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Minecraft mountain

My focus has been all over the place lately. A couple weeks ago, I got back into Minecraft. I’ve played since its very first release, when I was in college, and since then, my interest in it has been tidal, waxing and waning but never fully disappearing. It really is quite a good game–there are so many satisfying behavioral “loops” that bring me back.

I also installed Minetest, because hey, I like the idea of supporting open-culture projects. Buuuuut, I’ve been having so much fun with the richness and depth of Minecraft’s existing content that I’m concerned Minetest will just feel like an off-brand knockoff. I should give it a fair shake, and maybe I will at some point… but right now, when I want to play a voxel-based survival/building game, I can either play the very familiar Minecraft, or I can fire up the novel Minetest and try to learn the new (and less polished) ins-and-outs of that game. One option sounds like work when I want to be playing.

And that kinda speaks to where my mind is at right now. I had a big surge of task-focused energy a couple weeks ago, when I built my garden beds and did a bunch of interior household tasks. Now, I find myself retreating a lot more. I spent the last weekend playing Minecraft and Kingdom of Loathing and sitting on the couch with Rachel, watching several episodes of Mindhunter in a row. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but it’s not quite where I want to be. It felt good to make progress on things that mattered to me.

If I think about it, I’ve found myself in the same place with a lot of my projects right now. I’ve burned through a lot of the easy stuff: replacing cabinet hardware, upgrading my computer, buying an inkjet printer, building garden beds, purchasing the hardware for my Friendica instance. And with the easy stuff out of the way, I’m now facing the actual work–a lot of which I feel unequipped to handle and which I feel less capable of steering away from failure. So I’m facing a mountain of perceived snags, like:

  • Can I transplant my plant starts without killing them? How do I transplant my plant starts?
  • How are we going to organize our third garden bed, especially since bed #2’s carefully plotted layout got disrupted?
  • Have I failed at starting seeds because all my starts are leggy instead of stout?
  • What is causing my computer to run out of memory every day or two?
  • How do I get my damn printers to work with my computer?
  • How do I set up a shared music server for my wife and myself that minimizes data duplication while maximizing accessibility?
  • Will we ever be able to afford all the electrical work in this house that I want done? Is that prudent?
  • Is it responsible to have several computers running in this house if the outlets are ungrounded (and I therefore can’t use surge protectors)?
  • I should really start backing up my data–but what should I back up? How? Where? And how do I do that with multiple computers?
  • Did I properly duplicate data from my laptop when I moved to my desktop last year? Is it all moved?
  • Relatedly, do I have unnecessarily duplicated data? What is safe to delete?
  • How can I make all emoji appear in color on my desktop instead of some being in color and others rendered in black and white?
  • What can I remove from my old laptop to make it faster?
  • How can I write this blog post about the value of “magic” and ritual in a way I’m proud of?
  • What roles do Scuttlebutt, my Friendica server, and my blog play in my online presence? How do I want to use them?
  • Why the heck is my blog stripping the authorization headers and preventing me from using the IndieAuth plugin?
  • How do I decouple my WordPress installation from the LDAP plugin it uses so that I don’t get login errors every time I update the package?
  • How can I make (or commission) a little 3D-printable case for the Iron Clays poker chips I have sitting on my desk?

I could go on… but I recognize this is interesting to nobody but me. 😜 As I see it, though, the common thread is that all of these next steps require work. They require me to research and make decisions and try things. There’s not an easy answer, just hard work.

And hard work is harder when it feels like it’s all on my shoulders. Rachel doesn’t understand my server projects or my computer issues–this is not a slight, it’s just not where her interests or knowledge lie. The vast majority of this feels like solitary work, at least right now, and that just makes it ten times harder. I wish I could invite people to my house to look over my shoulder and guide me, or even just to sit in solidarity with me.

Because work that’s shared always feels easier. I grew up with a large extended family, and several times a year, we’d converge on my grandparents’ house for work parties. We’d spend all day trimming branches and hauling debris and planting gardens. It was work, yes, but it was social, too. It was shared.

Maybe I need to find some creative ways to make my tasks a bit more social–even if I’m still the only one doing the work. I’ve reflected before that the work of building a stronger, compassionate, anti-fascist world feels impossibly daunting (and anxiety-provoking) when I see it as a task I have to figure out on my own, but like Good (and Achievable) Work when I see it as a project to be distributed and shared. Perhaps that thinking extends beyond political work.

And maybe, when I don’t see these tasks as burdens I have to bear on my own, I won’t feel the need to escape to digital voxel worlds.

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Burnout

Throughout the month of August, I'm aiming to write 25 blog posts. This is post #4 of 25. Find them all in the "blogathon 2014" category.

I’ve only been doing this blogathon thing for five days, but in those five days (and three posts), I’ve written 4,500 words. Rather, I’ve blogged 4,500 words; I’ve been posting to support forums and writing emails and doing a lot more writing elsewhere in my life. Needless to say, I was starting to feel some significant burnout–and I still had 22 more posts to go.

This was weighing on my mind as I walked into the kitchen this morning to get breakfast, and I saw it. An idea struck me.

See, here’s the thing. I love old-fashioned cake donuts. They are easily among my favorite donuts of all, second only to buttermilk bars. And when R and I went grocery shopping this weekend, she bought some.

But not for me.

She bought two boxes of glazed old-fashioned cake donuts to bring for a coworker’s birthday celebration this week, which means I definitely cannot touch them.

Two. Whole. Boxes.

I walk by them every day. I see them, giving me those alluring eyes.[ref]What, your donuts don’t have eyes?[/ref] I don’t think R understands how much restraint I exercise on a daily basis just to keep from devouring them.

But I think I can help illustrate the point for her.

Donuts

It’s important to take breaks now and again. Can’t be all business all the time.

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Thesis word cloud

I turned in my senior thesis on Wednesday this week. All that’s left is an oral defense, in early May, and then I can actually graduate, hopefully with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology with honors, Summa Cum Laude. That’s the plan.

For fun(?), I thought I’d share some of the numbers related to the thesis process:

  • Final page length: 103
  • Word count: 20,758
  • Minutes spent editing (according to Word): 6,284
  • References: 56
  • Completed surveys: 447
  • Campuses surveyed: 2
  • Days until thesis was due when I began collecting data: 8
  • Days until thesis was due when I began analyzing data: 2
  • Statistical analyses in final thesis: 5
  • Hours spent learning statistical analysis before April 8: 0
  • Time went to bed on night before due date: 4am
  • Hours spent fighting with Microsoft Word to make thesis print correctly: 3
  • Turned thesis in at: 3:30pm, April 10th, 2013
  • Volume of beer consumed after turning in thesis: [redacted]

It feels good to have a life back.

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Here’s my problem with my study abroad program.

In the next week and a half, I have to:

  • translate interview questions in to Japanese
  • interview five Japanese people (in Japanese)
  • prepare a 25-minute presentation based on that data (in Japanese)
  • take a Japanese test
  • listen to and critique my performance on my most recent 20-minute Japanese oral exam
  • write a 600-character composition (in Japanese)
  • finish writing a 4-minute script for a film (in Japanese)
  • work with classmates to create the aforementioned film from my and others’ scripts
  • read approximately 200 pages of articles regarding minorities and immigrants in Japan
  • read a Japanese article for my reading comprehension class

This does not include any daily incidental homework that may be assigned in clas–this is just the stuff that I can see coming. And indeed, I’ve seen most of this coming from a mile away.

But I’ve been so swamped with the daily incidental stuff that I’ve been unable to make any headway on these long-standing projects. To illustrate this, in the last week and a half, I had to:

  • read 20 pages of a comic (in Japanese)
  • prepare a vocabulary list/task sheet for those pages (in Japanese)
  • do a Japanese listening practice assignment
  • read roughly 100 pages of articles regarding minorities and immigrants in Japan
  • take two Japanese vocabulary quizzes
  • take two kanji quizzes
  • translate a dozen complicated sentences into Japanese in preparation for a test
  • interview my host family about jobs and employment
  • select (and clean up) pictures to showcase in my photography class
  • write an article in Japanese about my experience with お正月 (oshougatsu– the Japanese New Year)
  • read a Japanese story for my reading comprehension class
  • write a 5-page midterm essay for Minorities and Immigrants in Japan

And that list’s probably not exhaustive. That’s mostly the daily incidental stuff that just came up. The longer-term projects, such as the midterm essay and the article on お正月 were pushed back to far later than one might consider prudent–not from laziness, but from sheer lack of time.

There is so much daily busy work simply required by my classes that I can not touch the long-term projects. I see them coming. I want to get them out of the way. But thanks to all of the stuff I have to do for class just to stay on top of the daily requirements, I cannot get a head start on them.

There are corners I can cut. I can come to Minorities and Immigrants having not read the articles (which I’m doing lately), and I can cut my sleep schedule short (which I’m doing, drastically). But skipping articles means that I don’t get as much as possible out of my Minorities class, which will bite me in a few more weeks when I have to write a final. Cutting my sleep–I’m already getting only about 5-6 hours each night anyway–means that I doze off in class (bad) or when trying to work, so I either get less out of class or my working efficiency drops. Beyond those two, I have a hard time seeing anything I can do (save for not writing blog posts, but this venting is preventing me from just completely breaking down into a nervous wreck, so I believe I can justify it on grounds of preserving my health).

This burns all the more because, for Pete’s sake, I’m in Kyoto. There are a million and a half things I want to be doing. I want to be roaming the streets, checking out temples that catch my fancy. I want to continue my as-of-yet-fruitless search for a double-edged razor (seriously; every drug store in Japan sells Feather brand double-edged razor blades, but none sell the razor itself). I want to peruse the wacky offerings of the enigmatic store called Don Quijote, buy manga at Book Off!, try crepes at a restaurant near campus, or just wander Uji and see what sights pop up to surprise me. I want to go on walks. I want to sing karaoke on Shijo and then slip into the weekend with a visit to a bath. I want to experience Kyoto again.

But I can’t. I can’t even spare time for the long-term projects that are required of me, to say nothing of my personal whims.

Rather than someone experiencing life in Kyoto while studying as a student, I’ve become a student grinding away at the piles of work he has, who just happens to be in Japan. I eat Japanese food for dinner and nobody’s speaking in English, but that’s the current extent of my daily–weekly–monthly experience in Japan. I can’t afford to do anything more.

It’s a recipe for disaster. Take one Spencer, marinated for years in “prone to stress out about work”. Coat in daily obligations. In a separate bowl, mix long-term projects. Keep separate. Sear until the juices of”possible stress relief” have all come out, then throw in a pan and bake on high until carbonized.

This is not, as a keen reader might deduce, ideal.