Morning

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris Leave a comment

I really don’t like the hype train. I’m very patient when it comes to people and obligations. When it comes to things I get excited about or that don’t have a specific wait time, I absolutely suck at waiting. Which means I hate watching trailers for movies and video games because they get me super excited for something cool and then I have to wait four months or a year or, in Breath of the Wild’s case, three years. Last week, Nintendo announced the latest Super Smash Bros. game would come out on the Switch this year and all I can do now is wait and think about it. It probably won’t come out until the holiday shopping season, but a soft release date is not very helpful to me.

I’ve never really enjoyed the anticipation portion of anything. I like knowing when stuff is going to happen and then mostly ignoring it until it is time to do something about it. This can sometimes backfire on me, as it did with the Switch, because I missed my 12-hour window to pre-order one. I managed to get on by waiting in line for 12 hours and freezing my butt off, but my life would have been better if I’d just pre-ordered it. For the most part, though, I don’t actually lose anything by avoiding stuff until right before it comes out. I got movie tickets to see Star Wars just fine. I can just go into most book stores to grab books I want. Game stores never actually run out of games these days. Steam makes pretty much every game easily available since I don’t know if it is even possible to run out of digital copies… Heck, most “physical” games are just download codes concealed inside plastic rectangles these days.

There’s only so much planning you can do for stuff like that before it starts feeding into anxiety. I already have enough trouble properly allocating my mental energy without marketing companies doing everything they can to convince me to uselessly spend mental energy on substanceless hype. I really don’t need the encouragement since I’m already to get overly invest in pretty much anything. This means I can be susceptible to marketing because it feeds into behavior I’m already prone to, so I spend a good deal of effort to stay away from marketing geared toward my interests. Which unfortunately means I miss out on a lot of things I might enjoy until long after they’re out.

Thankfully, I’ve got plenty of friends who all advocates of the hype train, so I can ask them what is coming up and get all my gaming news without any of the hype beyond their excitement. Books are a little bit easier to follow on my own because there isn’t as much energy put into marketing them via excitement like there is for video games and movies. Most of the time, we just get news from conventions or author blogs, such as Patrick Rothfuss confirming that The Kingkiller Chronicles trilogy is actually just the beginning of the story. Which I am super excited about, because it means I was right to suspect that there was too much left unanswered at the end of Wise Man’s Fears to wrap up in one book. I love the series, so I am excited to hear there will be more books, but there is no urgency behind this. We don’t even have a release date for the book that was for-sure happening, Stone Doors, so information like this is close to news than marketing.

Honestly, even if I do miss out on things sometimes, I feel a lot better when my life isn’t full of a constant stream of advertisements, marketing promotions, and pitches for things that I probably want. It is a lot easier to focus on what I am doing and what I already have to enjoy when I’m not being bombarded by what I don’t have. Inner peace, and all that.

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris 1 Comment

Rejection is hard. Few people enjoy it. I spent all of last weekend resting because of it. I did my first submission of 2018 and got a form email rejecting my submissions, so I decided to spend my weekend reading, gaming, and resting.

Rejection is something I’m still not used to facing. It has become familiar, but I don’t know that it will ever become something I am used to. I’ve faced it numerous times, as a writer and in other parts of my life. I didn’t exactly spend the four years between my relationships not asking women out. I didn’t just quietly hate my old job and the way things worked at my old company. I’m an action-oriented person. I do things. I ask people out, take risks, and try to affect change when I think it needs to happen. I submit at least one creative piece a month, and used to apply to any conference I thought was relevant in college. I have seen a lot of rejection and I’ve gotten good at processing it.

I was actually planning to not submit anything this year. I’ve got a lot on my plate with daily blog update, trying to figure out how twitter works (I think I’ve gotten the first couple steps down, but tips are always welcome!), and trying to get back into the swing of working on my books. There isn’t much time in there for me after you factor in my job, self-care like sleep and working out, and dating. But I guess I’m back to it? There’s no reason not to submit if I’ve got a contest or magazine and something appropriate sitting in the wings. Except, you know, rejection.

These days, rejection is a lot like a bee sting. It is painful and uncomfortable, but hardly fatal (I’m not allergic, so the analogy works for me) and the pain will diminish as time passes. Before long, all you remember is that you were stung. That’s what these rejections were. Painful and not something I wanted four of at once, but I handled it fine and I’m alright now. Honestly, the most frustrating part, and the only thing with any emotional bite left to it, is the lack of feedback.

Feedback is super useful when getting rejected because it means the reader like your stuff enough to make suggestions, even if it wasn’t what they were looking for. I don’t remember where I read it, but someone wrote that the process of getting published follows a pattern. First, you get form rejections. Then, once you have improved your craft, you start getting rejections with feedback. After that, you start getting a few small acceptances mixed into the rejections with feedback.

I know the above process is hardly something I can count on and not even an unlikely expectation, but it still sucks to not have gained anything from the stress and work of preparing something for submission and submitting. As annoyed as I felt, I felt even worse for my friend who had written an entire short story to submit and gotten a form rejection. I just took some poems, wrestled with my doubts, cleaned them up, and sent them off. Took about five or so hours, all told. My alpha reader spent several days working on this story, getting feedback, and turning it into something I honestly thought was a perfect fit.

While I didn’t enjoy it, I am thankful for this rejection. It forced me to slow down and take a break. I keep myself running at a high level of stress to maintain my focus, but I have a tendency to not let go of my tension when I need a break. I hold onto it and ruin my ability to enjoy whatever rest I’m allowing myself. Thanks to the rejection, I’m spending more time on taking care of myself and prioritizing doing things to recharge. I had someone contact me via my blog to recommend a game and I started playing that last weekend. I’m loving the game so far and enjoying having something super rewarding and engaging to invest my time in. I’m planning to review it for next week’s review day, so hang tight and you’ll get to read about a game that wound up being thematically appropriate to me and my life right when I started playing it.

The rejection sucked. The rest was good. Today, I feel more ready for the future than I’ve felt in well over a year. I am doing new things every week, constantly expanding my capabilities, and improving myself. I’m just over two months into 2018 and I really feel like this is going to be my year. I don’t know what it will bring, but I’m ready for it.

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris Leave a comment

The older I get, the more I feel like my life is made up of big moments separated by spans of time spent either recovering from the last big moment or preparing for the next one. Time passage is hard for me to gauge over long spans despite the fact that I’m really good at tracking it over short spans. Over a six-hour period, I can usually guess the time within five minutes. Beyond that, it gets trickier. I routinely have weeks that feel long or days that feel short. Variation in the perception of the passage of time is a common thing for most people, sure, but I feel especially bad at the larger-scale stuff. Until I actually think about it, I’d swear that I was just recently in college. At the same time, I feel like high school and the problems of my childhood are so old that they might as well have happened to someone else.

This isn’t earth-shattering or super special. People feel like this all the time. I’m just focusing on it a lot right now because I’m at this point in my life were things are starting to come together, but the one thing I want more than anything is still going to take a while. I’d give up almost anything to be a writer full-time, but I can’t throw aside my debt obligations for that super-useful degree I got in English Literature (that sounds way more bitter than I feel, but I have my moments where that feels absolutely true) because that’d hurt my dad, who co-signed some of my loans. I need to keep working and making payments in the hope of one day being free of this mountain of debt. Having a wonderful girlfriend is amazing. Having two roommates who respect me, whose company I enjoy, and who share my interests enough to at least nod along while I talk at them is the best living situation I’ve ever had. Being able to support myself AND start paying down some debts by working 45 hours a week is something I thought wasn’t possible a year and a half ago. I have so much to be thankful for that I feel horrible that I can’t stop thinking about how disappointed I am that I can’t write all the time.

I’m in my mid-to-late twenties. It is possible that only a quarter of my life has passed so far. A huge chunk of my favorite creators, including all of the ones who influenced me the most, didn’t get their start until, sometimes, as much as a decade after they were my age. There is still so much I can do. Even if it takes me another ten years to get to the point where I can write full-time, I’ll still have so much time to write and create. I just feel like part of me is missing when I’m at work, testing software, and trying to stay focused so that ideas of what I want to be writing don’t cause me to run the same test case multiple times without once actually seeing the results.

If you start discussing romance or relationships with someone, the idea of soulmates is going to come up at some point. Generally speaking, people fall into one of two camps. Either soulmates are bullshit and love is about building something with someone you’ve picked or soulmates are a thing and you’re destined for someone. While I’m not willing to rule anything out and I generally don’t call people out for relatively harmless beliefs, I get frustrated when the soulmate idea is expressed as the idea that people are incomplete without their soulmate.  There’s tons of philosophy and even some religious teachings that supports this idea. I don’t think that’s true and I feel like the idea of needing another person to be complete places a lot of responsibility and emotional labor for your well-being on someone else’s shoulders. I don’t need another person to feel complete. When I get lost in my writing, no where I am or what I’m writing about, I feel whole.

That is all I need. All I want. Just this little thing. Just this enormous, seemingly impossible achievement.

I’m working toward it. Updating this blog every day, working a few extra hours a week to reach a state of financial stability, and trying to make time to work on my novels in between it all. This all helps. Writing every day makes time feel a little more real. I can count the days between November 1st, 2017, and today. I can remember most of my posts. I’ve got a record of living all of those days and the act of sitting down to write each night helps me feel like I’m going to eventually get where I want to be. Hopefully, by the time I’m done with my year and a month of daily posts, I’ll be able to see how much closer I’ve gotten.

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris Leave a comment

I’ve been using Facebook since 2007 and I did a lot of growing up during the past 11-ish years. I never really did much social media posting with specifics to my life, but I sure did plenty of whining. And posting song lyrics. There are also the broken links to blogs I’ve run in the past that I ended years ago. Worst of all, at least to my mind, is that I did tons of “vague-booking.” For those of you who are not familiar with the term, it is what you call a post on Facebook that complains about something without actually indicating what is wrong or why you are upset. I’m sure urban dictionary has a better definition, but that is basically it and it annoys me these days.

It can be weird to look back on posts from the past and see myself upset about something that was clearly a big deal at the time but that I can no longer remember. Most of the big, lasting problems from my life during my later high school and college years are things I never posted about but still remember quite clearly. The break-ups, the betrayals and loss of friends, the fights between friends that shattered friend-groups, my attempts to act as a moderator to some dumb shit in college that only convinced both sides to turn against me since I wouldn’t pick a side, and more. There’s nothing on Facebook that is painful to remember mostly because I can’t remember anything I was complaining about.

These days, I maintain a bit of a “digital persona,” I guess you could call it. Maybe “Digital Identity” would be better. Either way, it isn’t an act or a fake personality. I just strictly maintain a certain self-identity across platforms. I try to use similar usernames if not my real name and be consistent in profile pictures, the things I support, and how I voice my thoughts. My blog is currently where I voice most of my thinking while Twitter tends to get more of my moment-to-moment impressions when I feel like they’re actually worth recording. Which isn’t to say I tweet everything that comes up. I try not to complain too much and don’t generally post anything that isn’t a part of my mission. I do similar things outside of the internet as well, so my online identity reflects my offline one. I just feel a little more aware of the performative aspects of being a person and constantly working toward a goal when I’m doing it online. Offline, I just want to make the world a better place however I can, so I generally try to look on the bright side, share things that are good, and generally be a positive influence. In the end, they pretty much work out to the same thing.

That being said, I’m not exactly a ray of sunshine online. I deal with my depression and anxiety a lot on twitter, posting about the weird sort of negative/positive mix of my thoughts that results from my depression and anxiety pulling me down and my attempts to avoid being ruled by them pulling me up. It is also a good exercise in making me focus on things I enjoy, setting my mindset for the day, and looking for the good that comes from everything going on in my life. My twitter isn’t happy, but it is positive and affirming. It represents what it is like to be someone who is active and creative, who refuses to stop doing anything less than literally everything he can, while struggling with depression and anxiety. At least it represents what that means to me, specifically.

My life’s goal is to leave the world a better place than I found it. To be a positive influence on the world, even if it means just making one person’s life better for me having been here. Angst-y Facebook posts from years ago don’t really support that. Plus, they’re kind of embarrassing. I thought I was so clever just sharing song lyrics instead of posting about how I felt, but the themes of the music and the specific lines I chose paint a pretty clear picture of my emotional state at the time of posting. I have to admit that the desire to get rid of these transparent references to transient, ultimately meaningless problems is a part of it.

If I’d actually posted about the real problems I was facing, if I’d shared anything like I do now, about facing life with depression and the constant struggle of managing my anxiety, I would keep it. People benefit from knowing other people out there have shared similar struggles. Something is easier to deal with when you know you’re not alone. The desire to let people know what it is like to be depressed or anxious, to have to struggle to get through every day even when you know you’ll manage just fine and aren’t a suicide risk, that is why I’ve chosen such a public forum. The few random comments I get on this blog from time-to-time make it all worth it.

I don’t really feel like it is self-censorship to remove old posts that no longe represent who I am. My social media should reflect who I am. While some of my past problems are a part of who I am today, none of the whiny little vague posts are. It feels a lot more like cleaning and maintenance to me.

 

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris Leave a comment

Lately, I have enjoyed joking that my life is finally in order so now I can say that, for sure, I am the mess. There’s some truth to this expression, but it isn’t entirely fair to me. I believe that my mental issues are a part of me and that they are a significant characteristic, but they are not limitations. I am bigger than my mental illnesses. I am more than them, though I am them as well. I may be a mess right now, but I’m a fairly organized mess and I’ve got a plan for becoming a not-mess. I’m in-between bookshelf organization methods. Sure, my books are stacked all over and covering the floor, but I know each stack and where each stack needs to go. I’ve just got to do the work of putting the books away.

I’ve been having a lot of stressful weeks, lately. I’m currently trying to do everything I can to avoid feeling too depressed and wanting nothing more than to just stop doing stuff for a few days or weeks so I can rest. Dating, writing every day, blog posts, working more, and more! Then there’s been a lot of individually stressful things like a few super busy weeks at work, tax-filing, and realizing I need a strict budget. This leaves me spending my Sunday in bed, watching my Steven Universe DVDs while listening to the Steven Universe soundtrack and playing Pokemon, only leaving bed for D&D at 5 pm and a few times before that for food and the bathroom.

I don’t even know if I can say I actually enjoy days like those. I have them every so often and I know I need them, but I don’t really enjoy retreating from the world to that degree. I talk to almost no one, get nothing productive done, and make a mess in my room because I can’t even be bothered to go downstairs to put my dishes in the sink. Don’t forget the time I spend agonizing over stupid little things that shouldn’t be stressing me out as much as they are while I ignore the actually legitimate issues I should be fretting about. Sometimes I eventually work through it all and can think about the real issues, but not always.

Depression is a bitch. As John Green once said in a video (I can’t find the video so I can’t attribute it to its primary source), “Depression is melancholy, without its charm.” There’s nothing fun about this. Anxiety also sucks. Nothing ruins a day quite like feeling like you forgot to turn off the oven about literally everything. I woke up at 6:30 because I apparently don’t like to sleep and then spent the next seven hours stressed out. That was last weekend and it was the longest day I’ve had in a couple of years.

I really want to find a way to calm down and let go of my tension, but my tension is a result of constantly working on things that are good for me and that I enjoy. I want to do everything I’m doing and more, so I’ve only got myself to blame for the position I’m in. If I want the successes I’ve set as my goals for 2018, then I have to pay the price. It’d be really cool if I could just get out of my own way and no longer waste so much energy on dumb shit like freaking out about whether or not I’m going to see an increase in the daily average views for this blog or if I’ve actually got enough clean underwear for the next week (which doesn’t matter because I’ve got a washer and dryer, so I can just do laundry whenever I want).

I’m used to being able to turn my anxiety and OCD toward useful ends. Even my depression had its uses. Now, all of my worries and OCD traits feel frivolous or irksome. It is hard to enjoy the feeling of being in control engendered by the act of cleaning your space when you can’t actually get down to cleaning because your cleaning supplies need to be cleaned first

I’d like to just shrug and say I’ll figure it out in the end, but it feels difficult to maintain that level of confidence and belief in the strength of the future when I feel like I no longer have any part of my mental health problems figured out. That’s the stress and exhaustion talking, but they sure talk pretty loudly these days. They’re becoming dominant aspects of my mental landscape every week. Hopefully another quiet weekend or two, following on the tail of a quieter work week, will help me get back on my feet and feeling like I can figure it all out in due time. That’s always a nice feeling.

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris Leave a comment

I enjoy arts and crafts. Always have. As a child, I enjoyed gluing stuff to other stuff and cutting up things (many of which I was not supposed to). While I didn’t make much of note prior to college, I really found myself enjoying theater carpentry. It was so much fun to build sets or props! I may not have loved every single second of my job working at the theater, but it is the only job I miss having so far. I learned a lot of great skills there and went from someone who couldn’t cut a straight line even with a straight line to follow to someone who could take a picture a set designer gave me and turn it, plus a few hundred dollars, into a set for a musical. I really wish my college laptop hadn’t died, because then I’d have some pictures to share along with today’s post.

After college, my opportunity to build things has been somewhat lessened. I don’t have easy access to all of the tools, work space, and scrap lumber that I used to, so assembling a pantry and bookshelf out of scrap wood and set pieces that were destined for the trash is no longer possible. Neither is easily building a coffee table you can dance on. Over the past almost 5 years, I’ve been collecting power tools and presents and finances allow, so I’m finally ready to start making stuff again! Or, rather, I will be once I’ve got an air-compressor and air-powered nail/staple guns. Well, actually, I suppose I could just screw everything together. Staples and glue makes for easy destruction, which is probably a bit more important for theater than if I’m making a nifty gaming table.

Outside of theater carpentry, I haven’t done much crafting. Pottery would be fun to learn, as would anything to do with metal. Metal is a bit expensive, though, and the resources it requires are a bit more than an extension cord and a garage. I’d need a real workshop and proper protective gear if I wanted to learn to weld anything. Interestingly, though, there’s apparently a workshop around where I live that I can use if I’m willing to pay $100 a month to become a member. It’d include training on all of the equipment they have, access to a work space (or “maker space” as they called it), and a ton of like-minded peers who’d be happy to give me pointers if I was attempting something beyond my skill. I’d love to sign up, but $100 a month is most-certainly not in my budget.

Honestly, after budgeting and doing taxes last week, I feel like I’ve got less money than before. That doesn’t really make sense because now I actually have a full understanding of my financial situation. It is actually better than I thought it was, though not by much, and that joy was mitigated by the fact that I, for the first time in my life, owed taxes. I’m not sure how, since I haven’t compared this year’s filing to last year’s yet, but I’ll hopefully figure it out soon and be able to prevent it in the future. In the mean time, I just need to tighten my financial belt a little more and see what room I can make between my expenses and my income for extra loan payments on my car.

Which, you know, is going to make it hard to buy things I don’t actually need like a bunch of lumber or an air compressor and nail/staple gun. It is hard to justify building a fancy and extravagant gaming table when my “fun stuff just for me” budget is $30 a month. At least there’s other stuff I can do, like create a sand mold with my girlfriend as a date last weekend and then, this week, go watch a bunch of molten iron get poured into it. Having never seen anything like this before, I’m super interested to see it happen. The biggest question on my mind is how viscous the liquid metal is. The thing I made has a lot of small details and I’m concerned they won’t come out. And that I did a shit job of making sure it was all level and neat once I was done. I’m probably going to need to get an angle grinder or a dremel to clean it up. That’ll be tons of fun, though!

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris Leave a comment

Being broke sucks. After the Christmas season and its associated commercialism has ended, I am forced to take stock of my financial state in preparation for filing my taxes. This year, as a result of a higher-than-average monthly expense accounting, I’ve been forced to make a strict budget. Having a girlfriend is great, for sure, but it makes me significantly more inclined to spend money on things I otherwise wouldn’t such as trips to other cities to meet new people or a bouquet of cooking utensils my significant other wants but doesn’t have. Which is a great gift idea, by the way. Flowers aren’t the only thing you can wrap in tissue paper and present to your significant other on special occasions.

I’ve stuck to a budget before and I keep pretty good track of my finances, so this is nothing new. It is an added layer of stress and anxiety, though, to have to update and track every single number to the cent rather than going with my “soft budget” that I’ve been using since I changed jobs. My student debt (and the credit card debt I occasionally accrue because I’ve got no answer to sudden expenses that aren’t covered by insurance) gets me wound up when I start thinking about how much I still owe after having paid as much as I have, so I try to avoid thinking about my finances in any kind of exact terms when I can. Even though I know my debt total has gone down since last year, it is still easier for me to think about last year’s inaccurate number than about what today’s accurate number would be.  I know it isn’t a very good idea to ignore financial situations like this, but I’ve got my finances set up so I only need to review the hard numbers of my debt once a year, when I do my taxes. When I do, I spend some time looking into solutions to better my financial footing like refinancing options and consolidation, so it isn’t like I’m ignoring my problems entirely.

My dreams for the future, in financial terms, are pretty simple. I just want to be able to live modestly without needing to worry about money like I do now. I want to have enough set aside to absorb sudden expenses without needing to rely on credit cards. I want to be able afford a nice place to live and to have enough space to welcome people into my home semi-frequently. I like to host my friends and our gatherings, and I love to feed people, so being able to afford that on a regular basis would be amazing. If I’m really aiming for the stars, I’d like to be able to put any potential progeny through college (assuming the current system is still in place) and have some money left over every year to travel somewhere new.

Ideally, I’d be able to live this lifestyle as a result of being a writer. I know it is possible, even if it does seem unlikely most days. One of my biggest barriers to writing consistently is how upset I can get when I spend a weekend writing and then have to go back to work on Monday morning. I’d be so happy writing full-time. I’d be willing to sacrifice a certain amount of my financial dreams to achieve that, but not much. Writing is fun, but I can still do that even if I’m working a day job to provide myself with financial stability.

Budgeting, though stressful, can make your financial life a lot easier. I may not enjoy thinking about it, but having concrete terms for my spending makes it easier to see the impact a change in my spending habits can have on my bank account. While paying off my car loan by the end of the summer seemed like a bit of a pipe dream when I thought of it last month, my budgeting has told me that it is possible as long as I toss my whole tax return in as well. As much as I’d like a new mattress, I’m pretty sure that I’ll sleep better with all that extra money in my budget. For paying off other loans, of course. The best loan repayment plans depend on that snowball effect.

Though I might just let it hang out for a little bit, make a few friends in my bank account, and then get blow it all on something to replace my 4.5-year-old, $300 queen mattress that has a giant sag down the middle. Springs, I tell ya… Not so springy anymore.

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris Leave a comment

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.

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris Leave a comment

I really enjoy spending time with my friends. Like most people, I’ve got a mix of introverted and extroverted qualities. Depending on where I am when I’m with my friends, it can be either relaxing or tiring. For instance, I organized a get-together tonight since one of my friends is leaving the state for her last semester of college and I like send-off parties. We went to a Mongolian grill restaurant for dinner and that was super exhausting because it was super loud, super busy, and I had a hard time participating in any kind of talk with my friends. Afterwards, we went to a coffee/chocolate shop where one of the group was still working, and the much quieter atmosphere helped me relax from the stress of the restaurant.

After the coffee/chocolate shop closed, they all opted to go to a bar and I opted to go home. It was a Friday night. The last thing I wanted, tired as I was and as busy as I am this weekend, was to go out to a noisy, crowded bar. They all get it, which made it easy to linger as they made plans so I could enjoy a last few minutes being around them. To be entirely fair, I probably still would have gone home even if they’d gone someplace super chill. I was exhausted after a long week and the continued reduction of my daily caffeine intake. I also started getting back into some more active things, so I’m super low on physical and mental energy. Throw in a week’s bout of depression brought on by the gloom and the cold that had ruled Wisconsin, and I’m also out of emotional energy. The trifecta. All energies dwindling and rapidly approaching zero.

So I went home and went to bed. Brushed my teeth, put on my pajamas, and decided to just wake up a bit early to get this written and pack for my trip. Unfortunately, as is often the case when I’m nearing zero, I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I opted to lie awake and stare at the ceiling until I wanted to pull my hair out. Rather than do anything to speed up my inevitable male pattern baldness, I got out of bed and worked on some poetry for a bit while listening to a band my girlfriend suggested since they’re in town for a concert next month. Walk the Moon makes for pretty good late-night-poetry-writing music, actually. They’ve got a good sound that fades in and out of the background as your attention waxes and wanes.

While I was trying to sleep and then writing poetry, the main theme of the thoughts I was trying to ignore was dread for my weekend plans. Even now, as I’m double-checking my bag and debating whether or not to bring my Switch, I really don’t want to go. I know I’m going to have a great time because I’m seeing some of my closest friends from college, people who used to fill me with such a creative charge that they drove some of the almost-insane amounts of writing I did during college. Well, insane in a sense. Given the amount I’d written at the time and how many projects I started that eventually influence my ability, I was at my most prolific in college. These days, I wrote more in a month (NaNoWriMo 2017) than I did in any entire semester of college.

Even though I’m going to meet with these wonderful friends, watch some fun movies, exchange late Christmas presents, and have a peaceful drive to clear my mind, I’m still dreading departure. This same exact thing happens all the time. I make plans that sound like a lot of fun and then the plans start to appear on the horizon, looking miserable. It happened with my plans to go out to dinner yesterday. It happened with my decision to return to my foam-fighting practice on Thursday nights. It happens with pretty much everything I do these days.

I will go and I will have a great time assuming nothing horrific happens. Unless I get in a car accident, break a bone, or get my wallet stolen, I’m going to have a net-positive trip. I’ve got too many great people and fun things packed into my weekend to have anything but a good time. The only thing that could make it better is bringing my girlfriend along for the ride. Which will happen eventually, I hope. The friend I’m staying with is still adjusting to her new apartment and hasn’t met my girlfriend yet, so I’m going to hold off on throwing additional stress her way. Plus, now I’ve got a reason to go back and visit everyone soon!

Saturday Morning (Evening) Musing

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Today was a nice day. Tomorrow marks three months with my girlfriend. That’s not a whole lot, objectively speaking, but it’s longer than most of my relationships have lasted so it feels nice to reach and mark it. Since we’re both busy tomorrow, we met up for a bit today to just spend some time together and we wound up spending most of it grocery shopping. We both love to cook, so it was preparation for both of us to spend the afternoon cooking. She was cooking meals for a friend who just had a baby. I was cooking because I wanted stew, my bean dip, and cider.

I, of course, had to clean the entire kitchen before I could start. It was too dirty and covered in dishes to cook, so I had to make some space and clean my surfaces. At the same time, it feels very good to get something visibly clean and I find it mentally refreshing. Part of cooking is, for me, imposing order on disorder. Taking several disparate things, my own knowledge and culinary senses, and bringing it all together to make something better than all the parts on their own.

Right now, my dip is made, my stew is simmering (to thicken), and my cider is delicious. It feels good to sit back and lent the scent of all of my creations wash over me as I watch the Overwatch League matches I missed during the day. I’ve got friends coming over to help eat the food I’ve made, and a nice warm house to enjoy during this cold weather. I’ve got no chores that need doing, no errands that need running, and no pressing business to attend to other than my writing and stirring the stew.

I catch myself thinking of the future a lot, of when I’ve finished paying off my student loans and finally settled down to live comfortably as I try to make ends meet as a novelist. I think about how quiet and peaceful my life could be, how idyllic my life would become. On days like today, I feel like I catch a glimpse of this future. Like I’ve gotten to look through a window into the eventual life I’d like to live. The problem with that idea, though, is that it does a disservice to my life right now. Sure, I have student loans and a good job that I don’t hate, but are those really reasons that I can’t build the life I want today?

There’s a reason we use words or phrases like that when we talk about the future. There isn’t one part that just magically makes it all come together, just like there isn’t a “right time” to start. We have to work on the life we want one step at a time, one thing at a time. I think I’m going to try to focus on that idea a little more often and let myself enjoy days like today as a solid step toward the life I want to lead.