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.