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Things with me have been a little weird lately.

I guess the main thing is that I’m having even stronger avoidance reactions than usual. It seems to me to be pretty clearly an anxiety thing, but most of the time I’m not experiencing it as the usual consciously evident fear/anxiety (though there’s been some of that too); it’s just been very hard to get myself to do the things on my to-do list, both at work and outside of work. That especially applies to responding to email and other messages—that’s always been one of my biggest points of anxiety, but I’ve had an especially hard time with it lately.

(No advice, please.)

I’ve also been having more than usual of one of my few Lexapro side effects: earworms. Most people get songs stuck in their heads now and then, but ever since I started on Lexapro, it happens to me more often than it used to, and for a longer period at a time, and more annoyingly. Usually it’s one or two lines of a song, over and over and over and over and over and over, for hours. My doctor asked me recently how often this happens, and I said every week or two, but I don’t know why I said that; it’s usually more like every day or two. And lately it’s sometimes been multiple times a day. Last night, I had a long complicated dream that was mostly focused on trying to look up the lyrics to one of the songs that I can’t get out of my head.

I am making some progress on things, both at work and outside of work. Nearly done with the ebook of Mary Anne’s cookbook, and approaching done with the first Constellation Press book. I had hoped to have the latter out before the end of the year, but it looks like it’ll be early 2020. But soon. (The text is nearly final, the cover is finished and gorgeous, I’ve done trial runs of creating the ebook and it looks good.) And I’m continuing to slowly approach other authors and estates about reprinting their work too. But all of my progress on all of these things has been much slower than would be ideal.

Have also been doing some sysadmin stuff for the SLF—helping transfer their email over to G Suite, mostly. Have learned a fair bit about SPF DNS records (an anti-spam measure), with help from various people, and have also set up an SPF record for kith.org, which may reduce the likelihood of Gmail marking mail from me as spam.

I closed about 200 tabs in my browser on my home computer over the past week. Unfortunately I still have about 70 open (and many more in other browsers and in iOS), but it was nice to make some progress on that.

Speaking of tech stuff, I spent a while last week downloading the archives of several Yahoo Groups. Time-consuming, but I did eventually get it done.

In most other ways, things are going fine. I’m getting a lot of reading done on my unread-books project. (Have read or skimmed or at least glanced over 11 books so far in December, and am partway through 4 or 5 more.) I’m spending too much of my time on iOS games and on Facebook; that’s not so unusual for me, but it has been more time than usual on both of those things lately.

Various projects that I’ve backed on Kickstarter have been arriving recently, and I’ve bought various other interesting items, so I have some new toys to play with. Not up for writing them all up right now, though.

I’ve been doing maybe 15 to 20 minutes a day of piano practice, with the excellent SimplyPiano app. Liking it a lot, and learning a lot.

Have picked up Duolingo again, after yet another period of ignoring it for a couple of months. And am occasionally playing Beat Saber on the Oculus Quest, but not often.

Kam and I finished watching Voyager (an uneven series, but overall I liked it significantly more than I had expected), and we watched season 1 of Raising Dion (really excellent show, very well done), and tomorrow we’ll watch the season 1 finale of For All Mankind (also an excellent show). I’ll be nominating both of those last two in next year’s Hugos. We’ve also been watching The Mandalorian; more or less enjoying it, but not loving it.

Friday, we’re going to see the new Star Wars movie. Saturday, we’re going to hang my new Canvia digital-art-frame-thingy on the wall. Sunday, I’m off to Chicago for most of a week.

After I get back, I have various social plans, plus a couple more days off work. I’m hoping that somewhere in the next couple of weeks, I can find a way to reset and start being able to be more productive again.