Corner of Bourbon & Division

Of course, it’s not like I’m engaging in fun hobbies in the meantime. For the moment I am choosing to blame the sleep apnea. I used to have hobbies and go out and do things. These days, not so much. Now I’ve never been a massive social butterfly, and now with Covid still running rampant I have begun embracing my inner hermit even more than I ever did in the past. Still, not that long ago I had activities that I enjoyed doing, like cycling and swimming and of course all the crafting.  These days it takes all my energy to go to work, cook food to keep me and KK from starving, and do a minimal amount of housekeeping.

For now, I am choosing to blame the sleep apnea. I have been trying not to hyper-fixate on it and failing miserably. I suppose I should embrace the hyper-fixation and just go with it. I’ve always had the tendency to go down research rabbit holes about whatever is going wrong with my health at any given time, and long-time readers of my (admittedly boring) blog will recognize this pattern. So, I’ve been doing a bunch of reading about sleep apnea, and the more I read, the more a bunch of my symptoms make sense, including my inability to focus for more than, like, five minutes at a time, my inability to learn anything new except with extreme difficulty, and the constant feelings of exhaustion and lethargy. I also read that sleep apnea can contribute to or mimic symptoms of depression. Now, while I haven’t been depressed per se, I have noticed that I’ve been having trouble mustering the same level of enthusiasm for things I usually enjoy. Hell, even trying to pick a movie or a TV show to watch to keep myself busy on night shifts has been a bit of a struggle because nothing quite appeals to me. I miss just outright enjoying things, you know? There is a reason I have a tag that’s called “Phnee has no chill.” I like enjoying things with unabashed glee, and these days everything just feels kind of muted or dampened. So, my hope is that treating the sleep apnea will get me back to feeling more like my old self. If it doesn’t, I honestly don’t know what my next steps are. More curcumin supplements, I suppose.

I do have another book that I’m hoping to finish tonight after reading the Care Manifesto, called Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Davis. Davis is a towering figure in the world of political activism and philosophy, and while I am familiar with her oeuvre overall, I have never actually read any of her books, so this is my attempt to rectify that oversight. Of course, it will largely be dependent on whether I can muster the concentration and focus needed to read through the book. I am extremely grateful for the existence of audiobooks, but unfortunately a lot of the books I wanted to read this year aren’t available in audiobook form, which is very sad. It’s been phenomenal to be able to enjoy stories again, even in a different format than how I used to read them.

Okay. Time to get back to work. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

My sock knitting lesson continues. I've finished the ribbing on my first sock and just started the first row of knitting, so I have a ways to go yet before I get to turn my first heel, but if I apply myself I might be able to get to it tomorrow night. My coworker and I have two more night shifts together after tonight, so I want to try to finish this sock by Saturday morning, so that I will have at least a sock to show for our efforts this week. Of course, if work gets very busy that may not happen, but you never know.

I should figure out if I can load photos from my phone to LJ somehow. It doesn't have an app that I know of, and that's how I've become accustomed to handling pictures these days. I think it's probably still easy enough to upload photos to my LJ albums, so I'll do that for now.

Huh. I appear to be unable to resize the images the way I used to in the past. That's frustrating. Well, I have put the beginnings of the sock behind a cut so it doesn't overwhelm people's pages.

I am going to keep going in a minute once I've finished writing this post. I've been knitting while ploughing my way through the Wuthering Heights audiobook. The version I'm listening to is narrated by Jane Froggatt, best known (I think) for playing Anna Bates on Downton Abbey. I must confess now to never having watched Downton Abbey, although I suppose I will get around to it eventually. I thought for years that I had read Wuthering Heights as a teenager, but it turns out that I read the other Brontë sisters and never Emily. I was passingly familiar with the story just because people around me talked about it so much, and it also turns out that I had some pretty serious misconceptions about the plot. I somehow imagined that Heathcliff's love for Catherine was unrequited, and didn't know at all that half the story is actually about the generation of children that came after them. Oops?

Anyway, I am not really enjoying this book. Almost everyone is cruel, selfish, capricious, or some combination thereof. As my friend Autumn put it to me very aptly, it's a fascinating study about how cruel people treat each other, and about how they breed cruelty in their children. Inhumanity begets inhumanity, or as the modern saying goes: "Hurt people hurt people."

The reading by Jane Froggatt is going a long way to making the listen more enjoyable, in spite of my lack of sympathy for the characters (with the occasional exception of Nellie, although I find myself losing patience with her a lot of the time as well). I didn't know that the book was set in Yorkshire, and her voice acting has breathed life into the dialogue that I think I likely wouldn't have appreciated if I'd just read the text on the page. Her ability to switch fluidly from one accent to another is really impressive, too.

I'm looking forward to being done, and to move onto a hopefully more enjoyable book. I am also going to try to read/listen to more "classic" literature this year. I have some significant gaps in my classical education. I will also be on the lookout for great books from more diverse authors, and hopefully broaden my horizons. My friend Sarah, in the wake of the Neil Gaiman debacle, commented that she'd stopped reading books by white cishet male authors a long time ago for precisely that sort of reason (not that she had a crystal ball about Gaiman, it was just on general principle).

I think my next one will be a regular murder mystery type, hopefully a fun easy read with nothing too dark and horrible. The previous book I read wasn't super dark, but it dealt with a lot of rape/sexual assault, and I could do with some lighter fare as a palate cleanser. I have about 30 minutes left on Wuthering Heights, so I shall get back to it now and hopefully progress on my sock.

KK spent most of today industriously doing All of the Baking. She made biscotti (a personal favourite of mine among her creations), chocolate chip cookies, and brownies. I am going to be eating baked goods for the rest of my life at this rate! Not that I'm complaining too hard.

Honestly, this whole affair of having to work in order to eat and keep a roof over my head is really cramping my style. I could really do with being independently wealthy at this point.

I am mostly not a fan of having to go in to the office during my weekday shifts. I don't mind going in on evenings, nights, or weekends, but day shifts are the bane of my existence. The traffic is terrible, the parking is an absolute nightmare and costs a fortune, everyone is cranky about having to be in the office, and it's just generally not a good time.

On top of that, today I was voluntold at the last minute that I needed to practice a relocation drill with a sort-of-new employee, and I haaaaate relocation drills. It involves having to pack equipment into a heavy bag, forwarding phones, making a million phone calls, and then trudging with said heavy bag on foot for multiple blocks to a new building, and setting up the operations centre in our backup location. I do understand why it's necessary, but it's super annoying and I don't enjoy doing it.