2024 Week 47 Tuesday Thoughts
Friday, November 15th, 2024.
Around 12:30PM I put in another good 5 miles on the treadmill. I am still very happy and, frankly, pleasantly surprised by how good it is. When it was first installed I had the silly idea in my head that I would set an arbitrary goal for myself of running a marathon length every week. It can be done easily with 5 runs of 5.25 miles each. That is rather nice because it is not a terribly long run and can be done in a solid hour at the rate that I run these days. I can give an hour a day for 5 days a week. I am making sure to wipe it down after every use and I try to leave it in good-as-new condition when I am through with it. I am also making a point to not shower without going upstairs and doing some very light barbell work with squats afterward. If we are going to do this, let's do this.
That night I eagerly tuned into the undercard of the Tyson/Paul event. What is there to say? The connection was lousy, but it was basically free, so I cannot complain. And the connection held stable for most of the undercard, and that is where the good fights were. Especially that women's match. You love to see it.
I drank a lot of light beer that night and by the time Tyson and Paul were in the ring I actually was feeling much more like tuning into Friday Night Tracks, the 'monthly' show that Paradox, formally of Furcast, still does from time to time. It was a bit odd. It was like seeing a band that you love, but long after they have lost all relevance and audience attention. The chatroom was very sparingly populated. I was able to basically converse directly with Paradox and Gaia, who was guesting for the night. After the show they stayed on to chat with us about the fandom and where furry is going. It had never occurred to me that, due to the rise in popularity, there are many young people now finding and joining the fandom simply because they were introduced to it as a place to make friends and whatnot. I still had it in my head that furry was something that you discovered in the dark recesses of the web and I assumed that people were all still having that "I'm not the only one??" moment. That is not necessarily the case anymore.
Furry is a known thing. It is not a thing that young people really need to discover after deciding to chase a strange affinity for anthropomorphic characters. They already know about it. It is almost mainstream. I had never thought about their experience and how different it must be from my own generation. I think that is really interesting.
Nevertheless, it felt like old times, and I was exhausted by the time the stream ended around 1:30AM. I checked in on the end of the Tyson fight but I did not really care much about it.
Saturday, November 16th, 2024.
Maybe I did not realize it at the time, but I was greatly looking forward to this weekend.
That morning I did not run, but I did find a game that would at last capture my imagination for a little while. I do not know how this one escaped my notice for so long. It was called Islets. The description reads like a list of my favorite features. It is a side-scrolling, hand-drawn metroidvania with a striking art style, anthro characters, and a great and twee sense of humor. The combat felt good, the sense of progression and exploration was top-notch, and it was genuinely, surprisingly wholesome. I immediately fell in love with this little game. It was no surprise that it was created by a single designer; it felt like a game borne of a singular vision.
I played a bunch of it that morning before it was time for S.T. and I to venture out to East Providence to scope out the place where she would be hosting her work Christmas party. It was a little towny place in a relatively nice neighborhood called the Red Bridge Tavern. We were shown around a little by the bartender and then sat down for a drink and eventually spoke with Burda, the owner, and went over potential menu options and other specifics. Honestly, it was very interesting to be in on the planning session for something like this. The owner was fresh back from Portugal, and her hand-written notes were all in half English and half Portuguese.
We stayed for lunch. I had a pretty good crispy buffalo chicken wrap and a pint of their house lager. I got excited, telling S.T. about how excited I was about Islets, and going into all of the things that I think it does so well as a Metroidvania, or 'search-action' game as they are sometimes called. It felt good to be enthusiastic about something again.
I paid and we headed home. On the highway, we were caught in a literal caravan of cars and trucks, maybe 8 or 9 of them, all with their flashers on and flying big ostentatious Trump flags. One women actually had a weird doll of the president-elect riding shotgun. They were taking up a good chunk of the road, honking their horns, their flashers flashing. It was like a funeral, but more ignorant.
It put me in a really bad mood. And I get it. That is what they want to do. They feel, for whatever reason, like they have got one over on the enemy, which is me, I guess. It is hard for me not to feel a sense of pity for them. If this is the greatest thing going on in their lives, owning the libs, making a big show of it by making a disruption on the highway, that is really sad and pathetic. And I was giving them what they want.
S.T. slowed down to about 40 mph to obstruct the driver behind us, and my first thought was that these people would probably feel empowered to look us up by our license plate and murder us in our home. They had won, after all. They were feeling empowered.
I honestly fear for people that fly pride flags and other things that these people would consider woke. They are going to feel empowered to do more and more disruptive things to people that they disagree with. And we'll be right back to burning crosses on lawns, maybe.
I hate it. I hate everyone that brought this about. I had the people that manipulated the idiots in our community into hating one another. I hate the people that played into the online conspiracy theories that threw fuel on the fire, just so that they could jerk each other off in their little social media echo chambers. Fuck all of you.
We stopped at Stop and Shop on the way home for some tubes of liquid cat treats for our poor dying cat Mr. Waffles. He is in a really bad way. I don't like to think about it. Fuck, man.
So, congratulations, people. You made your neighbors' lives a little worse. When did it become normal to view your fellow citizens as the enemy? When did life become a team sport? Jesus Christ.
At home I played a bit more Islets, half expecting someone with seventy flags on their truck to have followed us and put a brick through our window. That evening, S.T. and I watched The Substance, which was outstanding. One of the best horror movies of the year, for sure. I almost wish that we had put off watching it until New Years Eve.
Sunday, November 17th, 2024.
That morning I was excited to jump out of bed and get back at Islets. Unfortunately, I finished it with 100% completion a little after 1PM.
I went for another run, this time 5.5 miles, and set about the task of trying to find my next Metroidvania. There must be thousands of them out there. It is not like I am the only big fan of the genre.
Eventually I settled on two games that I already owned: Iconoclasts, and The Messenger. I had tried the former a few years ago, attracted to the 16-bit style art and supposedly philosophical story, but it had not clicked with me. Maybe it would be better this time.
It was alright. It suffers a bit from Ayn Rand syndrome where I actually think it would be much better if it focused on what it did well instead of overwhelming the player with so many words. The actual gameplay and puzzle solving are enjoyable, but they are too often interrupted with relatively uninteresting dialog. One does not come to a metroidvania for a lot of reading.
Islets got this exactly right. The dialog was extremely sparse, but what was there was always punchy and impactful, either making you laugh or pulling on your heartstrings. Iconoclasts wants you to bask in how smart the writing is, and I just do not find it to be so. I'm not sure if I will keep trying to get through it.
That night we watched most of Smackdown from Friday, and then at 8PM switched over to Hallmark. There was a movie premiering starring Angela Kinsey of The Office fame. I was not in the mood to hang around and watch. I'd most abstained from drinking and instead took in a lot of water and was feeling very restless. I was worried about going to work the next day.
I tried to go to sleep around 8:30PM, but I found it impossible. I laid there, frustrated and unable to quiet my mind, for around 2 hours, even with 100mg of OTC sleep aid in my system. You know how it is. You can't sleep, so you worry about being tired the next day, and that worry gets you more wound up, which makes it harder to sleep. It sucks.
Monday, November 18th, 2024.
I began the day feeling pretty sad and unmotivated. It is illogical, but it was one of those mornings where your alarm goes off and you just think... this is going to suck.
Busy morning. I actually made very good time getting myself together and getting out of the house. Forgot my kindle, so I did nothing on the train ride. I am still sticking to my cold turkey quitting of reddit, so I find myself rather uninterested in my phone unless I have a game or something that I can play to distract myself with.
The train got delayed by a bit over 20 minutes, so I was a little late getting into the office. It did not matter much; it was nearly a ghost town.
Lots of student emails all day. A few nice notes from my students. One said that they could not do this without me. That was really kind. A few thanked me for being so quick to respond and for being so helpful. That always feels good.
At 1PM we had a virtual meeting for all of the office of Academic Advising. It was our monthly one. Each time there is a different presentation, and this time it was about the Chinese and Korean languages and how to pronounce students names who come from those countries. There was a section about written Chinese, and the presenter asked if anyone know what this symbol meant, or this one. No one was answering so I raised my hand for two in a row. They were just kanji that we learned in college.
Jocelyn, my old boss, made a crack about "wait a minute, I think Derek knows something," or something to that effect. I panicked, as I do, and made some 'joke' about how this was finally my chance to use my college education, so let me have this, people! The presentation went on. I know I am not the only person in the office that studied abroad in Japan, so I immediately started to feel like I was both a show-off and a spaz, and that I must seem like a big joke to my coworkers. This is how my mind works.
Realistically, I was trying to tell myself that as the presentation went on, no one was thinking about that moment but me. Still, I was fixated on it. I hate myself. Simple as.
The just about the whole day I was feeling very sad and unmotivated.
That evening, about half of the class was absent from my Community Learning section that I teach, and there was not much to cover, so I let everyone out early. One student was full on sleeping as I was trying to teach them about making a US-style resume.
I just feel like a big fake and a failure. A joke. A pretender.
It was a long wait for the train home. I am used to having to rush to get to the station after class, but this time there was a lot of time to kill. I was tired and sad.
The thought occurred to me to stop and get some whiskey and crappy beer on the way home. A shot and a beer would feel good, wouldn't it? I almost did. Resisted the urge. It sucks.
I got home right at 7:30PM and ran upstairs to catch Joel, Andy, and Johnny for our schedule Monday hangout. Johnny was running late, and Joel wouldn't be able to join until later. Still, it ended up being pleasant. It was my turn to show a game. I showed them Road 96, which is still perhaps my favorite game of all time, and they seemed relatively engaged. It was nice to hang out and share something that I love.
A little after 9 I headed downstairs to meet with S.T. She was exhausted from the day too. We made some food, finished Raw, and I took some more sleep aids and made the decision to wait until they kicked in before getting into bed. Around midnight I was feeling ready to fall asleep, and yet when I actually climbed into bed, I was again restless and unable to let go. My brain sucks.
Tuesday, November 19th, 2024.
Today has been not so bad.
There were two student appointments this morning, both phone calls, and both were Security & Intelligence Studies, so they were both quite quick and to the point. The email caseload was much lighter.
I was able to get in my 5.5 miles on the treadmill and lift my weights, and then headed over to the grocery store for a few things that we need.
I spent some time with poor Mr. Waffles and tried to spoil him with these liquid treats. The little guy is skin and bones. It kills me.
I really want to drink but I'm stopping myself. Its frustrating and just makes me dislike myself more. That is why I started writing tonight, honestly, just to get my mind somewhere else and to think about something else. S.T. and I are in this together, and I can't blow it for her on day two of us trying to get back on track. I spent a month depressed, drinking and eating like an asshole, not exercising. Getting back on the path is really hard.
There is something that has been on my mind today. I'm not sure if I want to go into it. It has to do with the main two things that I took away from my parent's divorce, from the implosion of our family. They are two values that I hold dear, and are critical to my identity.
I learned the importance of living authentically. You cannot be happy, and you cannot create a real, loving home, if you are forcing yourself to pretend to be someone that you are not. If you were not meant to live the quiet suburban life as husband and wife with the white picket fence and two kids, I am glad that you realized it and took action. I got to watch them both grow and change from the people that I used to just know as mom and dad and they became new, more fully realized versions of themselves. I learned to never make that mistake, and I am grateful for it. It has helped me maintain an amazing, loving, honest relationship with the woman that I love for the last 20+ years and it has helped me nurture friendships for even longer.
The other thing that I learned, unfortunately, was the importance of submitting to the will of others and putting aside my own values and needs for the purpose of maintaining the peace and preserving connections with people. You both did a great job creating a feeling of safety in our home, while it was our home. I wanted that back so badly, but I knew that it was gone forever. This has proved valuable at critical times. I had the power to be patient and forgive people when they were being awful or going through a hard time that made it difficult to be around them, even when it cost me personally. I wanted to be the one who stayed. It is important to me that I am the one who is actually there and will not abandon you, because I myself felt abandoned.
These two values are now very much at odds, and that is causing me a lot of heartache recently. I have family members that actually use terms like 'vaxxed' to draw lines between themselves and others. Anti-science. Spreading conspiracy theories. Supporting causes that are anti-education and anti-environmental. And I have said nothing and gone along with it to preserve the tiny charade that we still have some kind of connection, because that is what I always do.
However, it is impossible to continue doing that and to still claim that I am at all living authentically, now. And I won't do it. And I am afraid of what that is going to mean, because even though I have blocked people on my phone and cut them off from communicating with me, I am sure that they will find a way and demand an explanation. And I do not want to give one.
You would know why I blocked you if you ever cared to get to know me or ask anything about what is important to me, instead of always needing to feel like you were the smartest person with some new philosophy, all while being an anti-vax, conspiratorial ignorant asshole.
I am going to have to deal with this at some point. This is why I started going to therapy 4 years ago. I saw this coming.
Fuck, man.