Time Management

post pandemicon

I work nights to pay bills in this here, our Usonia of Delicate Virtues, and it is a lifestyle which is growing increasingly difficult to maintain. This difficulty is being plotted by some kind of sinister design at work withing the imaginary lines that define our lovely little plot of mud, this colonizer’s dreamscape, and it used the pandemic which no one wants to talk about anymore as an excuse for restriction.

Restriction is control, after all.

Once upon a time, in the Kingdom of Dis, there was a pandemic and your ever humble correspondent needed gainful employment. Gainful is the keyword here. Simply getting a job in Usonia doesn’t necessarily equate with being able to pay bills, just look at rent prices right now. After about a hundred and fifty-six applications, the hundred and fifty-seventh came through, but it required that I would work nights, but that was OK because it came with a differential of pay.

And a good thing, too, see that rent problem above, but also all the other problems with supply chains. Remember those?

This night shifting was extremely helpful for the accounts, but damaging for relationships, and increasingly it is becoming more stressful in certain situations, say getting to birthday parties or seeing matinee’s or pretty much anything social at all. I am someone who has to have my eight hours, probably nine hours, or else I am someone who should not be around people, it’s just a fact of my existence in this sphere. Much of the design work within Usonia fills me with pain, and the less sleep I have, the more I’m likely to talk about it, because my brand of the ‘tism is all design related on a macro scale. Think less Fnord F-150’s and more electric rail. Less ticky-tacky suburbs and more Frank Lloyd Wright pairing with Buckminster Fuller. You get the drift. A certain kind of futurism that is so close to next door some nights I feel like I could push through the veil just…so, and voila. But, as the V-man once said, a lot: so it goes.

One of the latest issues I have is with almost everything closing at 11pm, which, being my work shift is between 8pm and 5am ((but just a second, throw in an hour’s worth of commute, because of KC being so damn highway-pilled and YES guess what, i-70 is shutting down for a year so that’s just going to be better omg)) and now we’re looking at ten hours dedicated to putting my body in a box to drive the box to be in a bigger box and sit at a box to move and alter things that are like flattened boxes but wit funny squiggles on them all to receive every two weeks some survival tickets because in Usonia, you must earn your right to live and anyone who thinks otherwise is trash. Now, some folk make more tickets than others, and they are more virtuous, just ask them. They’ll tell you it is so. They made the right choices. The nice thing about being in a box and moving the flat boxes with squiggles around is it gives you a lot of time to reflect on your own choices, and the choices that where hoisted upon you by others, and the choices you didn’t even know about because you weren’t supposed to go off and think for yourself. You were supposed to stay home and serve, and whiy didn’t you understand that? So it goes.

That’s all water that has drifted past my bridge of life a long time ago. What chaps me, though, is, when not working on survival tickets, is trying to get time to work on the things that matter to my soul, which has very little to do with moving boxes in boxes and driving around in a box in a city of boxes. No, my problem is, while the sinister designers keep trying to remove said night shift because they don’t like paying us what then needed to pay us in order to work the night shift in the first place and switching to days (assuming one could get hired) would remove and effective third of my income, which would make for a very stressful time, especially as the car’s oil pump has just decided to quit. At least I think it’s the oil pump. I’ll find out for sure sometime Monday, but what really chaps me is trying to figure out which project to work on in the sixteen hours per week of useful awake-time I have available to me. Because they’re all delicious in my mind and heart, but there is a thing where I would like some of them to pivot into a possibility of profit in the public sphere. It is, for lack of a better term, a problem of discernment, but it is also a problem of post-passion dopamine drop (PPDD).

In our Usonian culture, such as it is, PPDD is one of the most virulent of problems, and is exactly what AI designers are looking to exploit. New-new-always the new just keep scrolling magpie of doom scroll scroll tap tap. Why, you can almost hear Macbeth’s witches cackling about it. PPDD is up there with snacking too much after quitting smoking and drinking. Thanks to the intelligent design of the human brain, those nicotinic receptors go looking for the next fix, and the easiest one after smokes or booze is either heroin or sugar, and guess which one is legally pushed in Usonia? Dare I look at my snack accounting and not cry out in shame and anguish?

I have this rather secret project in motion but it’s going to be a fat minute before I can make any of it public. It’s a project that Flapjack readers might find surprising. It’s been a lot of work so far and it is, at the time of this writing, about twenty-five percent done, which is about fifty-percent less than where I want it to be because of material conditions and the dreaded above PPDD. But it also needs to get done. I feel this need in my bones. All I can say is that it is paper and glue adjacent, but it has heart and feet. I am desperate to get it done to show you, but I am also starting to feel the inevitable in these old bones. It’s an odd sensation. Very Saturnian. Very…restriction…IYKYK.

this isn’t it, but stull pretty cool

I imagine I’m not alone in facing PPDD. I’m looking into strategies to get around it or through it, and most of it gets down to some sort of metaphorical one foot in front of the other kind of mishmash. Or hiring gangsters to threaten you if you don’t make consistent progress. Neither seems very appetizing, but perhaps this really is just the human condition? Do you suffer from PPDD? Have you found workable strategies against it? Reply lines are open.