I am so tired.
I just did a month with no days off. That wasn't how I scheduled it, but people kept asking me for things. Please fix my dress, please feed my cats. I can't turn down things that pay money, and there's a pretty hard limit to how much I can do in one day, so it ends up spread out.
I tried doing this last summer, with the bonus of having an early (for me) call to a film set. That didn't work well either. I get erratic when I'm that tired, emotionally unstable, and lose my ability to do basic goddamn math. I've had some "free time" since then, but spent it mostly in bed, which means I'm now behind on basic life tasks like laundry and email and feeding myself.
When I have no breathing room, I get anxious about everything. Every social interaction looks like it's going wrong. Every piece of choreography feels like I've got my feet in the wrong place.
It's especially bad when I have to buy something. Fucking bath towels. I've needed bath towels for months now. I can use the ones I've got until they become shreds of lightly-connected terrycloth, or I can give Amazon $8 and make the mailman bring me some. It took me hours to argue myself into putting them in the cart. Repeat for another set of sheets, and a replacement desk lamp for the one that has actually already died. What if I need the money for something more important? What qualifies as important, anyway? Technically humanity survived for thousands of years without any sort of desk lamps at all, but I do have to function in society, and I'd like to not have migraines from trying to work under the actual overhead light in my room, which blazes with the fire of a thousand self-ballasted fluorescent suns and kills my head.
You can imagine what grocery runs are like. Endless stream of 'do I really need that?' until I break down and inform myself that I need something, and end up buying ramen and marshmallows, because when you're down to calculating raw calories per dollar those are actually not bad options. They're not great at nutrition, but CVS sells multivitamins for that. Apparently they think I need some, as they like to send me half a dozen coupons for more of the damn things a week after I've bought a year's supply of them.
I had a further extended argument with myself about buying a Bluetooth keyboard for the Kindle. The blog is connected to a Patreon that makes a non-zero amount of money, which means it is actually a job I should be doing. For the past few months I keep running into the problem that when I have something to say and time to say it, I don't have access to a computer. By the time I get home to a computer, I'm so exhausted I skip dinner in favor of sleep and get nothing done. Technically the computer is a laptop and can travel with me, but it weighs 3.5 pounds. That doesn't sound like a lot on its own, but it's not on its own; it's 3.5 pounds above what I normally carry, when I'm already having atrocious back and shoulder problems from carrying the original collection of shit around. I have a locker at the studio for shoving shoes and props into, but that's of limited help.
I did eventually order the keyboard (and the sheets and the towels and the lamp) but I still have the nagging feeling that all of this is going to go wrong somehow
I just did a month with no days off. That wasn't how I scheduled it, but people kept asking me for things. Please fix my dress, please feed my cats. I can't turn down things that pay money, and there's a pretty hard limit to how much I can do in one day, so it ends up spread out.
I tried doing this last summer, with the bonus of having an early (for me) call to a film set. That didn't work well either. I get erratic when I'm that tired, emotionally unstable, and lose my ability to do basic goddamn math. I've had some "free time" since then, but spent it mostly in bed, which means I'm now behind on basic life tasks like laundry and email and feeding myself.
When I have no breathing room, I get anxious about everything. Every social interaction looks like it's going wrong. Every piece of choreography feels like I've got my feet in the wrong place.
It's especially bad when I have to buy something. Fucking bath towels. I've needed bath towels for months now. I can use the ones I've got until they become shreds of lightly-connected terrycloth, or I can give Amazon $8 and make the mailman bring me some. It took me hours to argue myself into putting them in the cart. Repeat for another set of sheets, and a replacement desk lamp for the one that has actually already died. What if I need the money for something more important? What qualifies as important, anyway? Technically humanity survived for thousands of years without any sort of desk lamps at all, but I do have to function in society, and I'd like to not have migraines from trying to work under the actual overhead light in my room, which blazes with the fire of a thousand self-ballasted fluorescent suns and kills my head.
You can imagine what grocery runs are like. Endless stream of 'do I really need that?' until I break down and inform myself that I need something, and end up buying ramen and marshmallows, because when you're down to calculating raw calories per dollar those are actually not bad options. They're not great at nutrition, but CVS sells multivitamins for that. Apparently they think I need some, as they like to send me half a dozen coupons for more of the damn things a week after I've bought a year's supply of them.
I had a further extended argument with myself about buying a Bluetooth keyboard for the Kindle. The blog is connected to a Patreon that makes a non-zero amount of money, which means it is actually a job I should be doing. For the past few months I keep running into the problem that when I have something to say and time to say it, I don't have access to a computer. By the time I get home to a computer, I'm so exhausted I skip dinner in favor of sleep and get nothing done. Technically the computer is a laptop and can travel with me, but it weighs 3.5 pounds. That doesn't sound like a lot on its own, but it's not on its own; it's 3.5 pounds above what I normally carry, when I'm already having atrocious back and shoulder problems from carrying the original collection of shit around. I have a locker at the studio for shoving shoes and props into, but that's of limited help.
I did eventually order the keyboard (and the sheets and the towels and the lamp) but I still have the nagging feeling that all of this is going to go wrong somehow
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