(no subject)
Armed with my shiny new klonopin rx and upped cymbalta meds ruminating in my tummy, on Saturday I successfully made it out of the house, into the car, and off to Anime Central - although even before I arrived there were anxiety alarms going off in my head. I had wanted to go Friday night, perhaps, but Mom wanted to finally clear some of the stuff out of the upstairs, and I didn't want to turn her down. As it was, Mom wanted to do more cleanup on Saturday, too, so I didn't arrive until 6-ish. Got through registration, to find... they were closing the main hall at 6:30pm. WTF. I dashed around the vendors, didn't get to see the artist's alley at all, and then tried to figure out wtf everything else was.
(Note to con organizers: do *not* just fill out your schedule in Excel with times like "07:00:00pm" waaaay on the left, completely in black and white so that there's no easy visual time cue for items way on the right, or just shrug and claim that the Guidebook App will take care of all your problems. Especially if the teeny tiny physical map has a purple background and white lettering in a tiny font size, and there are almost no signs anywhere indicating "panel room A this way!")
The videogaming area was impressive, and I got to use some of my terrible Japanese skill to explain to some people wtf the table flipping game was about and doing. Found the tabletop gaming area, where there were a lot of people busily involved with various (large, complicated, multi-hour) boardgames. It all seemed nice enough.
I just couldn't get into it, though. The crowd was heavily skewed to the 18 and under crowd - I'd say at least 70% of the attendees were minors - and there was an astonishingly tiny amount of later-night or adult/mature programming other than the standard yaoi or shipping panels. I could tell that while the klonopin helped, the cymbal-banging monkey in my head was going crazy and I couldn't stand to stick around and try and engage with people or attend the possibly-interesting programming that was happening in an hour or three. (Even just writing about this is inducing forwards-and-backwards rocking motions.) I didn't luck out and see any of the three people I knew were attending but haven't met, and even the notion of DMing them to ask if they were interested in meeting a rando was enough to make my anxiety monkey's head look like it was ready to explode. So I drove home, tried to be as quiet as possible as to not have to deal with anybody in the house, and crawled into bed at 8:30pm. I woke up around noon; the cymbalta has been making it extremely difficult to stay asleep, so the depression-induced hypersomnia was actually quite welcome.
I was still amazingly depressed when I entered the kitchen; mom picked up on something not being right - but with dad there, I didn't want to get into it. She and I talked later, after I broke down and cried on her shoulder. This is something I would have expected as a teenager, but not in my mid-forties. But there's a lot of things lately - self image, gender and sex identity, what I want to do with my life, feeling like there's lack of personal agency - that seem more teenagerish than middle-age-ish.
(Note to con organizers: do *not* just fill out your schedule in Excel with times like "07:00:00pm" waaaay on the left, completely in black and white so that there's no easy visual time cue for items way on the right, or just shrug and claim that the Guidebook App will take care of all your problems. Especially if the teeny tiny physical map has a purple background and white lettering in a tiny font size, and there are almost no signs anywhere indicating "panel room A this way!")
The videogaming area was impressive, and I got to use some of my terrible Japanese skill to explain to some people wtf the table flipping game was about and doing. Found the tabletop gaming area, where there were a lot of people busily involved with various (large, complicated, multi-hour) boardgames. It all seemed nice enough.
I just couldn't get into it, though. The crowd was heavily skewed to the 18 and under crowd - I'd say at least 70% of the attendees were minors - and there was an astonishingly tiny amount of later-night or adult/mature programming other than the standard yaoi or shipping panels. I could tell that while the klonopin helped, the cymbal-banging monkey in my head was going crazy and I couldn't stand to stick around and try and engage with people or attend the possibly-interesting programming that was happening in an hour or three. (Even just writing about this is inducing forwards-and-backwards rocking motions.) I didn't luck out and see any of the three people I knew were attending but haven't met, and even the notion of DMing them to ask if they were interested in meeting a rando was enough to make my anxiety monkey's head look like it was ready to explode. So I drove home, tried to be as quiet as possible as to not have to deal with anybody in the house, and crawled into bed at 8:30pm. I woke up around noon; the cymbalta has been making it extremely difficult to stay asleep, so the depression-induced hypersomnia was actually quite welcome.
I was still amazingly depressed when I entered the kitchen; mom picked up on something not being right - but with dad there, I didn't want to get into it. She and I talked later, after I broke down and cried on her shoulder. This is something I would have expected as a teenager, but not in my mid-forties. But there's a lot of things lately - self image, gender and sex identity, what I want to do with my life, feeling like there's lack of personal agency - that seem more teenagerish than middle-age-ish.