Ramblings of the Lost and Aimless

So, you know how I said I’d come back and update after the dating game thing? Yeah, apparently I completely forgot about that. Whoops.

The dating game thing was pretty fun, though I didn’t end up getting a date out of it. I also didn’t get the tiny pride tattoo I was thinking about. They’re doing it again this year and I have ever so slightly more disposable income, so I might do it this time around.

I got another, bigger tattoo in January. It’s a bunch of violets trailing down my left arm. It’s a reference to a tattoo in my first book. It’s also a reminder that I can do hard things. January is an excellent time to get a tattoo. Long sleeves meant no one had to see the disgusting parts of it healing.

As for things going on in my life, school year 2 is almost over and I’ve basically survived. Somehow, my classes were worse behaviorally than last year. I guess that comes from teaching a required class this year vs. two electives last year. Also, I’m teaching nothing but freshmen this year. I really can’t stand freshmen. They’re just… so young. Some of them still act like they’re in elementary school and nothing I do seems to make them realize their actions affect the people around them. It’s very frustrating.

Book 2 came out at the beginning of April. Book 3 is completely stalled, as is most of my writing. Everything I write gets longer than I want it to and I run out of motivation super quickly. I’m not sure what’s wrong there. I’ve got ideas for books 4 and 5 but again, I can’t make any progress on them right now. I sit down to write and nothing happens.

In better news, it’s Voiceteam time!!! I’m off doing ridiculous podfic-y things to get points. If something weird shows up here, that’s probably why. My team is fully willing to embrace the absurd and I’m right there with them. There are secret mod dares this year for no points and we managed the first one twice. We’re trying to do the second one three times. I’m lobbying for completing the third one five times because a Fibonacci sequence is somehow funnier than just going up by addition and doing it four times.

I should really cross post my podfics here, but we’ll see.

And that’s where I am right now. Hopefully, I’ll manage to post more in the future.

School is so close to finished for the year that I can taste it. There are 4 'instructional' days left. But everyone has already finished finals, so most of the kids have disappeared. There were zero kids in my fifth period today despite twenty-ish kids being enrolled in the class. Four days left. And a teacher work day where I’ll show up for an hour then disappear for the summer. I have two weeks of 'how to be a teacher' training after that, then four days of 'how to teach financial literacy.' Then I have two weeks of nothing (read: lying on a beach). Then I go to Washington state for two weeks to pet sit for a friend.

Yes, I’m flying to the other side of the country to pet sit. But I had two plane tickets I needed to use or they were going to disappear and it only cost $50 to change my flights. Mainly the benefit is that I get to be Somewhere Else for two weeks. I shall be adventuring in the Seattle area and maybe the Portland area. We'll see where my whims take me.

After I get home, it’ll be two or three weeks before school starts again (read: more time to lay on a beach).

Before the PNW however, there is Pride!

I’ve been really missing being sociable lately. In fact, I’ve been downright lonely. Thus, I’m making plans to go out and do things and meet people.

First, not part of Pride, but timing adjacent, there is a new ttrpg meetup group, and I’m going to go to the first of their gatherings at a local brewery. I’ve played a ttrpg exactly three times, but I had fun playing, so we'll see if that holds true. Yay new people to hang out with!

And now, Pride stuff: So, the official city Pride in this city kinda sucks. There’s a small festival in the fall, but not much happens beyond that. There’s a parade in June with an associated pub crawl, but I’m not much into either of those things. Well, apparently I’m not the only one who thinks Pride should be in June and to hell with the heat. A local neighborhood started putting on their own Pride a few years ago. This is their third time doing it, and they’re doing so much stuff it’s ridiculous. There are 44 things happening over the week from the 6th to the 11th.

Things I am doing/going to:

• Inclusive speed friending
• A Rocky Horror airing featuring assorted live actors
• Drag bingo (maybe)
• A block party
• A feminist market
• A happy hour
• A second happy hour (maybe)
• Drag-karaoke (maybe)

And I filled out an application for a bookstore's version of The Dating Game. I’m waiting to see if I get chosen for that.

Plus, there’s a tattoo shop running a special on small Pride themed flash. $120 gets you a tattoo, a burger, and a beer, so I might get a tiny tattoo.

I also just ordered three very gay, short-sleeved button down shirts that will hopefully get here in time for me to wear them at Pride. They’re so gay, y'all.

Anyway, I am excited for next week! I’m going to do all the things!

I just hit 50k for my latest book!!! 10k left and I’ll have a first draft. I probably won’t get it finished by the end of Spring Break. 10k in one day is a really big ask. I have gotten them together. I have broken them up (twice!). I now get to put them back together again. Once I do that, and write a little epilogue, I will be finished!!! Book two will be complete. I just need a title.

At the ripe old age of 39, I’ve been diagnosed with mild adhd. Because of the bipolar, they can’t just put me on stimulants and be done with it because of potential concerns about me going manic. I would like to avoid that, so alternative ideas it is. Instead, I’m on blood pressure medication that somehow helps with adhd though they’re not exactly sure how. “They’re not exactly sure how,” is the theme of all of my psych drugs.

Anyway, the point here is: ever since I started them (giving them a bit of time to work because they take a little while to become effective), I haven’t felt that overwhelming desire to write constantly that I normally associate with, well, any sort of writing whatsoever. The compulsions that would come and go erratically. This started to concern me, so I decided to try to sit down and write something anyway. This normally wouldn’t work in the past, but lo and behold, I managed to sit down and write part of the newest novel I’m trying to write. Just because I wanted to. No overwhelming compulsions necessary. So, I’ve made some progress on the current book I'm working on and I have hope that I’ll be able to make more over the next few months.

I never understood how people could sit down every day and write before. Setting daily word count targets never worked for me because I wrote in such a sporadic manner. So yeah, I think the drugs might be working.

I've opened this page several times with the intent to write something, but then I close it because I don't know what to write.

My two-week break ends tomorrow and the kids come back on Wednesday. I'm not looking forward to either of those things. I don't think I like teaching high schoolers all that much. This school year so far has been hard. Not in a good, challenging way, but in a "grind you under its heel until there's nothing left of you" way. I'm teaching subjects that I barely know anything about, so I'm having to learn the subjects along with learning how to teach. And I don't want to do it anymore. I know that I have to, that I need to at least see out the year, but I don't think this is something I can do for 20 years. Another year, sure. If I have to. I keep thinking that maybe if I do it for another year, it'll get better because I'll know more about what I'm doing, but as I get ready to go back to school tomorrow, I'm not confident in that. I already want it to be summer and it's only January.

So, I've been thinking about grad school again. Going back and getting a history Ph.D. and getting to research things and write things and yes, teach. But teaching 18-year-olds is different from teaching 15-year-olds, and at least in college, they basically want to be there. I'm not sure if it's the best idea, or if it's just a desperate attempt to be doing anything else. I just missed all of the admission cycles to start in the fall. Most applications are due in December, so I have almost a year to figure out if this is something I really want to do, or if it is, in fact, just desperation speaking.

I haven't told my mom any of this. I think she would freak out. She's pretty invested in my being a teacher. I told her I wasn't looking forward to going back tomorrow and she seemed unable to comprehend that. "But you've been out for so long. Aren't you ready to go back?" No, mom. No, I'm not.

I managed to write about 15k worth of fic over the break. It would have been better if I had managed to write 15k of one of my original stories. I'm never going to manage to finish one of them. I will have the one novel and that will be all I ever write. Oh well.

Anyway, this is my post of discontent. Hopefully, things will get better from here.

I need to edit and post the latest episode of my podcast, but my motivation is pretty close to zero. Right now, all I want to do is read fic (I’ve fallen back into the Hermione/Narcissa tag [jkr can fuck off though]). Generally, when all I want to do it read fic, it means somethings going on with my brain. It took me a few days to catch on that something was going on until I remembered that my doctor and I were trying to taper me off of one of my medications. So, yet, looks like I’m not coming off of that one completely after all. I’m still at a much lower dose than I was, so that’s good. This medication can have some not great side effects as far as cholesterol levels go, so less of it is a good thing.

I’m trying to give myself some time to get everything back at an equilibrium though, so no podcast editing for me right now. My brain isn’t there yet. And no super complicated lesson plans for the kids. I don’t have it in me right now to be super creative in my teaching techniques. The kids will survive. I only teach electives, so if the kids don’t completely understand everything about operant conditioning, it’ll be ok.

I’m just going to crawl back into some fic and hide for a few more days.

So what with all of the talk about Twitter dying a quick death, I started thinking about other forms of social media. Now, I never really used Twitter all that much, but it led to discord conversations about where everyone was going now. I’m not invested enough in the tweet-like experience to bother setting up a Mastodon account, particularly because it seems complicated. But the conversation made me realize that I kinda miss DW. Then I came over here and logged on and lost several hours of my life reading my own entries from the past.

It was a deep dive into my life while I was in law school and while I don’t know that it would be compelling to anyone else, it was quite the trip down memory lane for me. And I’m sad that I don’t have that same sort of record for the end of law school to now parts of my life. I wish I had stuck around and written posts about what was going on in my life where I could look back on them now.

I have a whole bunch of updates since the last time I really posted:

1. I live in South Carolina now and have since 2018ish. My mom and I live together now since she’s nearly 80 and doesn’t need to live alone and the cost of living here is ridiculous. I’d rather my roommate be my mom instead of a random person.
2. I worked at legal aid for almost 2 years.
3. Then I worked at Total Wine for 9 months.
4. Now, I teach high school social studies. I have a podcast about my first year of teaching that I’m not going to link to because I’m trying to be more circumspect about attaching my “real” life to my fandom life. If you want to listen, send me a message and I’ll tell you the name of the podcast.
5. The girlfriend I was talking about when last I was posting regularly and I stayed together for a couple of years until she went off to vet school and I lost a job.
6. There was a Scottish girlfriend for a couple of years, but we broke up too (distance sucks, yo).
7. I wrote a book and got it published. It’s a real thing out in the world.
8. I’m trying to write another one, but it isn’t going well. I just realized I’m 24k in and there’s no conflict. I haven’t found the energy to fix that problem yet.

Those are all of the major bullet points. I’m going to try to be around more, though I’m super busy, so I don’t know what that will look like. But I miss it here. So, for now, I’m back.

Brenda hates Sutton College before she even steps foot on the Virginia campus. Once she actually gets there, things get worse. Her advisor is a prick. Her classes are tedious. And the Student Body President, well, the less said about her, the better.

Sharon O'Dwyer is two semesters away from graduating at the top of her class and then going off to law school and a successful career. Every woman in her family has attended Sutton College ever since the school was founded back in the eighteen-sixties. It's a tradition and one she's happy to uphold. If only that pesky first-year would leave her alone