Preface: I hope this doesn’t come off as depressive, as it’s meant to be more reflective, but I suppose we’ll just see where it goes…
Head Stuff
For lack of a better term, lately I’ve found myself feeling very lost and disoriented.
Life is, and has been for a while, quite chaotic, but even when I sit down and identify things that I think I could do to improve the quality in general, I can’t seem to actually execute on them. Sometimes it’s because my plans are too complicated, sometimes it’s because I get overwhelmed and other things come up that displace my original plans, and sometimes it’s simply that it’s often easier to sit down and make the plans than it is to actually do the work behind them.
Part of it could be a lack of attention because I have so many different things that I want to do, but all of them require the equivalent of full-time efforts and I just can’t force myself to pick one and thus leave all of the others behind.
And it’s tough because sometimes I have that nagging feeling of what one of them could’ve been if years ago I had just picked one and really focused on it instead of dragging everything out together. I try to tell myself that just because I pick one thing and focus on it now doesn’t mean that years down the road I can’t work on something else.
It also doesn’t help that I’m more inclined than before to lean towards the projects that have money associated with them because our finances keep getting tighter and tighter, and I don’t expect that to necessarily go away until all of these kids are off to college… 😛
Sick Stuff
Since Sunday night I’ve been dealing with another kidney stone, or at least I think it’s a kidney stone … if not, I’m real curious what it is that’s had me popping so much Vicodin over the last couple of days!
That’s on top of a real nasty rash (TMI?) that I’ve been fighting for the last couple of weeks, to the point where I saw multiple doctors and got all sorts of steroids to get it to go away. The specialist also took a biopsy of two hunks of my skin, which is something I’ve never done before and can’t say that I would recommend because I’ve still got the stitches to show for it.
Simply put, I need to be taking a lot better care of my body, but everything else being so chaotic makes it really hard. On a normal workday by the time I go to the office, work a full day, and come home and try to help put the kids to bed, I’m just exhausted and barely have any energy left to do anything at all – be it more work, creative stuff, or god forbid … exercise.
Political Stuff
Trump depresses the shit out of me, in the things that he says and the policies that he’s pushing, but mostly in the numbers of followers that happily agree with every self-centered, arrogant, cruel and crude, bigoted word of it.
Capitalism feels like it’s slowly eroding my respect for brands like Disney who’ve inspired me for decades, but now just seems to take more and more because they can.
I guess I have a hard time understanding where a lot of people allocate their values to be when so much of our world lately is every man for himself, I got mine, and you’re just not working hard enough.
I saw a quote the other day with regards to how airline flights are more cramped than they’ve ever been, and the response was, “Being comfortable on an airplane is not a human right.”
How did we become so jaded when people paying for a service don’t deserve to receive that service in a reasonable manner???
At the end of the day, I guess I’d just like to see people prioritized over profits again because it’s made a lot of aspects of life really ugly and unfulfilling, and it ultimately leads to a lot of people suffering so that a few can flourish, which isn’t right.
Relaxing Stuff
Amid all of this, I’ve been spending more time doing things that I enjoy recreationally, which I suppose is a good thing.
About a week ago I turned on my Super NES Classic and started playing Final Fantasy 3 – a game which I haven’t played since high school – and that’s been a lot of fun revisiting all sorts of memories from what made that game awesome way back in the day.
I’ve also really been enjoying finding random stuff on YouTube and collecting them in Plex – old TV shows, particularly ones that never even made it to DVD because they’re often episodes that somebody encoded off of VHS tapes and whatnot! Even though I might not necessarily watch a lot of them, there’s something oddly fulfilling to organizing these random blips in history into a format that’s more appealing to the eye if I did want to watch them … i.e. what a service like Netflix could look like if perpetually changing licenses and digital rights weren’t a thing.
Final Thoughts
Is it bad to yearn for what I think my life could be instead of simply embracing the general chaos that it is now?
It would be one thing if there was an end in sight to said chaos, but when I think it’s going to persist for the foreseeable future, particularly when some of those things that I strive for have the possibility to bring along with them great change, it’s hard not to want to run, not walk towards them both for personal satisfaction as well as just to find a bit of relief.
Maybe it’s about pacing, and trying to figure out a progression towards that thing or things that will actually work for you. Or in my case, also learning how to put certain things on the back burner without feeling like you’re all but abandoning them completely.
I feel like the chaos would be easier to deal with if there were some light at the end of the tunnel – something to remind me that all of this struggling isn’t being done in vain.
And that at the end of the day, it’s all going to work out and everything is going to be ok. Whatever that is.