A long and exhasperated F-word
Clearly, as anyone who happens to be my "friend" or following me on social media is aware, I've personally had an eventful second half of 2017. So why so long since my last post? Busy. Depressed. Tired. Uncommitted. Take your pick, they all boil down exhaustion induced laziness. Not that I haven't been working at all. Quite the contrary. I lost a job, I gained two jobs, I started going to school, I quit school, I started throwing short stories out into the wild willy nilly, I signed a publishing deal for my novel. It's been a roller coaster. And it's the nausea of all that motion that has just made the getting down to it, whatever it is, so difficult.
Let's face it, 2016 sucked, it was so full of celebrity deaths (that shocked and mattered to people), and negative world and national politics, it felt like 2017 was obligated to be better. But I knew that wasn't true. Once Trump was elected, I knew it could only get worse. And here we are, at the end of '17, feeling like we've been through the ringer again. So, '18's gonna get it right...right?
I say "no." I think 2018 is going to be even worse. The toxic environment our politics have created and the inability our government has displayed to do anything about it and the complacency and lethargy of the Western world only goes to show the monsters are going to keep on advancing. There will be no shocking upsets in the elections this year, because by then, all this toxicity will be normalized. People will have moved on and forgotten what they were mad at. 2018 will be a teeter-totter at best. There will be some wins and gains, there will be heavy tolls and losses. Despite raging upset with the status quo—in Hollywood, in Washington, on our own streets, in the workplace—the quo just keeps on being status.
Look, I hope I'm wrong. Personally, I'm looking at a good year for me and my family. The daughter will be graduating high school. The wife will complete a college degree. And I will publish a book. Our family is poised to move up. But I can't keep on rose colored glasses with blinders.
2018 is going to be hard and hard to deal with. It can be the rising tide, but we all need to work at it. Not just the United States, but the entire world. The entire world does not need to be the United States, far from it. In fact, it looks more and more every day like we need to catch up to the world. But there are other Western civilizations facing the mire of old world, isolationist politics and the time to grow up and become one world is long past due.
You see all this negativity I'm expecting? That's why I've been silent. It's not that I want to bottle it up, but I don't want to contribute to the waste dump of internet opinion.
So accentuate the positives:
Yes, I lost a job I held onto for more than five years. But that job was becoming dangerous to my health, so, all's well that ends well. Good riddance.
I started the process of enrolling in further education at the urging of my wife. She thought for the type of work I'd been doing, it would be a good fit, and it could pay well. I agreed.
I got a job that would be flexible with my being a student (after getting a job at Target that I really didn't want, so that was a two-fold blessing at the jump) and while working there, I clicked with my co-workers, I liked what I was doing, and they seemed to like what I was doing.
I started school in August and did well right up into December. See, I was going for a medical coding certification. I got A's in medical terminology and patient billing.The class dwindled from 15 at the beginning down to ten of us when we started coding. Three chapters into it and each test a lower grade than the last, I accepted the fact that this was not for me, I was not "getting it," and in the working in class, I knew damn well I did not want to work another sedentary desk-drone job. Yeah, I like being anonymous, getting my work done, and going home, a job is a job is a job and that is it (meanwhile, my now part-time job, I was only dealing with a few people all day long, those of whom I liked working with, and I'm being active, it's not sitting at my desk all day). Seeing that downward trend, I verified whether or not I could go full-time at my job (I could), and I dropped the class. As Kenny Roger's sings, "You've got to know when to hold 'em (my new job), know when to fold 'em (school)."
And the last line, "Know when to walk away"? I'm not walking away from anything. I'm walking toward the future.
I'm going to be published in the New Year. I'm going to try very hard to get some more short stories written and possibly out, and to finish another novel. I'm also going to continue to rant and rave about public atrocities into a void and share video game funnies with hardly anyone in particular.
Tomorrow will be the first day of 2018. It's going to be bitterly cold here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I'll try to make another blog post tomorrow about my 2017 gaming year as I've done these past few years, but it'll probably be a bit shorter. School, work, and daily stress have made gaming, or at least, completing any games, a little harder. Or maybe I'm getting too old for this shit. I'm not, I've been playing Breath of the Wild right up to midnight that last several nights, mostly on accident, I'LL NEVER GROW UP!
That's what all any of us really needs. Not kindness towards one another, differences are there, they are necessary, and we don't have to like each other (thought some respect could go a long way). No, what we need is some childlike wonder. Just a little whimsy now and then. So, tonight, wherever you are in the world, at midnight when we arbitrarily mark the passage of a new year, go outside or look through a window at the sky, and know that not even that is a limit.
Let's face it, 2016 sucked, it was so full of celebrity deaths (that shocked and mattered to people), and negative world and national politics, it felt like 2017 was obligated to be better. But I knew that wasn't true. Once Trump was elected, I knew it could only get worse. And here we are, at the end of '17, feeling like we've been through the ringer again. So, '18's gonna get it right...right?
I say "no." I think 2018 is going to be even worse. The toxic environment our politics have created and the inability our government has displayed to do anything about it and the complacency and lethargy of the Western world only goes to show the monsters are going to keep on advancing. There will be no shocking upsets in the elections this year, because by then, all this toxicity will be normalized. People will have moved on and forgotten what they were mad at. 2018 will be a teeter-totter at best. There will be some wins and gains, there will be heavy tolls and losses. Despite raging upset with the status quo—in Hollywood, in Washington, on our own streets, in the workplace—the quo just keeps on being status.
Look, I hope I'm wrong. Personally, I'm looking at a good year for me and my family. The daughter will be graduating high school. The wife will complete a college degree. And I will publish a book. Our family is poised to move up. But I can't keep on rose colored glasses with blinders.
2018 is going to be hard and hard to deal with. It can be the rising tide, but we all need to work at it. Not just the United States, but the entire world. The entire world does not need to be the United States, far from it. In fact, it looks more and more every day like we need to catch up to the world. But there are other Western civilizations facing the mire of old world, isolationist politics and the time to grow up and become one world is long past due.
You see all this negativity I'm expecting? That's why I've been silent. It's not that I want to bottle it up, but I don't want to contribute to the waste dump of internet opinion.
So accentuate the positives:
Yes, I lost a job I held onto for more than five years. But that job was becoming dangerous to my health, so, all's well that ends well. Good riddance.
I started the process of enrolling in further education at the urging of my wife. She thought for the type of work I'd been doing, it would be a good fit, and it could pay well. I agreed.
I got a job that would be flexible with my being a student (after getting a job at Target that I really didn't want, so that was a two-fold blessing at the jump) and while working there, I clicked with my co-workers, I liked what I was doing, and they seemed to like what I was doing.
I started school in August and did well right up into December. See, I was going for a medical coding certification. I got A's in medical terminology and patient billing.The class dwindled from 15 at the beginning down to ten of us when we started coding. Three chapters into it and each test a lower grade than the last, I accepted the fact that this was not for me, I was not "getting it," and in the working in class, I knew damn well I did not want to work another sedentary desk-drone job. Yeah, I like being anonymous, getting my work done, and going home, a job is a job is a job and that is it (meanwhile, my now part-time job, I was only dealing with a few people all day long, those of whom I liked working with, and I'm being active, it's not sitting at my desk all day). Seeing that downward trend, I verified whether or not I could go full-time at my job (I could), and I dropped the class. As Kenny Roger's sings, "You've got to know when to hold 'em (my new job), know when to fold 'em (school)."
And the last line, "Know when to walk away"? I'm not walking away from anything. I'm walking toward the future.
I'm going to be published in the New Year. I'm going to try very hard to get some more short stories written and possibly out, and to finish another novel. I'm also going to continue to rant and rave about public atrocities into a void and share video game funnies with hardly anyone in particular.
Tomorrow will be the first day of 2018. It's going to be bitterly cold here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I'll try to make another blog post tomorrow about my 2017 gaming year as I've done these past few years, but it'll probably be a bit shorter. School, work, and daily stress have made gaming, or at least, completing any games, a little harder. Or maybe I'm getting too old for this shit. I'm not, I've been playing Breath of the Wild right up to midnight that last several nights, mostly on accident, I'LL NEVER GROW UP!
That's what all any of us really needs. Not kindness towards one another, differences are there, they are necessary, and we don't have to like each other (thought some respect could go a long way). No, what we need is some childlike wonder. Just a little whimsy now and then. So, tonight, wherever you are in the world, at midnight when we arbitrarily mark the passage of a new year, go outside or look through a window at the sky, and know that not even that is a limit.
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