This week marks the first time I’ve ever been forced to take a week off at work, and that coincides with the first time I’ve ever taken a week off and stayed home instead of traveled. It’s been pretty great. My daily schedule varies as my sleep schedule drifts back into the life of a night owl, but I generally sleep in, then groggily wake up wander downstairs to eat cereal while watching cartoons. In the afternoon, I’ve been taking care of a chore or two per day, and once done I lay in the bath before taking a shower and transitioning into movie and videogame heavy evenings.

Somewhere in that mix, I try to work on a personal project (like the zines or my websites), do the daily chores in Animal Crossing, and browse the web for tech and game news. I’m also catching up on podcasts I fell woefully behind on after my commute time shrunk from 45min to 13-15min each way.

But most of all, I’m catching up on sleep.

Those of you who know me, or follow the blog, know that 2020 has been a hellish year for me. I started having kidney stone problems in late November of 2019, finally resulting in hospitalization and surgery in January/February. Then, as I recovered from that and went back to work, I caught the flu and was totally out of it for like two weeks. And as I recovered from that, the quarantine went into effect, meaning I’ve been at home about 2 weeks longer than most of my friends and colleagues… and if you could the WFH days occasionally taken during my kidney stone fueled December and January, it’s been a grip since I regularly left the house.

You’d think that with all that time at home, I’d be caught up on sleep right? WRONG. That time between November to February was awful for sleeping. Night was the most painful time of day, so I was up peeing all the time and constantly unable to find a comfortable position. While I had the flu, it was a lot of fever dreams and tossing/turning fits. And then with this quarantine the existential horror of it all, combined with layoffs and furloughs at work, has meant I’m running on about 6mo of awful sleep habits.

So I’ve been sleeping late, taking multiple naps per day, and just trying to rest and recover from my astoundingly high levels of sleep debt.

This is also the first time since I graduated from college where I’ve taken an extended staycation. I padded graduation from MIAD with a month-long break before starting at Kohl’s to recover from that whirlwind of art/design school. But since then, I’ve jumped from one job to the next using long weekends to recover between gigs. It’s been nice to have a break from the work brain, and while I miss feeling “productive,” it’s nice to get things done in other areas instead. I’m usually too tired to take care of the chores I’ve been tackling this week, so a big part of writing this is a reminder to future Mark to chill the fuck out and not sacrifice home-life for work-life.

The motto of “work is fine, but should stay at the office” is probably not a new one for most of you, but in the UX world, a lot of the work we do is research based and competitor-focused, so it’s hard to turn those skills off. Browsing the web activates my “this solution could work X” thought-pattern pretty easily, so I don’t need to have Sketch open or be on UserZoom to have work follow me home.

One of the great ways I’ve been escaping that is through some VR games. It’s so much easier to fall out of this world and into theirs when it feels all encompassing. Beat Saber doesn’t have much world-building, but it’s pure fun that rips me out of my work thoughts as soon as a song starts. SUPERHOT VR is a more fleshed out world, but still very simple and easy to find hours of the day gone while playing. I have some others on the docket to start soon, but it’s been nice to find a way to turn off that side of my brain with much more ease than even the most engaging RPGs when played on a TV screen feet away from my face.

I’ve spent way too long rambling about my vacation though, so it’s time to get back to actually enjoying the rest of today. For those of you waiting for a more substantial post, know I’m working on a super long Accessibility blog that I can’t wait to share when it’s ready. Until then, stay safe and take care!