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For some reason, even when I haven't been on here in ages, I remember to check in at the first of the year. Apparently, for 2023, it was the one and only time, and I did absolutely nothing with that fandom challenge thing, unsurprisingly.

2023 has been a year of feeling... quiet online in a way that I haven't before.

That doesn't mean I haven't been online at all. I don't really have anything that would substitute for "being online," but a lot of my internet use has shifted to my phone.

I don't actually have any apps I use to track that sort of thing, and if my phone has any sort of built-in "well-being" or app usage monitor, it would be skewed all to hell after this week.

I contracted COVID for the third time, symptoms starting to manifest late Thursday afternoon. This is unsurprising as I had a student who was out with it through the school week until Friday. It kind of sucks due to the chances of complications, for myself or others, but on the other hand, if I'm going to get it, it's one of the least-inconvenient times to be laid low.

2023-2024 marked the first school year when I was actually invited back to my teaching position, which means that my work life has actually been a repeat of the previous year in terms of curriculum, which I've got to say did do a lot to bolster professional confidence. But of course, for better or worse, the moment I stop looking for change is when one offers itself.

Sometime, I think in November, I got a random email from a woman offering me a job in Japan. The position was listed for availability as soon as February, but there was no way I could've made that work, and I don't think immigration would have been able to swing it either, given what's going on right now. In any case, it means that I am finishing this school year the Friday before Spring Break unless the bottom falls out on the Japan thing.

It's very surreal, and I'm still dreading telling my current crop of students in a couple of weeks. Nevertheless, going back to Japan has been like this little moon orbiting my head ever since I came back, though I'm glad I did choose to stay home in 2020, even before everyone knew how bad things would get. My life since then feels like it's been slogging through a lot of negative milestones, some of which I've talked about here, but others that were just chores that had to be done.

These have not been a terrible four years, but I still feel like it has cemented that the lifestyle available to me in my home state as a teacher is not one that is conducive to me feeling like a whole person. It's hard to have any energy or time outside my job, even when I love my job and am doing my best to only work approximately my contract hours. I come home, and no matter how early I leave, I feel like I only sleep until it is time to get up and go to work again.

Of course, some of that may have been fatigue that was building up to my getting sick recently, but it's been a pattern that has been deepening for a couple of years.

Back in the 2021-2022 school year, when I worked near Nashville as a middle school teacher, I would come home and somehow find the time to spend a few hours almost every night playing Genshin Impact. It was good for me, and my best friend and I would co-op together and she would help me through a lot of exploration. However, once I got past some of the early game content, and we got out of that habit, my Genshin playing has slowed down to a couple of times a month. Now, I have never been one to want to really dig in and play a video game every single day forever. However, I know that I was a more healthy and sane person when I was doing it consistently.

One of my resistances to playing games as a primary hobby is that I would like to be creating. When I'm in a fandom, historically, I want to write about it. I want to talk about it and create about it. Gameplay is about accomplishing a goal within the game itself, not being effusive about it, and so because of that, I get itchy when my primary fandom is a game. However, Genshin wasn't that restrictive. It isn't a hard game most of the time, even for me, for the basic content. However, there is this weird perpetual motion or law of thermodynamics thing where it seems like I was actually writing more on AO3 or whatever other platform when I was playing the game more.

Which is weird, because I felt like I was drowning at work more often and obviously I wasn't being quite as successful at that job as I have become now.

In this current job, I actually feel respected and like I'm viewed as a competent educator, not someone they're trying to fish out with a life preserver all the time. Which makes leaving it seem like a tricky proposition. However, I have lived here going on two years, and my life is either staying the same or getting smaller.

The issue is that my job is the best part of my life here. And that's not something to complain about, exactly, except that it is?

My landlady (the woman I rent a bedroom and a bathroom from) here is a sweet, kind, fair woman for what she's doing. However, in my past rent-a-room situations, the people I was renting from were peers who just so happened to be homeowners. This is a much different dynamic with a married couple, their baby, and a mother-in-law who doesn't speak English.

I don't really have full kitchen access here, to the point that I have basically accepted having none 99% of the time, no matter what it says on the tin. They're just such kitchen-centric people and it's just so uneven that I don't even try anymore. So that's one thing I'm looking forward to leaving.

Anyway, the weird thing that brought me to a place to blog that I wanted to note, apart from that niggling beginning of year reminder that's programmed into my brain, is that after about three days of drifting in and out of consciousness due to a combination of the COVID fatigue itself and the Nyquil I have been taking to mitigate my symptoms, I feel more... brain-alive than I have in months?

Hopefully that's a good sign that I don't have a brain fog causing strain of this plague, but it's just... I wonder what's going on with it? Like, it's not actually possible that I needed 72 hours of almost uninterrupted delirium to be a rested human being. I wake up and feel rested. I tackle my days. And the isolation of these past four days has been kind of wearisome except for the part where I was loopy enough not to care.

I read something earlier today on some social media feed where some scold was saying that self-care was some excuse to be lazy and someone was answering that, no, at worse it was a maladaptive coping mechanism for people with chronic illnesses.

Technically, I do have several chronic illnesses.

I am on... so many prescriptions (not narcotics). I wish I weren't. I hate it. But my doctor says I need them.

I am hoping that moving and walking and eating and BEING differently will help cut back on some of them...

My whole life holidays haven't had much symbolic or spiritual significance, growing up with a zealously iconoclastic father in my early childhood. He's chilled some since then, but neither of my parents were particularly swayed by dates or tradition. Nevertheless, it just so happens that this New Years Day falling on the Sunday before I must return to work for the second semester makes it sort of convenient to try and set some general trajectories that I hope aren't dead in the water by tomorrow afternoon.

The first week of break, I flew to Toronto and spent some time with my best friend. We ate some really good food, and I'm obsessed with hotpot, particularly the tomato broth flavor. One of my many reasons for wanting to live in either Asia or a much more accessible metro area is access to food like that.

On Christmas Day, I missed most festivities, but that was fine. I got back to hometown area by midnight and then spent the past week with my dad and his new wife since November. It's been a whirlwind and feels like forever and no time at all. My stepmother is a fine lady, but as a friend put it, my dad really did not spend any time "shopping" for a new spouse once they were on a wavelength where it was being considered. They went from friends to fiances to married in about two months with most of it happening between the first week of October and the first week of November.

Stepmother is a nice lady, but her level of energy and way of interacting with my dad is so much different from my mom that my inner child sometimes snarls a bit at it. I think any person who had fairly-happily married parents 'til death them parted might feel that way, though. I want to be friendly with Patsy, but I don't want to lose all one-on-one access to my dad, which so far has been quite a trial, but it's only been two months and we've all been very busy with various things.

Tomorrow begins my in-service for two days before my students come back. It's so strange how it can feel like my life revolves entirely around my students but that I have hardly thought of them by name or specificity at all over the break even though I spent a ton of time grading and did check my email a few times. Overall, it felt healthy to just forget about it for a bit, but it puts me in a place where I don't really want to start thinking about it again.

Tomorrow, the principal wants to have a meeting with "provisional" employees, and I guess I might get some information about what the coming year holds for me.

I will finally be able to advance my teaching license at the end of this school year if it is completed successfully. After that, I don't know. This school and my particular job are fine. I like my immediate team, at least. However, I hate this region in terms of finding any kind of permanent living situation. The school is a bit too far for any decent and affordable apartment to be anything less than a 30 minute car commute, and I long for walking and trains.

I have been talking with a friend who's still in Japan about it, and I am thinking very seriously about trying to embark on really working there. However, it would probably require a considerable leap of faith to get a visa again and then job hunt more aggressively than I ever have. Despite putting in dozens and dozens of applications over time, I've really just taken whatever I could get so far.

I also stuck a glucose monitor in my arm again and we'll see what havoc months of not monitoring it have had on my system. When I was in Canada in June, my last monitor came out of the box broken. Then, in transition between jobs and insurance, I just stopped thinking about it. In packing up for this trip, I finally found the last one I had. I have a doctor's appointment with telehealth in 9 days, so hopefully I won't get chewed out too badly about it...