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Ultimately nothing did happen

This blog wasn’t exactly a new year’s resolution; it just so happened that I started blogging again at the beginning of a new year and was somewhat resolved to blog every day. Like any pedestrian chump, though, I fell off after about a month.

Sad!

The trick is, I’ve learned, not to beat yourself up over resolutions that you make. Buddhists always say “Everyone suffers,” but if I could add a western spin to that idea, I’d say, “Everyone fails.”

It’s just true. No matter what you do, how often you do it, how good you are at it, or whether or not that thing is your passion, you will have setbacks and you will eventually face failure.

Imagine two people who make a resolution to go jogging every morning. Both people, being regular people, will eventually fail at this resolution in some wayshaperform. It just happens — they have a sick day or they forget to set an alarm or the ground is covered in ice — the world conspires against them and they can’t jog.

Womp womp! But how do they react to this failure; that’s the question.

Person A says to themselves, “My perfect record is tainted! I’d planned to run every day, but now that I’ve failed, what’s the use? Everything is horrible and life is a crap chute!” So they stay home and feel bad about their failure because it wasn’t perfect.

Person B says, “Oh, I couldn’t jog yesterday. Whoops!” and then goes jogging anyway.

I have, unfortunately, always put myself in the former category. I wish I wasn’t there, but here we are. I beat myself up for failing at goals that I have set for myself and I’m not sure what to do about it.

Other than to keep plugging away at this blog as if nothing happened. Because, ultimately, nothing did happen.

Dumb & dumber & grades

I swear I’m getting dumber and dumber as the days go on. It’s like my brain is turning into a dried up husk.

It’s not that I’m forgetting how to speak or do math (although I feel like I’m a lot slower at both of those things than I was, oh, five years ago) but that I’m feeling a lot more scatter-brained. I am all over the place.

You know that feeling you get when you walk into a room and forget why you’re there? That’s called an event boundary, and it basically happens because your mind starts a new “instance” of itself when you are in a new context. When you’re in the kitchen, kitchen-you can be perfectly aware that kitchen-you needs kitchen-your airpods, but when kitchen-you goes into the bedroom to get them, a whole new you pops up! It’s Bedroom-you, who doesn’t run the same set of processes. Bedroom-you isn’t thinking about how kitchen-you’d like to listen to a podcast while kitchen-you’re cooking; bedroom-you wonders if bedroom-your sweatpants are in the dryer or in the hamper. 

Hence, it feels like you “forgot” why you went into the bedroom just because your mind switched modes. Go back to the kitchen and, odds are, you’ll remember what you were after.

It’s like a crappy magic trick! You’re the one with the saw and you’re the one getting cut in half!

I left my kindle at work so I can’t draw pictures

See? I can remember that stuff perfectly well, but I’ll still fall victim to this psychological treachery.

The worst part of it is the way my attention span has been impacted. It’s not that I’ll be sitting and reading a book and then go, “I’m bored. I should do something else.” But I will sit down to read and find myself suddenly standing up to go do something else when I don’t even realize I’m doing it. Only when I’m elbow deep in dirty dishes will I go, “Oh, yeah, I was reading.”

This is just evidence

Anywho. I’m guessing that the problem is related to my sleep, which makes sense, since I just got done blogging about how bad my sleep patterns are.

It’s tough to decide what to do about this. Except, of course, have a cup of tea.

Of my inevitable mental decline

In other news, after a second round of grades put in the gradebook, hey, look at that, the average grades in most classes are normalizing. There aren’t nearly as many failing grades as the administration was worried about. Why? Because a student’s overall performance is no longer tied to one or two data entries.

It’s almost as if freaking out about off-track data during the first few weeks of school was a total waste of time. 

Who knew?

News flashes & routine procedures

I’ve been trying to set a bit more of a morning routine since school started back up in January. It’s always been tough for me because I’m not the most consistent sleeper in the world. On some mornings (like today), I’m able to hop right up at 5:00 AM and start doing things. On other mornings, I’m completely dragging ass and hit the snooze until 5:45. The problem is that I wake up randomly in the night and often struggle to get back to sleep, so there’s no telling if/when I’ll be well-rested.

I’m not sure what to do about that. I’ve tried to improve my sleep hygiene, but I don’t think I did that correctly (I’m still not sure what “sleep hygiene” means, exactly). I’ve tried medicine, but I’m not a huge fan of feeling super groggy. I’ve tried drinking more water, exercising, meditation, and most recently a humidifier. I’m still wildly inconsistent with my sleep.

The other problem with my morning routine is the news. I enjoy turning on the news first thing in the morning so I can see what’s going on in the country and world — my parents used to do this and I’ve always thought it was a “normal” part of getting up, but all of the news sources I can fund just … suck. It’s all either 30-minutes of “What is Donald Trump talking about today?” and/or segments on the most divisive subjects using the worst “reporting” they can muster. ABC. CBS. NBC. BBC. Their reporting is all garbage.

Not only is it bad to start your day with such rampant negativity — these bozos can’t help but spin every little thing to preserve the status quo that earns them their bread, which means treating disturbing, murderous content like it’s “just another day!” — but it’s wildly inaccurate and full of nonsense that isn’t news.

(Hill I’ll die on: Reporting on polling data doesn’t qualify as “news.” It’s a major corporation telling us how to think.)

I know I often seem flippant about current events, what with my funny little pics like this one:

But everything happening in Minnesota is so horrible I’m not sure what else to do about it. There’s video — multiple videos — of a guy being held down and executed. The Trump administration openly lies about it while the news shows the videos, and all the news will say is, “Well, shucks, fellas, it looks like we’re getting conflicting reports of what happened!” when what they should say is, “Administration officials are lying to your face.”

The whole thing does make me want to share this George Orwell line from 1984:

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

I’ve tried watching some Al Jazeera news in the morning to get more of a world perspective, but that station’s reporting is like a who’s who of starving nations, which is important but not the sort of thing I want to ponder over my morning tea. So, maybe my problem is more that the world is awful and I don’t want to hear about it at 5:00 AM.

It’s still cold and a lot of the country is buried under ice. (That sentence is true both literally and figuratively.)

Tea Times & Cold Snaps

I quit drinking coffee a couple of months ago (in an attempt, I suppose, to suck out all the remaining bits of joy from life) and it has turned me into a tremendous tea drinker.

I’m not saying “tremendous” like “I’m getting larger” but “tremendous” like “jeez is that your sixth cup already? Take it easy big fella.” You know what I mean.

I’ve tried out a few different flavors and brands of tea since December, including this bad boy:

“Black Cask Bourbon!” I thought. “I bet that taste’s great!”

It tastes like someone stuck a cigar in some scotch and then threateningly waved it at a teabag.

It makes me wonder what sorts of things are going on in the avant-garde of the tea industry? I don’t mean bubble tea or any of those new-fangled gimmicky sorts of teas with thick straws and chunks, but avant-garde in the sense of tea at its purest form. Which is, I’m almost certain, “Hot water with plant-based flavoring.”

I’m planning a trip to the Asian market this weekend for some noodies and soybean paste, so I’ll just swing through the tea aisle and see if anything catches my eye. Any time there are cool new tea flavors, the usually come from Asia.

(Sorry, UK, you guys do tea pretty well, but Asia really gets out there with it. I’ve seen teas in Korea that are made of dried corn husks and grave dirt.)

In unrelated news, there was no school yesterday thanks to this storm that’s hitting a whole swath of the US. I stayed home and napped for most of the day while poor Sarah had to drive all the way across town in -25 degree temperatures to work her shift at the library. “It really wasn’t that bad,” Sarah told me. “There was hardly any traffic at all.”

We haven’t had much snow yet, but it is coooold. People are saying that trees are exploding in parts of the country, but I think that’s all just a bunch of hype.

Teeth & Shit

I went to the dentist the other day to get a tooth extracted and it has not been pleasant. One of my wisdom teeth had an infected root and all dentists could do about it was pull the thing, because the easiest way to handle dental problems in America is to not have teeth, I guess.

Even getting to the dentist was a chore. The problem sprung up rather abruptly, and I couldn’t find a single dentist who did “emergency” procedures and took my insurance. Even my normal dentist told me they couldn’t do the procedure for a week, so, in the interest of saving thousands of dollars, I acted like a good mid-westerner, took some Advil, and suffered for a seven days.

Eventually I got in to have the tooth pulled, which was its own unique form of hell. (The tooth’s root was apparently shaped, in the dentist’s own words, “like a fish hook.”)

Anywho. They broke the tooth apart and yanked it and I had stitches in my mouth for a few weeks, chewing food on the other side the whole time. I got the stitches out the other day, at which time the dentist decided to tell me that I should probably get another root canal (on a different tooth) because, hey, life is horrible so we might as well drill around in your mouth a bunch, you fucking pleb.

The dentist makes me so … abjectly miserable I can’t stand it. There’s no mystery as to why: The dentist is a constant reminder that our bodies are falling apart. Minute by minute, day by day, year by year, we are breaking down like old cars. Brush and floss all you want, but your teeth are still going to be messed up. Eventually, they’ll all be in the dirt. Nothing beats entropy.

Should I feel bad about this? No. It’s natural and it happens to everybody. But the dentist doesn’t just make me sad. It’s beyond that, somehow.

One time in 2014 I had an emergency dental visit in Seoul. I’d broken a tooth at school and was able to get in to see a dentist the same day. (Crazy! And I didn’t even have to pay hundreds of dollars a month for the “benefit.”)

I vividly remember sitting in the dentist’s chair with a bunch of gauze in my mouth thinking, “I suppose I could just go home and end it all.”

I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t experiencing a “depressive episode” or being driven batty by pain. I’d gone beyond conventional emotions into an unusually pragmatic realm, a darkness so deep it was beyond anguish or fear. My body will fall apart, I thought. There’s no use in prolonging it. This is how everything ends.

I thought about it the way I thought about eating dinner, or tying your shoes, or blinking–it was just something that you did. As natural as breathing. There was nothing frightening or unusual about it.

Worse than that, worse than feeling such abject numbness, the part that drives me up the wall, is that these insurance asshats expect people to pay thousands of dollars for this? I’ve got to pay special insurance just for the privilege of A) Waiting a week to get any help, and B) sitting in a chair and feeling like dying while somebody sticks a needle in the roof of my mouth and tells me what a good job I’m doing?

This whole thing is a scam.

Quiet Cats & Whispering Cooks

I’m teaching my cat how to whisper.

I don’t know a lot about training cats (I seem to recall something about outrageous facial hair and a guitar case full of feathered toys), but what I do remember is that positive reinforcement works the best.

My cat’s name is Jolene and she is blind as a bat. She’s a bengal, and besides being blind, she also loves being around people and is extremely vocal. If you’re in the bathroom, she wants in the bathroom. If you’re in the garage, she wants in the garage. If you’re sitting on the couch, she wants to be sitting on you on the couch. If she’s unable to do any of these things, she’ll meow at you until she can.

She’s a great cat and I love her to death, but she can be annoying. Especially when we’re trying to cook.

Jolene loves all the smells and the sounds of the kitchen — but she also realizes that the kitchen is a dangerous place full of fire and strange liquids that might splash in your face. Since she can’t see anything, whenever we’re cooking, she’s torn between her desire to get in there and see what’s going on and her fear of burning her lil whiskies.

She’s struck a balance by standing on a nearby empty counter and meowing incessantly at whoever happens to be slicing or dicing or what-have-you.

So, what I started doing was giving her a lot of attention. Positive attention. Whenever I was cooking and Jolene jumped up on the counter, I’d go over and pet her the way she likes, scratch her head, get her purring, and then I’d lean in real close to her ear and whisper, “meow,” in the tiniest voice I could muster.

It took a couple of weeks, but Jolene finally caught on. “Oh, I get it,” she thought. “We’re being sneaky!”

She might not have understood why we were being quiet, but pretty soon I’d lean in and whisper, “meow,” and she’d rub her nose against me and meep out the quiettest little, “meep,” right back at me. It’s become a bit of a routine.

On the nights when I cook dinner, I make sure to go over to the counter and pet the kitty and give her a little whispery meep. Putting ice in a glass? Meep. Unpacking groceries? Meep.

She hasn’t really taken this habit to the rest of the house, but now, when I’m flipping eggs or whatever, there’ll be a surprising little whisper from nearby, and that means it’s time to take a minute to go pet the cat.

“Who is training who,” you whisper with a smile.

I whisper back, “Whom.”