I had to wake up in order to be on time for my phone call with Brian, my birth father. He actually sent me a text message saying he'd caught a cold and could we postpone to tomorrow? To which I thought "Sweet, I can go back to sleep!" so I agreed, but I then had to field a call from work asking me to come in early and then changing their minds because the supervisor in question hadn't done the math properly and my coming in early wouldn't actually help anything. After that I had to field a call from my mortgage specialist because the auditor apparently decided that the mountain of paperwork I provided was not, in fact, enough to meet all of my financing conditions for the house. *headdesk* So I have had to send even more paperwork to prove I am not an evil money launderer trying to get a mortgage to launder the rest of my ill-gotten gains through a rural property in Southwestern Ontario.

So, yes. Very much looking forward to my bed now.

Okay. I am going to go heat the last of my lunch and wait for the shift to be over. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

 It's the first night shift of the week, so I haven't yet descended into the usual madness of trying to revamp my entire life and making plans to become a whole new person by next Monday morning. Night shifts do that to me every time without fail, but usually the urge to create new calendars and to-do lists and coloured charts doesn't strike until a few nights in. We'll see how long I last this time. I might go a little longer this time because I have the professional organizer coming starting next Tuesday, so that might already serve to scratch the itch since re-organizing my whole kitchen does kind of have a similar feeling to re-organizing my whole life.

I really hope that we can get the kitchen into a properly functional state. Trying to cook in there is making my soul shrivel these days. All of my cupboards are topsy-turvy, I have almost no floor space, no counter space, and I can't stand directly in front of the stove because of the storage rack thing I put in because I couldn't figure out how to use the space well enough to store all of my kitchen equipment. So, yeah, we have four days of four hours each to get the kitchen whipped into shape. I would love to be able to just open my cupboards and grab what I need without things constantly falling over or on top of my head. Part of it is an organization problem, but mostly it's a clutter problem, and that is why I am paying the professional organizer the big bucks. Although to be fair, for almost an entire week of work she won't exactly be making a killing after taxes. I think her hourly wage comes to more than mine, but I don't know that I'd be chomping at the bit to do her job.

I've got two hours or so until I can go home. Today is the only day before Friday when I'll be able to get a decent amount of sleep. Tomorrow I have an appointment (virtual, thank goodness) with the dietitian from the bariatric clinic at 8:30am, and then I got roped into a separate meeting with two members of Ministry & Counsel at 14:30, which means I'm going to get about two hours of sleep at best between those two meetings. I might be able to get away with going back to bed after that, but I'm not super optimistic. Then on Thursday I have a follow-up appointment with the naturopath (also virtual, thank goodness), so that means I won't get much sleep then either. I hate scheduling things during my night shifts, but in all these cases I had very little say about the timing. Blargh.

And, of course, somewhere in all that I have to get over my weird psychological block and get my seeds started for the garden this year. I'm reluctant to sacrifice my sleep today, but maybe if I leave KK to fend for herself for dinner I can sleep late and then start the seeds between the time I wake up and the time I need to leave. 

In unrelated news, I've been watching Chicago Med in my spare time, partly because I do like medical dramas (I was an early adopter when ER came on the air in the 90s and have never looked back), and it's not exactly good, but I can't seem to stop watching it because it's like a train wreck. There isn't a single character in this show with an ounce of moral fibre, and they all seem to spend their time making terrible, selfish, impulsive decisions based on their whims, often at the expense of their patients. All of these people are walking disasters who need multiple years of therapy and have no idea how to communicate. Chicago Med differs from most medical dramas that I've watched by having a pretty strong emphasis on emergency psychiatry, and one of the main characters is Dr. Daniel Charles, head of the psych department.

Now, I honestly don't know many heads of psychiatry who routinely hang out in the emergency room (Dr. Charles lurks around corners and observes patients), but apparently for the purposes of the show he does just that. That, and conduct wildly unethical "experiments" on patients and colleagues alike (giving out placebos to patients to "test" whether their problems are medical, lying to coworkers about the status of patients, egregiously violating his daughter's explicitly set boundaries, etc..). He's a weirdly likable character, mostly because Oliver Platt is a gem and plays him as an affable, cardigan-wearing father type with a penchant for collecting autistic-coded young women to be his protégées. I do understand that the show has to come up with drama because real life medicine doesn't make for good television, but if this were real life none of these people would still have their medical licenses.

Anyway, I think that's enough talking about television. It's just this weird little micro-obsession with a TV show. Definitely not enough to want to join the fandom or anything, but enough that I want to keep watching, apparently, in spite of the fact that the show is ridiculous in the extreme.

Okay. Time to wrap this up. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Today's highlight was the dentist. Again. I know, I know, but you must try to contain your excitement, okay? I spent the better part of two hours with my jaw forced open at a rather uncomfortable angle while the dentist did her thing. It was not the most enjoyable experience, but I came out of it unscathed.

Mind you, she froze me but good. When I got out of there half of my face couldn't move. I looked like Jean Chrétien when I tried to smile, or maybe as though I'd had a stroke. Terrible. Eating and drinking is a heck of a challenge, too. I managed not to dribble anything down my front, but it was a close thing indeed.

Work, after a quiet holiday season, has picked up in earnest. My colleague and shift partner has been diagnosed with a tumour in his kidney, and is going under the knife on February 7th. He's off work from now until April, leaving me alone to do the job. His prognosis is good, for which we're all grateful, but I'm a little stressed at having to shoulder most of the work when I've only been in this job for four months. My boss is backing me up when he can, but he has his own job to do and can only do so much to help me.

So it's a little stressful, though not, of course, anywhere near as stressful as having, say, kidney cancer. :P

In less exciting news, I forgot my Kindle at home. I miss my books already, even though I generally don't get to read much these days. Just knowing it was there in case I found the time to do a bit of reading. I don't know, I just like having it nearby. I'll get it back Monday, though, so all is not lost. I can also read on my computer, or an actual book made of paper, too. Shocking, the variety of things I'm exposed to on a regular basis. ;)

Tomorrow is another day shift, then I switch to nights for the weekend. The roller coaster of thrills never stops.

Two more days of night shift, then I'm on days for the next little while. Woo!

My colleagues all signed a birthday card for me, which was sweet, only they got my age wrong, which I thought was hilarious. It was full of "Congrats on turning 30!" notes, and "Welcome to the new decade!" etc. Which, of course, I already did last year.

I giggled madly until they forced me to explain myself, and then they were all sheepish.

None of them believe that I'm much over 25 anyway. I have a baby face. I got carded in places until I was well into my mid to late twenties.

Still, I appreciated the card. It was a nice gesture.

It's snowing out. Again.

I have been sitting on my sofa all day with George curled up next to me. Every so often he rolls over and demands that I rub his belly.

I'm re-watching "Supernatural," because I am just that obsessed. It's still making me giggle and cringe and worry about the characters. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of shows that have been able to do that for me a second time around ("The Pretender" is one of them, for the record).

In short: snowy day, purring cats, good TV.

Yeah, life is rough.


( S.A.D. stuff behind the cut. The short version is: Phnee is taking St. John's Wort and things are better. )

So, yeah. Doing better. It's not exactly unicorns pissing rainbows and butterflies, but it's better.

Maybe later on I'll get around to posting the usual memes I do around this time of year, start making plans, which is what I always do around my birthday.

Good times.

Happy trails, all!

12 hours of night shift.

Don't wanna.

If it's quiet, I will be writing. If not, well, who knows?

Night shift is performing its usual magic. This week I have done very little other than work and sleep.

I did post new installments up at Midnight Crossroads, and God help me, I actually wrote some fanfiction for the first time ever, because I was bored and my brain refused to produce anything else. Not that I think fanfiction isn't a valid form of expression, let me hasten to add. It's that my version of fanfiction is... unpublishable. It's not quite Mary-Sue levels of awful, but I suspect it's close. ¬_¬ Oh well. At least I'm writing, right?

I am watching the first X-Files movie. I seem to remember it being better than this.

In more random news, I have pulled something in my neck, which is making existence a wee bit more difficult than usual.

I'm going to order some needles from Knit Picks. With any luck, they'll be here by next week, so that I can get started on my Christmas shawl next weekend.

So, yeah. That's what I've been up to lately. As you can see, excitement abounds. :)