4 things: Ladystuck, new job, the audiovisual media thing, blood donation

[edenfalling]

1. I finished a rough draft of my Ladystuck fic and posted it to the collection. I will be editing it extensively over the coming week -- maybe extending it as well, because while it's a functionally complete thought as it stands, there's a bunch of world-building I wasn't able to get in, and I would also like to do some more in-depth character exploration. But still, I wrote a thing and it's up on the site, which is enough for tonight.

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2. I checked my work schedule this afternoon, and while I'm only on for one day this week, next week I seem to be scheduled for over twenty hours, and the week after that for over thirty hours. Very exciting! I need to update my resume now to take this job into account, because being employed makes a person look much more employable.

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3. A couple weeks ago I mentioned in passing that I've been getting into Hannibal, which is weird for me both because it's a television show and because it's nominally realistic rather than fantasy or science-fiction. In practice, it's so stylized and flat-out bizarre that it comes across as effectively a dark urban fantasy. And so far, it seems that watching via actual DVD disks rather than via streaming video is a decent way to sort of... concentrate my mind. I've been telling myself I have to watch an entire disk in one evening and send it back to Netflix the next day, so I'm not always finding excuses for stuff to do instead of carving out time to watch and listen.

I may try this method on some other TV shows and see if I can carry the pattern over, or whether it was an aberration born of temporary white-hot interest and therefore not sustainable or transferable.

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4. I just made a blood donation appointment for the 22nd. This was annoyingly difficult, because the Red Cross site refused to cough up local blood drive locations based on a ZIP code search. I had to find the advanced search link and look by city and state name. You would think that would call up the same search parameters, but apparently not!

I also looked at my account, out of curiosity, because at some point they digitized their records. I can see all the times I gave blood in New York, going back to 2001. One of the dates has to be wrong, because the Red Cross claims I donated twice in February 2002, which is obviously impossible. Then there's a gap between 2003 and 2005, which is probably when I was having issues with mild anemia, and after 2005 there's nothing for nine years until my church had a blood drive last January and I thought to myself, oh hey, I used to do that, didn't I...? And now the Red Cross keeps sending me emails and calling me at random hours of the day to ask if I've made a new appointment yet.

(I do think I gave blood once in 2006, since I'm fairly sure I once walked down the hill from Cornell with a bandage on my elbow and then worked a closing shift at the smoke shop, but perhaps that donation was the time they entered my name incorrectly into their system. Or perhaps one of the doubled Feb. 2002 entries really should have been Feb. 2006. It is a mystery!)

Anyway, I changed my work availability to ensure I won't have any scheduling conflicts that day.

Comments

[transposable_element]

Maritus and I nearly always binge-watch series after they've been out for a few seasons. This is partly so we don't have to organize our lives around the TV schedule and partly because we've been burned by falling in love with series that got canceled after one season. We do occasionally watch shows as they come out, e.g. Agents of SHIELD and now Agent Peggy Carter, but even then we stream them the day after they air.

The problem with binge-watching TV shows is that it can be addictive even if you don't like the show. I think if I'd watched Battlestar Galactica as it came out I would have given up on it fairly early on, rather than watching all the way through to the *bitter end*. Same with The Sopranos, although I eventually asserted myself and refused to watch the last season. Both of those shows we watched on DVD, though, or possibly we began watching The Sopranos on VHS(!). We are now streaming Elementary (currently about halfway through the first season), and we seem to be watching one or two shows a week, and never more than one in an evening -- unlike Buffy, which we binge-watched three or four episodes at a time. So I do think there's something about the difference in format encouraging particular viewing habits. Then again, Buffy was before we had the kid.

Good for you for donating blood! You'd think they'd figure out better ways to make it less of a hassle for people who want to donate regularly. I haven't done it in a while, and I feel guilty about it. The problem is that I have teeny veins and they have to use a butterfly needle, and even then it's often a struggle. The last time I tried they couldn't get a whole pint and had to throw it away, adding insult to injury! And sometimes they don't want to let me donate because I'm diabetic (no, not *that* kind of injection drugs, look it up, it's perfectly okay as long as I'm healthy and not on any weird oral medications, sheesh!). It seems like a waste, because one thing I am NOT is needle-phobic...

[edenfalling]

I haven't watched anything on a live, regular basis since... well, since 2000, which is when I moved to Ithaca and therefore no longer had a television. Even before that, I was bad at remembering to keep weekly "watch this now" appointments (even with shows I liked and was actively trying to watch, which at that time meant BtVS and A:tS), and keeping even that up via a television in a college dorm common room? Not a chance.

I've occasionally tried to binge-watch stuff in the past decade, but it turns out that having an entire series (or even just an entire season) available all at once means I tend to think, "Oh, I have all of it here, so I can get to it some other time," and then just... not watch it, or at best watch maybe half and then run out of oomph. This has happened to me with at least three series. Having only one disk with only three or four episodes is a more discrete chunk of time/investment, and I can't get the next chunk until I finish the current chunk, so I'm more likely to actually sit down and watch. It also spreads the experience out over a few weeks, so I build up a little anticipation and eagerness while I wait for the next disk to arrive from Netflix; I think that helps me carve out a viewing period rather than default to other ways of filling time.

It feels a little weird to be deliberating going a step backward in technology and convenience, but brains are weird and if this is what it takes to trick mine, I'll go with it. *wry*

My blood donation problems are mostly to do with transportation and time conflicts. I usually worked afternoons and evenings in my old job, and most blood drives happen between noon and 6pm -- precisely when I was at work. And a bunch also happen in places that are inaccessible except via car, and since I don't have a car... *sigh* I am lucky in that I have large, visually obvious, and nicely behaved veins in both elbows, so I've never had trouble on that front.

[heliopausa]

Great about the job getting more and more material. :) And also, cheers for blood doning!

[edenfalling]

It's a seasonal job, and from what I've been told the busiest periods are late January/early February, and then the first half of April -- this is determined by when people receive their W2 forms and think, "Oh, hey, maybe I should get my taxes done," and then by the looming approach of tax day on APril 15th. So the hours will doubtless drop off in mid-February and March, not to mention I will need to find something else (hopefully more permanent) for once this finishes. But I was expecting even the busiest periods to be maybe 25 hours a week if I got lucky, so I will take 40-hour weeks while I can get them!