It is difficult to not look at my life from the past and not feel diminished in some way. The siren song of nostalgia is a difficult to tune resist, as I find myself feeling more isolated and alone than I have in years. I speak with fewer people on a regular basis these days. I have fewer recent conversations in all of my communication channels. I have no weekly events except the one I have laboriously scraped together every Sunday. I barely have the energy to even think about making any kind of positive changes to my life, let alone actually making any changes. I am in a rough patch and the thought that yesteryear was better is a difficult one to deny when I am watching the sun set while I fill up my water bottle for my final hour of work as the building settles into silence and darkness on a Friday evening. I am not the only one working still, but, like me, we all work in isolation and silence, largely unaware of each other’s presence. I do not know their life situations, but a part of me wonders if they, too, have little waiting for them but a trip home and a quiet weekend doing their own things. Sure, I’ll do some grocery shopping and get my weekly takeout before I settle into my apartment for another weekend, but that’s not much of a social life. The events I have this weekend will hopefully keep me from falling into the silence and isolation I’m increasingly familiar with these days, but it’s little comfort as I feel the building’s heat shut off and the temperature begin to drop while I’ve still got work to do.
Continue readingLoneliness
Pushing Back Against My Loneliness
Last night, I had a call with one of my friends. I think it was the first time I just sat down and had a chat with someone in at least six months (the last time was when I got to see a friend in-person for the first time in years and we met up after a wedding to get lunch and just talk, which was honestly really great except for the fact that I don’t remember half of it because I was so tired that my head was full of cotton). Most of the time when I talk to people, it’s to serve a particular purpose. Sometimes it’s to plan an event, sometimes it’s to play a game together (video or online tabletop), and sometimes its to provide emotional support. Rarely, these days, do I ever sit down with people, in person or on the phone, to just shoot the shit. Which, in retrospect, is probably part of the reason I’ve been struggling with feelings of isolation for a while now. I love talking to people for no purpose other than to talk, but it’s really difficult to do since most people are busy and it’s much easier to plan an activity with other people than to just set aside time to exist with each other in companionable conversation or silence, whichever happens.
Continue readingGetting Attached To A Shiny Pokémon Because Of A Sad Story
As I’ve been slowly working my way through the Pokémon Violet DLC, I’ve been listening to a wide variety of podcasts. I finished working through the entire Patreon catalogue of Friends at the Table and have begun to catch up on my usual collection of podcasts that fell by the wayside while I was incredibly focused on the one thing. I’ve been jumping around, from one thing to another, as my time and attention demand, and having a generally pleasant time half listening to a bunch of podcasts and half playing a game whose structure I’m fairly content to ignore. It makes for pleasant evenings, most of the time, though I’ll admit it gets very difficult to handle plot bits of Pokémon that I run into if I’m also trying to listen to anything. My general answer to that is to spend time wandering the new land and catching Pokémon when I’m more interested in the podcast than in making story progress, so I’ve barely done any of the DLC’s story (or at least what feels like barely any of the story but could easily be half or more of it, depending on how long it runs). What I’ve done plenty of is catch Pokémon and enjoy the scenery of this new area.
Continue readingOn Top Of The Waves
What a week. Started off kinda crappy with some on-going trouble falling asleep, which tends to cast a pall over everything else since, you know, being tired constantly sucks. But Monday started off strong with a Spotify Discover Weekly playlist that was nearly perfect. There were a few terrible misses, but it’s probably the best Discover Weekly I’ve had since before the summer. Just a bunch of absolute bops with a pile of songs to add to my upbeat and cheerful playlists, and it starts with a great sequence of eight songs before the first song I had to remove.
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