John Zeitler

I hate to be short today, folks, but yesterday was a long day at work, and I’ve had comparatively little time over the last few weeks to devote to building up the May backlog. I’m looking to fix that tonight, of course, but for the moment you’ll get this brief little discussion of how depression can really hit you like a ton of bricks sometimes.

Saturday I waas feeling really good when I woke up, and I got more than a little overambitious. I sat myself down for my usual internetless painting session, with only the XM for technological companionship. I was going to finish off 24 grunt troops that morning, taking them from mostly-started to completely-finished. That way, I could be ready to spray up the four tanks on Sunday morning and be more or less in the home stretch for my June deadline.

I got through painting the armor on twelve of them before I got bored and depressed. That’s just one color on them out of about four, and in all honesty it was still in the “sloppy” phase where I didn’t have to be too terribly careful. I’ll be the first to admit that my failure to commit to the task probably had a lot to do with how I was arranging the work: I was moving ‘completed’ troops back to the waiting table, and filling in my to-do queue with what I had to do next. This created the illusion that I wasn’t actually getting anywhere.

Of course, Sunday came and I was almost too depressed to really get anywhere, but the thought of getting to see a few people at the theater helped snap me out of the mood I was in. Until I got there and found that nobody really wanted to see the movie (myself included– we’re starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel for theatrical anime that we could run). And then I had to go to work on Monday.

All it takes is a handful of setbacks to wreck what should have been a productive weekend.