Whining

 Probably will be a short entry tonight, I am very tired and stressed. Can't think too good. My job in particular is giving me a lot of that stress, especially with them scheduling me a ton of days in a row and overtime I didn't want, and if there is anything that makes me incredibly angry, it's feeling dismissed or taken for granted by an employer.

I get that all of this is "at will" employment, and that an employer can basically do whatever they want ("and if you don't like, there's the door"), but that is no reason for a working relationship to be an abusive one. Seven shifts in a row is a lot, even when not working overnights, and only having one night off to rest (and do whatever else I may want/need to do) is also pretty unacceptable. And it was not, and never has been, discussed with me. And I know it could be worse. Could have no job, be homeless, die alone in a gutter, whatever. Doesn't mean it doesn't suck.

Still not sleeping well, either. Even if the roommate doesn't make a shit ton of noise in the morning, he's still using the bathroom for two hours (not hyperbole, I have waited for up to two hours to pee, checking every twenty minutes to see if he's still in there), and I have to sit there and wait. Hard to sleep when waiting to pee. But even if that doesn't happen, I am have an incredibly difficult time getting to sleep before 2PM lately, and it has been stressing me out. I can sort of fall asleep for an hour or two, and then I wake up, and either the noise/bathroom situation happens, or I lay there trying to sleep and just can't. It is terrible.

This all sounds really whiny. It's hard for me to take these things seriously, because somehow I got it into my head that complaining/worrying/caring about yourself is a selfish and morally incorrect thing to do. I'd fight like hell to correct someone else's discomfort, empathize with their problems, feel a million different ways, but if I direct any of that at myself, I feel like I'm being selfish or vain. "There are starving kids in Africa with nothing" kind of thing. I don't know exactly where that came from, at least for me...I know there were religious teachings involved in my childhood, and my Mother and Grandmother both instilled a certain "do for others before yourself" values, but I don't know where the idea that caring for my own well-being without a sense of shame or guilt, or at least without it being considered a moral failing, came from. 

The same is true about needing help. Help other people, for sure, always, but never ask for it. Never need it. That is a failure. It's weird how these things are coming to me now, at least on a conscious level, but there is something to be said for my being at a general low point in my life, which is kinda the purpose of this very exercise: to document the low points as some sort of way of understanding the whys and hows of being low, possibly in a manner that may help me to escape being low, and prevent being low again?

Anyway, other than feeling like an abused worker and a restless zombie, very little else is going on. Finished season three of Community. that was fun. That means it's time to move onto the (mildly) unfairly maligned season four, which should be an interesting exercise. Haven't watched that season in a long time. I am still mulling over what I might want to do after I finish that show...do I do a new show, rewatch a favorite? It's difficult. 

I had gone into 2026 with an idea I would try to watch new stuff, and there is plenty (both film and television) to get to, and the list keeps growing (the Fandango account Sammaeal is nice enough to share with me is probably around 1400 individual titles when you factor in bundles and incidental doubles, and I haven't actually seen at least a third of them), and I specifically wanted to focus on new stuff because I have the tendency to keep watching the same stuff over and over again (last night, home from work re: "illness", I just watch Rifftrax, which is a common practice of mine. To be fair, one of them was one I only saw a couple times before). So I'm in a sort of "Do I do comfort watching because I'm depressed? Or do I venture forward with the new and increase my overall knowledge and love of film?" place. Difficult to do both.

I've threatened myself with a "don't think, just go alpha-numeric and watch whatever is next" and maybe it is the only option that may get me someplace. I know I want to rediscover my love of media, and that really does mean a mix of rewatching things I used to love, things I currently love, and new things that will expand my horizons. Maybe I really should just go alpha-numeric and skip whatever is super familiar. 

Feels like this entry has been kinda pointless. I guess when journaling, not every day is interesting or a revelation. There is probably a lot more to explore about my strange inability to value myself at the same level as I do other people, but I don't have the bandwidth to really delve into that. But I guess it should go on the list of things to work on. I'm assuming other people don't have some martyr complex in which they believe they deserve to suffer while others don't, and that acknowledgement of that suffering of the self is a moral failure. 

Makes me feel like I need to watch The Deer Hunter again soon, though. That's kinda the whole point of that movie.