Things are ok...the start of the new year has been a bit of a challenge for me, but I'm taking it a step at a time.

Thinking about Rhythm Quest has been really intimidating.  There's this logical fallacy of sorts where you're supposed to believe that taking a break from work is supposed to leave you "rested and recharged" and ready to go at it again, but whether that actually happens or not is variable.  Adding custom level support was the right decision to make for the project, but abstaining from it was right, too; I feel like all of the added work makes the project seem more mountainous than ever.  I'm beginning to feel more external pressure to have progress to show on Rhythm Quest, which isn't good or healthy.  The internal pressure, sure, that's fine, but I think external pressure is something that isn't really good.

It's always a challenge when I'm faced with these situations because on the one hand, you want to make sure that you are taking care of yourself which means stepping away from working harder, and avoiding burning yourself out.  But on the other hand, just avoiding the problem for longer usually doesn't help make it go away; you can take a break but it's going to just end up gnawing at you anyways, so why not just take an honest stab at it?

The real answer I think is to just do something about it as often as you can, but to do so by picking the smallest thing that you can manage and then shooting for that.  The positive reinforcement that you get out of accomplishing these small things, and the feeling of consistent progress, can both serve to alleviate your worries, and get you in better spirits.

I feel like this has been probably the hardest part about working part-time in employment and part-time on Rhythm Quest, it's really hard to get into a consistent rhythm (hah), and feel like you are constantly marching toward completion, because it's instead always this sort of stop and go thing.  Driving for a long time isn't as exhausting as driving through stop and go traffic, right?

I can recognize that I'm at a lower point than I was a month or two ago; there's more negative feelings and in general less excitement about life.  But as always, I'm still functional during these times.  I tend to do the same things; it's just harder.  Still, there are small victories that I can always claim, which is important!  It feels good to exercise, good to take care of one's self.  Even though I've been sleeping late, that, too, has its own sort of charm.  I couldn't wake up at all this morning, though, so it seems the time had come for me to just try and catch up on sleep a lot.

I may have to wake earlier in the coming weeks; we'll have to see if I adapt to that successfully or not.

I'm continuing to catch episodes of Kanon (2006) here and there, currently in the midst of Mai's arc.  I'll do proper writeups of that later, but I think it surprises me how different my rewatch of the series is already feeling.  I imagine that I'll come out with significantly different impressions of the characters and of the episodes than I did the first time around.


Christmas was...okay.  I think it wasn't really the best, nor the worst.  I remember there were some really really bad Christmastimes for me in the past, I'm glad it was nothing like that.  It was just a little bit of a downer, I think.  Sometimes it's just like that, I spend a lot of effort on all of these letters and gifts and all that and I think at the end of it all I feel either a little burnt-out or simply a little bit alone.  I certainly have carried forth a little bit more cynicism from earlier during the first half of the year, I'm still feeling the impacts of that.  It's harder now than before, I think, to have faith in life.  But there are =always= those moments where I still remember why.