Tag: writing

Warning: Introverted Skeptic

In an extroverted society, the difference between an introvert and an extrovert is that an introvert is often unconsciously deemed guilty until proven innocent.
Criss Jami

Shame on myself for letting all of the outlets that help me get through life wither and wane on the vine hoping someday that I’ll come back and visit them again. Blindly paying the bill to WordPress for a domain and hosting that just… sits there… patiently waiting for me to return and breath new life into an impressive history of posts. A history of pain, mental anguish, life events, and other random crap that I felt like sitting down and writing about. I could go into details as to why I stopped, why writing became a burden for me instead of an outlet, why it felt as if I wasn’t getting any benefit, why, why why… It doesn’t matter honestly, really doesn’t. What matters is that despite not writing for so long, for whatever reason, I still kept reading and still kept up with all those that I follow. It was a one-sided relationship, take but never give except in rare occasions. The silent follower that would “Like” a post but almost never comment and admittedly in the last few months, the liking of posts had even stopped.

I’m in a weird place right now, mentally and physically. That in between place where you’ve sorted through the tough stuff and have all the annoying crap left that takes up way more time than it should. Using the regular routine of gym, work, dinner, lather, rinse, repeat is amazingly helpful to me but quite the opposite to everyone else. My attitude to them has been one of implying they should go pound sand and leave me be until such time that I’m ready to allow entry back into my head space. This is definitely one of those “in my own head” phases that’s lasting a little longer than typical and if I’m being honest, I’m in no hurry to really figure out because it’s just easier most of the time. Those that know me best understand, those that don’t, well, they’re getting good at pounding sand.

If you would have just told me to go pound sand and never contact you again... that would have been freakin' awesome. Cause I'm not real figurative but I understand words real well.

The approach of the infamous holiday season does not have me enthusiastic regarding my ability in finding a solution to my current situation. Arrival of family, in an otherwise closed in space, usually puts the brakes on any type of civility past a certain period of time and I end up just finding a space to retreat. Individuals that seek me out to find out if I’m “okay” after having segregated myself (obviously don’t know me well) receive the full force of attitude that has been stored up like a twisted rubber band. It’s not their fault really, more of a wrong place and time type of situation that I usually end up apologizing for later on when the tension is gone. There are days I wonder, not wish, why I am the way that I am. I’ve never known anything different though and have no frame of reference other than my perception of those that aren’t the same as me, which is subjective as hell.

Ok, for those that have made it this far, bravo to you. I’ll explain the featured image now. It’s awesome because in my advancing age, my skepticism has been one of my true infallible weapons. This makes for one hell of a combination though; introverted skeptic. I should start wearing shirts that give people some advance warning.

Three Things Thursday – 05/11/2017

Hosted by There She Goes
Originally inspired by Nerd in the Brain

BRING THE HAPPY!

The Dog

20170508_085137 — Seriously? Why you no pet me?

I worked from home on Monday and apparently the dog was a little lonely. She came down to visit me in my office in the basement and after jamming her wet nose into my elbow a few times, she finally gave up and sat down against the wall. She kept looking at me with a horribly sad look on her face. I’m not sure if she is cleverly manipulative or I’m projecting my own human emotions onto her canine facial expressions, but she ended up getting to sit in my recliner to the left out of view.

20170509_214959 — No, I not drooling on your comforter.

Later on Monday, after a long hard day of staring at me with “puppy dog eyes”, she was apparently really tired. That must be really hard work. She took to slowly sliding down the chaise lounge chair in the corner of my bedroom while the wife read.

Increasing Viewership

I’ve been writing for EPV now for just over 3 months and am loving every minute of it. I doubled my unique views from March to April to end up with the above number. If only I could get that kind of viewership here, that’d be really cool. Rather than toss out as many pieces as I can, I’ve taken a more measured approach and take my time writing and publishing a piece every few days. It really paid off for April and I’m on track to do more views in May. Hard to believe the EPV site is only 8 months old!

Back In The Day: ROFL Copter

Something a little new and hopefully a regular entry to my TTT weekly post. I was sent this from a colleague at work for saying something really funny on a conference call that no one could actually laugh to. It’s now made the rounds several times over between all of us at work and it’s still going. It made me quietly reflect for several days of all the things we used to do “back in teh day” when computers were new and relegated to the nerds and geeks of the world. I’ll be digging into my past and pulling out some gems to remind myself of days long past when it was actually fun to talk to most people you found online, aka Pre-Troll-ERA.

TTT Weekly Music Recommendation

Royals (Rock Version)

by Relic Hearts

Self-imposed technology limits

I know I’m spending too much time writing and reading. Having been here before in the past, I know that things like work, life and relationships start suffering in favor of writing and spending time reading articles. With that said, I’ve decided to put some restrictions on myself to help alleviate any problems before they’re actually problems.

Post Limits

Starting this Thursday, I’m going to publish a post every Monday and Thursday. Thursday’s post will be the regular Three Things Thursday and Monday’s post will be something related to whatever fired me up or I found interesting from the week before. I can take a few hours on the weekend to concentrate the post instead of having 3-5 posts only partially done at any given time.

Reading Hours

Feeling that reading blogs has started to take more and more of my free time, I’m scheduling 1-hour blocks on various days through the week to read and comment on blogs. It will be a fundamental shift in what I’ve been doing the last several months and comments will be made only when I have something substantive to add; otherwise a simple “Like” will be made after reading something.

Daily/Weekly Digests

Most of the blogs I follow email me as posts are published. It was fine when I only followed 10-20 blogs, but now I’m following almost 100 of them and it takes a large amount of time to work through 200 emails in my inbox sometimes. Starting this weekend, I’m going to be switching to daily/weekly digest emails so that all posts from an author are consolidated in one email per day or week depending on frequencies. What this means is that “Likes” and comments will come in groups rather than trickle in as they have been.

Twitter

Since deleting my Facebook account, my Twitter use has increased steadily over the last several weeks. I still have not decided how I’m going to limit my use of Twitter as I’ve been using it more and more as a news aggregator and following publications rather than people. I may decide that it doesn’t require limits, just simply turning off the notification on my phone/desktop app may be all that is required. More thought on this is needed.

Suggestions

I’m open to suggestions that might help and open to hearing what has worked or not worked for you. I know I’m not the only one that has had this issue and been forced to make some changes to their technology consumption. Thankfully I’ve caught it in time as it hasn’t affected anything too serious yet.

Sleeping at movies, not quite

Driving into work today I thought of several things I wanted to talk about, things that were bothering me. Now, as I sit staring at the white screen, my mind is blank. I guess that, in itself, is something. An ability that G is absolutely jealous of…. especially when attempting to get to sleep at night. Her brain, always on like a datacenter server, never turns off. I don’t know if its because I’m a guy, or if I just have an ability she doesn’t, but I can literally stop all brain cells from firing. A figurative off switch if you will.

Switching gears for a second, I’ve been watching movies online that have a science-fiction “end of the world” type of feel to them. The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact, The Core, Armageddon, 2012, etc. etc. The list goes on. Why am I fascinated with that theme? The fact I have been reading sites that dedicate themselves to the 12/21/12 Mayan calendar prediction isn’t helping matters. The one movie that I found incredibly interesting was “The Moon.” About a future where humans figured out fusion technology with Helium3 harvested from the moon. Its a complete 180 from my usual movie fare. I highly recommend it and the twist in the movie is actually quite scary as its something that we, as humans, have tinkered with in the past but have rejected for the time being. Watch it and you’ll understand.

Now, back to the original topic, sleeping. My sleep patterns lately have been very erratic and not at all normal. One night I can sleep 10 hours, other nights I sleep barely 4 hours. There really isn’t any real reason I can decipher other than every once in a while I lose my ability to turn off my brain. G would be happy to hear that, so she’d have someone to talk to rather than stare at the ceiling for several hours each night. One night this past week, I outlined a really excellent idea for a short story or a book; going so far even to write it down so I wouldn’t forget some of the details that made it excellent. Having been down this road before, I am keen to the fact that I have a motivation problem with things taking longer than a few days to complete….. I blame that on being male 🙂 But the idea is so good, it might transcend my procrastination.

What do you, my loyal 2 followers think? Make a jump at transcending my human male characteristics?