I’m not using my blog as a political soapbox. I’m not going to be openly choosing sides or trying to influence anyone to do the same. The only thing I want to encourage people to do is simply vote. I do my best to never miss an election that I’m eligible to vote in. Local, State, Federal, whatever.
Don’t let anyone tell you that your vote doesn’t matter. Don’t let yourself be swayed in any way so as not to exercise your right to vote.
If you’re among those that are already convinced that “my one vote won’t matter” then let me point something out. If you do think this thought, imagine how many thousands upon thousands of other people who think and act the same. You are not just another “drop in the bucket” if all of you vote instead of abstaining.
But if you still choose not to vote, then don’t complain about the results.
To me, knowing your life’s direction means understanding what drives you to action and fulfills you. Having a sense of fulfillment usually leads to some amount of happiness. Unfortunately, I just kind of go with the flow most of the time, no major drive to act, so I never really get a solid sense of fulfillment to know that I’m going the right way with my life.
If I’m in the right place and time, and someone needs help in a way I can help them, then I provide people with my time and effort to make sure they get that help. If I can’t directly help them but know who can then I point them that way and make sure that they connect.
Outside of all of that, I don’t actively seek out opportunities to help.
In retrospect, as I’m writing this post out, I’d say my lack of drive is probably because I’ve never made a connection with helping people in ways that I know I can do continuously. Like some authors who write books and know that their stories have helped readers around the world, which would help drive them to keep writing. The ways I’ve helped are always relatively brief. (Does this make sense?)
Maybe this is part of why I’m pushing through with writing every day.
Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?
So many people throughout history have provided wise words that hold some measure of “magic” that makes them resonate with others. There are many choices, from simple sentences to long form narratives, that we can choose from. When I first read this prompt I couldn’t decide where I wanted to go with my answer because I have four different sources of inspiration, but I think I’ll share them all with you in the order of most consistent impact they have had on my life.
The first one is simple and incredibly important. One that I think should resonate with everyone, and if you’ve watched the recent Fallout series from Amazon then you’ve heard it. It’s “The Golden Rule”. Do unto others as you would have done unto you. Now, I try to remind myself of this every day, because I believe there is so much truth to those words, however, I take it a step further. I don’t want to let people walk all over me or push me around. I won’t strike first, because I wouldn’t want to be hit, but I won’t let someone who WOULD strike first have that power over me. I won’t show them unnecessary kindness or respect if I can clearly see they mean to harm me or have otherwise ill intent. I show them the kind of treatment I would except for myself if I were in their shoes. I’ll leave it at that and let you all mull it over.
The second one is just as short and simple, if a slight bit fanciful. It comes from the game Tales of Symphonia, spoken by the character Kratos. Courage is the magic that turns dreams into reality. I don’t necessarily remind myself of this day in and day out like The Golden Rule, but I like to remind myself of this when I feel like I need to take a leap of faith. It falls in the same realm as “nothing ventured, nothing gained” and all the other phrases that sound similar.
The third and fourth ones I’ll lump together more so because they’re too long to contain in a simple blog post. Third one is very much like the second one and is probably much more familiar to many people. It’s The Man in the Arena from Teddy Roosevelt. Regardless of his history and controversies from his lifetime, there is a measure of truth to his words. I’ll let you choose to look it up so that I can move right into the fourth one from Bruce Lee. I find his essay The Passionate State of Mind to be a wonderful window into the minds and souls of individuals. Self-awareness, ego, pride, self-worth. How we see and value ourselves as compared to others. Well, I keep articles bookmarked for both of these sources of inspiration so that at any given time, if I feel the need to, I can refer back to them. I would encourage you all to look into them and see how they resonate with you.
Earlier this year for Bloganuary I talked about how I see July as basically the epitome of Summer. Adding onto this with today’s writing prompt, my favorite holiday is probably July 4th, or Independence Day, here in the States. However, it’s only my favorite holiday because of the timing and not 100% for what it represents, because that has been used for some measure of political manipulation.
Anyways, in more detail, it is my favorite holiday because it’s hot outside, you can stay out late, there are fireworks (when used responsibly and respectfully), and we do lots of grilling and water balloon fights. My family has an absolute blast around this time every year.
The last time I used a tent was several years ago. My parents had to travel out of state for a work conference, and they needed someone to stay on the farm to care for the horses. Rather than drive down from home every day for a week or staying in my parents house, I decided to camp out in the tiny little “forest” behind their house. My brother decided to join me as well and set up his own tent a little off from my own.
We camped out for a week, cooked food over a small fire, and bathed in an unused 500 gallon plastic watering trough that I fixed up. (A tank heater failed to shut off correctly over the winter and melted a hole through the bottom.)
I’ve always been a night owl, no matter how much I’ve adjusted to working daytime hours. I’ll take a nap after work or just be up late on the weekend and I’ll hit a period where I feel incredibly productive or focused, and part of that is because of the way I perceive the world. Night time and very early in the morning is peaceful and quiet. The world is still. Nobody is around to bother you. No extra effort to block out the distractions.
With the creation of emojis, humanity has come full circle and returned to its ancient roots of communication, and we have an amazingly well developed understanding of how to communicate via language. Yet emojis, unlike ancient cave drawings and modern spoken languages, can offer extremely complex messaging that people’s minds can rapidly digest.
And we use them for jokes and to troll our friends.
Or maybe that’s just me and my friends, I don’t know. I use a very small selection of built-in “emojis” on our phones. Typically just the standard smileys or whatever is default for Messenger reactions, plus the Flex emoji because my Magic group uses it a lot.
Where I differ in all of this is on Discord because I can use a much wider variety, and they’re also much easier to customize and design. In fact, here’s a sample!
My latest favorite is the last one in the Favorites section. The evil plan smile has been used a lot in the last couple weeks.
So many to choose from and this is only a very small amount that is available to use to express ourselves.
Anyone who has been following me on my journey of getting back into the swing of a consistent writing cadence might already know a few things I like talking about.
Video games and related media are a big thing for me. I could talk about strategies and tips/tricks or even just the history of games all day. With the exceptions of Racing and Fighting genres, I’m familiar enough with most of the rest to talk about (or at least understand) a huge variety of games. On console vs PC, how are they played, niches and tropes of the stories, design and functionality of game mechanics, the subjects run deep.
I’ve also spent roughly the last decade immersing myself into Magic: The Gathering, and I love talking about almost all the same subjects mentioned above because they’re just that similar! It makes it easy to jump from one to the other. There are almost 27,000 unique cards in the game and millions of people who play. This leads to a massive variety in deck designs across multiple formats as well as so many different play styles. I will add that I don’t play competitively and so I never really pay attention to that aspect of the overarching global Magic community. I just love playing the game and reading up on the stories/history of the characters and the worlds they come from.
I’d say those are the two biggest topics I like to discuss. I’m big into anime and manga as well, but I just don’t discuss it with many people or very often. Same goes for books and movies/TV. Occasionally a conversation drifts towards one of these topics and I can just go off on fun little tangents.
So, if you like the same topics/subjects as I do, maybe we can spark up a conversation about it someday.
When is the last time you took a risk? How did it work out?
I’m seeing a trend in the prompts lately, and you might think it would have gotten easier to answer them after being introspective of my life to cover the variations on risks and regrets. Well, it’s not any easier today than it was the last couple of times.
On the subject of “risks” I would hazard to guess most people will have a similar understanding or underlying assumption, and that is risks can have consequences. Sure, there are usually positive outcomes in the form of rewards, too, but we don’t think of the consequential outcomes as being a simple negative with zero detrimental impact toward ourselves. More often it is that consequences are hurtful and/or scary.
With all that in mind, I honestly can’t recall the last or most recent time I took a risk that held a potential consequence that could be detrimental to my life or livelihood. So, the latest risk? It was probably last year when I finally took my motorcycle out after getting it running again. Every time I go out on my bike I have to remain vigilant because I’m just a squishy sack of meat, blood, and bone that would lose in a fight against a four-wheeled vehicle. I don’t want to be a meat crayon, so I try to minimize the risks there by wearing protective gear.
Anyways, it worked out fine, no accidents or hospital visits, and I’ll very likely be taking my bike out again when the weather finishes warming up around here.
I’m not great with money, but I’m not BAD with money either, I’ve just chosen priorities that don’t allow me to live an excruciatingly frugal and bland life. I like to have fun and enjoy my (occasionally expensive) hobbies. Sometimes, though, life throws something at you that you can’t pass up.
Aside from the odd lottery ticket here or there when the jackpots are enormous, I don’t typically gamble. No video lottery or keno, no bingo, no casinos, etc. The risks involved in gambling just aren’t worth it. I have my retirement savings through work that are technically stocks/funds, but I consider the stock market to be gambling. Unless you have a shit ton of money to spread around and still live a comfortable life, it’s not a viable source of income because there is too great a chance of losing it all. So, for a long time now I’ve never really put much time or money into the stock market. Until the GameStop craze happened a few years ago.
I missed the window in January of 2021 to get in cheap right before the huge spike in the stock price for GameStop and some of the others that were in the same boat, but I kept watch and found an opportunity to jump in somewhere in the middle. Initially I was going to just be a spectator, but then I got my income tax refund.
Now, I didn’t jump all in with my refund money. I used some of it to chip at some debts and only used a relatively small amount toward the stocks. I invested enough that, should I catch another spike, I could see a decent gain and sell. Then I waited. June rolled around and the spike hit well enough that I decided to not gamble any further and sell. I made enough money in that short term gain to basically equal one of my paychecks at the time. I knew enough about capital gains to know that I would have to declare this on my taxes the following year, and rather than have to worry about it later I just made a payment directly to the IRS for what I believed to be the tax on short term capital gains on the small amount I had “won” from this gamble, and then I was truly done.
It wasn’t a huge risk because I could still financially survive and not worry about incurring losses, but I obviously don’t regret it because I made a little extra money. Not life changing money, but money I didn’t have before. That’s all that mattered.
The Dragon's Grove 