I’ve been writ­ing a lot less than I’ve wanted to lately. And read­ing a lot less than I’ve wanted to. Not to men­tion gam­ing, pho­tograph­ing, trav­el­ling, hik­ing and explor­ing. Ruby? Yeah, I remem­ber I should be doing that too. Dat­ing has been stuck into assorted time slots, and often pushed aside com­pletely when more impor­tant things come into play.

I’m run­ning into just about every­thing all at the same time. Work has been, as expected this month, absolutely insane busy and I’m find­ing it impos­si­ble to dis­en­gage myself in the evening. It’s hard to think of any­thing else when I know that if I get more done now, there’ll be less tasks when I come into the office tomor­row. My work-life bal­ance is pretty far out of whack, but it’s not going to get bet­ter any time soon.

I have this sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that my immune sys­tem is fight­ing off a virus and is work­ing over­time to keep me up and run­ning because it knows that if I stum­ble, things won’t go well. I’m keep­ing it rein­forced as best I can with sleep and vit­a­mins, but I just hope it can last out until I can pay proper atten­tion to myself again. On a nor­mal work­load, I usu­ally have one mug of green tea in the morn­ing. Now I’ve switched to mul­ti­ple mugs of black tea and cof­fee a day. It’s not a good combination.

My lease is up at the end of July, and I’m already freak­ing out about find­ing a new place to live. I know I’m going to be mov­ing out, but the prospect of search­ing for another place is ter­ri­fy­ing. It’s one of my least favorite activ­i­ties ever, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to fit that in. Can­celling sleep, maybe? Weekends?

I’m sup­posed to be plan­ning vaca­tions, con­certs to go to, and try to do nor­mal human things to try and get away from work and de-stress. But it’s almost impos­si­ble to get myself up to the task, and when oppor­tu­ni­ties do come up, our upcom­ing project sched­ule have already nuked plans. And even if those are clear, my co-workers have already planned things for the same days and I’m stuck cov­er­ing their loads. And, of course, once I do find some­thing, every­one else I want to go with is com­pletely socked up and unavailable.

As per usual stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dure, dat­ing is going ter­rif­i­cally ter­ri­ble. What­ever I can get sched­uled usu­ally results in awk­ward inter­ac­tions fol­lowed by a lack of any fur­ther cor­re­spon­dence. I’m not look­ing for any­thing seri­ous or long-term, but I would like some­thing at least resem­bling a rela­tion­ship. Clearly I must come off as a com­plete jerk with the per­son­al­ity of some pri­mor­dial ooze, and I have to admit: my self-confidence is start­ing to take a hit.

I guess what I’m try­ing to say is that please don’t take it per­son­ally if I’m not very respon­sive or unusu­ally terse, even for me. I’m just try­ing to save some san­ity. I’ll be back soon to the world of the liv­ing. I promise. Right after I flee to Alaska for a week. Or Van­cou­ver Island. Or any­where. Eventually.