Tired
And just like that, another three weeks have gone by since my last substantive blog entry.
And I'm not sure where all my time's been going.
(Added later: Just to be clear, I should note that this entry isn't meant as a complaint or as asking for advice; it's primarily a "what I've been up to" kind of thing.)
I know some of it. I've been spending way too much time on Facebook again lately; I need to figure out a way to reduce that, or I need to stop entirely. In the past, my solution to realizing an online activity was eating up all of my time (Usenet, various games, etc) has been to just quit those activities cold turkey. I could do that with Facebook—but I would be sad, because part of the reason it's taking up so much of my time is that so much of my social life is there.
But I'm hoping to just figure out some limits that'll make it manageable.
(My barrage of posts on Saturday was due to closing a bunch of long-open windows that had made my browser unusably slow. My barrage of posts on Sunday was due to being at Pride. So those days were outliers.) (PS: For those who aren't on Facebook, I've posted all the same things to Twitter, though sometimes slightly abbreviated.)
I think the other major factor in where my time's been going has been non-textual socializing. It's been an extraordinarily social few weeks. After the super-social week and a half of Madison + Chicago, there was one only-somewhat-social week, and then there was a fifteen-day stretch when I had only two days of no significant outside-of-work social interaction, and I had at least one houseguest for at least half of the nights in that fifteen-day period. It was, as always, great to see everyone, but the amount of social energy required may have something to do with why I've been unusually tired most of the time since WisCon.
The end result has been that I've been even more flakey than usual about all sorts of things. I haven't been keeping up with art class or with online Spanish lessons. I've pretty much dropped off the map in email correspondence, and haven't talked much with various non-local people. (Haven't even talked with Mary Anne in something like a week.) I haven't made travel plans for two urgently upcoming trips, and I've failed to RSVP for various important things. I haven't been accomplishing as much as would be ideal at work. I haven't been doing much fiction reading, nor any fiction writing, and I haven't written something like five blog entries on big and/or important topics that I've been intending to write for weeks. I haven't finished editing and posting WisCon photos. Until the past few days, I haven't even been watching movies. But I'm not sure what I've been doing with all the time that I haven't been spending on all those activities.
Anyway. I'm operating under the assumption that this phase will pass, as this kind of thing has in the past, and I'll get back onto a more manageable social schedule, with less Facebooking, and will start making useful progress on various things again. We'll see.
One thing that I do know I've been doing is watching TV, but even that hasn't been much. I watched all of Scandal so far: twenty-eight episodes over the past two months. I liked season 1 (only seven episodes) quite a bit, though I had some issues with it; but my issues with it expanded over the course of season 2, and I'm sorry to say I think I'm now (as of the end of season 2) done with the show. I hope to write more about it at some point, but given how much else is on my to-do list, who knows if that'll happen. But watching this has only been about an hour a day, and not every day, so that doesn't account for most of my time lately. And I don't think I've watched any other TV since the end of the Dr. Who season.
I've gotten back to movie-watching lately, after almost a month of no movies. In the past ten days, I've seen Much Ado About Nothing, Iron Man 3, Sabrina, Thor, and Hulk. (I had seen Sabrina and Thor before.) Hope to write more about those sometime too.
Another thing that's been taking up my time/energy has been various news items. The NSA surveillance thing, Supreme Court decisions (I had to revise my plans for an explanatory blog entry when events turned out to have moved much more quickly than I'd expected this past Friday), harassment and other misbehavior in the sf community; been spending a fair bit of time reading about all of those things.
And there've been a couple of side projects that have taken up time in intermittent bursts. I've spent a couple of evenings going through all the email from the Strange Horizons staff mailing list from the first half of 2000, originally just looking to see who participated but I got drawn in and have been taking notes on key moments and decisions as well. And I've spent some time helping out on various email-related things for Mary Anne's new online magazine, Jaggery. Neither of those have been huge amounts of time, but they've both taken a few concentrated blocks of time. Oh, and helped a friend prepare for a move.
And then today, when I had originally intended to devote most of the day to my to-do list, I instead spent most of the day at Pride in San Francisco. Which was worth it, but left me too tired to do much else by the time I got home.
One last specific recent activity is that Kam and I played through most of the video game Journey the other day. (Available only for PS3.) It's gorgeous, and I really hope to write more about it soon.
But not now. I've folded some laundry and had some dinner, and I was going to buy some plane tickets and prepare for an interview I'm conducting tomorrow (wrote most of this entry a couple hours ago), but now I think I need to just go to sleep and do all that in the morning. So it's time to bid you all fondue.