I’m not a wine drinker but I’ve heard some wines (and a lot of casks/barrels of alcohol) get better over time, and cheese’s too. Those are probably the most commonly known things, though.
Some pieces of pop culture age really well, like TV shows, video games, and music. Some people might disagree on the grounds that “aging means they change over time” but I have a different approach. Think cartoons from the 90’s. The references and jokes that flew over our heads as children that we now understand as adults. Now, I don’t have specific examples for music, but video games have some classics like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6. The stories and decisions that you have to make in those games can change how things progress, and sometimes the ramifications escape our notice as children, but if we go back to play them again years later we likely uncover something new.
Take some time to look back at those things you enjoyed as a child, and see what you can find that might have a different feel today.
“Bedtime” is supposed to be between 10:00PM and 11:00PM but often times I’m awake later. Once I’m in bed, sleep usually hits anywhere between 11:30PM and 3:00AM. Obviously, that’s not good, especially when I typically have to be up by 7:30AM to get to work on time. Though, I usually make up for it (a smidge) by going home over lunch to take a nap. Sometimes, I just lay there, and other times it’s actually a very restful power nap.
That’s all during the week. Weekends are worse, sadly. Depending on the weekend’s priorities, I’ll still fall asleep at the same times, but waking up is a whole different story. If I have something important going on and it happens before Noon? Then I usually am awake an hour or two beforehand (unless I fell asleep REALLY late, and then it’s more like 30 minutes.) If I have nothing going? I’m most certainly sleeping in. I’ll TRY to be awake before Noon on those kinds of days, but it isn’t uncommon for me to sleep until 1:00PM.
It’s not a very healthy sleep cycle, but such is life.
What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life?
Where do I start? What even is a “strategy for comfort”?
I buy clothes I find comfy for work that still fit the business casual criteria so that I can just wear them for a couple extra hours at home, no need to go through extra effort to change. Does that count?
I have a tendency to sleep hot, so I installed a wall mounted fan that sits above and on the side of my bed that I use to blow air across my head and shoulders. I keep the remote for it next to my pillow so I can turn it on when I start getting warmer. I also keep three different kinds of blankets on my bed to shift between as needed for the same reason. (A comforter, a fleece, and a thin cooling blanket.)
I guess that’s about it? Maybe include naps? Naps are always good, even if you end up just sleeping. (I call those napcidents.)
In the same vein as being worried about the future, I try to remain optimistic and look for the good in whatever tomorrow brings. If all I ever did was wring my hands worrying about tomorrow then I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
What will happen, will happen.
Focus on the possibilities granted by the actions you took today to set yourself up for tomorrow. I’ve always had some kind of inkling about that thought but never truly put it into words.
Admittedly, what solidified the thought was watching a couple of videos from Dr. K (HealthyGamerGG on YouTube) pointing out the very same thing but in a different manner. Procrastination and degeneracy. If I make bad choices today (choosing video games over working on my writing) how will I feel tomorrow? Like I should probably have done something different, and even though I’m naturally upbeat and optimistic these days, I did have the problem in the back of my mind of “if I don’t do this, I’m failing and falling behind” but couldn’t seem to get started on the right foot.
It’s not like I never planned ahead for things, but oftentimes there were very specific goals in mind. Thinking about setting myself up for a better tomorrow is different because nobody really knows what will happen and the goal is elusive and fluid. (The idea of “tomorrow” might be abstract, but you can still aim for it.)
The future can be just as exciting as it can be scary. It’s all in how you frame it for yourself.
What could you let go of, for the sake of harmony?
My question back is “Harmony with what?”
Harmony with friends? Family? The world at large?
If there is something that is actively harmful from a broader perspective, and it’s perceived that going without it is for the better in the long run, then I’ll first evaluate whether I can do without it via an alternative. If no alternative is found (at the time) I’ll weigh the option of completely doing without whatever the thing is.
However, if the thing can be proven to not be broadly (or even minutely) harmful, and other people are still decrying it as such, then that’s different. The process would look a bit reversed to the one above. Deciding whether I really need it at all before determining whether or not to let it go. If it’s something I don’t really need, and it’s not serving any major/substantive purpose in my life, then I’ll look at cutting it out.
Why do I approach them differently? Generally speaking, the things we’ve built as a species have all started out as harmful in some way, but everything served a purpose. Nowadays we have so much “junk” available to us that it’s kind of mind boggling how we aren’t advancing further and faster.
Anyways, enough dodging the question. I’m not giving up eating meat, at least not anytime soon. I could do without a lot of the sugary treats and processed foods, but the only one that I feel I’m at odds with is myself and I don’t really worry about internal harmony.
Food aside, if cities in the United States were much more walkable and had better public transportation, I could go without my car. Better harmony with nature and the environment would be great for everyone.
My musical tastes have changed a lot over time, and it’s hard to pick just one genre. Some songs, bands, or even whole genres have fallen off the radar when I go to make new playlists because I just don’t find them as audibly appealing as I once did. Some hold a special place in my heart even if I don’t listen to them much anymore. 90’s and early 2000’s Alternative Rock, Punk, and Ska used to be my genres of choice when I was growing up.
Today, my favorite genres haven’t swayed too much from back then, but they’ve definitely evolved to include some new flavor. Alt-Rock, Punk, and Pop Punk (and maybe some Emo) are the heavy hitters of my current playlists.
Barring anything I’ve done in the last decade, I would try to say my most memorable vacation memories were from my childhood. Unfortunately, looking back that far everything is disjointed in my mind and I can’t pick apart which instance of my yearly family vacations to Washington state have which pieces.
So, I guess I’ll have to stick to the more recent ones that I CAN better recall, and I’ll try to keep them brief because I want to share parts from several different episodes of my adventures back to Colorado.
Also, the prompt just says memorable and not happy.
I drove back for what was supposed to be a quick weekend. One of my best friends from college was having her “golden birthday” (the birthday where your age matches the day number in your date of birth) and she had invited me as well as a few others to be there. Several things happened on that trip. I visited the Micro Center in Denver for the first time, where I bought a couple parts for my first gaming computer. We at dinner at The Melting Pot (a fondue restaurant) and bar hopped a little. Then the following morning I took off for home. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that this all happened in a briefly unseasonably mild February for South Dakota. Started my little adventure with great weather and no snow. Ended it by driving home through a snow storm. What should have been an easy 10ish hour drive ended up being over 14 or 15 hours. Then it was back to work Monday morning because I wasn’t able to take that day off ahead of time.
These next two things happened maybe a year apart, one before the aforementioned birthday trip and the other after, and each time was on what was supposed to be a very quick trip. Leave Saturday, return Sunday.
One trip to Colorado was with my younger brother, and we had the truck and horse trailer because we were taking a horse to a family friend’s place out there. Near the northeast corner of Colorado, but still in Nebraska, the truck overheats a couple miles down the interstate after we had just stopped to refuel. Thankfully that was an easy fix, and we were fortunate that a mutual acquaintance of ours and the family friend happened to see us on the side of the road (he was managing a major cattle outfit in the next city we were coming up on at the border.) He helped us find the problem, a large coolant hose came off the engine block, and then helped us get some water to mix with the remaining coolant that had spewed out. The truck was fine for the rest of the trip after that.
The second of these two particular trips was with my older brother, with the same truck as before. My older brother and I were taking yet another horse to Colorado for this trip, and he agreed to go with me so he could meet up with a friend of his (to collect some things he had left behind when he moved to South Dakota a couple years after the rest of the family.) This time, though, the truck broke down on the way BACK from Colorado, and it happened around the same relative strip of interstate around that truck stop! The truck was running fine for the most part, until we noticed the lights slowly getting dimmer and the truck began to struggle. It was later in the evening, dark outside, and we were basically in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska. We called our parents to let them know what happened. They then turned around and were able to get a hold of a tow truck that could come get us. After maybe an hour at most, a really nice tow truck driver showed up to get us. He quickly loaded up our truck on the bed of his, and then connected the horse trailer to his hitch. My brother and I hopped into the cab of his tow truck and off we went backwards along our path to the (now believed to be cursed) truck stop. The tow truck driver surprised us with a super nice gesture. Before he had reached us, he had called ahead to the Motel 6 and was able to reserve us a room! Within about 10 minutes after picking us up we were at the motel, and the truck and trailer on their way to the mechanics in the next small city back (oddly enough, the same city where the acquaintance from the previous story had come from.) We checked into our room, and given the situation, we made our way to the bar attached to the truck stop. We had a couple of drinks and just sat there reviewing that evening’s events, talked with the bartender for about an hour, and then drunkenly made our way back to our room. The hangover the next morning wasn’t great, considering the amount of alcohol in a short period of time, but it was manageable after eating a late breakfast at the truck stop restaurant (I think it was a Grandma Max’s?) So, we ate, and waited. Within a couple hours the driver showed up with the truck and trailer. He explained a bit of what happened. Turned out the alternator had failed. Apparently, there was a car show going on that weekend and so all the other mechanics in town were closed, meaning he couldn’t just get a replacement for us and he needed to do a rebuild on it. Regardless, we were grateful for all he had done on such short notice, and after confirming he had been paid, we shook hands and off we went again. The rest of that trip was, thankfully, uneventful.
Not so great of memories, not really vacations, but definitely memorable.
First off, a disclaimer of sorts. I will be the first to admit that I’m no expert, on anything, and will likely never claim to be an expert or an authority on a subject. Everything I write here is anecdotal based on experiences and observations, or interpretations of information I find online. So, if you’ve been following me on my little writing journey and thought “hey, this guy is kind of smart” then I would be flattered to know that (but I’m not doing this to prove anything of the sort) and if that thought led to an assumption of my being an authority on a subject, then hopefully this disclaimer clears that up.
As far as answering the prompt, well, I’d like to start with the fact that, in my mind, to be “an authority on a subject” requires you to be acknowledged by others as such. For that to happen, you have to prove yourself or be “elected” to such a position (and technically, those two things are not mutually exclusive, you could prove yourself for the purposes of being elected in a position of authority.)
Now, I’ve been in situations at work where I was put into positions to act as a singular point of control for maintaining access levels in a system for a department, and as part of that I had to be educated on the subject. At some point, over time, they started calling me their “guru” for it but I never claimed that for myself. (Truth be told, it was only because I was very cautious and knew how to properly search for answers on my own instead of asking someone else.)
Anyways, that’s where I stand on this prompt. I’m just a guy on the Internet writing stuff.
I used to be one of those people who, as a hopeless romantic, believed in the way Hollywood portrayed it in movies and television.
Nowadays we have all these self proclaimed relationship experts that are dividing the romantic landscape between “mystery/chase” and just being plain honest/up front. On top of that, the older I get, the less “games” I want to play when it comes to finding a romantic partner, so I end up falling into the latter camp.
All of this adds up and has created the situation I put myself into today where I’m content on my own (and have been for probably close to 10 years now) and I feel like I’ve lost what it truly means to be “romantic” because people, and society as a whole, have twisted it beyond my own personal recognition.
I don’t have time for relationship mind games, or trying to figure out what even really qualifies as romantic anymore because romance requires two people and I just want to do my own thing. I’ll just keep up the kindness and respect I usually do, and maybe someday someone will figure out how to break through to me again.
(I’d like to reiterate, I’m content on my own and this is in no way a complaint or cry for help from strange internet romance “guru’s”. I’m simply trying to answer the prompt.)
I try to live my day to day life in a way that I can be appropriately grateful to the people I interact with.
If someone does something for me, I try to make sure I end the interaction with a smile and a “thank you” because I believe that it means more to the receiver than I will likely ever know. They might be having a bad day, or have been interacting with a lot of shitty people, so if my interaction with them is peaceful then it’s just one less weight added to their conscience.
Sometimes, though, I do show my gratitude in ways that go beyond the smiles and the words “thank you”. If I’m out and about shopping, and I see something that makes me think of them, I’ll consider buying it for them with no expectations of getting anything in return. It’s just a nice gesture of mine for them being a positive part of my life.
Simple as all that. A smile, a “thank you”, and moving along. That’s the bare minimum, and it really can go a long way.
The Dragon's Grove 