Prior to turning 32, a year of no particular consequence by any means, I decided my thirty-second year of life would be one of reinvention, reinvigoration, and rebirth. In short, I would rise from the ashes of 31 and the trials it entailed.
I had a post in mind for this. I stashed it neatly in my thoughts, where it waited. And waited. And then quietly packed its things before leaving. So it goes.
Sure, that’s a long-ass title, but it’s catchier than my usual go-to of indicating I’m not dead, that I’ve not forgotten I have a WordPress, or some pop culture reference. Related: how the Hell do I have 18 drafts? I need to do some belated spring cleaning.
The Halo Top, for the record, isn’t half bad, but it has a weird consistency – just to set the record straight.
“What’s new in the land of Phil’s Misadventures in Fiction (and life)?” asks no one in particular. Continue reading
I almost forgot to post tonight, which is acceptable as it was the second 11-hour shift in a row. I’m very tired. I did, however, make a delightful little paper crane out of a Post-It note earlier.
I’m trying very hard to actually utilize WordPress’ new-ish post creator, but it’s off to a rocky start as I’m already not fond of it. Something about typing into a tiny rectangle while everything else sits off to the left of the screen is frustrating for reasons I can’t properly verbalize, a problem which only further feeds my lack of joy in using this interface instead of clumsily wandering over to my Dashboard, then hovering over the Posts option to get to New Post. Or whatever it actually says.
Tonight’s post will be a split affair, starting now (with now being defined as approximately 7p.m. Eastern Standard Time) and finishing it after 11p.m. because I have to go back to work shortly. It’s also a short experiment to see if any ideas occur to me in the time between now and when I return home. The reality of writing blog posts, such as this one, on a daily basis without really giving them much prior planning (having a theme for each day panned out only so well) is that the ideas will eventually run out. Either that or you’re some sort of creative deity of sorts and you should be sharing your gift with other creative-types, as we need all the help we can get. Seriously. The point I’m getting at here is this: with time-sensitive posting, such as daily blog entries, it can be tempting to put off writing a post until later. Sure, I may have other obligations such as work, but if the idea for a solid post isn’t there and I just don’t feel like rambling pointlessly, well, the temptation to put the post off becomes far greater. However, there’s also never the guarantee that an idea, or a better idea, will materialize during the procrastination time, and so there’s always the chance I’ll just end up too tired and frustrated by the time midnight rolls around and just post another cat picture or something.
This raises the question: is it worth it to put off writing a blog post because you don’t have what you consider a strong enough topic? Or is it better to force a post to happen as soon as possible so as to not fall prey to later-laziness? We’ll see what my brain has to say once I get back later this evening. I’ve got to get to work in enough time to grab something to snack on.
It’s almost midnight and I want to sleep forever. Keeping in mind that I just worked almost twelve hours today, I’d say I made some more progress? Mind you, I have some fictional business floating around in my brain now, but I won’t disclose that here because it’s top-secret.
Goodnight, folks. Happy writing.
Today mutated into ten hours of work, and so I am (understandably, I think) quite exhausted. Continuing with my new habit of saying **** it and posting pictures, I’m leaving this entry in One Hundred Days 2.0 as a picture of my latest (and, really, first) personal touch to my office. It’s a cactus I bought while at Home Depot earlier, as I had to pick up some supplies for work as well. It still needs a name, though Fluffy is currently winning if I’m going by what has the most votes. I probably won’t.
My office cactus. Also pictured: the horrible state of (part of) my desk.
Yes, I know I sort of started said countdown already, but the official marker of “I’m almost on vacation” is really that I have one workweek between me and freedom. It’s not even a vacation about the destination so much as it is just not being at work for a week (and a few extra days), as I have reached a level of fried that is typically reserved for batter-smothered Oreo cookies and overheated hard drives. Sadly, I’m really proud of that joke because it came to me naturally despite my brain being all liquefied and so on. I’m constantly somewhere between high-strung and ready to pass out, which probably isn’t particularly healthy.
Thinking forward to vacation and bypassing this upcoming week, however, has also created something of a conundrum. In the same way many people yearn for the next weekend, I’m wishing away much of next week (including the drive to Pittsburgh next Thursday, which is further complicated by the Carnegie on and off ramps being closed on the Parkway; thanks for that, PennDOT) for the sake of next week, which could be excellent or terrible. It’s still just potential. I mean, I know seeing my family for the first time since Christmas will be fantastic and all, but there’s no guarantee the other bits of my vacation will have been worth this wishful bit of time traveling. That’s one whole week of time, complete with possible and probable good experiences, that I’m attempting to will out of existence. That, too, is probably not very healthy. There’s a lot to be said on the way many people live for two days of the week and exist the other five in hopes of making it to those two previously mentioned ones. On a related note, I’m beyond ready for my next tattoo…so that’s probably a strong indication that an addiction is a-brewin’.
Defending my wishes to bypass next week, and all of the hideous responsibilities it threatens, are the following: Jason, my brother-paladin, and Chrisy, my New Yorker sister who has accomplished far more than I ever will, are going to be home when I am. I will also get a chance to see my grandma, possibly my father, and some other relatives, so that, too, is wonderful. There will be much reading and writing in the later hours of downtime. At some point, I need to make stuffed french toast because cooking for people is loads of fun. I can’t, therefore, be completely damned for looking forward to these wonderful times, even if the bulk of my actual vacation will be spent cleaning up my apartment because there’s still shit in boxes from the move.
Ultimately, I’m going to get through the bad parts of this upcoming week by reminding myself of how much fun I’ll have with my family (and thinking about the impending Comedy = Tragedy + Time tattoo). I also vow to enjoy the good next week brings, no matter how limited it may be. Makes for a bit of a win-win situation until I’m on vacation, I think.
I’ll not mince words: this week has been pretty Hellish in terms of stress, but I can’t really say much regarding that because a lot of it is my usual introspective bullshit mixed with my capacity for building vast ranges of mountains out of a single molehill.
The good news: I managed to take a nap earlier, and it was glorious…and it gave me time to think things over after waking up, which is that precious time when I have clarity but not so much stress. Good times. Granted, that’s also the window I’m most likely to fall back to sleep in, but now I’m just over-complicating things.
A while back, I posted about my District Leader and his end-of-conference-call mantra of “Go out there and make it a great week”. It’s easy to lose sight of that as a goal, and so I think I need to make it a point to sit down every Sunday (which, really, isn’t so much the end of the weekend so much as the start of a new, potentially promising or terrible week) and put together a list of things that I’m going to try doing to make it a great week. These aren’t goals that must be accomplished, but possible steps towards furthering myself and my week in a positive way. They could be as simple as writing down five things I’m happy about with myself at that particular time to larger changes such as, say, cleaning up the house or whatever. The rewards are built into the actions, making this even better.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have two more posts to write before I go to bed tonight because I’m a self-destructive jackass.
Today turned out to be one of the more pleasant Mondays in recent memory, and I think it may be because I found out I have thirty-two unused hours of vacation time. I’m ignoring how such knowledge would have been valuable around the time of my move as I don’t want to defile such a good thing.
Perhaps the wonderful nap I took earlier (I know, I know, I said I needed to stop doing that, but sleep is just so nice after being so busy with something like moving while still working a forty-hour-a-week job). Or the dinner Brianne made.
Beginning to play catch-up on NBC’s Hannibal isn’t hurting, although I will admit that it’s not the best dinner accompaniment in terms of TV shows. I’m only about seven episodes into it, give or take a few (I actually can’t remember at the moment as a lot of things are just sort of blending together lately). I’m trying to remember why I stopped watching it for as long as I did, especially since I have such easy access to season one on DVD.
Admittedly, Monday and I don’t always get along and so having such a laid-back, relaxing start to the week is almost unsettling. I realize there’s something genuinely ridiculous in saying Monday is an inherently bad thing, especially given the number of people who no longer find their work-weeks confined to the Monday-through-Friday nine-to-five. This isn’t a post about “Well, it’s all a matter of how you look at something” or blah blah blah positivity. Nope. Just enjoying a particularly pleasant Monday just a little more before I head off to bed and prepare myself for…well, another day at work.
How did everyone else find this Monday? Hopefully it wasn’t too unpleasant.
It’s Day Ninety, I think. Or probably close enough. I need to not do this again any time soon, as it has been a soul-devouring experience.
Today’s post was one I should have made last week around this time, but I shuffled my feet a bit. I’m glad I did, as I received more relevant news that only made me want to wait until I knew I could do this topic justice. Hopefully I can manage that much tonight, despite being quite tired and behind on other responsibilities (I’m looking at you, Family Guy/Simpsons crossover article I need to write for Screen Robot). Moving, to state something rather obvious, is brutal. Moving along.
I don’t talk about my day job on here in much detail, and it’s largely because I know the pitfalls and dangers of doing such things. I can, however, say that it is a company that stresses leadership over management. I’m not a store manager, but a store leader. I’m not a boss, but someone who leads by example. I hope I’ve accomplished this so far, at least, and I constantly strive towards making that happen.
In the past week or so I lost two of my District Leaders, both of whom I hold in very high regard. Dan hired me (and, on more than one occasion, was so kind as to call me one of his best hiring decisions), and Bill chose me for my promotion to store leadership. They were mentors to me, and genuinely good people. They were, above all else, leaders. When they were in the trenches, so to speak, they would perform tasks at the store they would expect other employees to do so as to lead by example. They showed genuine interest in the people who worked for them. At no point did it feel like there was some great, looming power in the store when they would visit.
They weren’t bosses. They weren’t managers. They were leaders. I feel like my life has been enriched by knowing them, and I’m hoping I can take the lessons they’ve taught me and improve myself both in and outside of my job.
I doubt very much Dan or Bill will ever find this (I’m hoping not, at least, because it’s a lot more sentimental to me than it may necessarily appear). They were why I was, and am, so enthusiastic and passionate about my day job. Innovation and all that good stuff. Needless to say, this post is in honor of my two District Leaders who did me a world of good. I strive to make every week a great week, and “do more with less; God bless”.
Warning: posting this from my Android phone. Who knows what kind of silly shenanigans will follow?
Short summary of my day, better known as The Movening: I got very little done compared to my goals. This is thanks to me finding a groundhog’s dwelling with my foot, falling back on my left leg, and spraining my ankle quite badly. It’s been a symphony of swearing today. The ankle in question is bundled up neatly in an AirCast. It still really hurts.
I also started rereading Stardust for the hundredth time. There’s something in the magic of Neil Gaiman’s writing that fills me with such a yearning to get off my ass and do some of my own writing. The moving mentality I have seems to blot that out a fair bit, sadly.
And then there are the inevitable pangs of envy. Wanting to be able to create something as fantastically brilliant of my own. Lindsey, beta-reader extraordinaire and terrific writer, told me Joshua Harkin and the Wicked Nightmare King read like a collaboration between Neil Gaiman and the author of Howl’s Moving Castle. That is, without a doubt, some of the highest praise I have ever received, but it also got me thinking.
There’s nothing wrong with never achieving Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett level brilliance. No matter how much I try, I won’t. What I will, I suspect, eventually manage is to create my own kind of brilliance. Even if it’s never on a massive scale, it’ll be me and the creative style that is entirely mine. That’s something I hope all creative folks can embrace.
Find what you do well. Make it brilliant. Make it your own. Love it and pour your soul into it, and then rip it apart and fix it until you reach such a point where you can’t bear to look at your work anymore. Let it rest, and do it again.
Above all else, be happy with creating something. There are so many other, similar artists out there, but none of them are exactly the same.
Phil's Misadventures In Fiction 