Burnout!

Ever get to a point where you just feel burnt out in every single aspect of your life? Life at home, life at work, life with your friends, family, loved ones? And it's not necessarily anything they've done, just common, run of the mill, 'need a break from it all for a while' burnout?

This is where I am right now.

If it were just one or even two parts of my life, I could deal. Just take a little break from that area, focus on something else, come back in a few days or weeks refreshed and ready to tackle things with a new perspective. But alas, it's not just one or two parts of my life. It's every. Single. One.

And this need of a break is even extending to things that I'm not even actively doing. I've got a pile of unread books sitting around that I've been putting off. Movies, a small handful of games, TV shows, backlogged. I've got half a dozen creative projects that I've been intending to start, false starting, started and shelved... Sometimes, I have the time and just don't want to get into it, and other times, it's all I wanna do but I'm stuck doing anything else. It's maddening, really.

But its the big areas that I'm more concerned with.

Work burnout, however, gets a lot more worrisome. It makes you sloppy, less professional, and more willing to take chances just because you really don't give a fuck. And of course, I work in one of the more upscale, professional types of places in the casual dining hospitality industry, and it's been starting to show that I'm cracking a little under the surface. This is something that I really need to put the brakes on now, before I really screw up and get an unwanted kind of vacation. The kind that involves making a full time job out of finding a full time job.

Home burnout, is probably the least affecting one I have right now. Things around the house are fairly stable and for the most part, relaxed. There have been a few bumps along the way, but for the most part, everything lately has been getting a lot more manageable. Would a change of scenery be nice? Absolutely. Will it kill me to wait a few more months? Not right now.

Social burnout, this can get linked to two separate social circles.

My drinking circle, I've really cut back on the last few weeks, because of all the extra work I've been having to do. Of course, in my line of work, working more makes that end of shift beer sound that much better, but I've been trying to cut back on spending, and drinking out is the first thing to go. This'll change in a few weeks when a night or two out becomes a bit more affordable. It's been kind of nice not getting into a lot of the drama that comes out of these though, so there's another bonus.

My geeking circle, we've been getting burnt out on fast moving deadlines for goals we haven't been able to hit just yet, and everyone involved has been feeling the strain. Some people have already started taking the time off to recover, which puts the rest of us at a disadvantage, because we can't do things without them, which causes us to get more frustrated, which causes more burnout related breaks, which just becomes cyclic. There's other things involved here as well, which I have to take a bit more shit for since I'm in something of a leadership position in some aspects of things. This, likely, will become another post topic later on.

That odd center of the Venn Diagram of my primary social circles, ironically, is totally stress and drama free right now, thankfully.

So what can I do? I'm already planning a vacation early next month, which should help immensely with the work, home, and drinking circles. Said vacation corresponds with some things relating to my geeking circle, which deadlines hit or not, won't matter because 99% of our current projects will get scrapped and we'll be into something totally new. And maybe while I'm on this vacation, I'll figure out exactly how much juggling I really need or want to do, and come back with a few less plates in the air.

After all, everyone prefers 'moderately relaxed, smart assed because it's funny and I don't really mean it' Me more than 'rediculously stressed, extremely angry, purposefully mean so you'll leave me the hell alone' Me. I know I prefer the first one.

My Upstairs Neighbor Was Evicted...

... two months ago. I've been kinda busy, so writing this up took me longer than usual.

An actual conversation my upstairs neighbor and I had one morning as I was leaving the house for work. I knew what had happened, since I was up all damn night listening to the sounds of glass breaking, her screaming half in pain, mostly in rage, him screaming back at her, and the two of them throwing each other into objects of various sizes. Oh, and at the cops for the latter half of the incident.

Me: "Jesus, you look like you got mauled by a bear. What the hell happened to you?"
Her: "...I fell down some stairs."
Me: "...Were the stairs wielding like, a bat with razors in it?"
Her: "Something like that."
Me: "We'll, remind me not to piss of the stairs next time they ask me if I'm sure I don't want to pop upstairs for a quality tattoo job in your bathroom. A tactful decline would be the way to go, yeah?"

This was the point she turned red and walked downstairs to the laundry room. I never spoke to her again after that.

This isn't going to be an easy topic to write about. It probably won't be my usual snarky, smart assed, sorta darkly funny kinda thing. I kinda feel like I need to get it out, but at the same time, it's not really something I can make jokes about.

So a few months ago I moved into a new apartment. It's actually a pretty nice place, and for the most part, it's been pretty quiet. There was really only one kinda speed bump there. We had some upstairs neighbors who liked to fight.

Pretty much nightly, the woman in the upstairs apartment would get the shit kicked out of her. Her boyfriend, a stay at home unemployed guy, would get on her case and eventually start throwing punches, dishes, her, whatever was handy. It got pretty loud and noisy. Couple of times, I called the cops. My roommate called the cops. Neighbors called the cops. They'd come out, he'd be gone or hiding somewhere in the apartment. All the cops saw was just a beat up woman and her kids. After a while, it stopped being domestic violence calls, and just noise complaints, because there wasn't really a second 'domestic partner' that they could catch.

Second month in, it literally became a nightly thing, but a strange thing started happening. The woman started screaming at the cops, threatening to fight with them, calling lawsuits, police harassment, illegal searches, the whole nine. Couple of times she was the one taken away, and the kids were taken wherever kids go in these situations. Within a few days, though, the couple and the kids would always end up back at home, going at it just as viciously at 3 in the morning when the woman came home from work. They kept breaking up, breaking things, and breaking each other (resulting in more than one cast, hospital visit for stitches, splints, and black eyes).

Eventually, I just stopped calling the cops. The system obviously wasn't working for these two. So I just started complaining to the apartment manager about the noise. I wasn't the only one. The woman and her kids ended up getting evicted two weeks after she finally threw him out for good. Like, tossed all his shit onto the side of the street and changed the locks kind of for good. Like, he disappeared and no one who lived in the building here heard or saw him after that night for good. Hell, he didn't even pick up his crap, the groundskeeper just threw it all away.

Flash forward a few weeks, I'm at the office paying my rent, talking to the apartment manager about the whole thing. Turns out, for as much damage as the woman took from her ex, she gave back better than she got. By a very large factor. Part of the reason he couldn't find a job was because he was usually too injured to actually go look for one. Just not too injured to, ya know, smack his girlfriend around. That and he was kind of lazy, and keeping his job search narrowly confined to one tattoo parlor that fired him a few months before (for missing work, for being in lockup, for beating his girlfriend).

So, after about the 8th or 9th call to the cops that resulted in pretty much nothing happening, why continue to bother? These two were obviously made for each other. Sure, sucks for the kids, but how many times should I have kept trying to help people that were clearly beyond saving and willing to take their loved ones down with them?

So, am I an asshole for just being happy that I can finally sleep at night without all that noise? Not that I actually sleep at night, but ya know, someday I might want to. Maybe. Aw, who am I kidding? Everyone knows that sleeping is for when that bright burning eye hurting thing is up in the sky.

I wonder what my new neighbors will be like. Gotta be better than the last ones.

Calling yourself out

So, most of my drinking friends don't know exactly how geeky I am. I don't really hide it, it just never comes up. So when I get asked, 'Do you have any dice?' and my initial reaction is to reply with, 'How many sided?', then yeah, cat's out of the bag.

Inspiration is a Cruel Mistress.

I know I'm going to regret this later on. I should have been in bed hours ago, but I suddenly got the urge to sit down and do some writing. At this point, I might as well just stay up till after work. Why does she crack the whip on me at the worst possible times?

Anyone see that ball I dropped?

Get your minds out of the gutter.

I have a good reason though. Work finally leveled out and ramped up and brought a whole new level of topics to cover, which, ironically enough, I just had to sign a paper saying that I couldn't. I'll have to find a way to twist it around, although no one really knows which restaurant concept I do work at unless they, ya know, actually know me. And I hope they're smart enough not to say anything about it in the comments. I actually like my job.

I also moved. Got a pretty nice new apartment with a pretty awesome roommate. One of my neighbors sucks, and that's definitely going to be a topic that gets touched upon soonish (though hopefully not as heavily handed as the 'topic in question' gets 'touched' several nights a week). And now I feel dirty for even trying to make a domestic violence metaphor.

I've also been doing less geeking and more drinking lately too, during the transition period. It doesn't help that there's a decent hangout bar between where I work and where I have to park for work. But now that things have settled down some, that particular habit will correct itself.

Onto the writing front. I've gotten all my scattered notes together and half transcribed, and misplaced several of my written backups. I do have a few of them saved to backup discs. The catch there, though, is they're on 3.5s... And I haven't actually owned a computer with a 3.5 drive since... 2003? It's pretty moot anyways, since I've been gutting 90% of everything I had previously written and been redoing it almost from scratch. So that's coming along as well as can be expected. I did, however, decide to not post a few sample chapters, and just start the story from the beginning. I think it'll help me have it all flow better, and less chance I'll screw up the continuity of things. More on that later.

Lastly, I do wanna touch on a bit of actual geekery. E3 just came and went, and the one thing I was pretty hyped about was announced a few weeks prior. MAHVEL, BABY! Everything I've seen about MvC3 over the last few weeks has me so hype for this. I really can't express it enough. The new trailer looks fantastic, the match vids from E3, the released third of the lineup, and the speculation of who will realistically make the cut in the final build... I really haven't been this excited about a new game release in a very long time. Ten years to be exact. And it was for MvC2. I don't even get this hype for MMO expansions (though I am totally ready for Cataclysm).

So it looks like I've got a handful of topics to hammer out over the next few days. Hopefully I won't drop the ball again. I actually want to talk about this stuff. If it happens, I won't be apologetic for not keeping up with what at the end of the day is a hobby, but I'll make an effort.

Employment and Writing...

So I've started a new job, opening up a restaurant. So far, it's been pretty good. Once the labor pars get established and our target clientele figures out who they are and that we're actually open, then things will get a little more smoothed out and we'll actually start making money. Nature of the beasts, I suppose. It does, however, cut back on a lot of my free time that I've been lately working on my writing.

Speaking of writing, a few weeks ago one morning, I was sitting in on a speech trying not to fall asleep when I started jotting things down on the back of the program. I ended up with 3 pages worth of connectivity notes for a story I started writing almost 12 years and 300 pages ago, linking it to a few other false start projects I've got laying around. This got me actually pretty excited about what I think will eventually end up being a 4 part story. What at first only was to be a nod and a wink (a bartender with a couple of scars on her hand, who showed up in two separate stories, in a very eerie bit of clairvoyance. I initially wrote her about 3 years before I started bartending, and certainly before I got a few scars of my own in the exact same place on my hand), ended up making me relook at a lot of the similarities and start to draw a few natural connections in other places.

So I think what I'm going to do is post up the first chapter, of two or three of the four different book ideas here and see which ones get the most love. I think they're all stories worth telling, and I kinda love each of them and the ideas they bring to the table, I just can't decide which one to take and really run with first, not that I want to get serious about it. So come Monday, I'll let y'all help me. =P

Writing!

So I've been writing up a storm at the strangest times. This isn't a bad thing by any means. It's usually when I'm in a situation where I don't have access to my lappy or my desktop and have to try to jot down broad stroke notes on whatevers available. Work, social gatherings that I'd much rather not spend my time on, places where it'd be a bad thing if I whipped out Obsidian and started hammering away on the keys. It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have atrocious handwriting and could decipher half of what I've written. =P

On the upside, though, there's been some forward movement on several of my long abandoned and thoroughly planned and fleshed out stories I've been working on for the last... 12 years? Jesus, I feel really old now.

Turns out, they're all connected. Even the throwaway ones that I was just jotting around on as a writing exercise. Not all of them, mind, but 4 of the 5 big ideas I've had all seem to fit together thematically and in a way that makes sense. Now lets see if I can take these pieces and run with them.

BRB FOODGASM!

Last night in vent, Ian, Stephen, and I invented what we call a foodgasm (think thin mints, frozen, then deep fried, coated in sugar, slathered in honey, stuffed inside of a Klondike bar, stuffed inside of fried ice cream, wrapped in bacon, with a glass of milk).


It's the bacon that really sells it, imo. I don't even like thin mints.

So I Wanted to Talk About Writers Block.

And I sat down to write something up about writers/artist block the other day.

Yeah, that's all I had.

Fuck it.

(Seriously though, I got something cookin'. I'll have it up in a day or two.)

Cloverleafing Social Circles and You.

As I was driving to work today, I got to thinking about how people tend to attract specific types. I'm not necessarily talking about in a relationship-y kind of dating way. Just gravitating towards certain kinds of people. Like me, I find myself usually hanging out with other geeks, or other bartenders, for instance. It's pretty rare that these types of people overlap outside of actually sitting at a bar. It makes me kind of feel like a walking Venn diagram that contains like, one other person that I know. We develop circles of friends based on our interests, and we tend to keep them separate. Friends I know through previous parts of my life (bartending in the Carolinas or in Colorado, people I went to high school with, art buddies I talk to through PJ or SRK.com, people in my WoW guild, what have you) tend to stay in pretty small, self contained circles.

I used to date a girl who juggled several of these types of circles. She wasn't particularly extroverted, but when she did meet a new friend, she usually adopted that particular circle and kept it separate from the rest of her friends. On the odd occasion that there was a situation where the two worlds would collide, she would always comment that, "My circle of friends is cloverleafing! I don't know how to deal!"

Often times this leads to sometimes humorous and other times disastrous social interactions. I had a friend from Virginia staying with me for a few days when I was living in COS. We were invited to a party with some of my Colorado bartending friends. Most bartenders I know tend to be partiers, and are used to looking the other way if not actively partaking in certain... urban pharmaceuticals. It's just part of the casual restaurant and bartender culture. Doesn't mean everyone does it, hell, I don't, but I learned a long time ago to look past it. It's going to come up at some point with that kind of crowd though. Just the way it is.

My out of town friend? Totally not part of that particular circle. I didn't have any kind of a sheltered upbringing like she did. Needless to say, she really wasn't prepared for that kind of a party and spend most of the night extremely uncomfortable, but I will giver her credit for sticking it out and making an effort. It was just a kind of lifestyle that she couldn't (and still can't) wrap her head around. Partying, drinking to excess, things like that were taboo to her. As we were driving back home, she commented to me, "I never would have pegged you as they type of person to condone some of the things I saw in there. It's boggling to me how quickly you can switch between perfectly normal and safe to fitting in with that type of element."

Is it that unusual to compartmentalize our social interactions? Maybe it's just the different types of people we know, but I know that there are just some of my friends that I can't mix. I, for instance, know I wouldn't take some of my heavily religious friends out with some of the people I worked with in the past. Not just because of the theological differences of opinions, either. Hell, I go out of my way to avoid those kinds of conversations enough in my day to day.

Not that this is exclusive across the board. I'm sure I could pretty easily overlap some people of some circles together and they'd get along just fine. It's just that I can count those on one hand. For every time I've had it work out well, there's two more where it hasn't, and I'm slamming back shots just to make it through dinner.

So you want to be a blogger...

Someone earlier today suggested I start a blog to help me kind of kick start my old writing habits. In theory, I thought this was a good idea. Not only would it give me a chance to get used to writing on a regular basis, but it would also give me an outlet to spout off on whatever I wanted to talk about, regardless if my friends were interested or not.

Sometimes, popping into Vent and ranting about some topics just isn't cool, ya know.

So here it is. The thoughts and opinions of a geeky bartender on whatever I feel like spouting about. Expect to see me rant about news, current events, art, geek related topics, WoW, and whatever the hell else I feel like. While I'm generally a nice guy, I'm also a cynical, smartass bastard with a dark sense of humor. You've been warned.