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Life — Making Your Own Happiness

Kasey-Rayn 6 Comments

In my experience, there’s a certain type of depression/sadness that a lot of people have. It’s a very common affliction I like to call (as of right now) apathetic depression. It is the primary symptom of a state of life that is suboptimal for reasons that don’t appear to be your own. Your life sucks because you hate your job, you hate your family, you have no idea where your life is headed, etc. None of these things are your fault, so you just live day in and day out moping over how you drew the short stick when you were born.

I think there are people out there who drew the short stick, but you aren’t one of them.

The trap that a lot of people fall in is being comfortable in their contempt. It’s easy. Why blame yourself for the professional career you hate when you can just write it off by saying you have no other options? (It’s like in video games: nobody wants to blame themselves for their team losing; they will always point to somebody else first.)

Being happy sucks.

I say that because it’s not what people think it is. It’s not a magical state of mind that suddenly transpires when you get a raise or when you enter a committed relationship. Good events are easily overshadowed by that wall of the uncontrollable misfourtunes of life, because while it seems that good events are rare, misfortunes are constant and ever present.

But anyone can be happy, despite any misfortune and any life circumstance. I won’t pretend it’s easy. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. But it is simple. In fact, you’ll probably nod to yourself and think “Wow, that was really deep, Kollin” as soon as I tell you the trick. (Or maybe you’ll just think I’m an idiot pretending to be philosophical, which wouldn’t be far from the truth.) The key to happiness is something you’ve already heard many times in many different ways from different inspirational quotes. But the inspirational quotes are just flowery ways of mystifying the truth right in front of our eyes. Ready?

Being happy is just a matter of putting in the effort to be happy. It means getting up in the morning finding ways to get excited for work instead of hitting the ‘Snooze’ button as many times as you can get away with. It means preparing for your future (near or far) instead of rewarding yourself for things you already had to do. It means taking steps to forgive and love yourself rather than dwelling on things you can’t change.

Most inspirational quotes are just an indirect way of saying that being happy is like going to the gym. It’s not easy. It’s a ton of work. Very few people want to go to the gym, they just want the results. It’s the same thing with happiness. It’s so much easier to dwell in misery because misery requires no action on your part. It’s also like the gym in that the more you do it, the easier it gets and the more you can lift.

Treating yourself to Starbucks before or after work isn’t going to make you happier. That’s a mental lie you tell yourself that will actually just perpetuate the problem. Caffeine addicts aside, you don’t (really) need anything but to commit to a personal promise that you’ll think about things with more positivity, and take action to ensure your days are better.

It’s hard, and you might need the help from friends and family to make that effort, but it is worth it.

Me — The Wave™ Cometh.

Kasey-Rayn 2 Comments

My fall semester is starting to look very scary. I’m taking 5 classes and I’m still going to try my best to be working full time, and it’s starting to look like—without factoring in writing time or any homework—I’ll be either in class or at work at least 65 hours per week. If I’m also actively playing Dungeons & Dragons and weekly binge watching shows with a good friend of mine, that cuts down any “me” time I have to about 6-8 hours a week.

Fall Availability (Censored).png

I might die.

I’ll probably die.

I hadn’t thought about it until now, but that novelette/novella I’ve been outlining is now in a very dark spot. I haven’t started writing it yet, and at this point, when that 3-month long tsunami of business hits, I won’t be able to get anything done. I’ll still update this blog as often as I can, but I’ll be impressed if I can come up with any short stories during that period. Heck, I literally have to stop going to the writer’s group I’ve been leading for over a year now just to be available to take some of these classes. (It’s only for a few months, but still.)

It’s starting to dawn on me that right now, these next few weeks, will be the most open my schedule will be until next summer. If I want to get any substantial writing in, it needs to be now.

Transforming into a machine is going to be tough. All my brothers/friends will be playing new games soon, and I won’t be able to. World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth comes out two days before The Wave™ hits. (It will be henceforth referred to as The Wave™.) So while I wanted to play, that’s just not happening. Dragon Quest XI comes on in September, and I’m super excited for that, but I’ll have to wait for winter break to get a chance at it. At least it’s a single player experience and I’m the only one interested in it, so there’s no risk of spoilers. Speaking of spoilers, it’s going to be really hard to follow Critical Role during that time, although maybe I can somewhat keep up via podcasting at work.

It’ll be tough, but I have high hopes for the future! If all goes well, by this time next year, I’ll have two AA degrees, enough money saved up to afford my own car, and I’ll be finally stepping into the crushing weight of adulthood where you have no idea what you should be doing with your life and by all that is holy, you had better figure it out soon because you don’t want to be that guy that lives with his parents for too long, even though the economy of Southern California doesn’t allow for any alternative at your age, and if you don’t somehow win the lottery you will never enter you’re going to be stuck like this for the rest of your life because good things come to those who aren’t you, and with the acceptance of that fact comes the existential dread that life will only get worse from here on out.

So you know, fun stuff!

 

Me — A Rare Free Weekend

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Warning: this is a bit all over the place. It’s pretty much a very rambling free-write.

 

So, I (obviously) didn’t post a short story this weekend. I’d like to apologize. I offer no excuse, but instead I give you an explanation. When I woke up Saturday morning, I realized I had absolutely no plans whatsoever for the entire weekend, and I don’t know when the last time that was. I doubt it’s happened at all in 2018, (cancelled plans excepting).

As happened, I decided to spend it doing nothing productive at all and see where that got me, and I succeeded. I wrote a tiny bit and went to go buy groceries, but that’s about it. Beyond that, I played a ton of Heroes of the Storm and NieR: Automata. I’ll tell you what though, doing nothing was hard. It’s not as though I had to make a conscious effort not to be productive—I’m sure I’m not more or less lazy than anybody else—but I can’t let myself relax without feeling bad about it. I would play a few hours of something, get bored and stop. Make food and then struggle to find something else to do.

The heat certainly doesn’t help. It’s going to be over 100° for a good chunk of the work week again, which will be tough. I find it hard to be comfortable when it’s over 80°, even if I’m not doing anything.

So no, I didn’t have a great time relaxing. I got a lot done in the games I’ve been playing, but other than that it’s hard not to feel like I threw the weekend away. And it’s not as though I have a shortage of things to write. Beyond the two or three small personal projects I’ve been touching on here and there, I want to work on that Xelfure story I brought up recently. I realized that the two-layer narrative is unnecessary, and while I do want to keep it, the “story” is complete in itself, so I shouldn’t need to worry about the flashback part. Honestly, it’s just been difficult to get started because it’s not going to be a simple 2,000 word flash fiction. I don’t know how long it would end up being, but it’s a good length. Multiple weekends worth of writing for sure, and it scares me.

I’ve been thinking about my resources a lot lately. My time and money is generally stretched pretty thin, and gaining one means losing the other, when I’d love to have more of both. I’m sure that’s the case with the vast majority of people though, eh? Struggling to find that balance.

In any case, don’t expect me to stop writing those weekly short stories. Next weekend’s is bound to be interesting. If nothing else, I think I need to write these little stories for my own personal sanity if nothing else. I have this irrepressible need to be productive in everything I do. Heck, even all the games I play I have specific long-term goals in mind.

Time grows short. The fall semester starts in about a month, and I have plans for pretty much every waking moment during the work week throughout the semester, which means any and all things that could possibly be considered “free time” must all be done on the weekends. Oh boy.

 

Me — Back to Audiobooks!

Kasey-Rayn 3 Comments

I’ve recently started going through audiobooks again—before that I had been listening to Jukebox the Ghost almost exclusively, and about 7 weeks later their charm is only just starting to wear off on me. So, I thought I would tune that down while I catch up on books.

Well, back at my old job at Target this worked pretty well. I worked night shifts, generally, and being cart attendant meant I was outside in the quiet dark a lot. So, two or three nights a week I’d listen to 4 or 5 hours of an audiobook and I made good time.

But now, I’m working full time and listening to audiobooks for pretty much all of it. At 1.4x speed, so, well, that’s about 50 hours of content a week, or 4 typical novels. Problem is, I only had about 6 books to catch up on, so here we are. I’ve still have 2 to go, and by the time I’m through with Friday I expect I’ll only have half a book left.

Now, in this circumstance my preference is certainly audiobooks, but if I kept at it at this rate, that would be over $200 a month of new books. Now, don’t get me wrong, if I was overflowing with money, I would love to do that. At 4 books a week, that’s over 200 per year, which, if I keep up this rate for all of my working career (which I certainly hope I don’t), would be about 8,000 books, and on the clock to boot. Nevermind the $80,000 that audio library would cost me.

No, no. Podcasts are what it will have to be for the foreseeable future. Which is fine, I have no shortage of these, either. I have Hello Internet, Welcome to Nightvale, and if I find them as interesting as a brother does, My Brother, My Brother, and I as well as the half a dozen other D&D campaigns he follows. I’m sure all of those podcasts combined is well over 1,000 hours, or, 18 weeks if I can make good time.

This is part of the reason why I love my job. It’s sort of complex—there’s a lot of nuance that goes into it, but for the most part lately it’s just been a lot of things that take a lot of time, I’m not bouncing around everywhere. I’m not talking to customers and I don’t need to talk to coworkers all that much, and so it’s a prime environment to listen to stuff.

I love that fact because it means I can multitask in the most efficient of ways: gaining money while also working on what I consider to be self-improvement. Maybe I’m a little crazy in thinking that podcasts are about improving the self, not a mere replacement for music, but that’s what I think of it as. Maybe less so the D&D related podcasts, but you get the idea.

In other news, the fact that I’m going to be listening to so many new things in the near future means more meaningful Review posts! I’ve just finished the first book of the Belgariad as well as the first book of Dan Wells’ Mirador series. By the time Tuesday rolls around, I expect to have at least another review candidate! Maybe the next few Thursdays will be more Reviews rather than Me posts.

 

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 — Work Environments

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So, I’ve had my new job for a few months now. It was interesting, because when I came home from work the first day I had the thought of “Yeah, that was fun.” It surprised me, because all my other work experience has been a trade of money for services rendered. But with this job, it’s different. I feel like I’m part of a team working to achieve something.

Which is an amazing thing.

So, I’ll give a few comparisons my new job and my last job. I used to work as a Cart Attendant for Target, (which means I was the guy that brought the carts in, yes, but there was a lot more in my job description most people wouldn’t realize). Now, I work in Production for a small company that makes banners, vehicle wraps, real estate signs, that sort of thing.

Being Cart Attendant sucked for a number of reasons. One big one was the fact that I was also janitor, and oh boy am I not going to relate to you what cleaning public bathrooms is like. We’ve all seen the horribly disfigured stalls of some unholy ritual some person tried to conduct in there. Imagine being the person that has to deal with that.

Number one reason I hated working at Target though: it was hard work that went unappreciated, and on a given shift you have X things to do. A busy shift just means that you also have to do Y things, so you have to juggle more and work harder.

My new job isn’t like this at all. First of all, it’s clean and nice. The hardest part is lifting rolls of vinyl that weigh upwards of a hundred pounds. And let me tell you, this new job is so much more busy. There’s never a moment where I can sit down and think “Wow, I got everything done today!” But at the same time, having more things to do is meaningless. I’m always working, so having a longer list of things to do doesn’t make me more busy, it just means that I need to be more careful not to mess up, because if I did it could mean we have to start over from the beginning. Plus, being that busy is great. You don’t have time to be twiddling your thumbs and staring at the clock. There have been instances where I’ve looked at the clock and it was a full hour later than I would have guessed (which is remarkable because like with most jobs where I live you’re entitled to some sort of break every two hours).

Also, my new job I basically have anywhere between two and four coworkers (depending on how you define it). So since you’re in the shop working on things all in the same space, you really get a feel for the rest of your team. At Target, there were probably three dozen people on shift at any given point in time. I knew plenty of them by name, but nothing beyond that except for the occasional “is a working mom” and “is going to school”. I also felt pretty isolated because there’s only one Cart Attendant on shift, and that job is really the WD-40 that makes the cart run. You’re essential to the process, but you’re not really a part of “the cart”.

So yes, my new job is way harder, and in a few ways more stressful. My work station involves operating and moving very heavy things around machines worth tens of thousands of dollars, and even the specific things I’m making can be worth a comparable sum. But it’s way more fulfilling because you’re only working on a few things per day (as there’s half a dozen steps in making a vehicle wrap in between printing the vinyl and installation), and as you work you watch as it comes together.

Sometimes things work out.

 

Me — New Job and Feeling Good

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I’m in a really interesting spot in my life in that I’m very content. It’s sort of strange that that’s the case, given that I didn’t win the scholarship and I was excited for the prospect of leaving the country for the first time (plus I felt I had a really strong application this year). I also intended to both get my own car soon as well as move out. I don’t think either of those two are likely to happen any time soon, and yet… it’s fine.

I really love my new job. Working around machines and materials worth hundreds or thousands of dollars is stressful, sure, but it suits me far better than my previous taxable job at Target. I’m part of a small team and the things that need to be done take a long time, so on a full shift, I’ll probably be doing a total of four or five things for the entire day. There’s a lot I need to learn, but once you know what you’re doing these things are pretty simple. (Plus having somebody always there to double check whether you’re doing something right is good insurance.)

So, my life is pretty busy right now. I’m at the college for 24 hours a week, and at work 21 hours a week. Not including the homework from all my classes, writing blog stuff, teaching improv, and going to my writer’s group, I’m busy 45 hours out of the week. Nothing to sneeze at, sure, but then you throw in the 10 page research paper due in two weeks (that I haven’t started), the One Act play I’ll need to edit soon, and you know, other things I want to work on… and well, there goes all my free time. I’m trying to get through Hollow Knight right now, but man, it’s a much longer game than I anticipated.

The weirdest thing about my contentedness is the fact that I’m not currently writing any fiction. I left Lisa 3 half finished, Lisa 2 needs to be completely rewritten, and I have interesting ideas floating around in my head that I’m basically not giving much attention. A few years ago I’d have been stressed out by my lack of writing, but right now I feel fine because I’m already doing so much other stuff, that I know my writing would suffer if I tried. Staying up till 2am writing a thing after playing video games because I felt I needed a break was super unhealthy, so not forcing myself to write has been nice.

Added bonus: my job has required me to get up earlier, and since I no longer have any days off during the week, I’m waking up pretty much every day. Yesterday I slept in and didn’t get out of bed until 8:45am! Not feeling tired and having that be the natural time I woke up was the best feeling in the world, because I suddenly had so much time in the day. I hope I can make that a habit, getting out of bed at 11am feels bad.

I also just realized that my 600th post was a few days ago. I’m probably well over half a million words posted on my blog at this point. Go milestones!