Saturday, March 11, 2017

My Moods

I often think about my mood, my mental state. How am I doing inside? Not only do I evaluate my mood, I consider whether my evaluation of my mood is doing me any good. Yeah, I'm in a crummy mood. Yeah I'm aware of it. Being aware of the fact that I'm in a crummy mood does not seem all that helpful.

Sometimes I feel just kind of blah. One day I considered this: There are so many different shades of just kind of blah. There are different blends, mood blends. Sometimes my blah mood blend will have mild irritation components to it. Sometimes my blah mood will have heavy measures of dread. Sometimes blah is fatigue, layered with frustrations of specific annoyances.

My mood....my mental brew at any given moment...I recently thought about it and made a comparison: Every day, every minute, the pine needles get blown across the grass...re-positioned...re-pointed...rearranged. If you look at them at any moment, they will be arranged a certain way, and that's that. They'll be a little different the next time you look at them. The breeze will have shifted them. The difference in positioning will seem significant or not.

It's the same with the clouds in the sky. They will be up there shaped a certain way, arranged a certain way. It's up to chance how they'll end up arranged. The pine needles: it's a roll of the dice how they'll be pointed.

My mood brew: it's a roll of the dice how it will end up. Why read into it? Why try to figure out the reasons I feel this way or that way?

I feel emotions because emotions exist.

There's a great Eckhart Tolle quote: You're never upset for the reason that you think you are.

There might seem to be a good reason why I feel a certain way. I'm irritated because a guy at work diminished me by ignoring the things I was saying, talking over me. Well, has this type of thing irritated me every single time it's ever happened to me? No. So why this time? Sometimes certain things bother me, sometimes they don't. (If only I could have that undisturbed mindset all the time! Why can't I?!)

I experience emotions because emotions exist. I am susceptible to them. The occurrence of emotions blowing across my brainscape is about the same as pine needles blowing across the yard or clouds blowing across the sky. It happens because it happens. There's not a whole lot of meaning or importance to it. The emotions will blow clear out of my brainscape if I don't grab onto them and sniff them so hard. Don't be sniffin.

Saturday, March 4, 2017

I should write more.

I feel like I should be writing more, but I don't know what to write. I think the new medicine took some of the angst out of my sails and so I don't feel the compulsion to write. I guess I could just write my minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. Something will come out.

We went to the movies and saw Get Out today. The race stuff made me uncomfortable, but...maybe it's good that a white dude feels uncomfortable about race stuff now and then. I don't know. It was a great move, I thought, and I was glad that I went. It was scary. It was original...or...it had a level of racial audacity on the scale of Blazing Saddles.

What else.

I got drunk at the work orientation, but this was encouraged. Each of us new recruits and the HR lady and the other higher level VP guy were all drinking. I let loose some crackpot business strategy bs thinking thoughts. A bunch of what ifs and why fors and all that. Crackpot stuff. Talked mad shit.

Our visitor went back to Michigan. I was sad to see her go. She's headed back to a weird situation. I don't really get it, the trip she's on. If she's not careful, some years will pass, and she'll be 40 years old and living in her dad's basement, not that there's anything wrong with that, except for all of the things that are wrong with it.

I'm a little tipsy. After the movie today, we went to this little bar walking distance away and had some dringks. I had three bourbons. There is a waitress there who we always request. We hadn't seen her since the holidays. She sure did have some major life stuff happen, scary stuff with her tiny daughter. Scary stuff. She stopped breathing and her lips turned blue and she had some surgery. This lady - I don't know how the hell she soldiers through all this stuff. She is the sweetest person we have met over here in Triad, no doubt.

That's about it. Writing to nobody in particular, but the writing gotta get done.

Learning the Tools

More tools are dropping in our shop. They need learnin. The latest one is Spoon, a data integration tool. It seems like an offbrand ssis. It was easy to set up a little project that merged up two files and created a destination file with it, it was pretty cool. I'm still trying to learn R. I suck at math and I don't know much about advanced math, but if I learn R, maybe I can fill in some gaps there...and also gain some abilities to automate some stuff. I recently fired up Access to do a check on something I did in another system. I used to hate Access, but I used it in a databases class, and I ended up really liking it. Everybody complains about Access...and yet...it has not gone away. It's like a Swiss Army knife of a tool. The other day I ran a query in sql server management studio that ended up taking ten hours. They asked my boss what the hell I was doing, the IT people did. Fuggit. We needed the data, and they won't help in this project, and when they try to 'optimize' our queries, they end up excluding valid results - they screw up our results and bring bad data.

Okay, hopefully that will be the only time I rant about such things here on this blog.

But who cares, nobody's readin.

I just need to be typin.

Sunday, February 26, 2017

List Two 02/26/2016


  • No friends currently. Except my girlfriend. 
  • It's tough to make friends and keep friends when you move around a lot. We moved out of Florida together and spent a couple of years in the Raleigh area, and that sucked, and so we moved over here to the Piedmont Triad area.
  • I wonder if I'm just not suited or equipped for human interactions. I just don't do very well with people - I never really have. Maybe I should just settle in for a mostly solitary second half of life. Stop trying to be something I'm not. I'm not some kind of social person. 
  • I was sitting in a meeting Friday and looking around the room and thinking, wow, there's not really anybody in here that I like very much. I've already started building these dumb stories and grudges around people. I've only worked here for four months. Then I started thinking about a place I worked for eight years. My attitudes toward various people there shifted over time. But in the end, when I think of how many people I could call 'friend' - there were not that many. A person who is adjusted to normal human interactions....a 'normal' person...I guess a normal person takes a lot more shit off of people than a guy like me. I write people off. I give up trying to get close and stay close to people.
  • I didn't stick with the UU Church. Maybe I'll go back, I don't know. Lately all I've been putting energy into is learning the new job and reading all of the latest craziest Trump madness.
  • I signed up for some Resist Trump meetup group. I wonder what it will be like. I guess I'm a pretty political person. Lately, that is all I read, is politics stuff.

List 02/26/2017

  • I ain't been readin and I ain't been writin. Well, I read news. Constantly. CONSTANTLY. It was getting so bad, my right hand began to ache very badly. It is an involuntary action - before I know it, the phone is in my hand and I'm reading news online. I don't even realize I'm doing it...it's like biting the nails. Bad habit. Bad. I swear: If I read the same amount of words - out of books - as I do online, I swear...the equivalent would probably be three or four books a month or five or six. But that is a dumb comparison and who cares. All it is is a compulsion and it ain't makin me any smarter. I used to read books. Gees. I'm addicted to what's jumpin right now I guess. Gotta have the real time.
  • Management has yanked the noisy lady. Yaay! She talks so loudly and constantly and negatively and disgustingly/openly/personal-businessy. She puts it all out there. The only time she is not talking loudly, is when she's talking real dirt on somebody - then she quiets down. You can actually hear the progression. She will be complaining about somebody out loud, and as she gets more and more angry and accusatory and angry, she lowers her voice to a nasty little whisper. So much negativity. She poisons the atmosphere with negativity and suspicion...you know she's going really dirty when you hear all the pss pss pss pss stuff. Anyway, they put her in the corner, far far away on the other end of the suite. This noise of hers - this has been my all day every day...I didn't realize how destructive to my attitude it was, but I'm walkin around all day pissed...I can't fully blame her but I partly blame her. I blare music in my earbuds all day every day. Anyway, banished she is. Sit in the corner naughty rascal. She had been told about her noise many times but it just agitated her to make more noise I think.





  • I would like to hurry up and become more useful at work. I feel like the training wheels are still on. I have produced some useful stuff. Or, my efforts helped out. I didn't produce a thing, I copied a thing from one environment to another. Which was useful. The old environment sucked. The new environment was easier. I brought some experience talkies to the job - I've told the boss what we did at the last place and helped to figure out some new tools that we want to use. I guess I'm helping out....but I still don't have a handle on the nature of all the data.

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

OM and a Beam of Light


I took this picture in Winston-Salem. It was such a lucky set of conditions or circumstances that came together for this photo. Look at that beam of light! It illuminates the Om!

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

List 01/24/2017


  • I sort of understand the Trump voter, but...obviously, I don't fully understand the Trump voter.
  • I understand party loyalty, but I don't understand: A) How Trump was able to hijack the Republican party; and B) How so many people went ahead on and voted for him anyway.
  • Invention: bulletproof touch screen computers embedded in light poles in the inner cities.
  • My computer often has that one last program that won't shut down with everything else...so when I shut down, it's hanging there and the computer mentions it as it tries to shut down. My brains are like that. When I try to go to sleep, there is always that one thought process that won't shut down.

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

List 01/17/2017


  • My nephew's son was born! Welcome to the world, Keenan!
  • Keenan will be a skater (skateboards) and he will be handy with his hands, if he is anything like his dad.
  • I need to drive up and see the new member of the family. It's a four hour drive, not too bad I guess. It's better than the twelve hour drive I used to make from Florida.
  • I'd rather think happy thoughts than think about the upcoming thing in DC. 
  • I think I want to think happy things. Maybe not. Maybe the negative stuff is addictive like sugar cigarettes.

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Divides

How is it that we are so polarized as a country? Why does it seem like we are ever more divided?

Are we really not all that divided...it's just that all of our messages are zapping around the public consciousness much more quickly and rampantly because of the internet?

Police violence against African Americans: It seemed like it was on the rise. But what was on the rise was availability of cell phones, basically handheld TV cameras and world uplinks - anybody anywhere at any time could post video footage.

Same with these arguments on both sides of the Democrat/Republican divide: Anybody who wants to can plaster their opinions all over the freakin internet.

It's not that these incidents and sentiments of ugliness are increasing, there are just more lenses on them. Maybe.

There are certain divides. No doubt.

There is the growing divide between rich and poor.

The divide between rich and poor is not the same divide as Democrat/Republican. There are clumps of Republicans who are on the poverty side, and there are clumps of Democrats who are on the richy rich side.

Friday, January 13, 2017

List 01/14/2017

  • The weather warmed up after that brutal cold, and the birds were outside chirping by the end of the work week.
  • There's some hard work coming. I'm hoping I can automate some of it.
  • I can push all the air out of my lungs and glide to a soft landing in a quiet spacious spot.
  • Today I went to the world's emptiest mall:



We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.


  • Some people want to be decoded. They keep their heart of purported gold under layers of...hard bark. Some things are within my reach and some are not.
  • The forecast is worrisome with a chance of some scaries...what with all the Trump happening out there. Should I start learning Russian? Is he going to give the keys to the White House to Putin? It just gets uglier and uglier every day with Trump. God. You see what the presidency does to a person. Four years. Eight years. Every single set of before and after photos you see of a President...they are considerably grayer, considerably aged. Gees. What the shit will Trump look like after four years? Hopefully he'll be in a big orange jumpsuit, and you won't know where the jumpsuit ends and his six orange chins begin. And hopefully the hair will be gone. Gone. Dude. Just buzz your head. BUZZ YOUR HEAD TRUMP, YOU IDIOT. May inauguration day be windy and Trump's hair take flight in the most majestic display. I think that hair hates being on that head.

Thursday, January 12, 2017

List 01/12/2017


  • It feels like something really bad will happen to America soon. I don't know what. Maybe a big terror attack. Maybe a crazy confrontation with Russia - some kind of high profile assassination or something. Trump gets indicted and we watch hearings for the next months...years... video pops up across the internet of Russian hookers pissing on Trump....somethin...
  • I don't want to take the Christmas tree down.
  • Soon a family member will be coming to stay with us, a recent high school grad, trying to figure out how to start out. She's smart and she has a+ certification. She got that in high school! Wow. Pretty sweet that you can get that in high school classes. Anyway, I'm hoping the change of setting can kick start some life momentum. Not sure if a + stuff is enough, but it sure is a great start. If she got into some network stuff...started on it anyway...and got a toe hold somewhere...she could be golden.
  • I've made no new friends in the new town so far -- and neither has my lady friend girlfriend live in roomy life partner. We've tried though! We were going to this trivia night at a bar, and we started to get to know the people who organize it. We let that go though.
  • We go to a UU Church sometimes, and we talk to people in there. Hopefully we'll get to know some people in there.
  • We have two bars, really three, right within walking distance of our apartment. This one place where we go, we always ask for this particular waitress, because she's real nice. We talk and it's almost like we have a friend, one friend. Purdy sad so far. Things are settled though: we have good and stable jobs. We like where we live. It won't be too too long before the warm weather starts up again, and it'll be time to go to concerts and festivals and drinking opportunities.

Sunday, January 8, 2017

List 01/08/2017

  • I came back to blogger because it was like 'going back' to ham radio or the telegraph. It was a loved communication platform that the mainstream moved on from...but it's a medium that has its charms and character and nostalgia...and it reminds me of a different time, an interesting time.
  • Bloggin ain't what it used to be...to me anyway. People don't comment nearly as much...from what I've seen. Maybe I'm clueless or I'm doing something wrong. Blogger just seems like a rustbelt town anymore.
  • This is the coldest winter I can ever recall in the mid Atlantic region. It's going to be one (1) degree in the early morning hours tomorrow.

High Point, NC snow 2017
  • Work seems great ...but I don't want to jinx it ...but then again, I don't want to start thinkin I'm susceptible to jinxes. So work seems great. There is so much to learn. My boss caught me in a stupid on Thursday. It motivated me to learn more...learn harder...learn till it hurts. So I was up at 1 am Saturday morning watching training videos and studying the online things. As the weekend has worn on though, I have relaxed/relapsed into my usual trivial pursuits (readin politics, trying new apps, drinkin red wine and bourbon, watchin movies, watchin football, staring into space, sleepin, fantasizing about scooters and small motorcycles).
  • Trump: The things that he says can't be taken literally, but his hate and greed should be taken seriously. Maybe when he is in the moment, and he is actually saying the thing, he actually believes what he himself is saying, who knows. The reliable and realistic things will be the hate things and the greed things. And the deals with devils type things. How much Trump debt does Putin hold, I wonder. Why is Trump locked on a favorable Russia view. He's locked on it. It is the one thing he has said that he actually has continued to say and has not gone back on. Everything else he has said, he has gone back on -- except this one thing: Russia is nice and has a nice leader. What about polonium?
  • Trump is only in it to promote Trump. Trump is a narcissist. Trump is an egomaniac. Trump has no ideal except the ideal of Trump. (Plus greed and hate)
  • I saw an article about a Greensboro cop who goes around checking on homeless people in homeless camps - at times when the weather is so extreme like this.
  • I have been checking the site of my congress woman to try to learn what 'our next move' is. She's super busy though.
  • It was cool to see Maddow mention Indivisible - ",,,best practices for making Congress listen,,,"
  • At work -- even though I am supposed to be paying attention to work related things -- I still can't help but ponder and wonder about the people around me, and trip. I can't help it. I am a story hoarder.
  • What is your story?