As I work through my leftovers from the holiday feast I prepared for myself this past winter holiday period, I find myself reflecting on my cooking habits once again. After all, I’m aware I have a tendency to eat the same stuff over and over again because the recipes are familiar and require very little mental effort. Something like baking a turkey breast might also be fairly easy, but it’s not something I’ve successfully done very many times (I’ve eaten dried-out turkey all but two of the times I’ve made it myself) so it takes a bit more mental effort than even putting together a stew does. That has lots of steps, requires pretty active monitoring throughout the process, and requires a non-insignificant amount of chopping, but it’s still easier to make myself do that than it is to bake a turkey breast.
Continue readingReflection
The Stories We Tell About The People We’ve Left Behind
Content Warning for non-specific discussions of trauma and abuse.
One of the many lessons I’ve learned about writing over the years is that, if I’m writing about something that happened, about real people, I need to focus on writing about only my experience of the event. I’ve had a few disastrous attempts in the past, where I’ve written about how I’ve noticed someone acting and tried to put to words the feel of what they told me. I don’t think I’ve ever done it in a way that didn’t feel immediately embarrassing. It can be a fine line, the space between the two concepts, but it is easy to write about how I felt listening to someone talk or the part I played in a difficult time in someone else’s life. It is much more difficult to write about what they went through from a first-person perspective. As I’ve slowly worked at writing outside my direct experience, at learning to portray events and feelings I never encountered (frequently with much input from people willing to share their experiences with me, knowing I’m trying to write about something similar), I’ve paid special attention to all the high-profile instances of people basically stealing the life stories of others.
Continue readingThis Is My 900th Post
While I’d love to claim that this is a complete coincidence, I’ll admit that I did thumb the scales a teensy bit to line up the first post of 2023 with my 900th over all blog post. A teensy bit. My time off was legitimate and I definitely didn’t have anything ready for last Saturday as far as Infrared Isolation goes, but I did decide to still do a post on the 31st and not take an entire week off when I realized I wasn’t going to have Chapter 13 ready just so I could line this up. It was a small amount of effort and is, ultimately, a fairly small thing. I’ve been running this blog since 2017, after all, and while most of those years show huge periods of inactivity from me, 2018 and 2022 saw almost daily posts, and that’s most of 900 posts right there. The rest mostly come from posting in the last third of 2021 and the last two months of 2017, when I got on the daily blogging train for the fist time.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 19
Content Warning: mentions of depression, suicidal ideation related to OCD, death, grief, and loss.
Also, spoiler warning for The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask I guess?
Continue readingReflections on Next Year
As the year draws to a close, I find myself thinking about the future more and more. 2023 is going to be a busy and exciting year for me, at least intermittently. Two dear friends are getting married and I will be a part of that, which involves at least one big trip and then a wedding, all of which will happen within the first six months of the year. Shortly after that, I’ll be moving since I can’t stay where I’m living any longer due to the rapid rise of rent and my personal distaste for how aware I am of everything my neighbors do. From there, my year is unknowable. After all, I’m also looking for a new job and hope to be doing something I can do entirely from a home office, since I’d like to move around a little bit. Try living elsewhere for a time. See what that’s like since I’ve lived in the same major area my entire life (northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin). Meet some new people. Go on an adventure or two.
Continue readingMeditative Silence On A Snowy Morning
Today, in search of inner peace, I venture out of my cozy apartment, choosing to risk my well-being against the slippery, uncleared sidewalks of my area in order to enjoy a bit of untouched winter wonderland walking. After all, the people who clear the snow around my apartment do so in a swift, brutal, and utilitarian manner, churning up not just snow and ice but grass and dirt as well. Trading visual appeal, the health of the plant life on the property, and the occasional bit of property damage for speed, they will clear the sidewalks and then scatter mounds of salt until not just the sidewalks but the insides of our apartments are stained white with the remnants of the crystalline anti-ice measure. It will be safe to walk, then, but bereft of the appealing blankness and weight of a fresh, heavy snow. Whatever joy I might have gained will be gone, replaced by sad reflection on humanity’s drive to conquer and removed nature rather than cohabitate with it.
Continue readingSpending My Time And Attention
As you might have guessed from the subject matter of my blog posts of late, I’ve been thinking a lot about social media and the role it plays in my life. Which is actually just a piece of what I’ve actually been thinking about recently. And by “recently” I mean “for most of my adult life but in a new sort of context.” I’ve been thinking a lot about my time, my attention, my effort, and how I spend all three of those things. The recent focus of this mental exercise was inspired by a thread I saw on Twitter a couple weeks ago (that I unfortunately can’t find again) that made some bold claims about the amount of money and energy spent on advertising to people against their consent. I mean, all you need to do is look at how many ad-blocker programs exist for web browsers and phones to see how much people want to avoid it, and so much money gets spent on not only bypassing those things, but filling as much of the world with advertisements as possible.
Continue readingHoliday Preparations
I just spent most of the last three days cleaning my apartment. Got everything sorted out, finally, before I sat down to write this post following my post-cleaning shower (I tend to break out pretty bad if I don’t shower right away after doing all the vacuuming and similar dust-disturbing chores). My apartment is clean, tomorrow is a holiday, and I have zero time-sensitive obligations. I’m on my own for Thanksgiving this year, but that’s fine. I’ve had practice the past few and this means I can eat whenever I want, don’t have to get out of my pajamas, and can mix up the mashed potatoes with a bunch of little extras just the way I liked it. It also means I’m going to have a boatload of turkey since I bought a turkey breast (bone-in) and then a frozen boneless turkey breast as a backup in case I mess up the bone-in one. I usually do ham because it’s easier and doesn’t require the delicate finagling that a whole turkey demands, but I figured I’d just do a more simple version of turkey this year.
Continue readingVaccines and Convenient Healthcare
Today, after many delays due to scheduling issues, not being able to handle downtime from potential side-effects, and being just too tired and out of spoons to handle anything other than what I absolutely had to do in a day, I’m finally getting my second booster shot of the Covid vaccine. I was eligible a while ago, but I’d wanted to wait for the much-touted version to come out since it had proven effective against the strains of the spring and summer, but now I’m wondering if the current strains of the virus have mutated so much that we’re going to need a whole ‘nother booster to be as effective at countering them. I went to do some research, since that’s usually what I do with questions like this, but I discovered it had gotten difficult to find information that talked about vaccines and the pandemic as an on-going concern. In fact, the manipulation of SEO meant that I had to scroll a few pages down to find anything useful that wasn’t about economics or how the current administration in the US is to blame for how tired people are of the pandemic and so on.
Continue readingYou Don’t Need To Hit The Ground To Know What Will Happen When You Fall
Last night, I engaged in a choatic bacchanal during what some alleged might be the final hours of Twitter’s life. Of course, the site is still up this morning and I don’t think most people truly believed the website was going to abruptly vanish at some point. It was (and still is) pretty clear that Twitter is going to diminish and fade into obscurity or diminish and transform into something else, just like every other social media site that has fallen by the wayside over the years. After all, it’s not like MySpace is entirely unavailable, it’s just irrelevant. Things on the internet tend to not vanish completely so much as fade from public reckoning or change so completely that they’re actively abandoned. Thus far, neither has entirely happened yet, but last night marked the end of an era as, if the reports prove true in coming days, most of Twitter’s employees have left the company.
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