Uninspired-Musings

I think that love is being willing to sacrifice for someone.

I think love is also being unwilling to let someone sacrifice for you, even though they’re willing.

Being an emotionally-functioning human being has never been one of my strong points. Emotions are far less intuitive to me than I perceive them to be for other people. Consequently, I often think I wasn’t made for this world or that my humanity is somewhat less valid than that of the more emotionally-inclined. However, I occasionally learn more about  humanity (on both a micro and macro scale) by accident than I could ever could on purpose.

Snow is always something that I look forward to: serene, frigid, and a landscaping aid of unparalleled beautify; given that, I should not be surprised that it now acts as an agent of wisdom as well. Have I learned more during winter break than I did during the entirety of fall semester? Probably not, but this feels far more poignant. =P

I love and I am loved, even for a robot like me, that is a pretty amazing Christmas gift in and of itself.

After spending the better part of the past week switching between a handful of really boring, plain standard templates, I ended up actually putting some time into customizing a ready-made template into something that suits me a bit better, so if you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, come on over and take a look!

After some difficulty attempting to purchase it late last moth, I was gifted a copy of a Zombie Christmas Record last night. Given my all-consuming obsession with zombies and my fondness for Christmas music, I’m rather enjoying it. I mean, I’m sure I’d be enjoying it more if it weren’t presently serving as the soundtrack for a weekend of relentless paper writing, but it’s the end of the semester, so the seemingly-insurmountable pile of work is to be expected, I suppose.

I’ve been having a really difficult time limping through the last few weeks of this semester. I have had minimal interest in doing anything that requires even the tiniest modicum of protracted concentration. My brain has not wanted to play nice and devote its full attention to finishing this term off as strong as possible; it has taken a gargantuan amount of self control for me not to spend all my waking hours either zoned out in front of AMSR vidoes on YouTube or or lost amid my own thoughts.  I suppose its just that stereotypical year-end burnout, but man is it kicking my ass right now.

Honestly, I don’t have terribly much to say; I just didn’t want to fall back into the habit of ignoring my blog again (even though I’m sure I will at some point, let’s be real, here). Given the rambling nature of this blog entry, it’s become pretty apparent to me that I should probably keep a list of topics that I want to blog about so that when I actually take the time to sit down and write, I have something meaningful to say; I had a lot of decent ideas floating around my head earlier this week, but I cannot remember a single one of them.

What I can remember, however, is that I haven’t played Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 in the better part of two weeks, so I think I’ll go do that now before I drag myself back to productivity.

Over the past few days, I have been on a deceptively easy-sounding quest: collecting the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is my life from around the internet. You would think it would be a simple import/export job that’d be over in 30 minutes at most, but that hasn’t been my experience in the slightest. I suppose it’s to be expected. Given that I’ve been blogging for over ten years, gone through a myriad of hosts, and forgotten quite a few passwords, I’ve found myself up against a lot of obstacles that I didn’t quite expect to face in trying to hunt down as many of my precious memories as possible. From journals that have been deleted and purged due to inactivity to blogging services that have long since gone the way of side ponytails and legwarmers, I’ve had to get creative in hunting things down. I’ve been pouring through my old emails, trying to find .html files of old entries that I may have emailed myself, used The Internet Archive Machine, and even made plans to write down whatever I can still remember about periods of time where there are no blog entries to be found in some vain attempt at filling in the gaps as best I can.

What I have been able to find, I’ve started amassing here so that I can figure out exactly what the bloody hell the greater picture these little snapshots of my life are a part of represents. Right now I have all of the old entries set as private, but I’m fairly certain I will make them all public; I don’t feel any need to keep such dated information under lock and key, but I do want to get as much together as possible before I “unveil,” so to speak. I also think that once I get everything together, I’m going to take Feathers’ advice and get them bound into a book (or more likely two) so that I can have a hardcopy of my past for posterity’s sake; I think I’ll probably I make volume 1 “2002 – 2007” and volume 2 “2008 – 2012” since those are pretty natural places to break given the manner in which my life changed around 2007/2008 as I moved further into adulthood.

Unfortunately my little project is likely going to have to be put on hold for a brief time; Fall semester is coming to a close and I have a mammoth workload ahead of me the next week-and-a-half or so. As much as I’d like to devote more and more of my time to documenting my past, I’d like to have some academic successes to write about for this term a hell of a lot more, so I suppose I’ll grin, bear it, and bury my nose into my Discrete Math book and then start that Maimonides paper…and that Pandemic Influenza paper…and that program…and that Pre-established harmony/monads paper…

I fucking miss myself. 

I don’t always feel like I’m alive in here, in this brain of mine. I let hour after hour slip through my fingers, either daydreaming or disappearing into the ether, erasing myself with stolen culture while mumbling promises of  “tomorrow” at the growing piles of homework, laundry, and regret.

The only thing in which I seem to find solace these past few weeks is movement; the temporary safety of existing on a continuum between “here” and “there” does more for me than any comforting words every could, it seems. Friday I swear I could have walked from work to home, heavy backpack and all. Instead I took a five-mile stroll around Downtown to look at Christmas lights before grocery shopping.

As uncomfortable as this messy, jagged jumble of emotion lodged between my reason and my logic feels, I know it serves a purpose. I remember hearing somewhere (in the movie Garden State, perhaps?) that your teenage years are when your body goes through puberty and your twenties are when your brain goes through puberty. Given that I, almost exactly nine months away from turning 25, feel like I’m going through that oh-so-uncomfortable feeling of being stretched beyond my perceived limits, I’m inclined to believe this.

While browsing r/GetMotivated yesterday, I stumbled across a really amazing Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic that had a pretty big impact on me. The gist of it is that it takes seven years to truly master a skill. Given this, if a person lives to the age of 88, after age 11, they have 11 distinct opportunities to be good at something, or as the comic puts it, 11 lifetimes. I don’t think that I could have possibly come across this comic at a better time. In this youth-driven culture, it’s sometimes extremely difficult to remember that my value as a human being isn’t slowly evaporating with each passing day; things like this help.

I, in all of my seemingly-infinite predilection toward introspection, am extremely keen for this semester to draw to a close on December 14th so that I can fucking catch up with myself. I am beyond excited to disconnect for  a few days and read and write and organize and catch my breath and gain some perspective on where I’m going over the next few months.

P.S. — I’m importing all of my old entries finally. It feels so bizarre to skim my life in reverse no matter how many times I’ve done it before.