Spinning My Wheels

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There have been times when I’ve had to rush just to get a blog up so I don’t go a whole calendar month without blogging, but I’ve never had to do it under this level of sleep deprivation. My life has gotten incredibly hectic in the past few months, and even though I’m on break from teaching for the next two and a half weeks, I’ve got so many other things I need to get to while I’m on “vacation” that I’m not getting much of a chance to really focus on anything here at all. The worst part is that I’ve had stuff I’ve wanted to blog about (the absurd situation with Detroit’s water, the inhumane conservative response to the Central American refugee crisis), but I haven’t had time, and now that I have the time right now, I just don’t have the focus to write about those things because I’m so sleep-deprived. All I can really do right now is ramble about my life for a bit, stick it up on the .org, and hope that I feel ready to write about more in-depth topics soon.

It hasn’t helped that this has been the worst summer I can ever remember having in terms of my seasonal allergies. This part of the country was in the news a lot this past winter for how cold it got, but we’ve had a much cooler summer than usual as well, and I think that’s led to me having more problems with pollen and such than I’m used to having. I can only afford the short-term remedies of over-the counter allergy medications, and even they don’t seem to be doing as much good as they normally do. Between that and the sleep-deprivation today, it feels like I have my own personal fog cloud enveloping my head, going with me wherever I go. It’s not a fun feeling, needless to say.

I’m also coming off of one of the most difficult semesters of teaching I’ve ever had. This past semester was the first time I had to teach a class made up exclusively of students in one particular programme at the college, and that created more challenges than I’d thought it would. I normally like challenges when I teach — if it came easily to me, I’d know I wasn’t doing it right — but I got overwhelmed there, to the point where I was more relieved than sad to see the term end, which has never happened before. The good news is that it’s yielded a lot of material for me to write about in my professional writing, but the bad news is that it took a lot out of me, and I haven’t been able to recharge my batteries on my break so far. With the new term less than three weeks away — and me needing to come up with new material for a course I’ve never taught before — I feel like I could be in some real trouble.

Speaking of writing, there have been some setbacks with The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon that I need to write about on my Patreon soon, but that will have to wait for another day. In the meantime I’ve been trying to work on other projects that will be easier for me to self-publish, but I think I started too many of those, and then I wasn’t able to work on any of them for awhile as I dug myself out of this last semester. Now I can’t seem to pick up the thread on any of them, and I’ve got so much work to do to get ready for this next semester that I’m not sure if I’ll even be able to get back to that many of them before the fall semester begins.

In site news, you may have noticed the lack of Amazon banners in recent posts. Amazon wound up canceling my Associates account for lack of activity, so now all those links I’ve posted here since the dawn of the .org will no longer yield me any money. I need to look into another affiliate programme to use here to help me pay the bills for the .org, but that isn’t exactly a huge priority for me with everything else I’ve got on my plate at the present moment.

I think “discouragement” has been a huge word in my life for these past few months. I’ve had to deal with a good number of setbacks, I haven’t been happy with how well I’ve handled a number of important tasks, and there’s certainly been a lot of bad stuff going on in the world to make it hard to be optimistic about much of anything. It hasn’t helped that I’ve basically gone into hermit mode again, not meeting up with any of my friends for longer than I care to remember. I know that I need to work at turning things around because I can’t count on them turning around on their own, but that’s hard to do when your brain is muddled from lack of sleep, your eyes are puffy from pollen and even writing a half-assed blog like this is a struggle.

At least I got it written, though, so I can cross that off of my to-do list. That’s something, anyway. More blogs to come soon, I hope.

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