Author: A

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Dear Diary

the only thing pushing me forward today is the thought of late night ramyun.

I even put the package next to me on my desk. My beacon of gentle soft light, guiding me forward. Oh, how I will feast on it. It, and the solitary chicken sausage that I didn’t eat yesterday. Might add an egg. Should have got two packs of ramyun, now that I think of it.

And afterwards I will cook pasta napolitana to feast on the next day.

And tomorrow night it will be time for teriyaki noodles.

You should know by now that I have a thing for noodles. People doubt my ability to subsist on various types of noodles for days, weeks, months, possibly years – but they really shouldn’t. Who are they to deny the mighty noodle its versatility?

Oh I hope I have garlic.

In other news, I need to stop by the filling station on my way back home. “The”, because I really only go to a particular one these days. Nights, rather. It’s such a tiny errand, but for some reason it takes an unreasonable amount of convincing each time I have to do it. It’s not the money, it’s not the time. On some particular harsh winter nights it might be the cold, but it’s not like it’s an ordeal by any means. I was actually having a discussion with me just about now, trying to postpone it for one more day, but I have a quarter of a tank left, and I’ve got some driving in rush hour to do tomorrow.

Also, we city folk should stop calling these traffic jams rush hours – or even traffic jams, to be honest. Surely there’s a gradation of severity, but by no means is it a rush hour.

Here’s a random tip for you, by the way – fill up your tank at night, or whenever it cools down. Gas is sold by volume, and it also expands when heated. I doubt it’ll help you buy a house, but every bit counts. Also if you fill up at a self-service station – I don’t – don’t forget to raise that hose and let every little bit trickle down to your tank. Again, it won’t help you buy a house. But every bit counts.

Yes.

By now I’m just staring at my monitor with a blank expression.

Hmm. I wonder if the filling station sells ramyun. Oh I could have two packs then. Let’s not get our hopes up, though.

OK, I intend to leave the office on the dot, so I better start clearing out.

Categories
Writing

some rules for NaBloPoMo, then. supposedly postfactum

[ETA] This post was written at the start of October, scheduled to be published on the last day, to check in with myself on whether I have succeeded or failed in NaBloPoMo – that is, blogging every day for one month. Spoiler alert: I failed, so I made the post private. But I still found some use in looking back at this post and commenting on it. Publicly. That doesn’t mean, though, that this post has any merit for anyone who’s not my therapist, psychiatrist, or ‘cAReER mENtor’. I wouldn’t even suggest my bestie reads it. The reason I’m making this public is because I personally find such self-analyses and challenge accounts of others fascinating. So maybe you’re like me, in which case do indulge. If not, here’s a very condensed version: I kept up for about half a month, then I blanked out, because my mind was spinning around the thought of getting to sleep instead. And I let myself fail. Not that it helped me get a healthy sleep pattern back. In other words, insomnia is a bitch.

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I sat down to write, but it seems like today is the day when I can only type out an increasingly self-aware yet still compulsively whiny journal entry. I did type that out, but I have zero intentions of sharing it with anybody. In all of my running list of “ideas” – I use this term loosely, thus quote marks – nothing spoke out to me, except rules for the October blogging challenge. But I didn’t want to post them before the challenge is complete. I don’t even know if I would complete the challenge.

I suppose if I don’t then we can ridicule me collectively. I will write this now, but schedule it to be posted at the end of October. That’s why everything will be in future/ present tense. I’m not manifesting, I’m laying down some rules.

Maybe if I’m feeling it, I’ll post an analysis of success right after this post. [ETA: I chose to edit this post instead.]

So. I am writing this in September. But you will see it at the end of NaBloPoMo. I’ve scheduled it for 23:59 on October 31st.

A blog post should be 500 words, It can be a bit less – like 480 – and it can be longer. But can’t be significantly shorter.

Comment: In all the posts and drafts I did in October, I stuck to this rule. I still think it’s a good rule, but I won’t force myself to do this outside of the challenge.

It can be any subject. It can even be an excerpt from my actual diary.

I can write more than one post a day and schedule it for the following day.

I can’t skip writing days, though. Every day I must sit down and write. Diary counts. Morning pages don’t. It needs to be at least five sentences. They can be simple.

Comment: I kept at daily writing for about half a month. Then came a dry spell of several days, where I got tired of staring at the blank page. Eventually it angered me, and I scraped the challenge altogether.

Unless I significantly rework them, I can’t use old nearly complete drafts for articles and posts. Only if I improve them notably, or add new content of at least 2/3 of the 500 word limit, can they be counted towards this challenge.

Comment: I stuck to this. I have reworked some older drafts – still unpublished – into new posts.

I can use quotations from articles to reference what I’m talking about, but I will not count them towards the word limit.

Apart from that revision of drafts mentioned above, all posts should be written and scheduled in October. I can’t use anything I write and schedule in September towards checking off October challenge days. Including this post. It will publish on the last day of October, but it will not count towards the challenge.

Comment: Technically that’s what I did. Everything I published in October, I wrote in October.

If by some circumstance I will miss posting on some day, but I will have had a post written by then, I will not consider it a loss. It will be a point off, so to say, but I will not see it as a challenge lost. But backtracking will be. If I miss a day of posting due to lack of content to post, I will not stop and continue trying to keep up, but I will see it as a challenge lost.

Comment: Well, as I said above, I missed a few days due to me blanking out in front of a page, and then dropped the challenge altogether. So I lost points, and then I just failed.

I think this is it for the rules. If you didn’t care to read the whole thing, here’s a short version: 500 words a post, I can pre-write and pre-publish but I can’t backtrack, I can significantly rework and add new content to older drafts, I can’t skip writing days. Should I miss a day, I will not stop posting afterwards, but I will consider it a failed challenge.

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Ah, see, writing is a habit and a muscle. Now I really want to write about a recent book haul, and also some notes from my work days, but I must stop myself and head to bed. Today was supposed to be an all-nighter, because I completely fucked up my sleeping schedule, and it doesn’t help to stabilise me one single bit. But if I don’t go to bed, the migraine will progress. So I can just hope that I will wake up to the three hundred alarms I’m about to set.

Comment: And this paragraph sums up some of the reason behind my failing this challenge. I ruined my sleeping schedule in October. Rrrrrruined. It’s November now, and it’s still destroyed. Last weekend I slept for what feels like 30 hours total, and today is the third day in a row when I can’t sleep until 10 am, and then keep missing my 1 pm appointment.

But how does that pertain to a ruined writing challenge? It was responsible for me blanking out in front of a page, because I would keep thinking how I should be trying to get to sleep instead. This pattern of thinking I should be trying to sleep never gets me – or anyone dealing with insomnia – anywhere. It’s just an anxious response. What I should have done instead is just go on with my tasks as usual.

Categories
Dear Diary

180.

On Friday night – Saturday early morning, as my father would be willing to correct me – I had to call an ambulance. It’s the second one I ever had to call – for myself at least. If we call a visit to the ER that I didn’t call an ambulance for, then it’s the third.

This is too technical. What I am trying to say is that this is the third time that I have voluntarily addressed emergency medical services when it comes to my person.

OK, no. Now that I think of it, it’s the fourth. Yes. It was ambiguous, but ultimately I said yes. Everything else was not by me, or not for me.

I am- See, I hate writing sentences like these, because life surely does take pride in proving me otherwise – but I am not afraid of death, per se. I don’t want to die, but I don’t go around terrified of death. I am afraid of various long-term and/ or terminal illnesses that have the ability to take bodily freedom from me or put a term on my existence. And I don’t want to go around playing with my life, testing just how much shit the universe can take from me before it decides to end my presence on this earthly plane. Which is nice of me to say, but LORD knows I’m hardly able to learn from my mistakes.

I digress. I called an ambulance, because my chest, my jaw, and my upper arms felt like someone set my poppet on fire. It was just as sudden, too. One second I’m finishing my shift, the other I’m in debilitating pain. I ran down a list of what could be happening, settling somewhere between nerve pain due to my back problems and a heart attack because I really should eat less donuts. I took an ibuprofen just in case it was either, and tried to wait it out. It seemed to go away for about 3 minutes, only to continue with renewed fervour. About ten minutes later I called an ambulance.

The doctor asked me about my medical history and what meds I’m taking. She and her assistant did an ECG and read my blood pressure, ruled out impending cardiac arrest and stroke. She thought I might be having a panic attack, given the meds I take, but that day there was nothing to panic about, and I never had one before, so why the fuck start now? Just for shits and giggles, I suppose, the lady took my blood pressure again – and by her face I could see she didn’t like what the meter said. “Let’s give you something to lower that,” she said. She refused to tell me how much it was, but asked me if I had a hypertensive crisis before. Matter of fact, I did, and it was the second time I ever had to address emergency medical services.

They gave me a furosemide shot in addition to the initial captopril, and stayed with me until the digits started to go down. As they were leaving, I asked what the meter read again, and she told me it was 180.

“Yeah,” I said, “That’s a bit much.”
“A BIT?”
“OK, a lot bit.”

So here I am. I don’t have the blood pressure device, because a family member took both of them with them when they visited last time. Not sure why, I don’t care, all I care is that I need to buy one for me, and potentially hide it when not in use.

But since I don’t have a meter, I have no way of knowing what my blood pressure is right now. There are no visible signs of hypertension, and the symptoms I have are a headache and blurred vision – but I seemingly always have a headache, and blurred vision is likely because I fell asleep in my contacts the day before, and have an unfortunate case of the dry eye.

I should in all seriousness treat this as a cautionary tale. This slight medical scare together with my need to reorganise my life so I could straighten my finances should be enough incentive to do some shit and turn my life back to how I was. Psychotically organised, obsessed with how I look and feel, slashing every goal off of my list with a one-track mind ferocity of a really maniacal goldfish. When I’m focussed like that, I get results incredibly fast. It’s not that I’m special, anyone would, with that level of concentration on goals.

I am, however, going to end this day with a piece of chocolate cake and a glass of almond milk.

Categories
Dear Diary

my washing machine is about to go kaput, methinks.

What it mostly means is the increasing speed of thoughts spinning in my head.

You know.

I have debt. I want to pay it off. I need to pay it off. The exorbitant payments I do each month only represent 1.47% of the total sum.

Before I pay off debt, I need to have a small cushion of savings – exactly for situations like my washing machine going out. But even the third of the price of a modest machine will take me about half a year to save, at the rate I’m going currently.

And it just layers on, and on, and on.

I begin thinking about my personal values, and how my existence has been in complete misalignment with them. Even if we take away my constant fluctuation between anarchy, personal liberation, and absconding to live as a witch of the woods and my perfectly capitalist desire to live like the Sultan of Brunei, albeit still very personally liberated – there is no alignment to my values in my current actions, because the most radical thing I do these days is refuse a coffee to go at the start of my day and get a free one from work instead.

So I could either put away the two bucks towards life in the woods or the golden Rolls Royce. Whichever. Either the one that comes first, or proves to be most lucrative to my emotional state of the moment.

Please forgive me this jumbled narrative. I’ve been omitting one of the more important medications in my protocol, because I can’t find my back-up box, and there’s a shortage of it in the country, so I can’t buy any. It sure is fun to be a crazy bitch in 2023.

I suppose it’s more fun than being a crazy bitch in the 1960s.

But I digress.

I will need to get a little (just a touch, really) more radical with my value alignment, because my washing machine is about to bite the dust, and winter is coming, and I’ve got bills to pay, and debt to kill, and promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep. If I am to refuse that wretched cup of coffee for any period of time, I am to restructure half of my slack and lackluster habits. And it’s not even a matter of me constantly complicating things and wanting to be perfect in one smooth action. It would mean to have some breakfasts ready at work, because more often than not I also take a croissant with my coffee, because I was too late to have breakfast at home. So it will also mean waking up earlier. Which will mean going to bed earlier (though if my medication will be gone for another week or so, we can just exclude sleep from schedule). Which will mean leaving work earlier. Which will mean being more aggressive with my time and also eating at my desk, which will mean prepped lunches, etc. etc.

Who would have thought I’d have to abandon my languid swamp all because of a daily to-go coffee.

Categories
Dear Diary

thank you for your hard work this week

My predecessor at the job I’m currently at went out to lunch one day, and never came back. The following week, my (now former, by the way!) colleagues told me – the following week she sent an email disparaging every person she ever crossed paths with in her line of duties and checked herself into the central psych ward. The psych ward didn’t dismiss her, which tells me that she had good reason to go there, otherwise she would have become an outpatient in a designated regional hospital, only coming in for routine check-ins with her psychiatrist.

Don’t ask me how I know that bit of information. But that’s how it’s handled around here. If you pose no threat to yourself or the public, you will not be committed to the central psychiatric institution. Even if you ask them to keep you. I’ve only ever been a visitor there myself. The walls are a pale blue, and the late spring afternoon light is amazing. It makes the hall look as if it’s painted on silk. I still smile a little when I think of it.

I am much more resilient than the vast majority of people I know. And yet, another thing that makes me smile a little whenever I think about it is following in the steps of my predecessor and also walking out to lunch one day, never to come back. But what makes me smile even more is the thought of flipping my goddamn desk, kicking the chair from under my junior, and possibly slapping my senior with one of my monitors.

I will do no such thing, of course, nor do I want anybody else to do anything similar. It’s one thing entertaining these ideas in the darkness of your own mind, and it’s completely another thing to act upon these urges. That would be completely unbecoming. Don’t do it. I won’t.

But the thought lingers.

Which tells me that it might be a good time to switch jobs. Surely, yes, I am paid well. Surely, yes, “the devil you know”. But the only way to advance in career, or at least in pay, in corporate is to jump ship every two to three years. Unless you’re an outlier of a corporate worker – and I’m not, I’m a regular civilian who hates their job with a low-burning soul-sucking passion – unless you’re an outlier, every promotion you ever will get if you stay in one place is just reindexing for inflation.

Plus the hatred might just be dampened down a little by the newness of places and faces, and by the eradication of old and construction of a new personality for the new corporation.

Told you I’m getting bored. We must never, ever, ever get bored.

Yet we must not overexert ourselves either, and it looks like my current company is facing a bit of an employee crisis. It’s hard to find someone with the necessary skill set, which I continue to find surprising, because my job, and the jobs of my colleagues, are not difficult. They are not easy, don’t take me wrong, but they’re not complicated. It’s all quite simple. The tasks are straight-forward, and the skillset is pretty basic. Nothing you can’t learn on the job from others, or even quietly google, as far as I’m concerned.

Then again, the job I was at before that, the one where I was supposed to become a regional manager prior to the pandemic – that job was easier still, and I remember how difficult it was to recruit anyone quick-witted enough to perform the tasks there. But maybe we all just want bigger pay. For nothing, too, my inner capitalist critic tells me. For half my life and soul mortgaged to you, you bastard, my inner anarchist replies.

But I suppose if this job offers to pay me more, I may as well stay. Enter “the devil you know”. Although if they pay me more, they would certainly believe I ought to do more, and I’m doing way out of the scope of my paid responsibilities as it is.

I’m talking like I have an offer from someone different for bigger pay in my hand already. Ah, but to get anywhere and to get anything done one always needs to be a bit delulu. Fortunately that is something I excel at, as long as I set my mind to it.

I shall sleep and pray and do a cartomancy spread on it.