I used to be one of the people who wore shorts even during the depths of winter. I’m not sure how it is in other parts of the world, but in the Midwest of the US, it is fairly common to see such folk, frequently masculine in appearance (but not limited to that by any means) trudging through blizzards and all but the worst wind chills. It always made sense to me, given that I spent most of the winter indoors, in buildings with their heat set for people who needed a higher external temperature to be comfortable. I didn’t want to attempt to change the ambient temperature for my comfort alone, so I started wearing shorts and upperbody layers that were easy to remove (zippered hoodies, mostly) so that I could be comfortable. It wasn’t that I was immune to the cold outside, just that I was willing to endure a few minutes of being uncomfortable in order to spend two hours in class or at work without needing to fight off sweat or the sleepies.
Continue readingMusing
The Price of Too Little Sleep
One of the worst parts about not sleeping enough over a long period of time is how divorced from reality that level of exhaustion can make you feel. Going without any sleep can rapidly turn bad, making you more susceptible to getting sick or even causing you to hallucinate if you go long enough without just collapsing. Definitely not going to deny how awful all that can be or imply that just being chronically short on sleep is worse than getting zero sleep. I think it’s just a different kind of hell, though. One that varies based on how much sleep you’re missing out on, as compared to what you need to feel functional.
Continue readingI Don’t Usually Remember My Dreams And Today I’m Glad I Don’t.
I rarely remember my dreams. I’m not sure why, though I’d bet it has to do with my various sleep issues and how rarely I feel properly rested, but this has been my experience for my entire life. I can’t remember a time in my life that I recall waking up with the details of a dream in my mind more than once in a long while. Most of the time, the dreams I do recall are bad ones, full of negative emotions and unpleasant images perhaps only still present in my mind because the experience of these dreams was so awful that I shook myself awake from them. The rest are a general smattering of the sort of odd, disconnected ideas and sequences that seem to form most dreams and are utterly unremarkable in any way other than their rarity.
Continue readingReadying Myself For Summer
Even after nearly a decade away from anything resembling the US school year, I still find myself thinking that the coming of summer heralds a shift from my busy and exhausting days to a time when I can take a load off mentally and physically. I haven’t had more than a week away from my labors in nearly a decade and I still find myself mentally preparing for the coming warm months and the freedom they once brought me. It’s a weird mental space to be in. I know I won’t have any extra time off or a chance to enjoy being outside in the summer without much restriction, but I still find myself hoping for it just as fervently as I did when I was a student.
I haven’t actually had a summer break in much longer than that, though. When I was in high school, my parents forced me to find ways to fill my time. Either by getting a job of some time, by doing chores around the house (usually gardening on behalf of my mother), or by taking care of my younger siblings who needed minding while my mother did other stuff. In college, I had to work since I couldn’t return to my parents house and I needed to pay for summer housing at my college. Even before high school, I was usually occupied with some form of household chores or other work assigned to me by my parents, so I really can’t imagine why I expect a chance to rest and relax.
What the summer has actually brought me is change. In college I shifted from work and school to just work, and in high school I could stay up and sleep in as late as I wanted. My schedule shifted from what was demanded by the world I lived in to one that I could largely set for myself. Sure, I had to be at work at specific times, but the other sixteen hours of the day were mine to spend as I wished. Nowadays, though, the only change the summer brings is how generally sweaty and gross I feel at the end of the day. And I supposed the number of blankets I keep on the bed also changes, so there’s that too.
When I graduated college, I wanted to eventually get into academia in some form, probably as a college professor, so I could stick with that schedule. And, you know, because I loved what I was doing with my degree and wanted to keep doing that kind of stuff (still do, honestly). I eventually realized that a career in academia was likely not in the books for me, given my already substantial burden of student loans and the need for more loans if I wanted to continue my education, not to mention the generally sorry state of academia today. I used to keep up on articles about what was going on in the world of academia, tenure, and literary studies, but that effort was what eventually convinced me I would probably be happier sticking with work outside of academia and writing in my time away from my occupation rather than as a part of it (in an academic sense, specifically. I still think i’ love being a full-time writer of fiction)
Still, as the grey, chilly April days come to a close and we head toward whatever the hell May has in store (it has been unseasonably cold and cloudy thus far this spring, so all bets are off), I find myself planning vacations I’ll never take and looking at my life for whatever big changes I might make. I don’t really have any right now, since I’m trying to work on feeling more at-home in my apartment (rent is rising too quickly to make it worth moving this year, at least at my current income), but I keep taking stock of my life in the hope that something will jump out at me. I’m already making slow but steady steps toward most of my goals, so there really isn’t much to do other than stay the course, keep up the life maintenance, and keep my eyes peeled for any opportunities that show up within my reach.
Walking Away From Pokémon Go
For the first time in what might actually be years, I logged into Pokémon Go. Once I updated the app, remembered my password, and waited several minutes for it finish loading up on a phone that wasn’t new four years ago when I got it to play Pokémon Go (my previous phone overheated and died within an hour of starting the app which made it intolerable for the special events), I was in. Before I could do more than register that the app had forgotten my preferences for zero volume and no vibration, I was inundated in notifications, pop-ups, and notifications that there were activities to explore that didn’t exist the last time I opened the app. It was a truly harrowing five minutes as I felt like my phone was going to melt through its case because the game was demanding so much from my poor “old” phone, but eventually I cleared everything and the app settled down enough for me to look through the many Pokémon I had collected in a surprisingly bittersweet stroll down memory lane.
Continue readingVocal Reflections
I’ve always struggled with hearing my own recorded voice. It seems like a common thing to feel self-conscious about, given how different we sound when we speak and when we hear a recording of ourselves speak. Once upon a time, this discomfort could be easily blamed on tinny-sounding audio or poor recording equipment, but now as the ability to record and playback audio in high quality becomes ever more available to anyone with a smartphone or a hundred dollars to spare for a decent USB microphone, we’re forced to confront that fact that it’s just us.
Continue readingThere’s Time Enough Yet Today
Some days last an eternity. Seconds pass with the agnozing slowness of sunlight creeping across the floor, a change that only seems to happen when you find a momentary reprieve with some distraction or another. Hours pass with the glacial pace of trees growing once they’re past the point where you can use your own height as a point of reference. No matter what you do with a day like that, it always feels like a waste.
Continue readingThe Real He-Man Was The People He Helped Along The Way
I watched the new He-Man cartoon, “Masters Of The Universe: Revelation” and I gotta say it was a really rewarding return to the long-abandoned franchise. He-Man stabs a guy, lots of people die, and no one is introduced solely as a means of selling action figures. There’s even moments of character development and relevance for classic characters like Fisto, the guy with a giant metal fist, who gets to have his moment of heroics and screen-time despite his truly unfortunate name. It was a great watch, had moments of unexpected heart, and did a great job of bringing this ancient cartoon to modern audiences. It even had a few hints toward the end that it might get attached to the larger universe created by “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power” so the show could continue in some form if Netflix doesn’t spike it into the dirt because it didn’t get enough streams immediately after being released. That said, the writers did a good job of wrapping most things up in the show so even if it does vanish into the great abyss of abandoned shows on Netflix, there will be no lingering questions.
Continue readingI Think I Managed To Visit House On The Rock Incorrectly
I recently went to House on the Rock for the first time in my life. As someone who has lived in Wisconsin for almost thirteen years now, I have to admit that a trip to one of Wisconsin’s most famous tourist attractions was long overdue. To be honest, I’m not sure why it took me this long. It’s not like it would be difficult to convince people to go with me or that I was uncertain about whether or not I’d enjoy the trip. I just sort of never went. Like how I never went to a local branch of a coffeeshop chain I’ve long enjoyed since settling in one place after college. I don’t have a good reason, I just never went. I never felt like going during a time when I had the opportunity to go and I never felt the inclination so strongly that I made an opportunity to go, despite visiting a state park near House on the Rock many times.
Having now gone, I can say that it was pretty much like I expected. The descriptions in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods always made me think the space had more of a “warehouse” feel to it than the sort of carefully arranged collection of oddities that actually occupies the space. It was exactly as much of a trip as the book made it seem, though. Sure, there wasn’t a conflict of gods happening throughout it, but it definitely felt like the place a bunch of modern gods would show up in. What made up for that loss was actually the context the foundation tried to provide at the visitor center near the start of the walk-through.
I don’t remember many of the specifics from the various informational placards, but a few things leapt out at me and the general sense I got from said placards informed the way I saw the rest of the collection. Despite the clear eccentricity of the collection being a selling point, the descriptions of the collector, Alex Jordan, seem to have been sanitized in order to avoid offense to the more conservative leaning folks of the world. Even though Jordan clearly lived a non-traditional life, so much of the truth seems to have been scrubbed away in order to make the origin of this collection “more palatable.” Given that it has been decades since Jordan passed away and so much of his life was clearly sanitized, I can only wonder what else inside the displays has been changed so as to be “suitable” for all audiences. Which feels ridiculous given the number of artistic presentations that include topless or nude women. Somehow all that was fine, but admitting that Jordan had a romantic partner who he never married but still lived with was unacceptable. They had to call her his “companion and friend.” Hogwash.
Because I had already seen so much clear sanitization of the history of the man who built the collection, I couldn’t help but wander through the aging, slowly decaying collections and wonder what else has been altered to be more palatable. Every open space that seemed like it should have held something was a place for my imagination to fill in a blank and the strangeness of the collection that remains set a very high bar for how weird or strange something must have been to warrant removal. Sure, it’s possible that parts of the collection have merely broken and been removed rather than left to collect dust like so many of the music machines, but it’s difficult to trust that nothing beyond the history of the man was sanitized.
I’m not saying it wasn’t a nearly incomprehensible experience. It was, and still is, difficult to determine if I enjoyed it or merely survived it, but I had this thought in the back of my mind that maybe there was something missing. That maybe things had been pushed in a “safer” direction, despite the clear disregard for safety in the collections at large. I mean, I was pretty much blinded by a bunch of lights and mirrors in one section of the walk-through, forced to rely on the voices of my friends to guide me through it as I shut my eyes against the vertigo-inducing sight of all that lights stretched out by the mixture of astigmatism and faint blurriness in my dominant eye (a result of my on-going eye problems that only comes up when looking at specific types of lights that aren’t terribly common and every single LED anything ever) and none of the music machines had any sort of notice about how loud or quiet they’d be.
I don’t have much to say about the collections. I feel like I’m not yet in a place to share my thoughts in that regard (I need to go through there another time or two to figure those out), but it definitely left an impression that maybe this sort of thing was way more unique before the internet. Half the sites I used to visit before social media turned the internet into like five websites had a similar feeling to walking through House on the Rock, and most of them didn’t sanitize the history of the person who created/curated the odd collections. I guess I left there with a lot to think about, but mostly in regards to the way even the eccentric are sanitized for general consumption rather than about how strange the experience was.
Some Site News: I’m Gonna Repost My Own Stuff!
I’ve been thinking about making some changes to what I post here. Since I tend to focus on other projects on the weekends, I frequently never get around to writing a Saturday post until I’m into the next week. It isn’t difficult to write an extra post one or two days a week, but I think I might go back through all stuff I’ve written in years past and share it here. Not just anything of course. I’m thinking of either reposting old poetry or doing a re-run of my Coldheart and Iron series. I haven’t really decided, but it’s more of a “which one will I do first?” than a “what should I do?” type question.
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