As I write this, I'd like to be sleeping. God, would I. I've been working on the CSS for this site all day and it hasn't loaded in yet. I'm scared it won't work. On top of that, I have a final project due on Wednesday, two final projects due on Friday, another two quizzes on Monday and Thursday, and another final next Thursday.
My sanity is slowly collapsing but at least I'm learning something new.
That's an important experience for me. I struggle with stagnation. If I stay still, physically or intellectually, I start to lose it, which means resting is also an ordeal. Hence why I've elected to code a custom website rather than use the provided website builders for the class assignment that started this blog. Shirley Rose writes about the constant acquisition of new skills in writing, but I'm not even satisfied just advancing my writing--I need to learn how to sew, how to 3D print, how to improve the lighting of my digital paintings, how to use spreadsheets properly, how to repair technology. If I'm not stressed, I fizzle out of existence completely. Variety is the spice of life, but sometimes it feels like I'm banging my head into a wall just to feel it throb.
There's an absolute laundry list of factors that drive the creation of a website. God knows this one discards nearly all of them in favor of my own aesthetic preferences and braindead understanding of CSS. Cara Miller's Basic Design Principles seems, despite the name, like an insurmountable hill of buzzwords and terrifying professionalism. I've been trying to design buttons to take you to this page for three hours today. I only just barely got the div containers working in Brackets; the new CSS hasn't even loaded on Neocities yet, so I have no sense of how my site actually fares in practice. It worked on Brackets, though. I guess I just have to be patient.
Despite how much of a headache things like this are for me, I keep doing them. I seem completely incapable of making anything easy for myself. The idea of half-assing an assignment occurs to me frequently, but every time I think of it, something deep in my gut rebels violently against it. It's why I'm so scared of marketing myself. I don't ever want to be boxed into a specific corner. I love bouncing from hobby to hobby like a pinball, smashing into walls and falling directly into gaping voids of my own creation like I'm Wil E. Coyote.
It does take a toll, though. I keep bemoaning the fact that I'm not actually good at any of it. Sure, I'm decent, but things inevitably fall by the wayside when your focus is so scattershot. I haven't written anything for myself in months. I had to sideline my D&D game. I haven't finished A Link Between Worlds in a while, despite being on the final boss, and god knows my cosplays have been collecting dust for eons. The worst part is that I miss it all. I miss all of it, but when I'm free of stress and Those Things That I Must Do, I can't do Anything I Want To Do. I end up slipping directly into the space between, the comfortable and tedious Nothing.
Learning new things doesn't have to be a massive undertaking, though. I may not be good, and I may not understand all of it, but I've made this site. I still draw, I still write, I still play games, I still cosplay. I don't need to be the best at those things, nor do I need to doing them constantly. They're simply things I enjoy doing. I should do them because I enjoy them. I have to let myself rest enough that I don't dread anything sufficiently difficult.
If any of the CSS on this page is broken, now you know why.