Purim Treat-a-Thon

I finished the last day of regular classes for Term 1 today. It seems like yesterday that I was skimming through all the various streams of beginning of term info to figure out what the end of regular class schedule WAS and using it to make my Google Calendar work properly. In the past, I would make something recurring infinitely into the future and then just delete it when I got around to it when it was no longer relevant. I figured out how to make it "repeat until" certain date, so that is pretty helpful. I live by my Google Calendar.

I have said many times that I reasonably like my current job. I have worked much more thankless and miserable jobs, tbh. However, I totally sympathize with the people I work with who are far more critical of my workplace than I am. There's one new hire in particular who sort of drives myself and my colleagues insane. She seems to come from a culture where teachers are micromanaged to a point that she can't figure stuff out on her own, and if you tell her you don't know the answer to a question or direct her to the person who might, she just asks the same question louder.

I still have to work for the next couple of weeks, but it's a change of pace, and I will (Lord willing and fingers crossed) get a lot of my remaining grading squared away and contact any of my students who have legitimate excuses for extremely late work to be turned in. I have a few periods of exam supervision, but none tomorrow (again, fingers crossed), so I plan to just hide from people and grade.

Anyway, I came here because I was a little too energized and it felt a little too early to head to bed after I took an everything-but-my-hair shower.

I sat down and thought about doing something fannish/creative, like updating my carrd or making something silly to post on tumblr.

Then, I just realized that I am too tired to actually do that, too.

Recently, I've been rewatching old eps of MHA since bestie told me she was, too. It's fun. I like that vibe of shounen anime a lot most of the time. It feels soul cleansing somehow.

However, the thing that made me decide to make a post was a sort of complaint/lament about the fact that for the past twenty years my hobby-purpose (not necessarily my whole or main purpose for being but a huge, significant part of it) had to do with contributing regularly to fandom and helping contribute to fannish community. These days, though, the shift to viewing fanfic as "content" in even a similar way to how YouTube videos are "content" makes it feel really impersonal to throw things out there.

My recently completed Death Note fic got an actually decent amount of interaction from commenters, compared to my recent experience, but I just felt tired afterward. I wrote everything except the last chapter ahead so I would keep a posting schedule, which means I posted for 11 weeks or so, since there were one or two instances of posting two shorter chapters at once. But because I wrote most of it in February and March but only finished posting it a week or two ago, I felt like I had sort of let all that manic energy and enthusiasm drain out of it for me. I get that it seems to be the more "responsible" and consistent fan-creator thing to do, but it also meant that I sort let the brain chemicals level out too much to feel the same drive at the end as I did at the beginning.

For me, fandom engagement is like a little bit of an infatuation. Sometimes it comes and goes with different fandoms, but the best I ever feel about life and productivity -- both personally and professionally -- is when I have a difficult-to-ignore itch to write or something.

Recently, bestie and I have been RPing MHA again, which is great! I reread our like three year old RP over the course of about a week, and it's been the most engaging reading I have done for fun in a while. But I guess I just kind of look at the "world" on the internet, and where ten or even five years ago I had all these ideas about what I wanted to present to the fannish "world" and how, I just... don't feel that there's any kind of incentive or drive to do so anymore.

Even five years ago, everyone was into carrd layouts. Before that, tumblr themes. Now, we're all so deeply in our phones that web design barely matters. I was never the most visually intelligent person to begin with, but I used to have the time and energy to think up how I wanted to lay out a webpage or whatever as long as it was with building blocks I understood. I used to make my phone backgrounds relevant to my fandom interests. Now, I just... don't do that stuff.

Some people would call it growing up, but I feel like it's more like being wrung out.

Summer and humidity make me feel yucky, so I think that this is part of the problem, but I guess I am just sort of navel-gazing about what the hell I do / who I am if I don't feel particularly motivated to keep living up to promises to fics and fandoms that nobody asked me to make.