June: this is only a test

[bodlon]

Nearly halfway into June, I'm not entirely sure what to think beyond, "Wow. I really need to revisit my process."

I'm not doing badly per se, but considering that June is my first official month since October where all I'm doing is working my dayjob and writing, I could be more impressed with my output. So far, I've identified three stumbling blocks:

- This is the first whole month since October where I haven't been balancing school with writing and my dayjob. I'm having to completely re-learn how to balance my time. I'm either slacking off too much or getting to the end of the day feeling like I've had zero downtime.

- It's hard to balance my time when my schedule is disrupted by things like disordered sleep, my dayjob schedule shifting (I start at 7:30 and only get 30 minutes for lunch), and actually distracting levels of anxiety.

- My overall project situation is really ill-defined right now. With the exception of Hold Something, June is (intentionally) deadline-free. I don't know what I'm doing, so I kind of flail around at random.

None of this is impossible to resolve. In fact, I suspect that (with the exception of the anxiety and the dayjob schedule) that what I probably want to do is try revising my schedule and set a few goals. But oh, it is rough to see that it's the 13th and feel like I'm a week behind on everything and have no real justification for it.

I've chosen this afternoon to just take a breath, decide that June exists to test my resolve. Having decided that, it's amazing how much more motivated I feel. Good stuff, tests.

~*~

Today's awesome thing about being trans: two full metabolic panels a year as a requirement for being on hormones.

Yeah, this is more expensive than I'd like, but consider this: my mother has had Type 2 diabetes as long as I can remember, and it's a factor that had a severe impact on her quality of life. My aunt -- her sister -- was also insulin dependent before she died.

Getting to see my glucose, my cholesterol, and all kinds of other things every six months is a useful reality check. I'm not saying I'll never be diagnosed with Type 2, but I'm definitely in a position to aggressively respond to pre-diabetes/insulin resistance instead of just winding up at the doctor after the fact like most people do.

~*~

- I've started listing some classic Doctor Who novelizations and watercolor instruction books over at eBay as part of the surgery fundraising effort. There will be more where this came from!

- One of the most common criticisms of the mainstream comics industry is how female characters are costumed and posed. Here's a great image essay that demonstrates the issue by substituting male characters and putting them in actual poses, with source comparisons. It's a great illustration of how the problem is less about idealized bodies than it is the way they're posed. (Though, to be fair, let's not ignore the sheer ridiculousness that is DC's rebooted Harley Quinn. What the actual fuck?!)

- Bask in the amazingness that is the European Space Agency's Flickr stream. In particular, the Earth from Space shots have been captivating me today.

- So. Amina Arraf has turned out to be an American man living in Scotland. I find myself having a lot of complicated, angry emotions about this, like the whole situation is an epic car crash of being a bad ally and varsity-level sock puppetry. I feel like I need a whiteboard to parse it all out. Added schadenfreude: Paula Brooks from Lez Get Real is also a sockpuppet, albeit a significantly more benign one with an author who didn't fake a police kidnapping that put real people at risk.

- An interview with Brett Easton Ellis on the 20 year anniversary of American Psycho. I've always regarded American Psycho as being remarkable for the way violence becomes humdrum for the reader, and always hoped that was intentional. Reading Ellis discussing it as satire and as a figurative autobiography is...well, it's the sort of thing that I think is more comfortable for me than it would be if I didn't write.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com