(no subject)

[cleolinda]

Have been... well, sort of depressed and burnt out lately. It's one of those weird "blah" depressions--not sad, not angsty at all. I feel perfectly happy. I just feel... draggy and reluctant. About... well, everything. Felt very standoffish lately as well, like I'm pushing people away. Also blocked. Having a hard time getting things done--I mean, that's why the Empire recaps have been going up a full week later; they're hella easy compared to Lost, and I used to get Lost recaps up the same night. It's not "can't get out of bed" depression--it's more like "play Free Cell all day" depression, if that makes any sense.

The last time I got like this, really got like this bad, was my last semester of college. The semester before, I was writing papers in three languages and had some scary-ass exams, all of which I passed with As. But I remember being so stressed out--pushing myself so hard--that when Christmas came, I was just done. I should have already applied to grad school anyway, but I sure as hell wasn't going to at that point. I spent the spring term, thus, feeling "broken"--like I'd pushed myself so hard that I'd just popped a sprocket or something. I couldn't write papers, nearly failed half my classes, and flunked out of the Honors Program because I just didn't turn in a presentation (and didn't withdraw in time). I ended up taking a year off just to stare out the window and wonder when the real me was coming back.

I understand now why I had to go through that--I really do believe that everything happens for a reason, and my life would have gone in a completely different direction if I had gone straight to graduate school after college. For one thing, I probably would have gone to school out of state, or in Tuscaloosa at the very nearest. I probably would have met some great people and become a lot more independent. It's true, I gave up a lot of opportunities while I was depressed. But at the same time, I probably wouldn't be sitting here watching the mail for the proofs of my first book if I'd gone. And one of the things I rediscovered on my time off was my own writing style: the way I wanted to write, and the things I wanted to write about, which are not the things that most writing programs encourage you to write--that is, nothing that could be seen as "popular" or "entertaining." Not to sound too snarky about it, but... yeah.

Anyway, my point (if I can fish it out) is that I understand why I had to go through it once. I really don't want to go through that kind of depression again--I'm burnt out, yes, but I'm not at any kind of crossroads. I'm happy with where I am in general, unlike last time. I'm just not springing back from that homestretch of book-writing the way I thought I would. And this is why there haven't been any new "Fifteen Minutes"--I'd written down a few notes here and there on various movies, but I feel like I'm scraping an empty barrel right now. I can't think of anything to write for my poetry group. I'm not completely blocked--there are a couple of long-term projects that I'm noodling away on--but I'm having an extremely hard time with anything that would actually need to be, you know, finished.

I'll get through this. I always do. It's just frustrating when it's here.


Linkspam:

OH NOES BPAL HAS DISCONTINUED GLITTER *SOB* It smells like bubblegum and My Little Ponies on me, y'all! MY SOUL CRAVES MORE.

Kept meaning to post this--I am so behind. Opening lines for frustrated Harry Potter fanfic writers. (WARNING: Half-Blood Prince spoilers.)

What happens when you piss off JK Rowling in chat. (WARNING: I don't remember, but there are probably spoilers in here, too.)

Mmm, torta. I've been looking for a recipe for this since a student teacher made this for us in high school. ("Looking for a recipe" may here mean "idly wishing I had one, whenever I happen to remember it.")

The V for Vendetta trailer. Alan Moore comic, Wachowski Brothers producing. Kind of Matrix rip-offy, but okay. Natalie Portman's not doing much for me, but I would put down money to watch Hugo Weaving read the phone book, so... sigh, I guess I'm there.

OMG THEY'RE ACTUALLY MAKING PERFUME INTO A MOVIE. FOR REAL THIS TIME. Also, Alan Rickman is in it. See, I knew y'all would be interested.

I Am a Japanese Schoolteacher. More to the point, he's a black, 6'3" American schoolteacher constantly battling to save his ass from the pointed fingers of his students ("ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF PAIN!!"). Hilarious, still updating, and not your usual omgkawaii!! look at Japanese culture.

Over at plan_9_from_lj, lezopez recaps National Treasure.

jinx_says: Comic recs for everyone! With scans, naturally.


Grrr. Off to stare at a blank Word document some more.

Comments

[sparkythehamstr.livejournal.com]

It's not "can't get out of bed" depression--it's more like "play Free Cell all day" depression, if that makes any sense.

I know exactly what you mean. I'm still working on that sort of thing myself; good on you for getting past it.

[sparkythehamstr.livejournal.com]

Also, I think you killed the Japanese schoolteacher's bandwidth. Bad!

[fuzzystar3.livejournal.com]

writer's block or not you're still my favorite fanfic/movie-parody/whatever-genre-you-write-in author.

[galaxianomiko.livejournal.com]

I Am a Japanese Schoolteacher. More to the point, he's a black, 6'3" American schoolteacher constantly battling to save his ass from the pointed fingers of his students ("ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF PAIN!!"). Hilarious, still updating, and not your usual omgkawaii!! look at Japanese culture.


AHH! This is the BEST site ever. I'd forgotten about it for a while, and there's lots of new things to read! :) Thank you!

[sinkalicious.livejournal.com]

The Harry Potter links amused me endlessly. Bless.

And the Perfume thing just scares me, cause that book was the most effed up thing I've ever read. Really. Creep-ay.

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

Dagnabbit. I haven't finished reading "HBP" yet, and now you've gone and told me the ending. Well, at least the shippage ending.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Sorry about that. Added a warning.

[rhapsodeeinblue.livejournal.com]

Bwahaha. Thanks for posting the HP links... hilarious. XD

[stillxmyxheart.livejournal.com]

Hah. The Harry Potter links are highly amusing. I still can't believe people are actually leaving the fandom over the shippage... I mean, WTF...

[sunshine95.livejournal.com]

Hope you snap out of your funk soon! And thanks for the linkspam. Mmmspam. :D

[ex-krazycat651.livejournal.com]

Ah Cleo, that sucks. Know how you feel tho, been fairly useless since I finished my thesis, so I sympathize. Even if I play plain old solitaire set to 'casino' instead of frecell.

[spiderfarmer.livejournal.com]

q>OH NOES BPAL HAS DISCONTINUED GLITTER *SOB* It smells like bubblegum and My Little Ponies on me, y'all! MY SOUL CRAVES MORE.OH NOES BPAL HAS DISCONTINUED GLITTER *SOB* It smells like bubblegum and My Little Ponies on me, y'all! MY SOUL CRAVES MORE.

If you can dip a qtip, or cotton ball into the fragrance, and seal it really well, so it stays smelly, then mail it to me, I can have the distillers at one of me Essential Oils place run it through a spectrometer (I think that's what the machine is called"...anyway, I'm better that they can recreate it. :)

[atalantapendrag.livejournal.com]

I feel your BPAL pain. I never got the chance to order a bottle of Baobhan Sith.


As for writer's block... Mercury's retrograde until mid-August. So there's a lot of it going around.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

How lame is it that my immediate reaction was "AHA!"?

[iamthemoon.livejournal.com]

Grrr. Off to stare at a blank Word document some more.

Funny how I'm doing the same.

OMG that black teacher guy is great! XD

[silaquiholimion.livejournal.com]

When I get all procrastinatory/writer's blocky I find that fictionaddiction.net's prompts (I'm not exactly sure where they are on the site, unfortunately.) always give me something to write about. Or HP fan-fiction. If all else fails I just skim over select paragraphs of other people's books (mainly Jack London, whom I am convinced is the hottest writer in history) until something sparks my interest enough to think about writing at all.

Although, I'm lucky- in High School you have to write for school, so for now I rely (a little too much) on teacher's assignments to give me a reason to write.

[ambiguousreason.livejournal.com]

Ahh, hopefully the funk will pass soon. I know how it is, though -- it's such an odd feeling.

[purplepaisley.livejournal.com]

I'm a much older person than you, with young adult kids, a household and a business to run. But I know what you're trying to dig yourself out from - or would be trying, if it didn't take too damned much energy.

For me, it is absolutely related to feeling overwhelmed. It means I need more time of the kind that's actually relaxing, and not just the hiding-under-the-bed kind of time off. It also means I need more human company, although that's the last thing I think I want. It is difficult to take the relaxation time when I'm beating myself up for being useless as it is, but the play-freecell-all-day (psst...try SpiderNONO DO NOT LISTEN TO THE VOICE OF SLACKER EVIL!) kind of downtime is both unproductive and non-relaxing, so it can be better in the long run to stop pretending I'm trying to work and just actually get out and do something completely non-work related for a while.

Rereading the above, it may sound like I'm talking about a glum day or two, as if I didn't read the part where you talked about a year of this stuff. I read it. I know. Sometimes you also just have to wait for the wind to change direction, too. Hang in there.

And thank you so much for the JK Rowling MSN link. I actually laughed out loud, which doesn't happen a lot.

[lotusbiosm.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest a nice vacation. With sun and perhaps sand and maybe something of nerdy interest, and no real responsibilities. That is often good for recharging batteries.
In other words, relaxing time off, as opposed to the "there's all this time in a day, and I should do something with it, but I don't really feel like doing any of it" kind of time off.

[sorchar.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine ran into that "ivory tower" mentality in college writing programs too. If you write genre fiction, you suck balls. Which is why "creative writing" is one degree choice I've never contemplated.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Well, I did it because I figured 1) it was better than immediately going and getting a real job in a cubicle and 2) it was better than continuing with the French/Spanish thing I was totally burnt out on. But yeah, I totally went into it with this "shields up!" attitude of not wanting them to turn me into some kind of emo elitist snob. The worst part is the way people their poems read aloud after they've been through a program like that--you know what I'm talking about. It's that weird little blase upturn at the end of every line. So pretentious.

[shesnotallthere.livejournal.com]

I always feel like that after completing a big project. I've started referring to it as backlash. You expend all this energy and emotion, and once it's done, you're left feeling pretty bankrupt.

Everybody handles things like this differently, but I deal with it by doing something completely unrelated to whatever I was working on. Last time, I spent a few weeks learning to cook things other than scrambled eggs. I'm still a terrible cook, but it was a way to do something semi-useful, without further exhausting myself on anything related to work.

[anniversaire.livejournal.com]

Jesus. Why are people taking the 'ships this seriously? I mean, I'm glad that I got what I wanted, but even if I hadn't, I would not be participating in this insanity. I can't believe people have the audacity to start letter writing campaigns to Ms. Rowling, acting as though they know more about the books than she does.


But still, those HP entries you linked were too fucking funny.

[sleepypawn.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link to that schoolteacher blog.

I'm literally laughing so hard I have tears running down my face! Hee.

[illmantrim.livejournal.com]

I have been having similar finishign problems lately as well... on work aroudn the house and on writing especially... seems like things are just kinda... distanced and blurry...

V for Vendetta

[wulfric-tonks.livejournal.com]

Was that Natalie Portman with an English accent?
Oh dear.
But seriously, she's got to be the coolest bald, vegeterian, Star Wars fans' dream in media.
Doesn't "V" remind you of The Joker?

On a completely different note, depression. Seems like you understand yourself pretty well. I'm still figuring myself out. And I find it admirable that someone can *at least* seem to know themselves as well as you let on. But I'm not a fangirl. I could reconsider...

[http://users.livejournal.com/_waterlilies/]

Uhh, maybe this is a poor reflection on me, but I've read 3/4 of the first "I am a Japanese Schoolteacher" editorial and now I'm trying to keep myself from howling so I don't wake my roommates up. Awesome. You always have the best linkspam. :D

[kookaburra1701.livejournal.com]

Oh, man. I first read those about a week and a half ago, and I think I pulled something from holding in the snorts of laughter so I wouldn't wake up my parents.

[edda.livejournal.com]

You've been doing a lot of stuff lately, writing-wise, plus, you know, random other things have been going on, including but not limited to HURRICANE PREPARATION OMG (because there's more coming, OK?) and I think you can be forgiven for needing time to recharge.

I wonder if one of the Perfume backers is BPAL. ;)

[magikalcrab.livejournal.com]

OH NOES BPAL HAS DISCONTINUED GLITTER *SOB*

Wait, WHAT?! Discontinued as in, you can order it til they run out of ingredients, or discontinued as in "hahhahahaha, you can never have any more, ever"

*cries*

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Actually, they seem to be having a "component" problem--I'm sure it's one of the ingredients that Beth doesn't list, so she can't be like, "Uh, guys, due to hurricanes we can't get any... nothing. I said nothing." But that's why it's discontinued, like Baobhan Sith and a couple of others I wanted to try (they got temporarily DC'd because of a grapefruit problem). I'm just really pissed because I was going to order a bottle of Glitter in my next order, and now it's too late. WOE.

[royalsongstress.livejournal.com]

I know how you feel, hun. I've been sick for about 5 years now (nothing life threatening, but pretty sucky) and it takes all my energy to get to school. When summer comes, I'm done. I sleep all day and the best I can do is point and click on the computer. This year, in Mayish, I gave up and dropped out. Best thing I ever did. Except for the not getting highschool degree, but I'm planning to that by correspondance. My point: the best thing to do is understand your body needs to be lazy right now. Give in to it for awhile and pamper yourself. It'll come back soon enough. *hugs*