damned vulpine

Put in park (nine of swords, reversed)

I got into a lapse again. Not without much to say, just not a lot approaching insightful, or spontaneous. I do fine pretending I'm right when someone else provokes me. Sometimes I even hold my own.

It's 6 a.m., and I haven't slept. When I took this job just over a month ago, I started getting the best sleep I'd had in over a year. Mainly because I'm working a straight 8-hour shift with a half-hour lunch break, and before my hours were scattered in between early-morning page builds and late-night meetings. Now I'm worried that I'm falling into the opposite routine -- some part of me misses the lack of sleep I'd been getting, and so I stay up all night reading or playing games, then doze through the morning and wake up at 1.

Once again, these are problems that most people would love to have, at least in exchange for their own, more pressing problems. Among other things bugging me lately:

• Chapped lips. Part of the reason I'm up is that they've been a pain all night, and I finally decided to go get some Blistex. Carmex just doesn't work for me, but that's all I had.
• Bad shape. I'm not exercising, not like I ever did, and my metabolism's slowing down. Dumb me, I even knew this was going to happen eventually.
• Money. This month I'm finally coming out from under my bills, but I still owe my dad money (he says I'm good for it, and doesn't charge interest like my credit card does, but he's still my dad,) and I need to get some Christmas shopping done in the next couple weeks.
• Dull job. The honeymoon's over, though things still aren't too bad. I haven't screwed up too badly, though there have been a few times I've been told not to do something (like the time I ran the blurry AP photo of a soldier's mangled body -- he'd just been shot to death and Iraqi teen-agers might have given him a few whacks with bricks -- near the top of the newspaper's front page; my editor basically said not to do it again, even though all we got were two letters about it,) and it rankles. I do miss the work I was doing on the side for Shadowbane, and I've concluded it was probably the added interesting stress it brought me. (It definitely wasn't the money.)
• Isolation. Part of the reason I told people I wanted to come to the Austin area was that I had a number of friends in the area. Truth be told, I don't know that many people in the area, and the ones I do know, I don't see any more often than I did.
  Closer to home, however, there's a city park just a block from my apartment complex, that seemed nice from the main road and was a factor in why I chose to move to this neighborhood. But in six weeks of living here, I still haven't gone.

Definitely not the sort of problems that should keep me up at night. Maybe I need new problems.

Damn, that Blistex worked good. I think I'll try and sleep now.

Posted by j at December 1, 2003 06:26 AM