Author: Wren

A Little Change Can Go a Long Way

Wren Leave a comment

Last night, I got caught up reading a book. I was already up late because of D&D and remembering to update my blog, but deciding to read for a bit before going to sleep definitely kept me up for another two hours on top of all that. I’m running on about three and a half hours of sleep today. For now, I’m managing alright, despite having spent most of Saturday in a big-group social situation. Weddings are great, but they really wipe me out. Meeting tons of new people and being around that much energy takes a lot of effort for me. If it wasn’t for how wonderfully restful Sunday was (prior to staying up three extra hours, anyway), I’d be dead on my feet.

I don’t regret my decision. Matthew Colville is a wonderful author and I’m excited to review his two books, Priest and Thief. They’re an absolute joy to read so far and I find it incredibly frustrating (in the best way) that the third book is not yet visible on the horizon. The man has been incredibly busy lately, with his usual YouTube video series about running Dungeons and Dragons called “Running the Game” and working on the incredible Kickstarter he ran only a few months ago. Setting up an office and writing a D&D supplement take a lot of work and he’s managed to do them both without dropping any of his other plates, so I am willing to cut him some slack when it comes to working on his book series.

Staying up late can be a lot of fun. As long as I’m staying engaged and enjoying myself, I don’t mind doing it once every so often. It only becomes a problem if I start to make a habit of it and wind up leaning on caffeine to see me through the day. That’s never a healthy habit and it is an easy one for me to fall into since I feel the most awake and alert in the evening and night, no matter how little I’ve slept.

Thankfully, getting better sleep has been easier since I’ve gotten a “new” (owned by a friend, but still in way better condition than my previous mattress) mattress. It is some kind of foam and, while sitting on the edge causes it to sink alarmingly, it does a much better job of supporting my back than my old spring mattress did. My lower back pain is much diminished and might even totally disappear in time and all of my joints feel way better which is a benefit I didn’t expect. Six hours of sleep now feels like eight or more hours of sleep on a good night with my old mattress.

It was amazing to realize just how much my old crappy mattress contributed to the problems in my life. Low-quality sleep, aching joints and muscles, constant lower back pain, and little desire to actually go to sleep all added up to a certain degree of constant irritation or frustration that now seems so clearly tied to my old crappy mattress that I’d been putting off replacing for over a year. Almost a year and a half, actually. I probably would have continued to put it off if it wasn’t for the fact that one of my friends just happened to be moving and my girlfriend made a few comments about how my back pain was clearly tied to my creaky, dented, shitty mattress.

It is amazing how changing one relatively little thing I’d been ignoring for a long time made my life so much better. Even a return to “neutral” in terms of what sleeping did for me was a huge boon. Last week was super stressful and exhausting for a lot of reasons and in a lot of ways. If I’d been sleeping on my old crappy mattress, I’d probably be depressed, exhausted, and on the verge of tears/a panic attack at this point. Instead, I’m tired but ready to go play D&D again. I don’t need another evening of rest before I feel up for tackling another social situation.

That’s not to say I don’t want to rest. I would love to get to sleep early tonight and try for a lovely eight hours. I might actually wind up feeling properly rested if I could do that for a few nights in a row. I haven’t felt properly rested in a long time and it is now so easy to see why. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard to convince myself not to spend money on a new mattress. It was definitely worth what I spent and then some.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what else might be a seemingly insignificant thing that could have a huge impact on the quality of my life. Working out more springs to mind, as does putting more effort into ensuring my diet is well-rounded instead of the “eat food and just make sure it includes fruit and veggies” thing I’m currently doing. Neither of those are really insignificant, though. They’d both take a fair amount of discipline and effort every day, but the potential benefits should outweigh the costs. Back when I was more active in regards to maintaining my physical health, I felt better than I have since I stopped. Combining that with the benefit of a non-shitty mattress could have an incredible positive impact on my life. Likely will have. Should have. I don’t really know and I won’t until I try it out.

I’m going to keep thinking of more things I can try as well. I’m still trying to fit all the puzzle pieces from the past two weeks of meditation together, so something else to focus on for a bit should help me wrangle everything into place. We’ll see. I feel like I say that a lot. It’s kind of exciting to know that there’s the potential for so much positive change, but also kind of scary. Thing could wind up being incredibly different and, while I one-hundred-percent support myself getting into better physical and mental health, I’m not sure I’m ready for all the changes that might entail. Thankfully, I’m not on a schedule.

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Stay on Target

Wren Leave a comment

Today was wonderful. I woke up leisurely, lounged in bed, and only got out of bed to give my friend a ride to his car. He’d wound up staying at another friend’s house after they went out last night and I was up for a drive and some pleasant conversation. Afterwards, I stopped by the local diner for a long breakfast and some reading. When that was done, I opened all the windows and doors in the house to let in the beautiful weather, created a good background music playlist, and lounged while continuing to read the book I started at breakfast and listening to my playlist. A few hours later, my roommate and I cleaned in preparation for the night’s D&D session, did some shopping, and then settled in to wait for our friends to arrive.

D&D was tons of fun, even if it did run a little late, but it finished in time for me to remember that I STILL hadn’t update my blog. AGAIN. I think my change to my normal scheduling is making it difficult for me to remember and/or prioritize updating my blog every morning. I should probably get back to that soon. Not for another week or so, though. I still have a lot of reflecting to do and writing it out is really helping me. I should probably go back and read through all of my old posts again so I can remember everything I’ve thought. There’s just so much I can’t keep it all straight!

A little variety in my life is important. I tend to ignore it in favor of the comfortable and familiar, since I build habits easily and let my obsessive nature take control so I always stick to them. As I’ve written in previous posts, that isn’t always a good idea. It can stress me out and turn something that should be a fun and fulfilling experience into a rote recitation. A spewing of words with no value beyond the fact that they are correct and the words currently in demand. There is no thought to them.

In other words, they’re the exact opposite of what I want to feel when I write and when I post to this blog.

I think I might get my buffer back together this week. Make that my project, since there’s not much else going on right now and all the stress of last week has calmed down to the point where I’ve almost forgotten about it. I haven’t really forgotten about it. I hope I don’t. There was too much important stuff for me to think about. It just isn’t dominating my mind today, thanks to the peace and calm nature of the day. Honestly, just thinking about it now is getting me kind of wound up about it and that’s no good.

I need to find a balance between the sort of absent-minded freedom from responsibility and care that I felt today and the heavy stress and anxiety about the future I felt Friday and Saturday. That’s my goal. All of reflection and meditation is tipping me toward too much stress, even if it’s helping me manage my anxiety. Responding with an entire week away from cleaning the kitchen isn’t really a healthy response to that amount of stress. Ideally, I’d be able to clean the kitchen and maybe cut down on just how much time I spent on reflection. We’ll see how that goes.

I just need to keep myself focused on my goals, reflecting on my thoughts, and asking myself the questions I’ve been writing down that don’t have easy answers. As long as I do that, I should figure out what it is I’m expecting this period of self-reflection to produce. Hopefully.

Lost for Words

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What do you do when you’re a writer and you’re lost for words?
What do you do when every word feels empty and flat:
When your lexicon fails to provide
And your tongue hangs in your mouth, empty, sluggish, and fat?

What do you do when you’re a writer and no word fits?
What do you do when you have a hole in your heart:
When you can’t fill the space
And every single page, paragraph and sentence falls apart?

What do you do when you’re a writer and you can’t explain?
What do you do when you can’t seem to speak:
When the air hangs empty
And yet full enough to make even the strongest person weak?

What do you do when you’re a writer and your tongue is tied?
What do you do when the words are there but cannot escape:
When you know what to say
And yet the words hide inside and refuse to take shape?

What do you do when you’re a writer and you want to quit?
What do you do when the words stop coming:
When you want to work
And thoughts in your head will not stop running?

So what do you do when you’re a writer and you’re lost for words?
When the words are stuck, do you start writing?
Do you stare down an empty page
And, with words that feel like drops of your own blood, keep fighting?

Time for a Peaceful Afternoon

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Some days, all I want to do is sit on my porch in the shade, drink a cold beer, and enjoy the breezy peace of a warm spring afternoon. Unfortunately, this can be hard to do because I live in a duplex and share a yard with a family that has children who live to loudly play in said yard and who seem to invite all of the neighborhood kids over to do the same. Additionally, there are always bees on the porch, my only porch chair broke last fall (it was a cheap collapsing canvas chair), and lately the weather has been warm enough that going outside for any amount of time means being drenched in sweat.

Instead, I’ve had to find my peace elsewhere. Quiet moments of sitting in the armchair in the library or sitting in my desk chair with my monitors off so I can just gaze out my window at the trees in my front yard while I look for bits of blue sky between the dancing leaves. Occasionally, it is with my friends as we pause in whatever we’re doing to just enjoy the moment, like the silence we shared after reaching an excellent vantage point in our hike over the holiday weekend.

Peace, like silence, is important to me. My head is constantly a riot of thoughts, noise, and emotion so any time I can put all that aside to appreciate the calm feeling of a certain moment is something that helps me feel more in control.

Today, I’m pursuing peace. I’m leaving work early, setting this to go live at 5 pm, and spending the rest of my day in peace and quiet. I have a lot of stuff I need to sort through right now, so I’m going to focus on resting up, finding peace, and then trying to untangle the knots. While I don’t think I’ve made any particular breakthroughs, I do think I’ll be getting back to my regular program of posts soon. I kind of miss it and I’m hitting the point where all of my meditations are thinking a little further on things I’ve already thought about. I’ll probably still do more journal-ish posts, but they’ll definitely be less frequent than they are now.

Soon, things will be somewhat back to normal. I hope. We’ll see.

Fixing Points in the Darkness

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I often wish that life had some kind of external meaning. I wish there were fixed points in existence that we could derive our purpose from, things we knew to be incontrovertibly true about why we are alive. Things we knew we would find as points with which to plot the course of our lives. A soul mate. A purpose. A reason. Things that, added up, told us the potential value of our lives.

It would make my life easier if I had those things. I wouldn’t spend so much time wondering, so much time groping about in the dark, if I knew where I was or what I was reaching for. I’d never worry that I was wasting my time on my current path because I’d know I was at least headed in the right direction. I’d know why I’m here.

But fixed points don’t exist. We have many points to pick from and we’re never sure where they are or if they’ll stay. The concept of “soul mate” might exist, but I doubt it exists in the form of a single person. Perhaps an incredibly strong rapport with one person in particular, but there are too many humans for it to be statistically likely for anyone to find their one particular soul mate during their short span alive. Plus, if souls truly are immortal, then you’re opening it up to all humans who ever existed and will ever exist. The likelihood of finding your one soul mate is so low as to be laughable. Yet that’s still a comment idea because people claim to have found theirs all the time. If it truly exists as it is often expressed, I think a soul mate is someone you build a relationship with and connect with, not some pre-determined person. Sure, you found someone and immediately felt a profound connection, but we only apply the term “soul mate” when the connection stays and the relationship works out. If you didn’t work at keeping the relationship strong, they wouldn’t be your soul mate.

That means it isn’t a fixed point. If you could form that strong of a bond with anyone (or almost anyone, since there are prerequisites to even trying to form that bond), then it isn’t so much as finding a fixed point in existence as it is fixing a point in existence. The same is true of “meaning” and “purpose.” You may feel particularly called to doing something and your life might have a very strong pattern or theme to it, but you always have to work at maintaining it. Saying you’ve found your meaning and then pointing to your life from then on as evidence of it being your meaning is a self-fulfilling prophesy. You found something that you decided was meaningful and then dedicated your life to it. Just because your life was full of it doesn’t change the fact that you picked it.

I struggle with this sometimes. Because of my affinity for writing, the joy I get from writing, and the dedication I feel to writing, it is very tempting to say that I was given meaning and purpose. The same is true of storytelling. I want to say something outside myself determined that I was to be a storyteller and finding ways to be a storyteller is just me trying to live the life that was set out for me. It is very easy to forget that I haven’t always felt this way. Before high school, I didn’t write much at all. I read a lot and enjoyed stories, but I didn’t write them. Writing began as a coping mechanism and giving myself meaning because of my writing was a part of that.

One of the “Obsessive” bits of my OCD is a preoccupation with self-destructive ideas. I’ve never acted on them, thankfully, but my OCD makes sure they’re pretty much always there. Back when I first started confronting the reality that these thoughts were here to stay, I decided that giving myself reasons to want to wake up tomorrow was going to make it easier to push past those thoughts if they ever went from what was, at that point, just a burble in the back of my mind. I picked a meaning and a purpose for myself and believed in it so firmly that now, over a decade later, I almost forget that I didn’t always believe my purpose was to write and tell stories. I almost forget that this was something I chose.

Fixing your points in existence is important. Not because they’re going to lead you somewhere, but because they can give you a sense of direction. You know where something is and you can always find your way back so long as you never let them go. Without them, you’re just drifting. Some people like to drift and that’s fine, but that becomes a fixed point of sorts as well. Your purpose is to drift and to exist.

Ultimately, I can’t really fault anyone for what they choose. Even the people who want to believe that something else gave them fixed points and a direction. I believe they’re fixing the points themselves and even adding a couple more as a result of their beliefs. Religion, philosophy, ethics… They can all become fixed points if you want. I think some of those things are best left at least moderately adjustable.

This metaphor is getting away from me a bit and is probably a step or two further into the “mumbo-jumbo” department than I like to go, but I really think it is important to find our own meaning, our own purpose, and whatever else we want to fix in our lives. More fixed points isn’t necessarily better, but more points definitely helps you feel like you’ve got a direction to head in. Right now, all I’ve really got is my writing. The use of words and the goal for which I use them. These are my fixed points in existence and every decision on what to do and where to go is based around them in some way or another.

I’d like some more, but that’s not something I’m willing to just do haphazardly. It takes time and a lot of work to fix a point. It takes a lot less to lose one. Trusting my instincts and understanding myself used to be my two strongest fixed points, but I’ve lost track of them. I think I’m working on getting them back, but its hard to tell sometimes. At least I know I’m making progress, even if it does feel incredibly slow.

Patience and Perspective: Anxiety Feels Like a Nightmare

Wren Leave a comment

I’m really good at waiting. I can sit and pass time easily since I usually have a book or something on me at all times. I can even do it, though less easily, when I don’t have anything to do. I’ve got plenty to think about, can doze easily, and have no problem letting time traipse past when I need to. I never fret about being early because I don’t mind waiting and I feel more comfortable having to wait than having to rush.

The one catch is that I’m only good at waiting for things with set times. If I know how long I have to wait, I don’t mind waiting. If I don’t know and it is something important to me, then I will be a giant ball of anxiety counting seconds until whatever it is I’m waiting for comes to pass. A lot of the time, it comes up with stuff like waiting for important results or waiting to hear back from people. Job applications, medical procedures, the arrival of important packages, a return message from someone, a phone call that will make or break my plans. All of them will get me anxious, some more than others. I can distract myself, but not always and generally not for very long.

When it happens, I feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I can feel the tension in the air around me and it drives me crazy. I feel like something horrible is about to happen or I expect the worst and the seconds drag by because I can’t let my mind focus on anything else. I can feel the weight of it on the horizon and I can’t look away for fear of missing the chance to be ready for it.

Sometimes, when I am getting sick or have something preventing me from sleeping soundly, I have strange dreams. They’re almost always the same or incredibly similar dreams as well. My perspective is distorted, no matter what I do, like when you stare at a computer monitor for so long that it starts to take up your whole field of vision and the text or image you’re staring at seems like it is drifting further and further away as your brain attempts to reconcile the fact that what you’re looking at is actually very small with the fact that it uses a few tricks of the light to appear larger. In these dreams with the weird, elongated perspective, I have to roll up some tiny black and white grains into a ball. It requires “swooping” down to the floor for them because I can’t see them any other way thanks to the distorted perspective.

They make my brain hurt. If I have that dream, which sometimes includes a blanket made of the same black and white grains that keeps trying to cover me in what is supposed to be a comforting manner, it is a sure sign that I’m getting sick. There’s a similar one, with the same perspective and grains, but this time they’re arranged in straws or strings that are tangled in a knotty ball that I have to smooth out in order to continue traveling towards my destination. This one hurts my brain even more because the ball is decided non-euclidean and the normal ways I have of interacting with it and defining it as “smooth” don’t apply on account of its strange, irrational shapes.

A lot of the time, that is what waiting for a long but definitely unknown amount of time feels like. A brain twist that knots up my guts and leaves me feeling sick or nauseous. Distractions are like waking up. Sooner or later I’m going to go back to sleep and then I’ll be right back in the middle of it. There’s no escaping it until the night is over.

I’ll admit the comparison is a bit over the top, but waiting three hours past when I was supposed to get a phone call is just as exhausting and mind-bending as non-euclidean dreams fulled by anxiety and some inner part of myself that freaks out when I get sick. It fuels my anxiety like an energy drink fuels a small child. I try to set my expectations so that I am not left waiting for a long period of time. If I don’t expect to be called at a certain time, I cannot be disappointed when I do not get the call. If I don’t set an exact time, it can be easier to wait. Not always, but sometimes.

A lot of managing my anxieties is about setting expectations correctly. Managing my outlook so that I’m never in a position where I’m expecting something that is unlikely to happen or filling my head with all the horrible reasons that could explain why I’m still waiting on something. This is probably the easiest way to address my anxieties and something that every single therapist I’ve ever seen has recommended. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at it.

I’ve been trying to practice it as a part of my meditation and reflection, but that makes it feel like it is making things more difficult rather than easier. I remember being able to handle all of my mental health issues easily as a result of meditation and reflection back when I was in college and so getting back into the habit now is unfortunately giving me unreasonable expectation of just being able to fix whatever is on my mind with a single evening’s work. As I’ve said previously, that’s not how progress works. That’s not how I’m going to grow and continue to make healthy improvements. Things take time and setting that expectation is the most important thing I do every day.

Still, there are times I find myself settling in to meditate and wishing that I could quickly fix my own problems and figure out what to do with whatever it is I’m feeling. Now, it takes time and I grow impatient. Worse yet, it takes an unknown amount of time and it is difficult to prevent those anxieties from building. My mind creates a silent mantra of “why haven’t I fixed this by now?” that is hard to ignore.

I’m really glad I’ve been writing things down. It makes it a lot easier to remind myself to go easy on myself when I can read my own personalized reminders. I feel like a jumbled mess, still, but I also feel more stable. A lot of my mental structures may be shakey and built on fault likes, but they’re more reinforced than they’ve ever been. I just need to keep working and wait for the progress to become more noticeable.

Anxieties Can Grow into Fears and Trusting Again is Like Going for a Swim in a Lake

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One of the worst parts of my anxiety is how it can make something entirely reasonable feel like something I don’t dare ask for. A five-minute midday phone call to help settle all the nagging thoughts that are threatening to take up my entire day? Definitely not something I can request without at least an hour of writing the message and then half an hour of psyching myself up to hit send. Sure it SEEMS reasonable, but what if it isn’t? What if they’re busy? What if they’re actually pissed at me because of what we talked about yesterday and I couldn’t tell then because I’m horrible at reading people over the phone, meaning sending them a message now is only going to make them angrier at me.

It sucks. It was a reasonable request because we needed to talk about what happened and verbally recognize that we needed to continue the conversation. I felt much better and I can only hope they feel better as well, now that they know I want to continue working this out. It should have been easy. A two-sentence message and then a wait until the appropriate time for a five-minute phone call. I spent more time worrying about what might have happened, trying to figure out how to properly say what I wanted to say, and whether or not it was appropriate to say anything at all than I spent on the conversation that spawn all the anxiety this morning.

My anxiety can run away with me, more than my depression or my OCD can. If either of those ever feels like it is running away with me, it is usually because it is fueled by my anxiety. The thought spirals that consume me are driven by anxieties I can’t squelch. The internal storms that threaten to sink me are whipped up by anxieties that I can’t deny. A lack of information is the greatest challenge to controlling my anxiety and a strong enough anxiety can make it a monumental effort to ask for any information, let alone figure out what to do with it.

As I reflected on this, my worst anxiety attack in a while, I realized that I’m not really prepared to deal with something like this. Almost all of my coping mechanisms involve heading things off or reasoning them away. That can work with my depression because a lot of that is based on not dwelling on any one thing in particular, waiting it out, and reminding myself that it will end eventually. It works alright with my OCD because most of my OCD is based around obsessions and I can usually reason with them so long as they don’t have an anxiety behind them. It even works with most of my anxiety since I usually know I’m worked up over nothing or have evidence to directly contradict my anxiety.

The fears though, the big anxieties that don’t have answers and prey on uncertainties, don’t have evidence I can trot out and are usually about things that I should be able to assume but really can’t. They’re what feeds into things like my resistance toward being emotionally open and vulnerable with people or the nagging fear that everything and everyone I love is going to disappear without warning. I know most people aren’t going to try to manipulate me using my emotions or use any time I’m open about my feelings as a way to hurt me. I know that it takes time for people to leave and there are almost always warning signs.

The problem with knowing those things is all the evidence to the contrary. I’ve got a lot of experience with people using my feelings and what I’ve shared with them to hurt me in new and horrible ways. I’ve seen how people can suddenly vanish, either because they decided you weren’t worth their time, because it was easier than working things out, or because something horrible happened to them. A lot of these were fairly isolated events, but there were still a lot of them.

I try to recognize that there’s also a ton of evidence supporting the idea that people aren’t out to get me or that what I love won’t suddenly vanish, but it’s hard to remember it all the time. Also, it is hard to say being emotional vulnerable with people won’t be used against me when I don’t really do it anymore. I also can’t use evidence to prove people won’t just vanish because it is almost always sudden and almost always happens in ways you wouldn’t expect. How can you disprove something you don’t expect? Someone randomly getting run over by a bus or going to a movie theater or club that gets shot up isn’t exactly something you can work to prevent or say won’t happen to someone around you. It isn’t likely, sure, but it happens to people and every person is a part of that group.

The worst ones, the ones that can bring in my depression and OCD, creating the hurricanes I mentioned in my other post, are the ones aren’t wrong. If I get going on something like “my anxieties make me annoyed and frustrated and I’m more willing to put up with myself than anyone else is, so how much everyone around me feel when I’m acting particularly anxious/depressed/obsessed/neurotic/what-have-you?” then I run the risk of heading straight toward meltdown city.

That isn’t a fun place to go. I definitely do NOT recommend the vacation package, the over-night bargain, or even passing through it. Once you’re there, it is incredibly hard to leave and a pass-through always turns into a full-stop. You don’t just visit. You take up semi-permanent residence and usually need outside help leaving since the stationmaster is hard to find and the population generally isn’t interested in actually trying to help you leave.

When it comes to fears or anxieties I can’t deny and the ones I have no evidence to disprove, all I can do is trust. Trust that I won’t be abused if I’m emotionally vulnerable with someone. Trust that people and things in my life won’t just disappear if they have a choice in the matter. Trust that people aren’t just putting up with me. Trust is hard. Trust is easily broken and hard to replace. I’ve got a lot of pretty convincing reasons not to trust, but trust is an essential part of being a human and living in a community. You trust that someone isn’t going to break down your door and take all your stuff. You trust that someone isn’t going to hurt your loved ones or, at the very least, that there are people whose job it is to protect them. You trust that people aren’t going to use you to their advantage whenever they can. Without that trust, you become isolated and have trouble connecting with people.

That’s where I’m struggling. I don’t trust much. Hell, I don’t even really trust myself. Misplaced trust has hurt me more than anything else in life and I’m not eager to get hurt again. I used to be able to dive back in by affirming that it is better to love and lose, to take a chance and fail, than to risk never again feeling the warm glow of trust rewarded with trust and love. Then I spent most of my time in Madison, nearly four years, getting every hand extended in trust smacked away, being around people who made it clear they only barely tolerated me, and getting my feet yanked out from underneath me at work constantly. There were people who made me feel bad about some of the most basic parts of myself.

Thankfully, I’m away from those influences now. I’ve got a girlfriend who wants to hear about all the things I love as much as I’m willing to talk about them. I’ve got supportive, helpful roommates who I really appreciate. I’ve got a work environment that is positive and appreciates me. I’ve even had one of the first and biggest metaphorical hand-slaps contact me and apologize for how they acted. I really want to dive back in again, but my fear and anxieties keep me back.

Like going for a swim in a lake, it is almost always better to just dive right in. The rush of water will feel cold at first, but you’ll stop noticing it quickly afterward. Then you’re free to swim to your heart’s content. Sometimes, though, you need to check for rocks first and take your time getting wet. Eventually, I’ll be ready to take the plunge, but for now maybe I’ll just start with my feet.

It was a Beautiful Day

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Today was wonderful. A hike with good friends, followed by a cookout and then swimming in the lake with the same friends. It felt amazing to finally be out and about, doing things I love with people I love. I wish I had more to write, something I’d been thinking about to share, but today was all taken up by loved ones and thoughts of loved ones.

Instead, have a poem.

 

“Who are you and what do you do?”

We often ask this complex question-
Without even the smallest suggestion
Of malice or hint of aggression-
And expect answers without suppression.
We want nothing but a full confession
That includes every single transgression,
Whatever is your chosen profession,
Have you suffered manic depression
What is your favorite possession,
Do you often have indigestion
What you did during the recession,
How goes your latest obsession,
And we listen to every digression
Hoping you fit in a single expression.

Whenever this question is asked of me
I have an answer I give with glee.
“I am me; I just be;
I like to live my life simply;
I am often sad and often happy;
I live according to no decree
And I will not change myself to be free
Of your ceaseless inquiry.”
I will ignore insult and injury
And every single desperate plea
For me to conform to your would-be
Celebrated normalcy.
Instead, I will sit beneath a tree
And continue being me quietly.

I Think I’m Going to Step Out for a Bit

Wren Leave a comment

I’ve spent a lot of my weekend relaxing. As it is a three-day weekend in the US, I’ve been a lot less active that I might otherwise have been and much less directed. I spent Saturday with my girlfriend and her friend until I finally stopped putting off my evening plans, Magic the Gathering with my Saturday D&D group, and then got home in time to basically crash from all of the sun and fun. Mini-golf under the midday sun, three-ish miles of walking in the heat, and then a quick trip to the store so I could get a swimsuit. I didn’t want to miss out on the chance to jump in the pool after spending the previous four hours sweating in the heat. I got a bit of sun-burn despite putting some sunscreen on my face, so that was rather annoying, but doesn’t seem to be too bad.

Then I’ve spent most of my day today puttering about until I remembered I hadn’t updated my blog yet, for today. Played some old favorite games, some REALLY old favorites, and even a few games my friends recommended. Read a bunch, dozed about, and generally just avoided direct sunlight. It has been nice to relax and just lazily drift through the day. I can’t remember the last time I spent a day just doing whatever without getting “bored” and endlessly cycling between things after a couple minutes of considering them because I feel like I’m wasting my time.

While I was laying in bed, waiting to see if I could fall back asleep again and shifting to move my sun-burned bits away from contact with anything but the air, I tried to meditate, but my mind just kept running around in circles. I’ve tried twice more today, but I haven’t been able to get my mind to wind down enough to empty it out. There’s a lot going on in my life and it’s difficult to put all of that aside for even an hour or two. My girlfriend is house shopping; I’m entering my busy month and will be not getting much quiet time, let alone quiet time with my girlfriend; so many different things to reflect on; preparations for my hiking trip and grill-out tomorrow; and my general anxieties that I’m trying to avoid focusing on.

Mostly, I would love a quiet weekend with my girlfriend, hanging out without any particular plans, working on our individual creative projects, watching cartoons or movies, and playing video games. That sort of stuff is like plugging my soul into a recharging station. I’ve got other ways of doing it and recharging myself, but I would really enjoy that one right now. Between the sunburn, smashing one of my toes at the grocery store, and this annoying feeling of exhaustion that keeps pulling at me, I could really go for a quiet day and some peaceful companionship. I’ll probably be fine tomorrow, once I’ve got another good night’s sleep, but today I think I’m going to stop reflecting and just go back to playing games. I’d like to be outside my head for a bit since trying to work inside it has only worsened my mood.

This Book is Stuck in my Head!

Wren Leave a comment

If you’ve already read John Scalzi’s Science Fiction novel, Lock In, or its sequel that just came out, Head On, you know the title is a tasteless joke and I’d like to apologize right now for being unable to resist it. If you haven’t already read either of the aforementioned Scalzi books, then I will apologize after I’ve explained why the joke is tasteless. In the mean time, the most important thing for you to know is that my favorite Science Fiction author has started a new series and the series is excellent.

Lock In and Head On follow FBI agent Chris (No, I don’t just like this series because the protagonist shares my first name. It certainly doesn’t hurt it, though) Shane who isn’t what you or I might call an ordinary person. Agent Shane is what is called a “Haden” in his world. A Haden is someone who contracted a flu-like virus, survived all three stages of the disease (Stage 1 is flu-like, Stage 2 is meningitis-like, and Stage 3 is a coma), but never woke up from their coma. They’re still mentally all-there and capable of sensory input, they just can’t make move and their brains have been altered by the disease (which is why the title is in bad taste). Some of those who wake up from the coma also have their brains altered, but we’ll get into that in a bit.

Agent Shane, like a lot of Hadens, gets around the meat world by using what everyone calls a “Threep,” a nickname based on C-3PO from Star Wars for what is legally called a “Personal Transport Vehicle.” It is basically a high-tech robot body that communicates with the device implanted in his brain so he can experience the world with a minimal amount of lag and all the perks of being able to record everything, access the internet with a thought, and bail out of your body if it gets trashed (as happens more than once). There are certain limitations, of course, such as the inability to eat things and the rather pervasive (if relatively minor) prejudice humanity if famous for, but it allows Agent Shame and many of his fellow Hadens the ability to live a relatively normal life.

To further help the Hadens live a normal life, there are these people called “integrators.” Integrators are the people who progressed all the way through the disease but did not either fall into the coma or did not stay in it. Because of the way the disease altered their brain, they were also able to be fitted with a brain implant device that lets a Haden basically take a certain degree of control over their body. The control is limited, as the integrator remains conscious and aware the entire time, able to reassert control over their should the Haden attempt to do something illegal or harmful to the integrator.

There’s a whole culture that grew up during the decades are the disease first appeared, and they place a central roll in both of Scalzi’s books since the protagonist is a Haden who works for the FBI and his partner is an ex-integrator. The two work out of the Washington D.C. office of the FBI and investigate Haden-related crimes that fall into federal jurisdiction. In the first book, Lock In, the story kicks off with an integrator who is found next to a dead body in a hotel room after a sofa is thrown out of a window. The investigation serves as an excellent showcase of Haden culture and some of the finest subtle world-building I’ve ever read. It introduces readers to many aspects of Haden culture as the two FBI agents try to unravel the true tale of what happened in that hotel room and has a lot of nods to the way the modern, primary world works. I’ll admit I might like it a bit more than I otherwise might because it changes our world’s history a bit to fit better in the future Scalzi created along with showcasing the kind of positive development you’d like to see happen in our species, but it feels like it really could just be a couple of decades down the line from our current time.

The characters are all wonderful, each of them a complex person with layers. There are no caricatures in Scalzi’s novel and that’s worth mentioning because the circumstances of the story make it incredibly easy to justify using them. The books are better for having a full cast of complex, multi-faceted characters, and while there a lot of the same characters across the two books, different ones are highlighted in each book. You can tell Scalzi is building a series out of these books without even taking into account the novella explaining Haden’s Syndrome and its history in greater detail than either of the novels does.

Head On focuses around a sport developed as a result of the ability to destroy a Threep without killer the person inside it, as one of the players in a huge game dies during the match after behaving strangely. A lot comes up during the investigation, including a few nods to current events, but ultimately the story winds up feeling pretty similar to Lock In. Which isn’t a bad thing. Head On doesn’t feel like Lock In repackaged in a new book, but it has a lot of the same qualities and features the same character work and subtle story-building. The investigation is different and you can see some growth in the characters, but it ultimately was made to serve as a stand-alone book featuring the same characters rather than a sequel building off the last book in any significant way.

If you’re looking for some new, fun science fiction to read and like these sort of “cop” books as well, I highly recommend checking out John Scalzi’s new book, Head On and the first book in the series, Lock In. You don’t need to read them in order, but it does help if you do.