After nearly a month of being in my new apartment (at least it will have been a month as of when this goes up), things have continued to settle into a comfortable pattern. I’m still adjusting my apartment bit, since I prioritized rest and relaxation over finish up hanging art and string lights, but I’m getting close to being done. Plus, there’s some stuff you only ever figure out as you live in a place, like what constitutes an adequate number of curtains, which sections of the floor really need a carpet, whether or not you need more lamps (or just need to move around the ones you’ve already got), and so on. There’s plenty that I’m only figuring out as I move from my recovery period to my comfortable occupation period, so it might be a while before I’m one hundred percent done. I will say that sleeping without earplugs is great and that finally getting the right curtains set up (with two sets layered atop each other in my bedroom) has really improved my sleep. Now I just need to fix my horrible broken sleep schedule and I should be good to go. All those late nights from moving and then stress have really messed up my body’s sense of when to go to sleep.
Continue readingExercise
A Protein Most Fowl Fuels My Apartment Hunting (and Workouts)
Between all the streaming and trying to get back into the swing of daily life after my trip to Spain, I’ve spent most of my free moments either hunting for a new apartment, figuring out how much it would cost to buy a house, or trying to continue improving my workout and dietary habits. I’ve had the whole working out and going on vigorous walks thing down for one and two years respectively, so now I’m trying to incorporate some more healthy diet decisions. Nothing as (personally) anxiety-inducing as counting calories or following any of the recent fad diets. I’m just trying to make small, incremental changes that will help me live a longer and happier life.
Continue readingSaturday Morning Musing
I have a tendency to get distracted while I’m doing things and then see something move out of the corner of my eye. This happens to a lot of people, usually as the result of some small shift in something our brain chooses to ignore, like a hair that’s out-of-place or a shadow in the background somewhere. It’s super creepy. Countless horror stories have been written about creatures that lurk just outside the scope of our vision; something that can only be glimpsed out of the corner of our eye when we aren’t looking for it. I know of only a few examples of positive things with similar abilities and most of these are more purposely ridiculous than positive.
After I graduated college, while I was still working the area, I stopped having this rather common occurrence and started seeing something in front of my eyes as well as off to the sides. I spent a lot of time talking it over with my friends, both skeptics and believers, and even started called it “The Apparition” because it was consistently the same thing. The more I talked about it, the more detail I was able to notice about it, and and the longer it would stick around. I was under a lot of stress at the time and my imagination was at its most active, so I’m not sure if I even really believe what I think I saw. Despite being so positive this was happening four years ago, looking back on it now makes me doubt it ever really happened.
I don’t really have any proof that ghosts are real, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are. Science can only be used to explain what we can perceive and make educated guesses about what we can’t, so it is entirely possible ghosts are real and we just don’t have the means of detecting them yet. It’s also possible that what we call “ghosts” are just the result of some easily explained phenomenon that escapes us simply because we haven’t figured out how to perceive things correctly. There’s a lot of support for them in the general population, in part as a vague interest and sometimes as a serious belief, which includes a number of people you wouldn’t expect. One of my mother’s church friends claimed to be able to see or feel spirits and also firmly believed that a number of my anxiety, OCD, and depression problems were actually qualities of this spirit that had attached itself to me. According to her, it was likely my great-grandfather. Which is super creepy to think about. Who tells a twelve-year-old that they’ve got a ghost attached to them?
There are, of course, the countless rumors of buildings or places being haunted. After seeing some of the stuff I did in the theater I worked in most days, along with the stuff I felt, I find it hard to believe that there wasn’t something there. Maybe it was a figment of my imagination, maybe it wasn’t. The further I get in life, the harder it is to maintain anything more than a perfunctory skepticism about a lot of things. Maybe I am haunted by the ghost of a deceased relative. Maybe I’ve got some kind of otherworldly being who hung out around me for a while. Maybe they’re the same thing and my spirit’s brief appearance in my vision was a mark of my transition to full adulthood. Maybe they’re not real at all and I’ve got an imagination that just wants to tell stories, even if only to itself.
Who knows? I don’t think it really matters, either way. Sure, it could change some of the way I live my life, but only the micro details. Nothing major. All I know is that thinking about something like this is like lighting a fire in my mind. Open-ended questions that require me to build stories just to think about them are a lot of fun. As a result of these mental exercises, I think I can see where stories for things like Cthulhu or Mind Flayers came from. Additionally, seeing unknown things out of the corner of your eye has given me an idea for a story I would like to write. It would be different from any of the variants I’ve encountered and the prologue I’ve written so far, to solidify the idea, makes use of a few characters who had been homeless for a long while now.
Now, hopefully I haven’t creeped myself out too much to be able to go into my basement to do some laundry. All those memories and thoughts of the stuff I encountered at the theater have given me the heebie-jeebies. I’m going to go spend some time in a well-lit room with many light sources so as to minimize the amount of darkness and shadows near me.
We Try Things. Occasionally they even work.
So, I’ve once more been struggling with my depression. Big surprise there. Kinda snuck up on the back of some of the stuff I was writing last week and just overwhelmed me when I wasn’t paying attention. Luckily, with my renewed focus on watching for it and the help of my friends, I was able to notice it quickly and come up with a few plans to circumvent it.
Historically, working out every day has been a good way to deal with my depression for a few reasons. There’s the health reasons, studies that suggest that regular exercise can have a significant positive impact on one’s mental well-being. There’s the easy reasons, that I’m generally too tired after a heavy workout (and those are the only kind I do) to be anything. Then there’s the mental reasons, that I’m finally making progress on one of my big goals by losing weight. All of that together leaves me at least neutral for as long as I can keep it up (usually 3-5 weeks) though I get almost nothing else done.
Another, more mentally productive, way to deal with my depression is by creating something. Writing is often a good way for me to take a step away from everything and let my mind work out my problems through my stories. When I was in college, working on building a set for a show or helping put together some internal improvement project for the theater was always very relaxing, letting my focus and keep busy while leaving my mind free enough to work through things in the background. Unfortunately, I’m not very good with music or visual arts, but I’m certain those would be just as helpful. Anything that gets me focused on and engaged in the act of creation always helps.
Sometimes, even working a lot (at my job) can help, if I’ve got the right kind of projects. Put in some overtime, rake in that delicious OT pay, and start making even more progress toward being debt free. A good amount of rewarding work (people recognize what I’m doing as being useful and I can contribute to the good of my team/company) is just the right kind of mentally exhausting. I get so wrapped up in what I’m doing to let my problems in and then I’m too tired to make myself fret about anything.
All three have worked individually in the past. Unfortunately, none of them would last for long. I wear myself out to the point of not being capable of working out again, or I get finish a project and can’t figure out the next steps, or I finish whatever work project had me so focused and I’m unable to find a new one to fill that hole. Eventually, they all come to an end.
Which is why, this time, I’m trying all three at once. Work 10 hours days and try to get super invested in an interesting work project. Workout immediately after work. Come home, eat something, have a cup of tea to help me stay awake, and then write/try-to-write until 11 or 12. The idea being that, when one of the three fails, I should still have the other two continuing on to prop me up until I manage to get the third one going again. So far, it’s working out pretty well.*
First, I pushed myself too-hard in my workouts initially and had to really dial it down, but that means I’ve just got a little more time and energy for writing. Then I picked my workouts back up again, full-force, and was too tired to write for a couple of nights, but since I workout after work I was able to continue investing in my latest work project.
Unfortunately, there are still some flaws. After an entire week of this, I hit Friday and couldn’t do anything after 1:30. I had to run a meeting about my project which taught me a lot and forced me to herd cats for an hour and a half. Senior Coworker Cats. Some of whom had been at the company longer than I’ve been alive. I went home pretty much immediately afterward and decided to take all the pictures off my phone as my day’s project. 800 pictures later, I played a few rounds of video games with friends and went to bed.
All-in-All, it seems to be working aside from a few quiet moments here or there were I just kinda feel sad, but those are growing shorter and less frequent after only a week. Maybe, if I can keep this up long enough, they’ll disappear entirely.
*Side-effects of the pursuit of three major goals may include drowsiness, irritability, a zombie-like demeanor, and a severe allergic reaction to social interaction. But hey! At least you’re not a depressed sack of sad!
Pokemon Go – The Latest in Fitness Apps
Apparently, all I need to do to make something I post or say wildly popular is mention Pokemon Go. I’ve been tracking the changes in my exercise habits since I started using the application and making a few remarks about it on Facebook. Each remark, and even the few tweets I made, have all been very popular (by my standards at least, since I generally don’t get more than handful of interactions on any kind of post). I almost want to see if I can start planting references to it that will tickle peoples’ subconscious like they do with subliminal advertising.
There’s definitely a lot of health benefits to it. I’ve started walking an average of 6 miles a day, been getting plenty of sunlight and bug bites, actually making use of my evenings for something more than watching TV or playing video games, and really started connecting with my area. I’ve explored parts of Madison I’d normally never visit and walked through neighborhoods I never even knew existed. I’m not even chasing a Pokemon all the time, either. A lot of the time, these past few days, I’m just going out to see what’s out there. Its like I’ve always wanted to do all this walking and exploring but I needed an excuse to do it. So now I have one.[
Pokemon Go is definitely a ton of fun, there’s no denying it. I’ve never been all that outgoing, but seeing a bunch of people walking around on their phones is like having a keyword search to identify the other nerds in my area. It’s the best. Its like, suddenly, everyone is just embracing their inner nerd or child and banding together to enjoy this magnificent application. I’ve met and partially befriended more strangers in this less than one week than in the past few months. I can’t imagine that my life will ever be the same. Never again. Heck, I doubt life as we know it will ever be the same again. This is the start. Going forward, this type of game and this integration of VR/AR is only going to get, obviously, more popular. There will be more games just like this one.
The community already forming up around this has so far been amazing. You meet people wandering through the woods and compare notes on which Pokemon you’re trying to catch, giving each other advice on which paths to take to find which Gyms or Pokestops, and while the competition for Gyms is definitely fierce, no one seems to get so into it that they’re being rude or lying to people on other teams.
I’ve managed to avoid spending any money so far, but part of me just wants to dump money into the application so that the creators, Niantic, can continue to do their amazing work (and, you know, add more servers so they’re not constantly going down).
If you like to meet new people, it seems like Pokemon Go is the way to do it. Just look for people with their phone constantly in their hand who randomly stop walking for a few moments before continuing forward.