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⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-04)
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This entry would be mostly focused on my meat-space self and how things have progressed (or not) in that end. These reflections are collected from a couple of scattered micro-diary entries and thoughts that I have built up in my physical planner-cum-diary. In writing this I hope to get it out of my mind, or at least organise it into a coherent whole.
Either grandma or mum is yelling at the maid very much who is visibly getting upset about it. I'm powerless to console her or prevent these conflicts from flaring up, which makes me feel very bad. I have tried to make her life a bit easier as a result, but I'm not sure at all if it helps.
I'm definitely worried about the fact that she would be unhappy to renew the contract which is ending in about half a year. It's entirely selfish, sure, but I really don't want change especially in this tumultuous time and I want to cling to literally any kind of constancy in it, plus it's in my nature to help make people more comfortable.
It's like the doors-are-closing thing from last entry; I feel like there's something I could in fact do to resolve the problems but there's not very much I can do about it.
And anyway maybe I upset her as well, I know I definitely have some habits that she seems upset about and I don't know how to change myself to accommodate.
Actually come to think of it there's a lot of acrimony going on in this family, with frustration being given by and received in every which way. I should really make some kind of diagram to map it all, but it's a little bit too close to home and making such a diagram would be hard to complete. It is definitely useful for mapping out the exact grievances and targets, but beyond that its value is dubious.
My new secondment starts near the beginning of May, and I'm not looking forward to it. The time of work-from-home is going to end soon, of course, but while that's sad it's not that bad; what really is getting to me is that I feel like I'm coming close to the end of my tether when it comes to programming; other people are publishing programs very quickly while I can't even get my basic stuff to work. It seems like I'm simply not as good at programming as some might think. Definitely, it seems like I can't seem to program GUI programs very well, and that it seems like every approach since my AHK days have been met with failure. Maybe that would change when I go to work, or otherwise become irrelevant.
I kind of dread work because of that. Also, work clothes suck and so does buying them.
In a kind of related fact, it seems like every day I'm running out of time to do what I want. Whether it's just working on my Minecraft world, or my conlanging projects, or indeed doing programming. Even time for Animal Crossing seems very tight. Every day when I finish up work, after exercise, baths, dinner and such like, it's like 20:00 and 21:00 and I feel not like working very much anymore. And now what with my current binge on That Chapter videos it's even more of a time drain. And yet every time I look at my diary not very much can be filled in because all these things are routine.
To get into a PhD course of course you need to actually apply for it. All my previous attempts were not met with much success, though this is mostly for lack of trying; I was really scared of applying for things so I just end up withdrawing and not going through it properly. It's also because I dread interviews, though it never really got to point where that is relevant.
Nevertheless, work has prepared me and got the fear of interviews out of me, so that's not really a problem anymore. However, it's still a bit of a pain to handle the application process, of which I'm not sure of. I need to think about how to handle that.
It's really annoying to me that at some point I just can't seem to muster up enough time to do anything. It's like, if I decide to go out for lunch in a particular day, and then I feel tapped out for the day and can't get anything else done.
This is annoying to me because I want to do so many things, even if those things are not at all productive. It just feels like the day has been occupied by so many things that I have to do that I just don't have any time to do things that I want to do. Though that's not exactly true; it's more that I simply lack the energy to do anything after such an action.
I guess there's a way to settle this particular issue. Let's do it quantitatively:
Together all of these occupy 18 hours or thereabouts, which leaves about 6 hours that are free. There's more to it than that of course; I should really not sleep so little and there's cooling-off time between each of these activities, so in practise the amount of "real free time" is a little bit less than that, but I don't think too much.
To put that into context of a regular clock, we have the following arrangement:
07 Free + Meal
08 Commute
09 Commute + Work
10 Work
11 Work
12 Work
13 Work
14 Work
15 Work
16 Work
17 Work
18 Work
19 Commute
20 Exercise, Meal, Shower and other stuff
21 Free
22 Free
23 Free/Sleep
24 Free/Sleep
01 Sleep
02 Sleep
03 Sleep
04 Sleep
05 Sleep
06 Sleep
Which reveals that I basically only have three or so hours genuinely to myself and my own work. Much of the remainder of this time is occupied by things like regular videos and other recurring tasks that I have put upon myself, which I am desperately trying to ballast myself out of just to get some free time doing some unstructured play.
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It's now a couple of weeks later since I wrote about this and it's not actually getting any better. For more than a couple of times I literally just collapsed straight to bed shortly after finishing everything up for the day. So much for hobbies, they just kind of fall off by the wayside and I don't feel like doing anything at all after work.
There is something uniquely draining about this job that makes it very different from the rest. I don't know what to do about it right now, maybe we'll discuss it later. For now I'll just push this out as a sign that I'm still alive. Kind of.