(no subject)

mantic_angel showed me this. It is cute and happy. Enjoy.

Arbitrary make updates evening

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

I have not been updating much recently. This seems odd to me, as I used to post as often as half a dozen times a day.

It might be tempting to blame this on Pokemon, which I have recently started playing again and the playing of which has been interfering with my ability to hold conversations with people. But that would only apply to the past couple of days at most and I am talking about something of months.

(I started with Yellow, by the way, and so far have a little team in Vista counting of course a pikachu [Chikapu], rattata [Ratsy], pidgey [Perchy] and two nidorans, male and female [Nirodan and Nita, respectively].)

For the past several weeks I have been undertaking an industry placement for TAFE two days a week, which means working in a somewhat looking Catholic high school library. It has been interesting and fun. I got to do actual cataloging for a catalogue. Well, copy-cataloguing. Also designed and put up a display on this year's Olympics, shelving, cleaning shelves, some circulation (mostly the checking out of laptops to students, who seldom borrow books when I am looking) and end-processing. Also recently making sure signage is in the right place and designing new signs for the shelves.

This necessitated much colour-matching yesterday, to get the new signs with their number breakdown to match the colours of the existing signs pointing to the first hundred divisions. The other people there seemed to think this was a sort of brilliant idea so yay. Currently that is in an intermediate state of being cut to size before getting laminated, after I spent much of yesterday calculating the right font size to use to get the desired spacing, and other such sign-related activities.

The point of saying all this is that I have been doing work-type things for nearly the first time in my life and although for a while it was leaving me tired unto sleep once I got home (now less so to the point of being able to be productive ish in my own time again) and it has been interesting and varied and even in some cases fun. So far I have managed not to succumb to the occasional bouts of anxiety which have me wanting to whimper in a corner until it goes away and I have managed to do socialising a bit.

So. Library work. I can do this. I have also been finding that, if this is what library work is, it is not interesting enough for me to want to do indefinitely. Fortunately it is something I can do and not hate and even enjoy in parts, so I am not looking to abandon it even for the next several years barring some unexpected opportunity, and may well continue with it for a very long time. However, I will definitely be considering what else I might do that could provide me with more intellectual satisfaction.

Astronomy is something I have been wanting more and more to get back to. Doing so would mean really working on my mathematical skills, which I keep not doing. Still not sure how to do so, though I am sure it involves cutting down on the amount I feel obligated to do online and especially the things I do to shut off my brain and thought. Even if I do, I am doubtful I would want to pursue a career in research. It seems laden with a lot of distasteful scrabbling for funds and tenure and a whole lot of pressures not really related to learning about the universe.

Writing is something else. Despite my occasional mutterings about the end of my writing, I do not intend to give it up. I am less focused these days on the idea of publication, and even if I am published it is unlikely I would be so successful and prolific that I would be able to write full-time. It might however provide a diversion from work which would satisfy me. I might find, too, this 'satisfaction' thing in other aspects of my life which I do not expect.

Satisfy, that is a curious sort of word to use. I do not imagine myself ever being satisfied in life, experiencing contentment without ambition. But I might apply that word to the pursuit of things, to engagement with what I am doing, to the journey itself even if no destination can quite compare.

While writing this I have been thinking about my recent decline in posting. There have been ideas.

One is that I am currently in three romantic relationships and quite possibly this has the effect of socially saturating me. There are people (not limited to those I am in relationships with, though nearly so) who are willing to talk to me on a near-daily basis in interesting ways. I do not have much desire to seek out social contact outside what I already have - the main reason at present is the inconvenience of the hours, which leave me often awake with no one about.

Another is that posting is a habit and a mindset, and one I have fallen out of. More than once over the past few weeks I have begun writing a post only to lose heart soon after. I was a bit depressed in the first half of the year and this may have had an effect.

The last one in this little list is that I have been doing such things as going to classes and this industry placement, and I find such activities exhausting beyond their content. Often the first day after these (Tuonday and Sriday currently) I spend decompressing, not doing much at all beyond recovery. So this is going to cut into what I actually do in my free time, although it seems to be improving.

And that seems to be all for now.