Hello and good morning.

Happy February 29th.  This is a date that only comes approximately once every four years.  I say “approximately” because as I’ve noted before, on three of every four turns of centuries, there is no leap day.  This is because the length of a year is ever so slightly less than 365.25 days…though I don’t recall if that’s measured in solar days or sidereal days.

Anyway, I’ve gone over this ground often enough already‒too often, probably.  I won’t bore you with more of it for now.  Probably I’m the only one who really finds it interesting, anyway.

Yesterday was a miserable day overall, though I did start off somewhat productively, typing all of what I’d written so far of Extra Body into the laptop computer.  It was almost five handwritten pages, which turned out to be just shy of 1400 words.  That’s roughly how much I used to write on any given day when producing a draft of a new work of fiction.  Anyway, I didn’t write anything new after that yesterday , but at least it’s primed and hopefully I’ll do a page of new writing today, once I’m done with this.  I’m heading to the office early‒even for me‒to try to make sure I have plenty of time to get that started.

I ended up leaving the office really late last night, because now it turns out that even the two people I like most there are getting to be part of the group who is willing to roll over the guy who’s not capable of just shutting out and walking away from work and saying to Hell with people who don’t worry about how what they do affects others.

I was already really depressed and frazzled to start the day.  I even put ear plugs in and then wore my airport-style hearing protector muffs to block out the noise of the music and the people saying silly things.  Neither of the two measures works adequately on its own, but together they do a decent job.  However, the ear muffs give me a headache after a while, because they squeeze my head.

I should just sabotage the stupid sound system; unfortunately, it is both fixable and replaceable.

Sometimes I feel almost as if a collection of a few people in the office‒among them people I thought were my friends‒are trying to drive me to quit, or to kill myself, or perhaps just to lose it in some other way.  I know it’s pretty silly to think such things, but in some ways, it’s emotionally less horrible to think that people are deliberately out to cause me harm than to think that people about whom I care, and who I thought cared about me, are willing to cause me distress and pain just out of thoughtlessness and inconsideration.

I’m probably being oversensitive.  I’m probably actually just on the verge of seriously losing my mind.  That probably wouldn’t surprise anyone.

Anyway, I ended up getting back to the house quite late, and then‒because commuting is not inherently relaxing‒I was a bit wound up and had trouble getting to sleep, so I watched several videos of people “reacting” to songs that I know.  This can be kind of fun, to a limited degree, because it feels almost like listening to a song (or similarly, to watching a movie or show) with a friend who hasn’t seen it before, though there is no actual give and take.

It also doesn’t give you the experience of watching some new thing (or listening to some new song) that you yourself have never seen with a friend, because the YouTube videos can’t really embed an entire show or movie, without being taken down due to copyright.  One has to join Patreon groups to watch things like that, and I’m really only following two people on Patreon.

I joined one of the two to see reactions to Doctor Who, but they are now all caught up, and there won’t be new Doctor Who episodes until May, I think.  They react to other shows, most of which I haven’t watched, but unfortunately, most of those shows are ones in which I am not interested.

I might be interested in them if I truly, literally had someone with whom to watch them; I watched many shows with my (now-ex) wife that I probably wouldn’t have watched on my own, because she was interested in them, and it made me happy to enjoy them with her.  Also, of course, we had similar tastes in many things; there was, after all, a reason we got married.  Or, well, there was a whole set of reasons.  Just one probably wouldn’t have been an adequate incentive for either of us.

But I’m a tiresome person, even to people who honestly love me.  I can sympathize, since I find myself tiresome.  Maybe people at the office really would prefer me to be gone, but are too kind to allow themselves to think such thoughts in their conscious minds, but end up acting on them nevertheless.  I couldn’t blame them, really, for such a thing.  How can someone be blamed for their subconscious thoughts?

I should just take myself out of everybody’s way.  I don’t make other people happy in any kind of reliable sense, but I do make many other people unhappy, though I would prefer not to do so.  Since I’m a net negative on the world, any personal return to zero on my part would be a net gain for the world at large.  And after that, it wouldn’t be my problem anymore.

Time will tell, I guess.  I’ll try to screw my courage to the sticking point and see if I can eventually succeed.  Well, actually, I will only see if I fail.  Only others will be able to see if I succeed.  That’s the nature of the thing, as far as I can tell, and is one of the most potent arguments against it, given I would be causing problems for which I could provide no possible assistance.

But since other people seem sanguine about inconveniencing me‒and it seems to be a general tendency among humans‒I shouldn’t let it be an absolute barrier to my choices, though I still think it should be a relative one.

Anyway, that’s that.  I hope to get a page written on Extra Body today, if I can.  I suppose, if you’re unlucky enough for me to be still around tomorrow and writing my blog, I’ll let you know.

TTFN