lost my phone - nobody panic!

Pancakes!!!! I'm just posting some links from some random stuff I found on the net...like Bacon Salt, which actually sounds pretty good. Maple Syrup Crystals, I must have been hungry for breakfast that day, and Tomato Powder. Neat. Add one Mad Science Bartending Set, drop in some Skull and Crossbones ice cube trays, and you're good to go.

Hey, do something for me real quick: relax all the muscles in your head and neck. Don't forget those little ones around your eyes, and the jaw muscles you've been clenching from time to time. Take your time, make sure you get all of them. There, now doesn't that make a difference? Remember to do that more often. Have a good day.

Ugh...what a week

As of 8:05am this morning, I am 30 years old.

Solved some problems, don't want to talk about how. Found my phone, sorry to everyone who tried to call since Tuesday - I will check my messages at lunch and return calls. I am feeling particularly awful today, between being depressed and having an apparently imaginary cold for the last week, so don't expect happy fun time.

Couple of things...the writing is coming along, not well, I've abandoned my original approach and decided to actually sit down and write an outline. Many authors say that real writers don't write from outlines, and I believed that for a long time, until someone pointed out to me that those authors simply don't write their outlines down - they still have them. The outline is coming well, and I have not been foolish enough to scrap everything I've written so far - nothing gets thrown out! I can't stand it when you people do that. Edited perhaps in the next draft, but nothing gets thrown out in the writing process and finished works are either not finished or things you move on from, not burn or throw away or edit down to a single line - you people know who you are.

Some webcomics, though webcomics fans do not read this blog I don't believe. Mansion of E is pretty good, I'm not bothering to look up the links on these, The Dreamland Chronicles is also good despite being the sort of art I usually can't stand, and The Gods of ArrKelaan is pretty freaking amazing. Joe Bob says check them out.

My job is stressful but still okay. I'm having to exert more conscious will to remember to be empathetic, but stress in my own life probably doesn't help with that. I've discovered that I apparently project as my primary way of relating to people a sense of reassurance. Everyone can use reassurance, especially those that don't need it.

Check out this site, it is really delving into some of the things I've been merely dipping my mental toes into - Mentalstates.net

What a weekend. Ugh. No power was fun - we got to be gypsies, but without the backstory or the oral history and cultural identity. And with public schools. Anyway, glad that's over. I have learned I function very poorly with actual cash. Not because I spend it, but because I have to go to inconvenient places during nearly impossible hours to accomplish anything. I think I have figured out how I'm going to address the problem I was having with chronic overdrafting, though, so I'm thinking that going back to the direct deposit/debit card system (with help from my Secret Plan[tm]) is the only way for me to actually be able to function effectively in a financial sense. There is a 45 minute window for me to cash my check on the day I receive it between getting off of work and the closing of all places that will (sometimes) cash a check. If the machine can read the numbers, which apparently cannot be entered manually. You know, the Chinese that were trained on the abacus and developed reasonable skill with it can do amazing feats of calculation in their heads because they can simply visualize the abacus. We have a great many retail workers (I'm guilty of this one occasionally, too) who are unable to function when the cash register goes down, and have to resort to a calculator for really simple arithmetic. I'm trying to not do this anymore, but I still check my work on the calculator. I'm okay with that - that's what the dang machines are for.

Mystery meeting at work this afternoon. I assume it's good? They just give you the boot if they're getting rid of you usually. Makes me nervous when they don't tell you anything about the meeting, just give a location. Sounds like a trap. What if one of those meeting rooms is actually carnivorous? No one misses temp workers...scary.

Been thinking about the Buddhist concept of ego death as a goal to be pursued and how much it used to disturb me, but doesn't anymore. I've found I am more likely to engage in effective actions and experiences if I let as little awareness of self and its relative abstract involvement in events intrude. Basically, if I start thinking about what this means for or about me, specifically in an identity sense, I am no longer involved in events. Most of the time, my sense of identity is at best a tangent or non-sequiter to the flow of events, and the more I remember not to let self-consciousness crash the party the more interesting and fulfilling my life becomes.

I sit next to a guy with a mohawk and very little visible skin that isn't tattooed. Nice guy, very professional phone voice. Sometimes I love this town.

I remember a time, when I was younger, where I had a lot of determination and focus on developing personal discipline. This seemed, from every way I could look at it, to be a good approach, but I noticed over time that it seemed to have difficulty achieving lasting effects, and peculiar new quirks would quickly spring up in unexpected places. Rather like trying to plug a leak in the old Pink Panther or Warner Brother cartoons.

I think the problem was that I was focusing far too much on the end goal - the discipline - and not enough on the root causes. It's one of the reasons I believe in depth-oriented psychology, even though I do take some issue with a lot of the methods and models used for it in this era. I've found that despite my notable lack of organization lately in taking care of my business, overall I have achieved many of the goals that I set out to achieve way back when by the simple expedient of "applying self-discipline" without any such expenditure of maintenance effort. Changing the fundamental mechanisms of my thinking and action has rendered the grinding application of will to a recalcitrant whimsy redundant, if not absurd. I'm still working on it, mind you, but I notice sometimes the things I do with ease - things that used to be impossible. Change takes us all under its wings.

Ugh. January sucks the past few years. February used to be the bad one, but lately it's been January.