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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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:

• Today I bought a book called Dhammapada, The Sayings of the Buddha. The first thing it says is:

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.

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.

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?

List 12/31/2016

• I'm storing it all in my shoulders, the stress -- the bogus, conjured up stress. I slow down what I'm doing, and I notice that my shoulders are all hunched up and bunched up. I then allow my arms to relax and hang at my sides. I allow my shoulders to come down a little. I begin to feel the muscles across my shoulders relax and cool down.
• I conduct my mental inventory. It's my mental activities log. What thoughts are passing through? What thoughts am I following to all the dark places? What feelings am I feeling? Where is my quiet spot? Where is my calm little camp site where I usually like to go and stay. I would stay there every day all day, but I get driven out by rabid raccoon attacks...
• I'm trying to decide whether to learn Python or Visual Basic. I've already used Visual Basic to do actual work things. Python, I've only experimented really. It is so promising for data handling, though, and for web scraping and all kinds of fun stuff. Visual Basic is already in our work stack though and I took a class in it and nailed it and I've used it here and there over the years...
• I come away from every scene with exactly one (1) friend. The drum circle scene? One friend. The organization where I worked for eight years in Florida? One friend. Personality Type Forum? One friend. The apartment complex where I lived in Altamonte Springs? One friend. Heck. If I try out enough scenes, I'll have all kinds of friends. But. You gotta stay engaged long enough to make that friend connection. I'm a total gypsy. Always moving.
• Here's a list within a list -- the cities I've lived in -- looking at it now, it almost looks like a concert T-Shirt where they list all the cities where a band has played:

Portsmouth, VA

Blacksburg, VA

Norfolk, VA

Lorton, Va

Burke, VA

Laurel, MD

Takoma Park, MD

Washington, DC proper

Silver Spring, MD

Kissimmee, FL

Eustis, FL

Altamonte Springs, FL

Sanford, NC

Raleigh, NC

Morrisville, NC

High Point, NC

• I'm just trying to write the real stuff. Maybe I should start a niche blog. I don't know what I would niche out though. Politics? There's too much of that, but it is my addiction. News? Geography? Land conservation? Meatball Data Science? Walking? Handwritten Notes? Lists? Self-help? Dharma? Nah, I'm just writing the real stuff. Maybe a little too real. Real McReal.
• Come back to the basics! It's easy. It's never too late. It's never too late to come back to the Big Empty. That good kind of empty I mean.
• At work, with the various people who I encounter: the people I sit near, the people I walk by, the people in the lunchroom -- with these people: there is some 'hello' and some ' hell no' ...I'm overthinking the hell out of it.
• Happy New Years, Deers

List 12/28/2016

• Trump is going to get a lot of Americans killed. Why is he jabbing the beehive with a stick. He continues to fuck with Muslims. Sticking his nose into the UNSOLVABLE problem in Israel...that's just one more reason that radicals are drawing up their plans to attack Disney World or New York City again or maybe small town USA. We're overdo. It's our turn to get hit. Trump is painting a big bull's eye on us with his anti-Muslim shit.
• I used to wonder if terrorists would attack small town USA. Think about it. Pick a small town that only has a few ways in and out. Send people to a few of the gas stations and blow those bitches up. Big fires. All over town. While the fire departments and police are sorting all that out, squads of terrorist gunmen fan out and just wreak havoc. The only thing, though, is that in those small towns, probably just about everybody has guns.
• I had a horrible thought: I was thinking about fake news, and it was Christmas day, and I started to think: is the Bible the biggest example of fake news ever perpetrated? I have faith. My faith comes from outside logic or reason or any kind of thinking. My faith is a gut thing and I can't put it into words. I get a feeling when I walk by a Church. I feel The Spirit ...or something. I feel the warmth of that. I feel the fear when I blaspheme. I feel fear typing this stuff, believe me. But I believe science. Maybe the Bible is a bunch of stories and exaggerations that were told at times throughout history when awesome things were happening. I'm pretty sure that Jesus Christ existed and inspired many. I think he inspired people to the point where they got a little crazy.
• I still keep the light of awareness on my inner bullshit and manage to stay somewhat calm...in spite of my various crazy thoughts. Crazy thoughts will happen. You (I) can't stop em from coming along. It's your (my) choice whether to follow down the whack trail or just let them go.

List 12/26/2016

• I thought that Hillary would win by a landslide
• I am out of touch with much of the world because I'm such a loner
• I've moved around a lot - hard to forge friendships
• I don't understand how so many smart people could have voted for Trump...like people at my job for example...technology people, finance people. Are they just so party loyal that they vote Republican no matter what? Did they buy into the fake news stuff that portrayed Hillary as the leader of a pre-school prostitution ring or whatever -- how many people actually believe that???
• I read where some people on the right don't really believe the stuff, but they say it just to will it -- it's like how someone would chant a mantra or -- or like how they would shout a cheer to stoke up their spirits before a football game: rick 'em! rack 'em! roke 'em! ruck 'em! come on team, lets really... Their version of it is: Lock her up! . . . or: Hillary sexually exploits children! Rah rah rah! 
• I was reading about how pundits on the right are calling all mainstream news fake. 
• I guess you decide to believe what you want to believe. But you can use logic and try to build as strong a case as you can in your quest to get closer to truth.

Lunchroom Showdown

I'm a little jittery, rattled and nervous because I just squared off and gave a contrary opinion to a lunchroom pundit. Politics stuff. He's one of the geezers who blares Fox News every day, only this guy gives loud rolling supplemental commentary for all to hear in the lunchroom. He walked up to me because I guess I looked like I had a fuckin problem with it. The thing is, I had no problem, I had a solution. Or, I had an answer, put it that way. So I said some shit. And I wasn't smilin, dig? This guy though: he likes to make it seem like he's just a good ole boy, never meanin no harm....smiling as he spews the hate so that it don't seem so nefarious... but lemme tell ya what...

UU

I went to UU today. Today's message really exemplified what UU is all about. Today, they talked about the birth of Jesus, the birth of Confucius and the birth of Buddha - all in the same segment. I don't know where else you could go on a Sunday morning and hear about all three of those dudes in the same service. You'd have to go to a Buddhist Temple; hear the things in there; and then jump in your car and haul ass to Christian Church -- in order to fit those stories in -- all on the same Sunday morning. I'm not even sure where you'd go to hear about Confucius' birth. Today, one of the hymns even mentioned Islam, and devotion, and their daily calls to prayer.

I used to go to the UU back when I lived in Florida, but I started slackin on that pretty quick. Now that I'm fairly set up and relatively stabilized here in NC, I hope I can stick to the program. Even if I don't go on Sunday mornings, they have other stuff throughout the week. Later in the day on Sundays they have a meditation Sangha mindfulness thing. I want to check that out.

Where should I write it?

Gees, is blogging dead or what? I actually googled that: Is blogging dead? I couldn’t even find a recent article on that question. In other words, blogging is so dead, people aren’t even asking whether it’s dead anymore. I am so behind anymore. In everything.

I was an early adapter with Twitter, and I'm still on there. I entered Blogger pretty early. But that was like six blogs ago. I never got on Facebook. People I talk to aren’t really that enthused about Facebook anymore anyway. I was on tumblr a while. I was late to that party, but it was fun. Same with Wordpress. YouTube – I’m all over it, but I don’t really read comments or make comments. Vine – I created exactly one (1) vine. Instagram, I was on there for a couple weeks. Pinterest – I installed but then uninstalled like ten minutes later. Periscope – I’ll install it if there is a major ongoing news event going on somewhere and I want to see firsthand footage. Blogger and Twitter. Those are the main ones I keep coming back to. Where the hell do people write stuff online anymore?

Join us in congratulating . . .

People just disappear from work. Sometimes a prudent HR department will send out some kind of notification. They'll maybe tell you who to forward work requests to now that the needed person is no longer with the company. They might even congratulate the person for moving on to something bigger and better. A lot of times though, they just disappear. All that you hear is a bunch of rumors. The lady diagonal over the cubicle wall is gone. There was a box on her desk, I guess filled up with all her stuff. I've heard other people complain about her work. She seemed as sweet as she could be to me. I don't know anything about what mistakes she did or didn't make. I'm just starting out in this place, it's my seventh week. I hate to start hearing all the bad shit so soon.

I worked in one place where...a guy who sat at a nearby desk committed suicide. First he was missing. He was missing for two weeks, and then the HR lady came in and told us that he had taken his own life. Never know what people are going through.