My effing Internet has been going down on and off for two days now and it’s driving. me. crazy.

It’s sort of sad to realize how attached I am (or maybe how addicted I am) to my technology, but at the same time, I just want my stupid Internet. I mean, I REALLY want it.

I feel like Gollum.

So anyway, Internet down. Driving me batty. Other than that I’m just trying to enjoy my weekend and not think about work. Impossible, really. I wake up every day really tense because I know I have work to do and I can’t put it out of my mind. Even if I conceivably had nothing on my plate all weekend … I’d still be thinking about the stuff coming up. And the only way to quit worrying is to get working. So I work. All the time. Literally. It’s really fun. I love it. No, really. I do.

In fact, were it not for the fact that my Internet is down, I think I’d be working right now.

Now onto a completely random tangent: IKEA. How much do you love IKEA? I think I may be as addicted to IKEA as I am to my technology. That’s weird, right?

IKEA is thoroughly underrated, if you ask me. People are always saying it’s low-quality, student-style crap, but it’s not. Sigh. IKEA.

Okay, onto another completely random tangent: The Three Day Novel Contest. In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s … a Three Day Novel Contest. You write a novel in three days. You hope for the best. Someone wins. That novel gets published. I did it last year, got totally fucked over by my bullshit office at the time. (They knew I was doing the contest, AND I’d officially booked off the day, but they called me into work anyway … bastards.) But I finished anyway. Then I didn’t end up sending my manuscript in because I hated it so much. All in all, it wasn’t the best experience. By day three I was so sleep deprived I was completely irrational and upset about everything and ended up having this hoopla semi-fight with someone over the phone, who granted, was being a total unsupportive bad-friend bitch, but still. All in all, it sort of sucked.

I’m probably going to do it again this year.

Maybe I’m a sadomasochist, I dunno, but admittedly, pumping out 90,000 or so words in 72 hours, even when those words are horrible, is somehow satisfying. ‘Cause even if you don’t do any writing for the rest of the year, you can feel like you met some sort of quota.

Jen

P.S. 2018-05-21: This post is a little all-over-the-place, but what stands out for me is that, as previously mentioned in some of my updates, I’m clearly burning out at work. This will become important as we go along because the end of my career at Dose was really fraught. The official story is that after nine months, my contract was simply not renewed, but what really happened was that I was fired and humiliated. It was extremely traumatic for me, and I never really recovered. There were allegations of plagiarism. It was a whole thing, which I will eventually write more about, that left me devastated and depressed for a long time. I think I developed a sort of PTSD about it. Only now, 13 years later, am I even starting to feel ready to talk about it publicly, but for so long, the idea that people would “find out” that I was fired (ie. “the truth about me”) has been a major source of anxiety, and a plague on my professional life.

Photo by Quinten de Graaf on Unsplash