Month: March 2024

Never enough time for hobbies

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

What do you wish you could do more every day?

Hobbies are a great way to pass the time. Unfortunately, we live in an age where work is a necessity and it can take up a lot of time. Not just with the actual work, but also getting ready for and traveling to work. Oh, and responsibilities like taking care of your home, cleaning, feeding yourself and/or your family. All those “pesky little activities” that suck up your time.

Truthfully, I don’t mind all those “extra” responsibilities outside of my desire to spend oodles upon oodles of time on hobbies. I often enjoy most of those things well enough as it is anyway.

The problem is that I have a bunch of hobbies that I bounce around from one to another. Reading, playing video games, writing, Magic: The Gathering, painting miniatures, putting together those wooden constructions that come with instructions as if they were like LEGO’s. I just want to do all these things all the time! Sadly, I have to pick and choose, day by day, which ones I do.

Oh well, maybe if I get to retire someday, then I’ll get to do more of each.

Wanting a new tattoo

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What tattoo do you want and where would you put it?

I only have one tattoo, a dragon on my left side, and I have plans for it to someday have a friend on my right side.

The backstory of my dragon tattoo (and the eventual phoenix that I want) starts with my Dad. He got one a long time ago (we’re talking nearly 50 years ago) when he was in the military. Well, my siblings and I all wanted to get tattoos eventually, and my younger brother was the first to get his dragon tattoo around 10 or so years ago, which spurred on our sister to get hers not long after. I would get mine a couple years later.

Unfortunately, as old tattoos do when they age, my Dad’s tattoo faded a little and the lines blurred together. So, when it came time for my sister to make the move to get hers done, she took a picture of Dad’s dragon tattoo to use as a base. She used her photo editing skills, traced what she could of it, and tried restoring it enough for her tattoo.

I did something similar. I have a friend who went to school for video game art and design, so I commissioned him to do roughly the same thing my sister did, except that he would be allowed to add a bit of his own style and flair. After I had taken the redesigned dragon and gotten my ink done, I went back to the same friend and commissioned the phoenix that I want to go on my other side. (The idea for the style matching side tattoo actually came from my younger brother. He has his dragon on the back of one of his calves and a style matched unicorn on the other.)

The refreshed art
The tattoo I have
The tattoo I want

There are definitely other tattoos I’d like to get someday, but they’re still only ideas and nothing as complete as these two pieces.

One word of many

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What is one word that describes you?

I’m glad this prompt doesn’t say “what is the one word that describes you?” One word alone is not enough to describe a person in their entirety, and someone might choose a different word to describe you versus the one you choose for yourself. Which is precisely what happened in a Leader Outing I was part of a long time ago when I worked for the “Big Red Circles” store.

I was a new Team Leader for the overnight shift, and at some point we did a group activity outing to a pottery store where we all got to paint our own mugs. The activity also included us passing our mugs around to have each person write a word or two that comes to mind when thinking about the original owner of each mug.

So, pick a word! Except “Hi”, the gaming controller, and the upside down surprised face for obvious reasons.

I’d like to think that all of these still apply, except for “puppy” because I never had one (it’s my roommates dog.)

Being complimented

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Daily writing prompt
What was the best compliment you’ve received?
View all responses

Unfortunately, this post might come across as a bit of a humble brag, but the prompt is practically asking for it.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate any and all compliments I receive, I just usually feel awkward about them because I don’t much like the attention.

A majority of the compliments I get are at work. My manager loves to sing our praises and acknowledges the gifts and talents that each of us on her team bring to the table. So, when she starts going with handing out the compliments I usually just respond in a manner that says “I was just doing what I was supposed to do.” or something of the sort. I apply myself to my job in the ways I know best and that’s all there is to it, so I don’t usually give it any extra thought.

As for an exact compliment, well, I don’t have one at hand because they’re all on Teams, my email, or in a Christmas card (or something similar) that I don’t recall where I stashed them.

I’ll paraphrase a compliment from my manager: “Taylor, I am so blessed to have you on the team and I don’t know where we would be without the gifts and talents you bring each and every day. Thank you for always being willing to jump in and use your skills with Power BI and Excel to help with creating new tools and reports to support the efforts of your teammates.”

As for whether that would qualify as the “best” compliment I ever received I couldn’t say, because, again, my manager likes to give them out frequently enough that I have a hard time selecting just one. (For the record, she doesn’t just give them out like candy, I maybe get compliments like this once a month.)

Cross-country modes of transportation

Taylor Burian2 Comments

You’re going on a cross-country trip. Airplane, train, bus, car, or bike?

I feel like the “or” is incredibly limiting, especially considering the scale of the contiguous 48 states. Honestly, who would select a bike to cross over a couple thousand miles?

Okay, I’m sure there are some people who would choose the bike, but not me.

I’ve crossed large spans of the country by plane, and it’s wildly different than by car, but I’ve only ever traveled across a max of four or five states by car, all in the western half. I’ve also had to travel from one side of the state to the other by bus, and while that trip was interesting to be able to see the environment around us without worrying about the road, that trip wasn’t entirely pleasant.

If I had to pick just one mode of transportation for a cross-country trip it would be by train. I’ve always wanted to take a train and watch the sprawling countryside. Sitting in a private room, reading and writing, eating in the dining car. All those kinds of things that you see in movies and TV shows that make it seem incredibly appealing.

Unfortunately it is very cost prohibitive, especially because I would want a sleeper unit.

Well, in the event I somehow pull it off or the costs come way down, I do have an idea of how I would go about it.

The first place to start would be in the northeast and traveling south along the Atlantic coast. Then I would take a westbound route, hopefully to Washington or Oregon, and then repeat the southbound travel along the Pacific.

I’ve looked up some of the numbers previously, and I would likely need a solid month to accomplish the full trip, maybe more depending on availability.

I wonder if I could work from the train so I can save PTO? That would be interesting.

A day off

Taylor Burian1 Comment

Some days I see the daily writing prompt and just don’t feel like I’m going to have a solid answer, no matter how much time I take to think it through. So, rather than struggle to write it out I’ll just take a day off to let my brain rest.

If you feel like this, take a day off. We can’t always be “on” day after day. That’s how we experience burnout.

Affirmations and Coping

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Daily writing prompt
What strategies do you use to cope with negative feelings?
View all responses

Disclaimer: I am not a mental health professional, nor a professional of any medical field at all, so these thoughts are my own. Right, wrong, or indifferent.

Once again, I was up late enough to see this prompt at the turn of midnight giving myself time to think and digest how I wanted to respond. I put my phone aside, laid my head down on my pillow, and started running through potential openers and content.

The entire workday later, I have forgotten every word I thought up which means I get to stare at my monitor, falling in and out of my usual daydream like daze, as I try to start over.

Emotions, and positive/negative feelings are complicated and complex. No matter how we try to dissect and understand them, boiling them down to singular words to describe our feelings in as simple a form as possible, there is always the underlying complex nature of emotions. How we respond to them, handle and control them, will vary from person to person based on personal life experiences.

I’m not going to delve too deeply into this subject, but I wanted to at least address the fact that I have different measures for handling different emotions and negative feelings.

Anger: I try not to let things get to me. I do not anger easily, and as I’ve gotten older (and hopefully wiser) I have reached a point where it is really difficult to anger me. Someone makes a mistake that directly impacts me, hurting or setting me back, and instead of flying off the handle I take a moment to recognize as many factors as possible that led to current situation. I recognize that dropping everything to get angry, to expend that kind of energy, doesn’t fix things and only serves to hinder me. That being said, if someone REALLY crosses a line, to the point of hurting and outright disrespecting me, my family and friends, I can and will let the anger rise a little bit because sometimes I need to get a point across to prevent that line being crossed again.

Frustration and Helplessness: I’ve decided to lump these two together because I feel they go hand in hand. I try not to let myself fall into situations that could lead to frustrating outcomes by recognizing my limits and the risks involved. Preemptive measures, if you will, learned and earned through life. Although I am not very religious I do have a response for those times when preemptive measures fail, and that is the Serenity Prayer. You don’t need to be incredibly devout to recognize the simplistic power of an affirmation built on the Serenity Prayer. If you don’t know the Serenity Prayer, here you go. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.” I do not let myself get frustrated and feel helpless when things don’t work out or something fails. I take a step back to recognize that there may have just been something I couldn’t control, and move forward by reminding myself of the intent of that prayer.

I’m realizing that I could probably go on and on, and this post would become a self-help book, so I’ll leave it there because I feel like those are the most prominent negative feelings I usually have to deal with. I know I could share about things like sadness and depression, hate and fear, but a lot of times those are all handled under similar measures to anger, frustration, and helplessness. I feel those things, I recognize what caused them, and find a way to pull myself out of them so that I don’t do something stupid. I always want to be moving forward, and hopefully someone who stumbles across this post can find something that helps them move forward as well.

Lose yourself to the daydream

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What activities do you lose yourself in?

If daydreaming counts, then that is one thing I can lose myself into every single day. I even had such a problem with it as a kid in elementary school that it got me in trouble. I can space out in seconds, the world in front of my eyes blurring and going out of focus as I let my imagination run wild.

Usually when this happens I’m thinking about hypothetical situations and potential responses, or trying to think of new ideas for writing.

It took a long time but I’ve more or less gotten it under control. I try to use it only when I need to give my brain a break from work or if I get stuck, instead of just letting myself daydream out of boredom.

Otherwise, if I’m not losing myself to daydreaming, it’s my hobbies. I can totally lose myself for hours playing video games, reading a book, painting miniatures, or building new Commander decks for Magic: The Gathering. All of those activities have resulted in very late nights even when I have work the next day. It’s not uncommon for me to go until 2:00 AM because of these things. I’ve even recently caught myself doing it playing an early access survival crafting game called Nightingale. I look at the clock, see that it’s getting late and tell myself just fifteen more minutes. Over and over. Until the next thing I know it’s 1:38 AM and I should have been in bed a few hours before.

So, if I’m not preoccupied with my hobbies, I’m daydreaming. Some days I wonder how I get anything done.

Watching on repeat

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What movies or TV series have you watched more than 5 times?

Aside from a couple of anime series (Trigun and Hellsing) there aren’t many shows I’ve watched more than 5 times. My Netflix watch history would disagree, but that’s because my roommate and I used to leave Netflix playing all day for his dog while we were at work. (I had requested account history and learned that his dog had been subjected to watching every season of Parks & Rec, The Office, and Trailer Park Boys nearly a dozen times each.)

Looking at movies I can probably only name a few that have reached the same level of rewatching. McHale’s Navy (the 1997 movie with Tim Curry and Tom Arnold), and Clue (also with Tim Curry) are the two that come to mind as I’ve probably watched both a couple dozen times since I was a kid. I’m fairly certain that while growing up my siblings have each had their turn to subject me to their favorite movies nearly as many times, but I’ve put a mental block on that time. Teetering close to the 5 time threshold is Scott Pilgrim, though I don’t recall if that’s more or less.

I’m sure there are others, I just don’t care enough to recall them because more often than not they just get put on in the background and aren’t really “watched” while I’m doing something else.

Disbelief in the superstitious

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Are you superstitious?

Simple answer: Not really, I guess?

Complicated answer: Superstition stems from the irrational idea that something will happen (usually a bad thing) if you do (or don’t do) something specific, but with no explanation of HOW, like breaking a mirror or a black cat crossing your path. So I often don’t put stock in those kinds of things.

As far as I can tell, more often than not it’s all just coincidence, and the only reason this information sticks around is because of the human need for rationalization of the unknown and unexplainable, usually through storytelling.

All that being said, I’m sure there are SOME superstitions that hold some merit to them, but not for any unknown or mystical reason. Like walking under a ladder, which is just plain stupid and unsafe. Some parents probably saw their children walking under ladders while people were working on them and made the connection that if they told said children a story about bad luck curses then they wouldn’t do it anymore. (I say it this way because I am fairly certain that most parents these days don’t actually know the origin of the ladder superstition in the first place.)

As for why I sound hesitant in my simple answer above, it’s probably because there’s potential for things to be omens rather than superstitions. Not like Biblical omens, but just signs of something that actually can be explained. If you look in a mirror and it cracks it’s probably not a sign of bad luck (just odd timing on your part) but rather just a sign or symptom of the way the world around it is, like something resonating with it happened to catch the slightest imperfection in the glass and making it crack. Little things like that which most people are oblivious to because of how subtle they can be.

Does that make sense to you? I hope I made it make sense.