Category: Uncategorized

I’ve just stumbled across something for the first time that has been going on since before I was born. I’ve never heard of it before.

Also, as you may recall, I attempted to do exactly what they do there, on the same weekend, with the same rules for myself. Yes, I not only made up the same set of rules, but I implemented it at the same time (though shifted one day to suit my work schedule, Friday-Sunday rather than Saturday-Monday) and produced a work of approximately the length that their participants create.

Except that if I’d known about it, registered, and paid the fee, I almost certainly would have had that extra little kick of motivation I needed to get to the end of the thing. Not to mention that someone would actually read it, definitely, when I sent it in, and maybe I could have won – and the winner gets published.

I’m so clever. I invent things that people thought of before I was born. Things that are well known to people in whatever field it is my idea falls into. And then I do it the hard way, on my own, or not at all – not learning that it’s all been done before, usually better, until after the fact. Hooray me!

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 97% on depression You scored higher than 91% on mania

230lbs this morning.

Got to stop eating too much. Got to start exercising. Got to kill these voices in my head.

((Okay, I was kidding about the voices. Killed those years ago.))

So, there’s the one thing that I’m not going to post about here OR in private/friends-only posts at least until something happens with it one way or another. I write a lot about what I’m planning, what I’m hoping, what I want out of this time or that experience, and for this thing I’m just going to try to let it take its course and see where I end up and THEN, MAYBE post about what happened. If you’re my good friend, you can ask me about it when we’re alone in person and I may tell you. It’s not a total secret. I just feel that not putting it here right now is the way to go.

And then there’s that the management and/or HR where I work may be checking up periodically on my website to see what’s here. I got written up a couple of weeks ago for visiting “non-work related” internet sites (Modern Evil included) – officially, the severity of the punishment goes from ‘none’ right up to termination, there’s no standard. According to the HR person who heard that I might have looked at my own website from work and had IT get a 30-day-log of every HTTP Request my system had made, the default reaction, whether I’d only visited one or two sites or many (I’ve visited many; for the last 9 months or so I’d basically had one window open to something interesting to read and the rest of my screen up for me to continue working at full speed while I read geek articles and what-not, so from the logs it looks like I would start ‘surfing’ as soon as I walked in and then sit there reading these web pages for hours at a time, and if I’m doing that, how can I be working?), the response of the company is ‘always’ ‘supposed to be’ termination. Luckily, I’m only just sitting on the verge of termination for at least the next 6 months there.

So: No posting about work. That above may be too much, you never know. Again, if you’re my good friend, you can feel free to ask me about it. I’d even use email or IM for this subject. Heck, if you’re my good friends, you probably already know everything I have to say about employment right now.

I don’t even want to think about my grandparents’ worsening condition, let alone post about them in detail. It’s not nice. Worse, I feel simultaneously glad that I’m not the one who has to do all the work and put up with my grandmother’s failing mental state day in and day out, I feel bad that I’m not doing more to help them out. And what productive thing is there to say about that?

I may post about stucco’ing later, or about helping Zoe move, but not now.

I certainly don’t want to post about the hub-bub surrounding trying to do something with my sisters this weekend for my birthday. One or both of them might read it, and then maybe start crying again.

But I’ve been working on cleaning the house this weekend. It’s starting to look reasonably good. Yay!

I think that one of the things I do with the extra hours I gain by not sleeping is to get the things done that I didn’t get done while I was overcome by depression and anxiety. I’m not sure I come out much ahead in the long run compared to where I might be if I was never struck down by this crippling sadness, but I think I come out close to even.

I probably won’t finish Book Three by the end of the day tomorrow (my 27th birthday, two years after I finished my first book), but five finished books (four of them novels) in two years is a pretty nice accomplishment anyway. Six books in two years sounds a little better, but if I keep things up I might just reach a dozen books in three years, and that’s better still.

Depression and lethargy (not specifically related to being tired, just to losing the will to move) sapped me at about 24k words in and again at about 42k words in, but I’ll be done soon enough. The cliffhanger ending I’m working into drives the action of the next trilogy rather than just the next book, so I’ve got to be sure I handle everything just right. Which for me seems to mean doing stream-of-consciousness writing most of the time and complex math and research here and there.

I was looking through my paperwork from grade school and middle school earlier, and while the actual grade reports from everything but 7th grade are missing from my copies, the documents I do have indicate that I was always a pretty bad student. I didn’t do my homework, I didn’t get good grades in class, and I didn’t meet expectations. But on standardized tests I scored 93rd percentile and above overall, with my lowest areas being Math Computation, Spelling, Capitalization, and Punctuation. Yep. Understanding math concepts, no problem. Overall math scores, great, but on the test in my equivalent of 8th grade, with most of my grades well above average, my math computation scores actually managed to go below average. Not just low relative to my other scores, like my spelling, punctuation, and capitalization were, but actually below the national average. I was getting B’s, C’s and D’s in my classes in 7th grade, and at the same time I tested out to 93rd percentile.

I suck.

Anyway. I’m going to go watch TV and maybe cross-stitch a custom design.