It's been a little while since I was on this website. 

I started my new job on April 1 of this year at an international school in Tokyo. I had a couple of weeks before that to settle into my new apartment, but the moment I got moved in, I got sick for a few days. My body really does seem to just give in and give up every time I have a moment of peace from expectation and obligation. 

I am currently writing from my dad's house in Tennessee. It's the first time I've been back in over a year. I was nervous about coming through the airport, as outspoken as I am online about things that suck about the encroaching fascism in the US, but I should know that for the most part as a white woman, no one is really paying attention. 

My flight home ended up being delayed by 3 hours in total which cost me spending 12 extra hours in airports in total. Kinda sucked, but I dislike airports less than most people I've heard talk about it. 

My new job is night and day better than my job that I left, so I feel confident that I made the right decision there. It's a really lovely job most of the time, even though every job has its bullshit. The two things that are most difficult in this job: my direct-report boss is a True Believer in AI and as an English teacher this makes me want to pull my hair out and, because the international school is private and people choose their junior and senior high schools in Japan based on a variety of factors, June and July were just a blur of hardly ever getting a full weekend from my job. We get flex time at this job, though, so most of those events I got paid back in hours I could use. Means I have a few extra paid leave days left over after taking several during the month of August. I think they gave us 10 or so days off besides weekends, and I ended up taking 8 in total. 

And yet, I am stuck in this limbo of feeling of having too much free time and too little. 

While I am here, my dad and stepmom are planning to go out of town for a few days, since they never have a dog sitter. Maybe I'll start to have creative thought again in that quiet. My stepmom is old enough that she turns up the TV loud enough to bother me a little, but I want to sit in the den both as a social grace and because it's where the air conditioning is the coolest. 

I was hoping to get time and inspiration to write or otherwise do fandom interaction or contribution, but my last two fics have gotten next to no traffic or engagement. I did post them a few places, and I have at least one or two kudos, but it's just so lonely to get NO comments in spite of showing it to people. I feel like my greatest strength to make anything is writing, but no one bothers to act like fanfic authors are people offering them their ideas anymore. 

Even before that, I participated in a secret santa type exchange, and my recipient kind of ghosted the entire thing. 

I just really have... idk... a sense of lost competence? I've written over a hundred fics, and I know that it's a cultural shift, but I just... don't have whatever it takes to get people's attention anymore. 

Maybe I should post them here, since people actually treat people like people here, but I feel like it's hard to find the audience... anywhere... for any specific thing I write. 

Anyway, that's my current mope. And because of it, I lost steam on the few WIPs I had and can't think of anything new.