Trudging along

Even as I drag through the effects of COVID, I am still somehow getting things done. The car is full of donations for the help center and everything for my father's upcoming move is planned out as well as I think it can be. Each day, there are things I need to do. For example, today, I have to submit the change of address forms online.

I am still working each day although the fatigue makes for a bit slower paced day. I am reading at night and catching up on shows I want to watch. I finished "Pretend It's a City" last night which I highly recommend.

I wish I could report feeling magically better today but unfortunately, everything is about the same as yesterday and the day before that, etc. etc.

2021 is not turning out to be my most stellar year but I stay optimistic and keep trudging along.

 I wonder what happens if I try to publish a post with no title.

Labels

I just went back and removed all of my labels from my posts. I hate labels. I hate having to think about how to label what I just wrote. Is this about ham? Label it ham. Is this about how cloudy it is today? Label it meteorology.

Screw the rules of blogging. We don't need your stinkin' labels.

Infiltration

Part of me wants to infiltrate this other blogging site by signing up for a free account and adding positivity to offset this other person's negativity. They are so invested in updating the site multiple times a day that I know they would see my posts but how long could I keep up the charade? I am not overwhelmingly positive myself. Sure, the happy pills help, but they are not magic.

I would have to create a whole new online persona, not using any website name or user name I have used before. I would not want this tracked back. It would need to live independently of who I currently am on the internet.

Now I wonder as I go back and read this - is the COVID effecting my brain?

Looking in the mirror

Did you know that there are other blogging sites? I know! It's surprising to me also. There are so many people out there that have so much they want to say that a whole economy has built up around these egos creators. 

I know. I have no room to talk.

I get into these phases when I go out and read other blogs on some of these sites. Some do a nice job of providing feeds so you can read the newest updates in real-time and I often encounter people I want to yell at right through the screen, people who, based on what they are writing, are so self-absorbed and pious that I know they are stuck in a mire of their own making and they are broadcasting their feelings to the world via their blog not in the vein of self-improvement but merely to boost their own ego.

Even if no one comments and sides with them, they still feel better knowing that there are people out there who they might reach that are also stuck and then everyone can be stuck together in one big unhappy whiny stuck family.

It got so bad that I had to stop reading what one person was writing. I know I felt sorry for them because I could recognize shades of past me in their current situation and I know there is no way they will get out of that at the state they are in. So they will just continue to complain and waste perfectly good days.

Post-lunch braindump

It's weird outside right now. The sky is that funky "it's about to storm" color. Everything in here is bathed in sort of a yellowish tint. I see this often in spring but can't recall seeing it a whole lot in January.

I went out to Sonic and picked up lunch that we had ordered in the app and while these apps are great for keeping contact with people minimal in the age of COVID, they are also great for me not having to read out my order to someone over a tinny speaker and having to repeat myself ten times when they can't hear what I am saying or they are too distracted to process my words in their already full brain. It's not about health and safety. It's about me not being annoyed and I am all for that.

The internet is so busy

The internet is so busy. Or maybe I am making myself busy because I allow the internet to make me this way.

I've been sipping my coffee and surfing around a bit (if we still call it that) and I spend a lot of time scrolling with the wheel on my mouse. On Google News, I see a steady stream of headlines, most of them not good news. On Twitter, I see bits of information in between rants and pointlessness. I avoid Facebook but I know I would be bombarded there in a similar manner.

Even if none of this was bad news or people unloading their negativity, it would still fry my brain a bit to see HEADLINE HEADLINE HEADLINE HEADLINE or IDEA IDEA IDEA IDEA moving by on my screen so quickly. My brain barely has time to register one item before another item is being encountered.

Newspapers were once upon a time quite intimidating in size and in the amount of material they presented to me every morning (and in the real old days every evening also) but the pace was slower. I could settle into a story and get all of the detail and typically didn't jump headline to headline, page to page. 

I guess my pace was slower because new information coming to me wirelessly 24/7 wasn't competing with the newspaper for my attention.

Align time

It's time for me to align this site with how I am doing everything else these days.

How am I doing everything else these days? I am putting away everything I don't use and focusing on what I do use. 

That does not mean trips to the thrift store at the moment. For now, it means items put in totes in closets and all I see around me are the things I use at least on a weekly basis. Everything else is out of sight but somewhat still in mind because it will need to be dealt with eventually.

On the internet, that means no longer trying to juggle updating special.fish or Flounder, two sites you might not know about but that I had dived into over the last few months while trying to figure out my place in the virtual world.

For this site specifically, I needed to get rid of the silly name. Done. I needed to stop the gimmick of naming posts after dumb national holidays. Done. In order to go into a new direction with this, I had to delete all of the previous posts here. Done. Keeping them was not necessary for where we are going next, where ever that happens to be.

Is this simplification? The next step in minimalism? I do not know.

What I do know is that when I just looked around the room back here in the home office, shelves are less cluttered than ever before and I know where everything is.

This is the beginning of it, whatever it is, and this site is the beginning of documenting it, whatever it will lead me to next.