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National Lazy Day 2024
What more could you ask of a Saturday in the middle of my least favorite season? It’s National Lazy Day and I’m totally feeling it.
Permission 🀧 Slip
Summer is the annual permission slip to be lazy. To do nothing and have it count for something. To lie in the grass and count the stars. To sit on a branch and study the clouds. ~Regina Brett
The funny thing about 🌞 Summer 🔥 heat is how it sucks the life out of me. I just want to lie around like a lizard on a rock.
Naturally, there’s the childhood association of having several months off from school to make one feel lazy around this time of year.
There’s even the basic need to recover from a hard week at work. I’ve had a lot to do recently, so the weekends are basically a work coma.
As much as I miss the lost time, I celebrate that I get to sleep away my least favorite season.
Seriously, the faster it goes, the happier I’ll be.
We’re closing in on Pumpkin 🎃 Spice season with every passing moment, and I can’t help but smile about that.
Burnout 🏝️ Avoidance
what to do when you feel like doing nothing (unmotivated, burnt out, unproductive)
There’s a lot going on at work recently. It has the potential to lead to burnout if I continue operating in panic mode.
I know I can chew through all the stuff on my plate, but the amount of it compounded by the continuous changes in what I thought I had done already makes it feel like I’m trying to shovel my way out of an avalanche with a hand trowel or a mid-sized serving spoon.
It’s situations like this that make a dedicated “lazy day” crucial. Fortunately, I’ve got today and tomorrow to be lazy days so I can recharge my battery.
It’s so important to be able to set it all aside for some period of time.
Whether that’s being dead asleep for 10-12 hours or actually awake and at liberty to do things that need doing outside of work needs, lazy time matters if you don’t want your brain to melt.
As someone who has experienced crippling burnout in the past, I’m quite wary of approaching that threshold.
Even so, forewarned is forearmed. Having been through it before, I can see the warning signs and yank the handbrake.
When I do, it’s time for a lazy day or two.
🌻 Making 🍹 Sense 🦩 Of 🌴 Chaos 🥥
Blame is just a lazy person’s way of making sense of chaos. ~Douglas Coupland
That’s the essence of The Sentinels series and superhero stories in general.
As I plan to spotlight in the companion Collateral Impact anthologies, in the main narrative and even (to an extent) in my Holiday Season Serial Romances, living in a “realistic” world with superheroes is the very heart of chaos.
You and I go about our daily lives doing fairly mundane things.
Sure, an exceptional few go out and do exceptional things by mundane standards.
Some people climb mountains for fun or run marathons for charity.
I’m not one of those people.
| If you are a member of the military or law enforcement, you’ve got a pretty good idea of the kind of chaos that bad guys doing bad things introduces to an otherwise normal life.
Here’s an example of that: |
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Superheroes take that kind of crazy and kick it up exponentially.
| Gangs
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Supervillains
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Full-on Invasions
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In the Sentinelsverse, it’s literally chaos that drives the comic-book-style mayhem.
The reason there are superheroes in the world of these stories is because some privileged elites are literally summoning entities from a dimension of pure chaos to extend their corrupt lifespans. Periodically, the entities escape the ritual and randomly imbue people with their unworldly energies.
Every comic book milieu has its own explanation for super powers. Space aliens, chemical spills, mad scientists, government programs and so many others have inspired comic book superheroes and supervillains.
In mine, most people with super powers are suffering from chaos poisoning. Mary Christmas is the odd woman out with her powers coming from her alien origin. Hellion has an AI-enhanced suit of armor and Mr. Awesomeness is the product of experimental serums and customized training. The kids who get their powers after the Chaos War get their powers from a mixture of chaos energy and experimental compounds.
It’s all still a work in progress and I’m discovering new facets of the tale as I go along. Eventually, I’ll remember to put these factoids together in a worldbuilding bible.
How to Create & Use a Worldbuilding Bible
That’s all for today. It is lazy day, after all. Enjoy your weekend and don’t burn out.