Just When Things Started Getting Interesting May 25, 2014
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My life has been, without doubt, very interesting.
It is said that the phrase, “May you live in interesting times,” is an old Chinese curse. It isn’t. But that doesn’t make it a less effective curse nonetheless.
I’m really kind of a meek and mild librarian type. I’ve never really tried to have an interesting life. Sure, I wouldn’t mind skydiving or stuff like that, but that’s all kind of safe and controlled and calculated-type risks. I brought a “little” of the stuff that happened to me on myself, I think, but that was just me trying to live a normal life. “Interesting” was never really the planned outcome.
For example, saying I played a game at an arcade really isn’t at all fascinating, but my sole intention was to play a quick game and then go to do other uninteresting things.
The fact that game I wanted to play involved an arm wrestling machine might add a slight modecum of interest to my arcade adventure, but still one that would noone would write home about.
The fact that the machine broke my arm, though, THAT’S where things start to get interesting. I never planned that. I never even dreamed that it was possible.
The fact that the break was so bad (a spiral fracture) that it required surgery and a plate put into my arm makes the story more interesting still. This would be enough had it just stopped there. But no. Hell no. The more interesting stuff just keeps coming and coming.
What happened next was another intended-to-be-uninteresting event of my accompanying my then wife to a blood donation a few weeks after my surgery. Soft gurneys. Nurses all over the place. And they check your blood pressure and iron and all that stuff before they even stick a needle in you. It’s not the place where you’d expect interesting events to unfurl.
But when your wife takes a nose dive off the gurney upon sitting up, well, that’s where interesting things start starting. Add in the fact that she gets a concussion and it gets interesting as hell. She gets a ride in an ambulance because my arm is still in a sling and can’t drive.
Well, she couldn’t drive either. Not for a couple of months. And there we are with two non-driving, dependent children and my parents out of town for another week. There I was, looking forward to a few months off of work to do whatever the heck I wanted to do, and instead I end up taking care of my wife with a traumatic brain injury because someone has to.
And that’s just the headlines of the events. The details are interesting too. As are the details of the details. It’s kind of a fractal of ever more minute interesting things.
That was just one event. I have another dozen or so life-events of equal if not greater interest. As a rule, most of these interesting things sucked.
So seriously, FUCK interesting. I’ve had MORE than my share of interesting things happen in my life. I want to go with boring and conventional from this point forward.
But curses don’t work like that. I’m afraid that my life shows every promise of remaining interesting indefinitely.
le sigh
~ Steve
Great Day, if busier that heck May 21, 2014
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What a day!
Work wasn’t too terribly bad. I got the important items done from my checklist, and I will accomplish more tomorrow.
I had yoga after work, and am beginning to see that it might be an actual exercise after a while. I also went to Planet Fitness on my lunch hour for the first time in over a month. I saw Jon the shrink, and I gained a few more insights about myself. I ended the day by going to Rams Horn for dinner, where I had a very productive session.
And TOMORROW, I’m going to meet Jurate. We are going to meet at Millers at 7:00pm. I still don’t know whether to eat first or not. I’m gonna go with ‘not” I think I’m very slightly nervous, but from reading about her I have a strong feeling that this is going to go well. (Jeeze, I haven’t even met her yet and I’m already imagining what it would be like to kiss her. 🙂
Okay, I keep falling asleep. Time to give in to the invitable
Namaste and Love
~ Steve
Meditation is the bomb! May 20, 2014
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I am awesome, I am complete. I always do what needs to be done.
Psychological affirmations. They are effective, at least in the short term. And sometimes the short term is enough.
The house took another step toward cleanliness today. I got the back yard mowed. I did my push-ups, and I plan to run again tomorrow morn. Means I need to get to bed early.
At work? Well, I accomplished my two most important tasks, and I didn’t waste time doing things that didn’t need doing. It was a good day.
And a perfect evening with Statica.
Kinda a boring entry, I know. Maybe I’ll have more time tomorrow. But I do what I have to do as best I can, and that has to be enough, because it’s all I, or anyone, can do.
~ Steve
Exciting Freaking Shit!!! May 19, 2014
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I washed clothes!!!
I trimmed the frackin’ rose bush!!!!
I ran for 71 minutes!!!
I cleaned-ish the bedroom!!!
It was nice having a day off of work, and it was doubly nice that I actually got some stuff done around the house. In addition to the above, I now have clean sheets on the bed and clean dishes in the cupboards. The house still has a long way to go. The bedroom is better but it’s filled with old computers and wires and stuff. It’s the computer geeks equivalent of having a bunch of junk cars on the lawn. The living room is also not really fit for living in at the moment.
It’s hard to wax philosophical after a day such as this. Purple prose posing potential profit prays powerless in my perception. The creative juices have dried and are flaking off. Sleep sounds good, but my mind is too active at the moment to even dream of dreaming.
I followed my diet scrupulously today. I have hopes that eventually the extra 20 pounds I gained over the winter will begin falling off. The thing that could hamper my diet is the same thing that put those pounds on in the first place: depression and attempting to bury my woes under tons of food. Even though I feel well enough now, I know that I’ve been particularly prone to horrid moods for the last several months. It’s hard to get too enthused about having a good day when I know with certainty that I will once again be wallowing in the dumps; it’s only a matter of when.
I think I’m doing everything right. I take my happy pills regularly, get in enough exercise, eat well (when I’m not slumping), meditate, and try to keep a positive frame of mind. Lately it seems that it’s taking less and less to knock me off track. One little party at work or one especially tempting menu item and poof I lose it again.
Meh. When I blogged before I kept my mood blogs in a separate location. Having only one blog at the moment this is kinda the place where everything would go. My philosophy before that I didn’t want to talk about my mood because it could just lead to negative reinforcement. There is probably some truth to that, but I don’t want to pretend that my bad moods don’t exist, either. Not sure how I’m going to work that one out.
Peace and stuff to all
~ Steve
Not as Worse as It Could Have Been May 19, 2014
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It was a BEAUTIFUL day outside and I could sometimes see it from inside the library, which was the place I most decidedly DID NOT want to be.
But, it is supposed to be a beautiful day outside tomorrow as well. I think I did pretty well keeping to my diet thing for a change and, although I didn’t end up doing anything around the house, I did think about it a lot. 🙂
I have a much needed day off tomorrow. Even though the Big Read party was nice and stuff, it was still exhausting in that I don’t usually work Saturdays. A Saturday and a Sunday back-to-back is virtually unheard of.
Tomorrow I have to do some chores. The rose bush needs to be cut back hard, the lawn needs to be edged, the backyard needs mowing, and I’m supposed to put down some fertilizer. I also want to run, to get dinner started in the crock pot, to run the dishwasher, and to do my laundry. I *really* don’t want to do my more customary task of sitting around the house doing nothing.
That’s the thing about moods. I’ll go into a state of hyperactive activity and I can’t imagine ever leaving this state. I just feel so good and so on top of things. BUT, always, the mood dissipates and I’m left sinking back to my morass of self-pity, which generally accomplishes nothing positive. I don’t even know what I’m self-pitying. But the house seems to collapse around me along with my diet and my mood. So, I guess that the one conclusion I can reach about this is Meh.
As far as days go, though, this one could have been a lot worse. Let’s hope that the lack of worse today carries forward for a while.
Toodles and poodles,
~ Steve
Way too late May 18, 2014
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As I type this it is 1:15 AM, early morning on Sunday May 18, 2014. I have been searching over the net to try to find a voice I can try to emulate this summer: a voice I can practice with and use to try to improve my own voice. The basses voices I’ve heard seem too low, and frankly the baritone voices seem too high. I’m kinda in between. I suspect that there are many pieces written within my range, but I just haven’t found anything just right yet.
As to why this search is keeping me up this late I honestly have no good answer. Which is to say that I have an answer, it’s just not a good one. I am, once again, unable to control my impulses, as has been my problem for many days/weeks on and off of late. I planned to start my diet and the tracking of my to-do list this day, and frankly the end of the Big Read just gave me an excuse to fall off the wagon before I was even able to properly get back on it. Frustrating, but, alas, entirely predictable.
I don’t have a lot to say this e’en, but I felt the impulse to say…something. Somehow, I have to find a way to get these impulse things back under control.
At any rate, Good Night Moon,
~ Steve
Aaaannnd Four Years Later May 17, 2014
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It may seem odd, my going back to a blog that I haven’t updated in four years. So much has happened since my last post in 2010 that it would be ridiculous for me to even try to catch up. What’s more, Alphonsus, the Second Life character upon whom this whole blog thing originally started, has more or less gone into complete hibernation. Now he only comes on for five minutes about once a week to give Hestia money to support her not too overly lavish lifestyle.
Nevertheless, I’ve been journaling off and on, and after I went online to try to import some of my old journal entries into the private Evernote journal that I’ve been keeping, I got interested in some of my old stuff. Without undue humility, I must say that some of the things I wrote as Alphonsus all those years ago were pretty danged good, and while my followers weren’t overly plentiful, I also have to admit that the small feedback I got from the public postings made my journalling much deeper and interesting that the stuff I’ve been keeping in my private notes.
So I’m back. I think. I will attempt to create entries on a regular basis here. I will also try to rename this journal as Steve’s Random Drivel (if I can do so without changing the url I am using), as Alphonsus Peck is not likely to come out of mothballs any time soon. In Second Life, Hestia has become my main personality, and Hestia isn’t really the journalling type. I may go into the reasons for this change in a later post, but suffice it to say that there have been many non-trivial changes in my life since my last entry and that Hestia is filling my needs better than Alphonsus ever could at this time.
So, what are some of the most important things I should mention…hmmm. Well, first of all, Princess Ivory and I have permanently separated, both in Second Life and in real life. We are still friends and still get along fine, but I think we’d both agree that the possibility of reconciliation is pretty much zero at this point. While it may seem strange, much of what Alphonsus was is related to what Princess was, and the loss of Princess in the relationship may have had something to do with my reluctance to bring Alphonsus out of mothballs.
Secondly, rather than filling up my Written Word and Random Drivel posts with my atheistic musings, I now run a Tumblr blog as the Skeptical Avenger with over 6,000 followers and growing. On Tumblr I can chat to my heart’s content about my religious thinking without boring my real life friends about it. Suffice it to say that my Tumblr blog is a big part of who I am these days, and it feels good to be one of the most popular atheists on that platform.
Third, I’ve lost about 70 pounds in Real Life (which will be the default place I will speak from from this point on). I am currently fighting to keep from gaining too much of those 70 pounds back, and that too is a struggle I also will speak of on another day.
It feels much better to journal to the open world…to real people, than it does to keep my musings to myself. I am much more thoughtful and and introspective of the kind of things I say in a public forum. While I realistically know that there will be few, if any, of my old friends who are still following me at this point, I’ve no doubt that eventually I will find others in time. And honestly, it doesn’t matter too much if I don’t. Even speaking to the world in general feels much better than speaking only to myself.
Wishing peace to all,
~ Steve
Steven's Random Drivel 