The last time I was updating my blog as rigorously as I am updating it now, I wound up stopping because I had too much stuff going on. Between work, my grandfather’s final months, trying to support my family during that time, sorting through my feelings about my family, and being forced to confront the loss of the one person who seemed to just be happy to see me any time my family gathered, I just didn’t have the time or energy to keep up posting. Plus, a lot of the time I spent on things like consuming media or resting vanished as I wound up driving back and forth from my home to my parents’ home. It was a trip that took about three to four hours to travel just one way, depending on the time of day and traffic, and I was doing that at least once a week, sometimes twice as I haphazardly worked from my parents’ guest bedroom when I could and had to return home when work demanded my physical presence. The only thing that made this segment of late 2018 (from November onward) and early 2019 possible was that I’d just gotten into podcasts.
Continue readingGrowth
The Line Between Naivety and Forgiveness
Trust, once lost, is not easily regained. The process of losing trust can be anything from drawn out and complex to instaneous and simple, but regaining it is always a time-consuming and difficult affair. We’re seeing a lot of that play out in the world these days, on a lot of different scales. Perhaps the biggest and most difficult to define example is people losing faith in government instituions. A much smaller but still impactful example is the recent loss of trust in Wizards of the Coast. It will take decades to restore trust in government instutions, especially given how every day seems to bring more evidence that the institutions we thought were safeguarding our government are actually just there to serve and protect the most powerful and wealthy among us (not that we needed more evidence to believe that). Likewise, it will take Wizards of the Coast a long time and some pretty extreme conscessions for people to trust that they’re not simply kicking the can down the road with this latest backpedaling they’ve been doing.
Continue readingMy Shrinking World
Some days, it feels like the world is shrinking. So many pillars of my life are disappearing or crumbling before my eyes. The recent Open Gaming License (OGL) debacle by Wizards of the Coast has shaken one of the foundational pillars of my modern life, revealing the growing cracks that were hidden from my eyes (largely due to privilege and my frequently tangential involvement in the Tabletop Roleplaying Game section of the internet). The way that Twitter is slowly dwindling as it is likely on a path towards being mismanaged into irrelevance (as evidenced by the recent changes to the app’s feed system). Old apps and websites I used to go to for entertainment have already boiled the frog and it took major highlights of the difference between my recent experiences and the reasons I used to spend my time on them to make me realize I needed to move on. Sure, I’ve managed to find a lot of new things to fill the gaps in my life (at least mostly, anyway), but it still feels like my world has shrunk.
Continue readingGod of War: Ragnarok – Not An End, But The Beginning of Something New
Content warning: this post will touch on themes of trauma in general, alcoholism, abusive parents, loss, and grief.
Spoiler warning: everything after the first paragraph is going to have spoilers for God of War: Ragnarok’s main plot thread and conclusion, including major twists along the way and the conclusions to character arcs.
Continue readingReflections On My Birthday
Today is my birthday (the day of writing this, not the day of posting it) and, after waiting my entire life for this moment, it finally arrived. My Golden Birthday (or Champaign Birthday or Lucky Birthday, depending on where you’re from). I turned thirty-one on the thirty-first of August. I was always very excited as a child about the idea of a Golden Birthday and always a little sad that it would take me so long to experience mine. As I got older, I comforted myself by saying at least I’d be able to have a real party. In the last decade, though, I’ve stopped caring. I don’t really like to make a big fuss about myself. I like it when other people fuss over me, of course. Who doesn’t love attention from the people you care about? But I also don’t like people making a fuss over me when I’m in a bad mood and, as I mentioned in the post that actually went up on the 31st, I’m usually not in a good mood during the month of August. This year has been no exception and, in fact, might be one of the worst in the last decade thanks to everything else I’ve got going on.
Continue readingA Turning Point In My Relationships
One of the side effects of leaving behind the trauma of my youth (along with all the places and peace I associate it with) is that I don’t have many relationships that are more than a decade old. I have a few friendships that have finally hit that age, but I wound up losing (or ending) contact with a lot of the people I was close with in my first few years of college and I didn’t really get close to most most of the poeple I’m still friends with until my final year, so most of them are only just now hitting the 10-year point. I have only one person I knew in high school that I’ve spoken to in the last few years and our current time zone difference means we’re pretty much never awake and online at the same time, which would put a damper on reconnecting even if I was so inclined. The only people I’m still in contact with from further back are two of my siblings, and that’s a weird situation to bring up in this context given my complex feelings about family and the life my siblings were a part of. Most of the people who are still a part of my life are from just the most recent third of it, despite the prevalence of social media, and that list seems to only ever get smaller with time rather than bigger.
Continue readingProgress Takes Effort, Which Kinda Sucks
The longer that 2022 goes on, the more I see how my mood on any given day is effected by more factors than I could ever account for. I’ve been working to get into better habits this year and while I’ve made some progress, I don’t feel like my average mood has gotten any better. I feel more productive for sure, but I also feel more tired. No matter what I do, I seem to always wind up trading one thing for something else and making almost no net change to how I’m feeling. For instance, I recently changed my wake-up playlist to music that engenders positive feelings in me, but now I’m having a more difficult time feeling awake and alert because the old songs did an incredibly job of rousing me as the playlist played through. I’m getting out of bed later than usual, but I do feel a bit better in the mornings.
Continue readingSlow Progress And Daily Walks
Every day that I go into the office, I go on a walk. Rain, sun, snow, sleet, whatever. I take my daily walk unless it has a significant chance of being incredibly detrimental to my physical well-being. Even during the peak of tree pollen season, I take my daily walk through my workplace’s parking lots, down the road, through a park that borders my workplace’s property, along a path, and then back up the street to my workplace again. Nothing can stop me except lightning or rain that is heavy enough that I’ll be soaked no matter what I do (I gotta stay at the office after the walk still, so being soaked isn’t really a choice I’d enjoy). I follow the exact same route, pass all the same places, see all the same sights. It is the rock around which the rest of my day is built.
Continue readingWalking 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 readingRecorded and Reposted: Tending A Garden
I have planted countless thoughts in my garden.
Though many took root on their own,
Unminded and without attention,
More still are those I set in place
With all the tenderness of a parent
Caring for their first-born child.
Broken Words 