I think I'm getting burnt out on vacations.
I dunno what it is. I have no agency on this trip. The only two options are to buy something or to wander around until I find something I want to buy. Maybe it's just a mismatch of interests. Am I not seeing the things I truly want to see? I like nature. I went on a nature walk and it was nice but something about it felt too fleeting to be anything more than a shade of a memory with a few JPEGs to go with it. I want something that will change me. What's the point otherwise?
Today was alcohol tasting. I like drinking, but it's one of those things I don't really have any respect for as a higher form. I have no patience to taste bourbons or wines or beers. I don't care if something is "heady" or what it pairs well with. It's all the same stuff to me. It's just not my thing. Tasting in general doesn't really do it for me.
I like seeing shows. But I rarely ever remember the shows I see. So it can't be that. I like museums, but they're mostly just conveyor belts that dump out into a gift shop. I like hikes, but I have a bad habit of taking photos like I'm equal parts taxonomist and Japanese tourist. I like going to restaurants, but I can never seem to order the right thing because I'm plagued with indecision.
When I was a kid, I loved stuff like theme parks and whatnot. But I hear they're not as good anymore, and they're not really for adults. Disney is; that's why there are so many weirdos who go there into their 50s trying to prevent the last shreds of a manufactured innocence from slipping through their fingers like so much fine dust.
Honestly, the only interesting thing to me about travel has been seeing new places and staying at hotels. I'm kind of a weirdo with hotels, but as my body has deteriorated over the years, I've grown less and less fond of them.
What are some trips I've had in the past that were memorable? Honestly, it was mainly that; going to a new place. But it wasn't enough to just go somewhere. I mentioned this previously, but it's about the people I go with. I think the mix of people on this trip is just not really doing it for me. It is wildly dysfunctional up in here.
But I don't even know if that's it, either; I've been on bad trips with people I have no chemistry with and I still find memorable little nuggets to dig up and polish and put on my shelf. So, what is it? In a perfect world, I can go do what I want with who I want and for how long I want. What does that look like?
Do you want to know something weird? My game I'm working on...I've been hammering away at it kinda nicely. I don't get why, but it feels like I'm afforded a certain mental freshness when I travel somewhere. My productivity, my creativity, my imagination...it all kind of gets boosted or renewed when I'm working somewhere that isn't my house. There is a bit of a childlike aspect of roleplaying like I'm some big businessman with his laptop and his briefcase, ordering takeout and programming stuff while the TV's on. But I think just being somewhere else really makes me feel like I can work harder and more passionately without expending any extra energy.
Maybe there's something in that idea. Maybe the thing I get the most out of these vacations isn't the lack of work or whatever. Maybe it's a way to kind of give my senses a break from the usual grind I expose them to. It's not about working less, necessarily, but about treating the brain to some new stimuli. The woods will burn down, Disney will go bankrupt, museum artifacts will be looted, and hotels will eventually succumb to decades of bedbugs and termites. But getting out of the house, seeing the world in a slightly distorted lens, and putting pen to paper in a new place with slightly different rules...I think that's the ideal vacation for me.
At least, for now. Once I get a good travel buddy, I think I'll definitely appreciate wine tasting more.
I'm staying in a 100 year-old house on a family vacation. As a teenager, I probably would have thought this was super dumb or something, but as an adult, well, honestly, it's still kinda dumb. Just for different reasons. Every logical place you would want an outlet to be is not where one is located. The stairs creak in a way that makes you wonder if the human body can really survive a 10-foot fall. The bathroom in this place is goddamn weird, I'll try to get a pic and post it as a standalone. It's simultaneously a very spacious and very cramped house. There's no garbage disposal but every room has a closet, and some rooms even have a half-closet. Yeah, I don't get it. Also, how does a room from back when men were considered the only sex fit to go outside the house not have a coat rack or a closet near the front entrance?
I suppose it's still a cute house, all things considered. Vacations are really what you make of them. I've been on trips to places that wouldn't move the needle even a micrometer on the Travel Channel, and yet I take the right company with me to ensure they are absolutely unforgettable experiences. If you take an asshole to Disneyland, Disneyland isn't gonna trump the fact that you had to go with an asshole. So yeah, it really is about the company.
Vacations with lovers are fun. Besties too, for the same reasons, but lovers have that extra element that I'm sure you know. But yeah, that's a good way to test where you're at with somebody, platonic or otherwise. Take them to a place that's kinda blehhhh or whatever and see what it turns into. I've had some of my best memories with friends when we were just driving around in a city or dunking on the food at Long John Silver's. Fun is something you make, not something you find.
Granted, this is a family trip, so the verdict is somewhere in the middle for me. My family is kinda dysfunctional, but they're all fun in their own ways. This is day 1 of the trip, so there's still a bit of settling in to do. I'm 2 long island iced teas deep and feelin' pretty good, but man, Calfornia can be ROASTING sometimes. Where I come from, March never really gets above sorta warmish. I can't imagine how brutal this place is in the summer. The HVAC is impressive for such an old building. They've struck an interesting balance here of modernizing the appearance without really trampling too much over the place's identity as a literal ancient building. The fridge looks like it's older than the TSA, but the house's single solitary TV looks pretty new and spiffy. THere's an Xfinity cable router sitting on top of an ancient box for what I can only assume is some kind of Victrola. The doorbell is entirely mechanical, but the fireplace has been refitted with a gas line. It almost feels like we're sleeping in a museum.
Which, honestly, isn't too bad. I've slept on an actual WWII submarine before. It was uncomfortable but honestly really fun in a weird kinda way. But I also have really inconsistently eclectic tastes as far as American history goes. Anyway, old good, old bad, and old alright. Time to go sleep in a bedroom that's older than my great-grandparents. Goodnight!
God I just hate designing UI. I know I've said that before, this time it's about webpages. Like, I totally get why the world has moved to WYSIWYG editors because man, this shit is HARD. I did all kinds of cool padding and stuff based around desktop layouts, but now it looks like dog shit on mobile. And the more blogroll pages I make, the more stuff I gotta edit. I dunno. I really like having this all be self-made, but I need to do some future-proofing before this snowballs and I give up and just make an account on something a little more Web2-ish that's more out of my control.
Honestly? I kinda wanna just roll up on ChatGPT and get a crash course. Not a "make this entire thing for me" type query, but more like "Tell me what I can do in order to achieve this, that, and the other thing" and then do my own reading and learning and execution from there.
Honestly, that's been the most value I've ever extracted out of AI. Not for nothing, though; it's an experience nothing else in human history has provided me. It's just that people seem to over-appraise AI as a solution to problems that were never really problems in the first place, while ignoring the stuff it does that enriches my life in an objectively calculable way. The ability to just get a roadmap on any subject I ask about, and then use that to teach myself stuff is invaluable. I do occasionally use it to solve math problems for me, but my excuse is that I'm no longer in school and I failed Algebra three times over. At this point, I've accepted my cognitive ceiling in that field.
Math grumbling aside, I don't need AI to do complex stuff for me; partly because it's not there yet, and also because it takes away the suffering and the love. Part of making something is that suffering that comes with exerting and challenging yourself, and also in finding the love that comes from doing something with your own mind and body. If a computer just does all the suffering and love for you, it's not the same. Art that comes from a place of insulated sensibility is rarely enticing. I love AI's potential to deal with gruntwork like writing the same String-concatenating function I've written 50 times already but forgotten where I've put it, and I love having a personal secretary that can point me in a direction for my inquiry and give me a few keywords to get me started. I would arguably trust it more than an expert in whatever field I need a primer on. An expert is gonna write me a charged manifesto on how to avoid mistakes that I don't even know how to make yet. AI is gonna be more approachable about the subject while being just reliable enough that I know it's not serving me total crap.
More of that kind of AI, please. I want AI that enables me to be a more well-rounded, critically-thinking, and experienced person. I do not want AI that manifests my every thought for me while I collect Bitcoins and bedsores.
I hate crunching. I hate that I lost so much steam on my project. I hate that my projects take too long and I end up putting them away to start other projects that I lose steam on before I can finish them.
I am so close to having something halfway decent with this new game. I say that all the time, though.
It's like every time I finish 1 thing, 3 or 5 more things take its place out of nowhere.
What do I even accomplish with this? Like, I have projects I really really want to do, but it's like I'm holding myself back.
It sucks because I really need experience shipping projects and I really need to make a name for myself if I want to give my good stuff a chance at success, but I keep falling into these holes.
I just KNOW it hurts my standing with friends and family. "Look! It's the guy who can't finish anything he starts!" After a while, people stop taking you seriously.
Honestly, sometimes it feels like I'm making this game for everyone but myself. It's a game to show that I can finish something, that's all it was meant to be. But I got absolutely lost in the details. I've crossed some sort of event horizon, and now I can't trim anything back without the project feeling strangely sparse or rushed.
More and more I'm feeling tempted to ditch the project and do something else. Is it poor character if I do this? Am I repeating the same mistakes? Or am I learning a weakness or shortcoming?
I hate working with addicts. Newest hire at work is surely on or recovering from uppers, but she's a major alcoholic and a pothead. Unreliable and uses substances as coping mechanisms at the expense of her job. And they're keeping her. What does that tell people? Honestly I want to give up. I need this paycheck but I also feel like my job is being made harder for no reason other than to see what they get away with. I need my boss to step down so that I can be the boss and actually get us things we need. She needs to stop working so fast, it sets a new baseline that they can use to grind us down under their thumb. I hate politics and bureaucracy. I just want to farm.
Midna is and always will be my girl. (Click to enlarge)
I rearranged my room recently. I really like having a desk again. My old setup was so bad for my mental health. I did everything on a bed with my TV being my computer monitor. This new setup is very uncomfortable but it feels like I'm actually doing work. I am trying slowly but surely to re-acclimate myself so that I don't just give up and play Switch on the bed. And hey, once I move out, I can get a nice comfy desk chair and a few extra tables and really become a power user.
I'm going to California in a few days. Some kinda tourist town. I wonder if the town was ever inhabited by real people? It's scary to think about, watching your neighbors die or move away and having outsiders come in and set up wineries and axe throwing shops and pizza made with some demented variant on truffles. If that ever happens to my home town, I hope it's after I'm dead. No, it definitely will happen in my lifetime. Sigh
I've never done a "life update" like this one. It's kinda neat. I really should do more with the front page, though. It kinda sucks. I'm not a web designer so maybe I'll just ask ChatGPT for ideas on what to put and then kinda build stuff myself based on the list it spits out at me. That's a post for another time.
You know what? To hell with the stock market. I'm not gonna give you advice on how to buy your cares away after you make a fortune mooning some flash-in-the-pan shitcoin. I'm not gonna tell you what a nest egg is, or what the "T" in "ETF" is. I'm not gonna tell you the best Philippine cities to retire in to maximize your dollar. Those tips are for idiots.
I'm gonna tell you something that's absolutely gonna change your life more than some dumb personal finance or life motivation stuff. I will disclaim that it's something I'm still figuring out. But because I'm in the throes of it right now, you had better take my perspective seriously if you want to start making gains in your own life.
You know sleep? That thing we do for like a third of our lives or whatever the statistic is? Your body absolutely NEEDS that stuff. I'm serious. If you can't sleep, you can't live. You make poor decisions and you die an unfulfilled shell of a person. You ever try and run a car when there's dirt and ice and nutella inside the engine? Yeah, you can't. You gotta clean that stuff out.
Our brains poop, by the way. I like to harp on about this point every so often because not only is it a weird thing to think about, but it puts into perspective just how fucking important sleep is. It's not just recharging batteries and sorting memories into piles. It's literally about clearing toxic garbage out of your brain. You don't get that shit out and you are slowly killing yourself.
Sleep is one of those things that everyone just assumes they're doing well, until one day they fall asleep in an awkward place and realize they've been a zombie for too long. I think my country's caffeine addiction definitely hides this truth from us, to some extent.
But why and how are we doing sleep wrong?
The first "how" is easy. Sleep hygiene, a term I'm not fond of because I have weird aversions to things, is better known as "doomscrolling TikTok in your bed when you should have been asleep hours ago." It's that thing that I think we've been doing more of, where we just check our phone in bed. We check our phones at all times. As someone who is perpetually socially awkward, I love having a phone to pretend-check as a graceful exit from an awkward situation. But even I have my weaknesses, and I'll catch myself pulling out the phone to blankly check the same 2 or 3 places whenever I'm bored. The bedroom is not the place to do this. You don't need to be militant about it, and hell, some people have to be available after hours for shit, but trust me, put your phone away and if you're gonna use it, don't use it while you're in bed.
This one is a bit hypocritical of me to say since I use my computer in bed. See, I told you I was still learning. My therapist suggested I decouple the PC space from the bed space to promote better sleep hygiene, so I'm gonna be doing that soon, for the greater good of myself.
The next "how" is stimuli. Maybe that's just more sleep hygiene. Set up your environment so that you fall asleep and you stay asleep. If you need music, set music, but make sure it doesn't run all night and wake you up. If you like lights, put them on a timer so you don't wreck your circadian rhythm. If you need to sleep naked, I guess sleep naked. I'm not your mother. The stuff that helps you fall asleep may not be good at helping you stay asleep, so plan the two items separately and with as little extra effort required as possible.
Another "how" is breathing. As someone who can't breathe, let me be the first to confidently tell you that breathing is important. If you can't do that while sleeping, then you really aren't sleeping. Try and get a sleep study done so you can figure out where you are with your nocturnal nourishment. Sleep apnea, asthma, etc.
Another "how" that is kinda tangential is trauma. I'm not really a trauma survivor the way other people I know are. But that affects sleep in so many ways that I can't even begin to go into. Trauma can impact our willingness to sleep, or how well we sleep, or other stuff I'm trying to grasp at without coming off as insensitive. This is more in the crosshairs of a therapist, but it's worth tackling the problem if only in a way that gets you better sleep, because getting better sleep will color everything else about your healing process as a survivor.
The final "how" that I can think of is chemicals. Like vaguely, I guess. Eating is important. Some people say don't eat before bed, but they also say don't go to bed on an empty stomach, and some people lean back in their recliners after dinner and go "you know, it's the tryptophan that makes you tired." Where in the hell was I going with this
Melatonin may or may not improve your sleep. THC and marijuana-derived products may help you induce a state that's way more conducive to good sleep. Also, if the idea of self-preservation antagonizes you, antihistamines are also a good sleep augmenter, provided you have the free time.
I'm sure there's other stuff too, like the quality of your mattress and following strict sleep schedules and stuff. Yeah, like I'm currently not doing. Point is, I want to live longer, and maybe you should too, so take a hint from what I'm about to do in 5 minutes and get some sleep. Some GOOD sleep.
I had a tumor cut out last month.
I've only been "under the knife" once other time to get my wisdom teeth taken out. This time was different, the tumor was something called a "Glomus tumor" which just barely sat under the skin or something, meaning it's quick to excise and they only need local anaesthetic. The tumor itself was probably the size of a plastic bead or something. It's likely benign, but it seemed to press against my nerves in just the right spot to hurt like hell.
So I go into the surgeons last week, they shave my fuzzy arm a little bit, and then they inject the anaesthetic. The surgeon comes in with this cute Asian understudy, and I'm already sweating because the A/C on the top floor doesn't work. I'm just hoping this'll be over quickly.
The very first time I ever got my blood drawn, I committed the cardinal sin of watching them do it. The moment I saw that bluish dark red fluid extricate itself from my body through a tube, I felt so physically unwell. That's mine! That's the essence of my very life! Why are you taking that from me!? I think I got a little pale and a little queasy, and I had to sit in my car for a few minutes afterward to regain myself. A few months later, I got blood drawn again. And this time, I didn't look, but it didn't matter. The stage of expectations had already been set. I felt the prick of the needle, and within moments I turned ivory-white in front of the nurse and several of my coworkers. I had to be laid on the floor with my legs up, while my vision got all...noisy...and someone was trying to hand me juice and crackers.
So, I don't do too well with blood loss anymore. And wouldn't you believe, there was a lot of blood loss with the excision, too. I didn't look. I felt the pain of the first incision from the doctor's scalpel, but the anaesthetic took on quickly and everything after that just felt like numb tugging. But I could feel that I was losing something, and that something was probably pretty important to staying conscious. I clasped my shirt uncomfortably, staring at a fixed point in the ceiling like some newly-minted trauma victim. I was breathing heavily through my nose, my face and head were absolutely beaded with sweat, and noise began to cloud my vision. I wanted that operation to be over so bad. I didn't dare look. It felt like another minute on that table and I would have certainly passed out.
Is this dramatic? Absolutely. But in the end, I lost enough blood for my mind to kinda lose itself in some way. My doctor says I have really bad high blood pressure. Maybe that has something to do with it? But yeah, turns out blood is really important for you.
Anyways, I get patched up, I get my bearings, and I head home. I wanted to ask them to see the tumor, but I unfortunately couldn't get the timing right. I can't say I'm nostalgic for it anymore.
So I get home with this recently-closed wound, and am told I can't shower for like 2 days. Luckily I was off work the next 2 days, but because I had just gotten off work prior to the surgery, and because I work in a rather dirty environment, that meant 2 days of sleeping in my own filth and just letting it hang out all over my sheets and headphones and whatnot. I couldn't really "wrap" the wound area or anything. But yeah, my bed has trace amounts of dried blood and nicotene and cigarette ash and stuff. God, I can't wait for this thing to fully heal so I can fully disinfect my place.
The funny thing about tumors is that people always think they're Hollywood tumors: those big undulating growths that show up just to kill someone a few minutes later in some heart-tugging hospital scene. So of course, when I come back to work gauzed up like I just fought off an English mugger, I get so many wide-eyed platitudes, like this tumor was threatening to yank me out of this mortal plane or something. I don't like attention, but I do take a perverse pleasure in bait-and-switching people with something that seems way more dramatic than it actually is. Leading with noncontextualized shock value might not even be a useful or even healthy tactic when telling stories, but I love catching people off-guard like that. The key is to have a quick and effective line on hand to de-escalate the conversation in case they start to freak out.
So yeah, lots of the same interaction for the first few days. What's that bandage? OMG You had a tumor? Did they put you fully under? Can you use your arm? etc etc etc for several days.
Honestly, if the repetitive social interactions are any indicator, I'm glad the tumor was benign. I can't imagine having to constantly give news to people of varying importance that I've got 6 months left to live or something. After a certain point, I should just stop explaining and instead hand them a business card with all the FAQ's about my impending death. I bet Vistaprint would even give me a discount.