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Me — April ’19 Update

Kasey-Rayn Leave a comment

I feel as though I have some big decisions down the line. I’m not necessarily going through a lot at the moment, and my life isn’t particularly stressful, but my path is nearing a precipice, or perhaps a simple fork. The thing is, the choice that I make in the nearing future is going to impact the rest of my life.

But before we get into that, the Monthly Update Topic Order™: blog, writing plans, video games, reading/listening, school, D&D, and other things.

Once again I feel as though the blog is in a good spot. Twice a week is a great pace for somebody whose writer’s block has become mentally crippling. No changes on the horizon.

On that front, I’ve been sort of working on a story for the passion project I’ve been collaborating with, and even that has proven to be an insurmountable slope. So far, in 10 days, I’ve written two different beginnings, each roughly 400 words long, and the story is simply supposed to showcase a piece of worldbuilding, nothing even largely important or exciting, really. I did recently write nearly 8,000 words in a month (not staggering by any means, but with a mental block as powerful as mine’s become, I was pretty proud of it.) I was able to do that because I was given very strict time limits to adhere to when I wrote each scene, and was held accountable for it. As it turns out though, I cannot self-impose similar time limits on my own projects, because I know that there won’t be any consequences if I fail. I know there’s a workaround in my head somewhere, I just don’t know what it is yet.

As far as gaming goes I’ve been playing a lot of World of Warcraft lately, but almost purely as a time sink as I mindlessly kill monsters, because…

I’ve once again picked up The Dresden Files. This is my second time going through the series, as Jim Butcher is nearing the end of Peace Talks and I’m optimistic that we will (finally) get a release date in the coming months.

I’ll hold off on the school topic because it ties into decisions.

D&D has been going quite well. Buckle your seat belts. The Knights of Fire (the party in my Aleor campaign officially has a name!) has just left the city of Craydon to venture into ancient Elven ruins for… reasons. I make no promises, but I intend to start posting a campaign diary of all that’s happened very soon. Perhaps even starting Saturday.

The other campaign I’m a part of (as a player, not a DM) just ended, and my character was the only one that died in the final boss encounter. The poor orc mystic only ever wanted to be a tree, sleeping on dirt and meditating as often as possible, and only in death did he get his wish, having helped save the world! I will note that this is basically the first ever campaign I’ve been a part of that we played start to finish consistently, even coming to a natural end. It wasn’t until our DM gave us the epilogue and one of the player characters visited Ki’s grave that I got a little sentimental. That campaign was very much a “silly over rules”, and neither our characters nor the plot had any depth, and I didn’t really like the mystic class, and we’re planning on starting a new campaign soon, and I might be more excited than I’ve ever been for my new character, and yet, I can’t help but feel a little sad that the story of Ki and his friends is over, doomed to fade into obscurity as new campaigns and new characters take to the stage.

*Pause for dramatic effect*

So, other things. At risk of getting too personal, I’ve grown to actively dislike my living situation. Specifically, I have never once in my life had my own room, and therefore have never really known a true sense of privacy or ownership of my own space. Most often this is fine. The brother I share a room with has the same interests as me and now that we aren’t kids anymore we get along great. The problem is that our lifestyles are very different and not conducive to sharing a space. Added onto that is the fact that I do not like living in Southern California, primarily because of the living cost and lack of weather. As such, I’ve been seriously considering and making tentative, mental plans to move north, to Oregon or Washington. My trip to Portland felt in a lot of ways like I had found a home, and I’m desperate to go back.

However. There is an increasing likelihood that I’m going to be staying in SoCal for a bit longer. I have to take an extra semester of school, as I’ve previously established, and that alone sets me back a year. What’s more, my job may “require” me to step up my hours, as we’re going to be short handed soon and since I like working there, I’m more than happy to give them a hand and return to working full-time. In addition to that, there is a possibility I might be teaching improv more seriously next school year, and I have confidence that the passion project I’ve been working on will have legs to stand on by the end of the year. All of these are heavy incentives to stay, and I like the prospect of pretty much all of those things.

And yet, if I do stay here, part of me feels like I’m delaying a transition to a new life I would be much happier living. New friends, new job, new everything. Scary, yes, but I’m not really one to let something like that get in the way. My problem is that I know I need to move in order to preserve my sanity. Moving within the area I live might solve some problems, but the larger issues of living in Southern California would remain and would delay what I believe to be an inevitable migration northwards.

I feel as though I can’t win, because choosing one means losing out on a lot of things the other option yields. The nice thing about this situation is that both options are promising, and I’m not picking the lesser of two evils, and in addition to that, this choice is only presenting itself now, and I won’t be required to make any life changing decisions for a few months at least.

Until next time!

Me — Having Something to Say

Kasey-Rayn Leave a comment

For the longest time, the MO of this blog had been “write for me, and anyone that reads it is a bonus”. That’s sort of translated to writing regularly about what I’m feeling about so that future me can look back at how very specific events have affected me over the years. For instance, I can look read the post about my cat that died November of 2017, or when I went to Portland, Oregon last July and how I felt during that time.

Most often, though, it just means that every week I commit myself to writing a “Me” post, but all I can think about is stuff I’ve written about in past weeks. At this specific moment, roughly three things come to mind: weather, and how I deal with the cold, getting up and being productive in very early mornings, or just general stress, and how the combination of an ever strengthening writer’s block and an omnipresent feeling of loneliness are working together to make insecurities more and more prevalent.

I’ve already talked about the former two, and the latter isn’t really something I feel is a good topic of conversation, even for a blog post. I’ll say this much, though: I’ve always imagined myself as having a bottle of emotions, and once every several months I rant to a friend about all my problems and then I feel nice and empty for a while. Recently, though, I haven’t managed to empty that bottle, and what worries me about that is that I’m starting to crack. In all honesty, I’m one serious tragedy away from a full mental breakdown. Not that I would wish it, but maybe that’s something I need—a traumatic yet cathartic release of emotion in order to reset my emotional balance.

But anyways, every week I’m struggling with finding a subject of conversation to go into. I really want to talk about my new D&D campaign, but that seems better for a Saturday post for arbitrary reasons. I don’t really like the idea of reviewing games or movies at the moment—the purpose of that was so that future me can look at my first impressions at all this media that may or may not end up being anything—but really I only go back at archived blog posts for references, and when I link them in new posts I don’t reread them. Part of that problem is that the current me isn’t far enough removed from any of those posts, so I know I haven’t changed, but still.

This is a long way of saying that Tuesday posts will no longer be restricted to “Me” posts, because I’m a boring individual and I don’t even have enough to say to interest my own writing muses, so nobody, not even future me, should be subjected to reading that sort of crap. (The preceding paragraphs that are only tangentially related to each other are a good example of this.)

That said: here’s something that doesn’t deserve a full post but I want to mention anyway. I got two pairs of nice cotton pajama pants for Christmas and they are so cozy I love them. One of them even has tea cups on them.

That is all.

Me — How to Find Your Energy

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I had a really heavy workload last semester of school, as you might have guessed by my unprecedented absence from this blog. I was working a lot, directing a play I wrote, and doing what I would simply describe as a mini dissertation for one of my classes.

Towards finals, I was starting to get really stressed. I would get home from work or class, and based on the schedule I outlined for myself, I would often have a single two hour chunk of free time to get work done before it was due in the morning. Problem was, I would get home with no energy to do any of that; the only thing I’d want to do is sleep.

This problem was surprisingly and miraculously solved when I watched a video from one of my favorite “public” figures: Day9. He’s a streamer (known for Starcraft) that I’ve talked about a while back, an old post of which I did not re-read, so browse at your discretion. He has a very casual and sociable persona, and he’s one of the people I admire most because of that.

That video was a snippet of one of his streams; just a conversation where he’s talking about this very thing: How do you structure your life in a way that allows you to get the work done with the time that you have? You can watch the video with that link, it’s about 9 minutes long (he does occasionally curse, though). But I’ll also just talk about it in my own words.

The solution is actually alarmingly simple. You can start tomorrow, in fact, and you don’t need to prepare. You’re not going to like what I have to say, but let me tell you, all it takes is the discipline to commit to your own promises and the ability to restructure your day to day.

All you gotta do is wake up early and do all the extra stuff then. If you’re trying to learn a language, write an essay, whatever doesn’t matter, don’t set yourself up for failure by pretending today will be different. It won’t. You’re going to get home from work exhausted like always and then you’ll hate yourself for looking at Instagram or Reddit for two hours after you get home.

But let’s say you have work at 9. Here’s what you do: You get up at 5am. Yup. 5. You cry a little inside, maybe take 20-30 minutes to get up and you curse me for convincing you to do this, but then you get up and get ready for your day. By 6am you’ve showered and eaten, you’d be ready to walk out the door now if you had to. But now you have 3 hours to just do stuff. The house is quiet, nothing going on, you’ve got the whole day ahead of you, and now that you’ve woken up you’ve got the energy to work.

That’s when you write that essay, or go to the gym, whatever you want to be doing more. You devote some time in the early morning, and by the time you get home after work, you’ve already done the stuff you want to, so now you won’t hate yourself for wasting the rest of your night. Maybe you’ll go to bed a few hours early, but who cares? You’ve already done the things you need to. Plus, if you go to bed early, it’ll make getting up earlier that much easier.

I tried this in the middle of a work and school week, throwing caution to the wind, and it changed the way I did my day-to-day. I’d get home with so much more energy because I wasn’t dreading the work I’d still have to do after work. And because I got up at 5am every week day, sleeping in on weekends meant getting up at 7-8am. I felt like every day suddenly and magically had 3 extra hours.

So, that’s it. Watch that video if you’re not convinced. Give it a shot. Trust me, I know waking up that early is awful. But if you can do it, you’ll feel better, and every day after that will be easier and easier. Especially if you’re a morning person like me, sleeping in until even just 10-11am feels terrible because there’s no morning left.

I wish you the best of luck, and as a farewell note, I highly recommend doing things that wake you up immediately. Shower and eat right after you get out of bed because there is no being tired after that. If you jump out of bed and immediately start working on an essay, you’ll just fall back asleep and you’ll hate me all the more.

See You in 2019.

Kasey-Rayn 1 Comment

Hello! Yes, I am still alive.

When last we met, back in August, we were sort of floundering and struggling to update on a regular basis. Posts were late, and probably subpar (though I will not bother to go back and read them), but I have news.

I am back. I am currently setting my blog up for the new year. We’ve got lots to talk about, and I’ve got some news on the horizon! When 2019 hits I’ll go back to posting regularly (I’m thinking three, maybe four times a week tops), and with some added regularity, the quality of what I produce will be improved.

See you January 1st!

Me — Temporal Issues

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I’ve been dealing with a number of personal problems lately, each on a different level of magnitude. I won’t talk about the specifics of any of them here, but I will say that they are all, in their own sense, simply temporal.

I’m a problem solver by nature. I think about everything going on in my life so often that organizing and recalibrating everything is, in a lot of ways, who I am. So when I have problems, there is a reason—and that reason is probably because it isn’t within my power to fix. I’ve thought about every feasible solution, and have either tried it or otherwise deemed why it should fail.

That said, I’d say I’m pretty good at finding solutions to the day-to-day things that bother me. Lately, though, the things I’ve been dealing with are all things that just need time. For example, I’d like to move out of Southern California, but that just isn’t in the cards for me right now. I’d like to find my spark of inspiration so I can start writing cool stuff again, but I can’t simply manifest it, I have to wait for it to come back. Things like this.

I won’t lie. It is pretty frustrating to have issues that are not within, well, anyone’s power to fix. Sure, I suppose it’s possible that I’ve misdiagnosed the roots of my issues and I could find ways around them that I haven’t discovered, and I certainly don’t claim to know everything about my life situation or my psyche, but as I perceive things to be now, a lot of the problems I’m currently having in life will simply go away given time. (Of course, by that time I expect new problems will arise, but that’s a separate issue.)

Having spoken to a friend about this recently, he gave me very encouraging words in that he noted how positively I talk about my problems. I mean, blog posts like this are basically exactly how I talk in real life (which is why it’s so easy for me to churn posts like this out), so when he said that he could tell how upset I was based on my phrasing and general language use, but still noticed I was optimistic, I really felt good about that. It made me realize just how much it takes for me to get taken down to a level where I would be considered sad or angry. So good job, me.

One thing that I’ve noticed as well is that things are always way easier to deal with when you’re too busy to even think about it. Working full time has helped with that a lot, because I noticed that when the weekend hits, I get very tired and down simply because I’m (sort of) alone with my thoughts. Somehow, I can enjoy myself more coming home after work on a weeknight than I can having two full days to myself.

So while I am honestly doing okay, things bother me just like every other normal human person on the planet. I wish they didn’t, but if I’m right, this too shall pass.

Me — Habits and Resolutions

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Everyone likes to start every new year with a resolution. Like “I want to lose weight” or “I want to be more mindful of other people’s perspectives”. If you’re not one of those people, you’re probably one that likes to bash on other people’s goals. It certainly isn’t easy to suddenly become a new person, and a lot of resolutions are sort of destined to fail.

One problem I see a lot isn’t that people establish goals that are too high, it’s that they set goals with no road map. They say “I’m going to lose weight” but don’t get a gym subscription. They want to eat healthier but don’t take the time to research what sort of food they should start eating. They just set this idea and put it on the shelf only to be procrastinated indefinitely. That just doesn’t work.

I used to make blog posts on “How to do X”, such as making this post about how not to fail, but I think life is, in general, too complex to have problems such as this solved in 500-800 words. So I won’t try to tell you the solution to the problem. Instead, I’ll just talk about what I do, because it seems to work out for me alright.

In the end, the goal isn’t actually as important as the steps you’re taking to get there, and a lot of those steps involve habits. I, like everyone I’m sure, have a lot of things I want to change about myself. But instead of deciding to turn instantly be the person I want, I’m taking actions that the person I want to be would have a habit of doing.

I actually got a Phone App called Habits that works amazingly well, and yet is so simple. You write down things you want to do, and how often you want to achieve those things. Most of my goals are daily things I don’t want to forget doing, so I can easily keep track of whether or not I’ve done that thing today. It also has a stats page that keeps track of streaks and how “strong” your habit is. It’s nothing special, but things I would otherwise want to be different about me are suddenly things I do regularly, because the only thing I need to remember is to open the app every once in a while and look at the checklist. I will say—checking things off a to-do list is an amazing feeling, so that in and of itself is a great reward.

So if you want to lose weight, don’t just give yourself a deadline. Ask yourself what steps you’re taking to achieve those goals and work for it. I have some awesome writing related things planned for this year, but I know that these things won’t magically get themselves done. I’m going to have to make sure I stick to my schedule.

Also, as a general rule I think post changes in a person’s life are too gradual to actually consciously perceive on a day-to-day basis, so having a resolution where you want something to change quickly is not only unrealistic, but also discouraging!

Best of luck!