Tag: blogging

A wonderful teacher

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Daily writing prompt
Who was your most influential teacher? Why?
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This is going to sound a little weird. I don’t know that I could qualify a teacher in my life who had the most influence on me. However, I can say that I know a teacher who qualifies beyond that on the influence she has had on the lives of my family and friends.

Roughly 20 years ago, when my family still lived in Colorado, Kelly Gibson was my teacher, and my sister’s teacher before me. She taught English and Theater. Sadly, I had other English teachers, so I had the amazing chance to have her as a teacher for one Theater and Improv class instead.

As I recall, my sister had started participating in theater before high school, and my mom helped with costumes and makeup, so if anyone could share more information about Kelly it would be them. If this leaves you wondering why I would bring her up as an influential teacher despite my limited time with her, it’s because of the reach she has managed to develop in the years since.

If you know who Guy Kawasaki is, you may have heard him talk with Kelly on his podcast Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People. If not, you can listen to the particular episode on Spotify here. (If you don’t use Spotify, I’m sorry, but you can look it up by title “Kelly Gibson: The Real World of a Public School Teacher”.)

So, while she may not have had the level of influence on me that I may have hoped for when compared to the time my sister got with her, you can hopefully tell just how influential she is even if I don’t have anything to provide as an answer to the prompt.

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.

Being complimented

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What was the best compliment you’ve received?
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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.)

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

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What strategies do you use to cope with negative feelings?
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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.

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.

Dear Future Me

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Write a letter to your 100-year-old self.

There is a very high probability that I won’t see the age of 100, unless medical science finds a way to extend my life by an extra 30 years, give or take a decade.

Either way, here goes.

Dear Future Me,

How is the year 2088? Just kidding, I don’t care because Current Me (Past You) wouldn’t be able to receive your response, but I’ll catch up eventually and learn about it anyway when I become You. I hope Current Me and Tomorrow Us did alright did alright by You.

See you eventually,

Past You

Always looking to learn something new

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What is the last thing you learned?

This is hard to pick out. I haven’t kept track of the exact items or concepts I’ve learned recently, because I’m always looking to make sure I understand what I’m doing and improving myself along the way.

Of course, I’m also probably just making this out to be more difficult than it needs to be. If I didn’t want to think about this from the angle of “worthwhile lesson” I could just list off things I’ve learned from random YouTube videos that aren’t about useful life skills.

Oh well.

I guess I could just go down that route anyway.

I learned some interesting tricks that people use to speedrun Baldur’s Gate 3. Like the way that you can effectively carry an NPC while invisible, or you can carry a dead teammate in your inventory, so long as your character has a high enough Strength stat. In conjunction with carrying the body of a teammate in your inventory, you can also “reverse pickpocket” that teammate’s body into an NPC’s inventory and then use a teleportation skill that swaps positions between character and dead teammate.

Wild things happening in these any% speedruns. If I could have figured these things out on my own my first playthrough would have been WAY different.

Failure is the name of the game

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How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?

I glanced at this prompt as I was getting ready for work this morning and used my short “meditative morning commute” to let my thoughts build themselves around the question.

FromSoftware has built up a reputation for making difficult games, however, the reality is that their games don’t follow or utilize many standard/common game design elements that the majority of players are used to. This made for the eventual creation of the “Soulsborne” genre of games. Brutally difficult for beginners, but exceedingly rewarding with that feeling of accomplishment when you make progress and beat a seemingly insurmountable boss.

Their game Elden Ring is no exception. In fact, it dials it up a notch!

You have the potential to build your character for any play style you choose (and yet you will invariably get your ass kicked at some point.) I always liked doing  dexterity builds, using light weapons for quick attacks and being able to dodge out of the way, so that’s where I started my character build. I ended up layering in magic quite a bit not long after starting.

Being a dexterity and magic focused build, my character was squishy. Not a lot of defense or health so most everything, not just bosses, could stagger or kill me in one or two hits. It took a while to get used to the timings of everything, dying over and over again, but eventually I did.

Every time I died, every failure, became a chance to try something different. Charging in and catching the enemies off guard? Checked. Sneaking in and pulling off a backstab? Tried. Attacking with magic from a distance? Sometimes a good start. Learning the parry timings? That eventually became paramount to my build. It took a lot of experimenting, learning different magics, finding and trying different weapons and shields over the course of more than a hundred hours just to get through the game.

There was one particular “hidden” boss that I got really stubborn about wanting to beat. I didn’t keep an exact count, but I probably died 60-80 times until I finally nailed down the parry timings and learned the distances I needed to work within to control the actions of the boss so that I could make it through the fight. Amazingly, I did it without a scratch in the last attempt, AND I have it recorded! If you’re curious you can check it out on my YouTube channel that I never really used.

Two or three hours of failed attempts, dying over and over again, boiled down to a three minute fight. The feeling of satisfaction at beating it was incredible!