April Fools’ Day, the day belong to the multiple fools of April, has always been a strange creature in my life. In my youth, it was a day of complex emotions for me. On one hand, my maternal grandfather–the one I was close to and cared about who passed five years ago–was a great lover of practical jokes and provided me with no small amount of delight by introducing all the little practical joke toys one could buy from a magic trick shop (that my grandfather frequented for much his adult life since his love of practical jokes and magic tricks was lifelong and much to the chagrin of my grandmother and their children) to my family. Whoopee cushions, little hand buzzers, flowers that squirt water, pop rocks, and so on. It was always a lot of fun when we’ve visit him around the end of March, usual for some Easter celebration, and he’d pull all these little pranks on his grandkids, none of which ever hurt and were always a delight because we got to keep water tools he used (which always came with instructions on how we could prank our parents at home).
Continue readingReflection
Looking Back At The Distant Peaks Of 2023
A year ago today, as I’m writing this, I was frantically double-checking my packing lists, my driving plans, and my flight details. I’d just had one of the most stressful months of my life, as I realized my original flight plans had been messed up, had to scramble to cancel my flights and book a new one in its place, and had to figure out how to change my plans to incorporate a thousand-mile drive into both ends of my first trip overseas. After all, I couldn’t afford to to get a convenient flight from anywhere to where I was going. I could, though, afford to take an extra few days off, drive across the country (there and back again), and sleep in my car (at rest stops, of course) during the long overnight drive. I had already budgeted for work on my car’s breaks, after all, so it was clear that the more affordable option was to spend time rather than money. I have more time than money, most days, so it was a pretty easy calculation to make. I also had to spend hundreds of dollars on new clothes since nothing even remotely nice looking fit me anymore, which made March of 2023 the most expensive month of my life. Even with some hefty student loan payments (ramped up as part of accelerating my repayment plans) and my much increased rent hitting my bank account every month this year, I don’t think I’ve topped out that monumental month of costs. I was stressed, barely getting enough sleep, and had lost some pretty significant chunks of my support network the month before, so I was barely scraping by. Still, I got everything done, didn’t have to spend money I didn’t have, and made it safely to the east coast even on the tiny amount of sleep I’d gotten the week prior. I made it, despite everything.
Continue readingLove Languages Are No Substitute For Good Communication
Today, as I waited for a response from someone I know is not typically a swift responder to text messages, I started thinking about love languages. The whole concept is a pretty useful shorthand for talking about the ways in which people show and feel love, but I’ve grown to feel that they’re more limited than useful when it comes to communication in a relationship. Sure, a lot of people’s modes of affection, given and received, can be captured in one of the five categories (acts of service, quality time, words of affirmation, physical touch, and giving/receiving gifts), but they’re collectively broad enough that pretty much every type of action someone might take can be lumped into those categories. Where they become limiting is in the idea that people tend toward one over the others, sometimes with a secondary or tertiary option, and that this answer is, actually, an answer that will stay true for an individual. Most people are not boiled down so easily and I, personally, chafe under any attempts to take something as complex and nuanced as the ways people express and feel love and reduce it to a personality quiz where most of the questions can be honestly answered with “well, it depends on the situation.” Most of which means that I don’t particularly enjoy the whole concept, even if I can see it as a useful tool for opening communication or giving people a resource to express themselves while they’re still working through how to communicate better.
Continue readingMy Year In Haiku: 2023
In what will probably become a yearly tradition (two years in a row does not a tradition make, but three definitely does so I look forward to calling this a tradition next year), it is time for my yearly Haiku post! Before I share all these little glimpses into my day-to-day life in 2023, though, I’ve got a couple notes. First and foremost, they’re all titled as the date I wrote them, which can be a bit troubling sometimes since there’s a few from the same date, but they’re not necessarily connected beyond sharing the title. I leave it up to your interpretation to decide if they’re a part of the same message or disconnected expressions. Additionally, and probably most importantly, these aren’t traditional Haiku. Or really Haiku at all, since the structure of them is a part of the poetic form and the whole 5-7-5 thing is an English adaption of a Japanese form of poetry. Unfortunately, we changed a poetical form and reused the name, so I’m pretty much stuck calling them Haiku for the time-being. If you’re one of the handful of people who was about to bust my chops before I wrote this disclaimer, just think of them as structured free-verse poetry. If you weren’t about to bust my chops, then it’s fine and we can keep calling them Haiku because language shifts and changes and I think its fine to reuse names in new ways for things that people used to be confused about.
Continue readingSuffering At The Hands Of My Parents’ Religious Orthodoxy
As I’ve had plenty of time to myself over the last couple weeks, I’ve been doing some thinking. It has almost been a year since I stopped doing family therapy and was able to make peace with the idea of probably never talking to my parents again. Prior to that moment in late January of 2023, I’d been feeling guilty for cutting them off while they were still paying lip service to the idea of fixing things. Thanks to that incredibly awful two-month period, I was able to confirm that it was just lip service and that neither of them possessed the emotional maturity to recognize their part in the travesty that was my childhood. Since I’ve had enough time to process all that, I’ve been thinking about it again, mostly by way of reviewing in my mind what we talked about and how gaining a better understanding of my parents has or has not changed the way I see some of the events of my past. As I’ve slowly worked through this process (largely deciding that not much needs to change at this time), I’ve found myself thinking that, for all their faults, at least my parents never denied me my humanity. For all they put me through, for all the horrible and wrong things they taught me, at least they never taught me that I was somehow less “human” than other people. However, the more I’ve thought this, the more I’ve started to wonder if this is actually true, or if it is only technically true because they never explicitly used those words or tried to teach that specific lesson.
Continue readingEnding 2023 On A Positive Note
I wrote a couple days ago about how I do not really care for all my year-in-review things that have been cropping up all over the place since they mostly just remind me of the incredibly varied and emotionally draining year I’ve had (and I’ve had more of these things crop up since then that just further cemented this unfortunate pattern), but I wanted to take some time to end the year on a more positive note. I spent all year writing about my struggles and what made the year difficult, often in broad strokes that brushed aside all the positive stuff that actually happened, so I wanted to take some time to paint my year in review by connecting all the bright spots in a way I rarely take the time to do. It is, after all, so much easier to be miserable. Still, I think it’s work worth doing before I wrap up 2023 (well, aside from one last piece of Flash Fiction that will be posting tomorrow) and maybe it will help lift my mood as I prepare myself for whatever heaven or hell 2024 will bring.
Continue readingHiding From All The “Year In Review” Messages I’m Being Sent
It seems like everything has a “your year in review!” thing these days. Sure, I get it as far as Spotify is concerned, since they’re all about music and basically stealing from musicians, and having all of that data is a great way to generate some buzz and attention to your platform, even though they share the data before the year is over and don’t include your entire year’s worth of listening. Nintendo started doing the same thing, but with video games, showing the number of games you played and how much you played them. My podcatcher app (Podcast Addict) doesn’t have one, but it does compile your stats in a menu somewhere so you can look any time you want rather than needing to wait for the end of the year. Amazon has one, if you use any of its media services. Barnes and Noble even sent me some kind of email about it that I instantly deleted. I don’t want to know how much money I spent on books this year since I know precisely how many books I actually read and the disparity would probably make me sad, especially after I was finally able to get myself back into a place where the quiet I needed for reading was within my grasp again. Honestly, the only services that don’t seem to do this kind of year-end review are social media companies, which I really appreciate since I would hate to see just how much I posted and how little interaction I got.
Continue readingUnpacking The Past
Recently, my younger sibling (the middlest of us middle siblings) brought me the last of my things from my parents’ house. A lot of it was model train stuff that used to belong to my dad and that now belongs to me for reasons I don’t remember (I probably said I’d take it when he mentioned planning to throw it out sometime a decade or so ago), but this delivery also included a bunch of the seasonal decorations that had been given to me in my childhood and all of my “baby books” as my family called them (pretty much anything for kindergardeners and younger). I had a pretty impressive collection (all of us did), but I think I might have held onto mine the best. I was always the kid most interested in building my book collection. I reread things the most. I enjoyed having them since, with one exception, books were never forbidden to me in a household where every other piece of media I ever acquired had to be vetted by my parents to make sure it was appropriate for me. Which is funny, since books wound up being some of the most subversive stuff I ecountered as a kid in a lot of ways, some of which weren’t always terribly constructive or thought-provoking. I mean, I remember tearing pages out of my Dragon Ball manga because some of the art showed a woman’s breasts and I knew I’d lose all access to manga (which had somehow fallen under the blanket approval of books in my parents’ minds) just as well as I remember how Fullmetal Alchemist taught me to be more critical of authority. Or how Tuck Everlasting taught me that maybe endless anything wasn’t actually something I should desire (which laid the groundwork for me questioning the faith I was raised to accept without thought) and how Hatchett taught me how to start fires without matches.
Continue readingViolence As A Vehicle For Progression In Video Games
Over the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the place of violence in video games. Pretty much every game I’ve played this year requires some degree of violence in order to make forward progress. In my beloved RPGs, it is the central pillar of almost every game. Sure, there’s usually a story and some excellent character work, but almost the whole thing still revolves around violence. My favorite RPG from the past year, Chained Echoes, features combat as the main mechanic of moving around the world and the method of resolving every bit of story tension in the game (even if the story isn’t really about violence and is actually critical of how “the ends justify the means” style philosophies are almost always an excuse for power getting what it wants through violence). Perhaps the biggest game of the year, Baldur’s Gate 3, is incredibly violent, sometimes moreso than others because there are entirely legitimate, if digustingly evil, paths through the game that involve indiscriminate murder. Sure, both these games involve violence against monsters and people with little to distinguish the two groups from each other (and next-to-nothing to explicitly point out that maybe you’re the greatest monster of them all, in the case of Baldur’s Gate 3), but games with violence exclusively against monsters aren’t much better since they still require violence in order to progress the game. Even one of the cutest, most-delightful games I’ve played (Lil Gator Game) involved violence, albeit violence against cardboard “monsters” rather than against other people. There’s almost no escaping it, which is unfortunate because one of the things that drives my escapist desires the most these days is the amount of violence in the world.
Continue readingThis Moment And Place In My Life
This morning, as I prepared to take my post-workout shower, my morning playlist cycled over to a song that’s been on there for a while. I added “Wherever We Are Now” (from the game “Cassette Beasts” and the EP Same Old Story (from “Cassette Beasts” Original Soundtrack) to my daily preparation playlist this summer, during July, when I finally had the time to make some decent progress in the game. I then promptly stopped playing it on the weekends where I could be bothered to turn my PC on because I developed a crippling addiction to Baldur’s Gate 3, which took over my life for quite a while. Still, I’ve really enjoyed the soundtrack for the game and plan to get back to it eventually, if only because I’m limiting myself to songs from the soundtrack that I’ve already heard in-game and I really want to listen to the rest of it.
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