wicked & divine since 1899

It's been a long week. For those who don't know, I work at a bank and I work a lot. This is just starting to pay off. My boss is talking about promoting me to an account opener. I got my first raise this month and finally breached minimum. Still not sure if it's a living wage, or worth my student debt, and it definitely doesn't pay my hospital bills from this summer. But it's something. 

For the next three days, we are watching my sister in law's daughter. In theory, I am excited. I love kids and we have a good relationship. There's this selfish part of me that wonders how I'm going to survive though. As of right now, we are watching Happy Feet while she also watches a different show on her tablet, cacophonously playing over each other. It just has to be this way, because I'm too tired from work to really parent right now. It's giving me a window into what it must be like for my SIL, who is a single mother with my exact same job. After a long ass day of dealing with bitchy customers who are stressed about money, and having to come home and be an engaged mom. I've gained a new level of respect. Thankfully, Tanner is doing most of the parenting.

What else? I don't know if I mentioned to DW yet, but Tanner got laid off last week which has been a huge, nasty financial shock. And I found out that not only did Tesla cut their contract with his company, but they also laid off a huge percentage of their own workers. Apparently, this is due to their government contracts which are not getting funds thanks to the shut down. So I guess all of our anger at Tesla was misplaced and we should really just be screaming "fuck Trump" some more.

I've had like five glasses of wine and my head is pounding at Happy Feet + Peppa Pig. I just made the conscious decision to get through grad school before having children if I can help it.

So, wrote this today for the bestie. Kind of weird because I haven't written Obikin in a while and I basically forgot every detail about their dynamic, and TCW and anything else important. Felt nice to write and finish something short and not hold myself to any length or quality requirement. I also really missed using second person and not feeling like trash for it. I'm still deciding if I want to participate in the Obikin Big Bang again this year -- if I did, I would likely just write something around 10k as opposed to embarking on another novel. To be fair, I wrote two 10k pieces in the month of November alone and burned myself out a bit. 

I work 40 hours a week and just don't have the time I once had to write. In college, I was churning out 10k or more a week for academic writing alone and so adding a novel on top of that wasn't a huge challenge. My work-brain is a number-brain just due to the nature of banking and so turning on literary-brain is a challenge sometimes. Not to mention, I'm exhausted all the time and dead broke again, and stressing about my wedding. I love the feeling of little pieces, no due date, no pressure. To be fair, I'm also involved in two ongoing collaborations right now. I need to work my way back up to longer pieces. Unless TCW reboot comes out sooner than I'm thinking, I may not have enough inspiration fodder for the Big Bang.

I guess that's fine, but I kind of planned on participating again because I had so much fun last year. I dunno. I do this thing where I punish myself for not creating enough, not wanting to create more, and overcreating as opposed to being "productive" so I guess there's no winning. It's no surprise I write self-deprecating characters so well. It's cold here but no snow -- I'm tired of winter already. Really grateful I have people in my life who support my writing -- I just have a hard time being one of them.