Wait, what?

As you can see I'm not consistent here. I do have ideas, but I never take the time to write them out. Mostly because I know that it will take time and effort and these days I just don't have the patience. Or maybe don't even have the desire. But when I do actually write something meaningful, at least meaningful to me, I feel better. But just like I know that I will feel better after I go for a run, doesn't mean I'll go and actually do it.

I don't even have the patience for watching tv shows or movies. There's a ton of shows and movies that I just sit here and scroll through and just say, eh, I don't feel like sitting here to watch something that's 45 minutes to 2 hours. I can't even read a book. And I love books. How did my attention span shrink so much in like two years time?

I do watch a ton of YouTube though. I'm on there almost every day. The other day I was watching an interview of Neil deGrasse Tyson. And he said something truly profound to me. He said "Create meaning. Don't spend your life searching for meaning". Those likely weren't his exact words but that is what I paused the video and typed into the notes on my phone. I, along with so many of my generation struggle with is finding purpose and meaning to our lives. Always asking what's the point? Why? What is my purpose? What am I meant to do? Those questions and many like them constantly run through our brains like its an infinity loop.

Stop searching. Make it yourself. That's hard to do. I also recently took the survey to get sorted into a Hogworts House on the Pottermore site. And I got very upset that I was placed in Gryffindor. But there were so many answer options to questions that none fit. So I still think I'm in Ravenclaw.

Then today I watched a video on the differences between INFJ and INFP from the Myers Briggs personality thing (yes I know it's flawed). And I never could figure out which of the two I fit into and thought "hey, this video may actually tell me" but nope there were like six points and I fell evenly three on one side and three on the other. No wonder I'm so confused all the time.

Constantly searching for purpose and meaning and never fitting in to any one group anywhere. Not at school, not into particular personalities, zodiac signs, or even Hogworts.

I'm just a middle-aged adult baby, lost at sea with one paddle stuck to one side of the boat so all I can do is go in circles.

There's a Twenty One Pilots song about this. Of course there is. But I won't nerd out on you about it here.

I'll just be in my little one paddle boat trying to figure out how to stop the infinity loop of my life and start living my meaning, my purpose, my creativity. Now where to find it...

Attention K-Mart Shoppers, Blue Light Special in Aisle you really should have your shit together by now, where's the cat food

Here's a little something to tie you over till I buck up and get stuff written. I started this well over a year and a half ago now. And it's been sitting in the proverbial death pile known as drafts. I better check the link to make sure it still works. This also ties in to a future post that's partially written. I really have been thinking about this stuff for a while. So on with the oh here's a cool thought that fizzled...



I'm technically not a Gen-Xer, Gen-Yer, or a Millennial. This article tried to call my "generation" Xennials. Wha? Stupid. I was born into a micro-generation or as I like to call it, the Original Star Wars Generation (1977-1983). I was a child in the 80's, a teenager in the 90's, and thrust into adulthood in the 00's. I had an analog childhood and a digital youth. Pagers were all the rage in my high school. I remember the first personal computers. We had an Apple IIc with the big floppy disks and an Atari 2600. I was forced into getting my first cell phone in my late 20's.

I just turned 40 (see, sitting here for well over a year). I feel old now. Because I was born into this strange micro-generation, I don't quite align myself with Gen-Xers or Millennials. I was brought up to be a pessimistic optimist. Sounds ironic. It is. Que Alanis Morrissette. It was believed that we could become anything we wanted. Go to college, get a degree, become millionaires and change the world! But also brought up to realize that Social Security would be depleted by the time we needed it, the environment would be past saving, and the government would collapse, and we'd spend our senior years in a post-apocalyptic hell hole. But dammit, you better amount to something. You better make your mark on the world. You better be or do something important with your life.

So I was going to be a famous author, or astronaut, or a Ranger (the park kind). I was going to be a somebody. Well, I'm not any of those things. I haven't changed the world by writing something groundbreaking like JK Rowlins or Ta-Nehisi Coates. I didn't spend a year in space like Scott Kelly or sing David Bowie's Space Oddity like Chris Hadfield in the international space station orbiting the big blue orb. And I'm no Betty Reid Soskin, the oldest National Park Service Ranger.

I've always felt that I'm an extra human taking up space on the planet. The third child. Not the heir, not even the spare. I'm the oops. The "well that answers the question of do you want to have another"? I didn't marry. I didn't have kids. I never wanted to populate the world with more of me. Is this what a midlife crisis feels like? Is that what I'm feeling?

Get off my lawn!!

I never did make it to Oregon.

But I'm a grown-up

I have to keep reminding myself that I am a grown ass adult. I can do whatever I want. If I want to stay up til 4am watching random YouTube videos, I can. If I want to sit in bed all day in my cat PJ's, I can. There's no one telling me I can't or shouldn't do that, but me. There's nothing wrong with staying up til 4am. I don't have a job where I have to perform brain surgery at 8am. No. So why do I think that it's so wrong? It isn't. Maybe it was a bad idea when I was still in school or had a job that started at 8 or 9am. But I don't. What's the big deal? Why do I hate myself?

Why does that voice still have so much power over my choices? Why do I still believe it when it tells me staying up til 4am is bad? Or that waking up at noon is lazy? Or that wandering around my house in my PJ's all day is pathetic? Hey, I don't wear them to Wally World, okay? I don't even shop at Wally World! Get off my back, man.

Growing up we're told as kids and teenagers by our parents that you need to go to bed at a "decent" hour, and get your proper 8 hours of sleep, and get up every morning and put on proper "you're going out in public" clothing. Go to school, do your homework. Did you brush your teeth? When did you last shower, you stink.

I think that it is so ingrained into my psyche that it has become this annoying nag of a voice in my head. So that every time I don't want to sleep and watch video's or read weird articles on the internet or play farm heroes on my ipad til 4am, I feel this overwhelming sense of guilt. Or when I just don't want to go outside my house and only get dressed from the waist up (bra's are important to me), and stay in my cat PJ's and Dr. Who slippers all day, I feel like I was a lazy slob or crazy cat lady shut-in who just wasted an entire day of her life doing absolutely nothing? I may have actually accomplished many things in my PJ's, but I'll still feel like I just wasted away, sitting on my ass on my bed surrounded by my cats. I only have two cats, I'm not an official crazy cat lady yet. Wait, how many cats does it take to become a crazy cat lady? Are their rules or requirements? Hold on, let me check... the INTERNET!!!!

A cat lady is a cultural archetype or a stock character, often depicted as a woman, a middle-aged or elderly spinster, who owns many pet cats. The term can be considered pejorative, though it is sometimes embraced.
Women who have cats have long been associated with the concept of spinsterhood. In more recent decades, the concept of a cat lady has been associated with "romance-challenged (often career-oriented) women". Specifically, it has also been embraced by lesbian and queer women.

Oh Wikipedia.... Wait there's a syndrome? Crazy Cat Lady Syndrome? What's this? Oh, it's just toxoplasmosis, a very common parasitic disease that in healthy people shows in flu like symptoms or no symptoms at all. It is contracted by eating poorly cooked food or infected cat feces. Ahhhh, okay. Wait, I said that wrong. I'm not implying that people eat cat poop... well I'm sure some people have. The human species is quite dumb. So some cats have this parasite, they poop it out, and some stupid human cleans their little box with their bare hands? Who does that? They make poop scoopers people. You never have to actually touch the poop. Gross. And wash your hands. Wash your goddam hands... with soap!

So yeah. Wash your hands, wear a bra, and then do whatever the hell you want. Tell that nag to fuck off!

Shakespearean Taxidermy on a Bloody Monday

Everyone seems to hate Mondays. Usually, I am one of them. Today it was the beginning of a new week. Last week sucked. Nothing horrible happened, but I was not having it. Customers and co-workers alike, kept getting on my nerves. Everyone seemed to annoy me. To a point where I was about to punch people in the face. I would never actually punch someone in the face on purpose*, but I was totally about to do it in my head.

I didn't do very well with my workouts last week either. John Valbonesi (the dude I can hardly understand who runs Fight Camp Glasgow that is the trainer of Sam Heughan (the hot actor dude who helped start the MyPeakChallenge thing I'm doing) said it was time to do the fitness tests again to see how we are improving, so I re-did test 1 on Monday of last week and made myself sore the rest of the week. Wow, how 'bout that sentence! Anyway, I did improve. But I can only do lunges so fast before I fall over and squish my cat that likes to walk and plop down round my arms while I try and do burpees. I did 11 more burpees than before and can now hold a 2 minute plank. Wednesday all I did was the burpee test, and Friday?... Well, the night before I decided to finish a book I was reading. I finished it at 4am. So I slept in. The book was totally worth it. It was hilarious! So, yeah, last week wasn't the best. Here's the book:

And yes that is a taxidermy mouse with a Shakespearean neck ruffle and Dracula cape holding an alas poor Yorick mouse skull.

Today, I got to start anew. And I did. And it felt great. Until I did my taxes. I owed this year. That totally sucked. And that put a damper on the day. Apparently extremely poor minimum wage workers who are just above the super extremely poo(r)** minimum wage workers don't get a tax break for being extremely poor minimum wage workers.

I don't know where to go from here in this post. Don't quite know what I'm trying to say. Well, let's just say I have no real point. This is so not how I saw this post shaping out to be.

The End




*I would totally punch someone in the face on accident, I can be quite clumsy.
**the "r" is silent when you're that poor.

The Glamorous Life

So instead of writing about what I set out to today, I'm going to talk about bodily fluids again. Oh joy! One of my more so called "popular" posts was about a time when I had a most unpleasant experience in the middle of a desolate landscape surrounded by my "minions". You can read it all over again here, if you really want to.

Back when I was an archaeologist and was playing out in the world, I had to "used the facilities" in various states of actual facilities. Some times you're close enough to an actual flush toilet that is stocked with actual toilet paper and a sink with soap and stuff. But usually... that's not the case. As a side note, I know where all of the bathrooms are at the Monterey Presidio just in case you ever need to know. You learn early on in your archaeology career when it is safe to use a port-o-potty. If you are working with a construction crew who carts their "john" around with them... don't even open the door, just don't. It is also safer to just walk around to the back of one and go elsewhere when it hasn't been sucked out in so long that the mound is now actually visible without having to look down the hole.

You also learn early on to carry TP or something to wipe and dispose of with you at all times. (it would have been nice to be told this in field school) This is especially true for the females. When you don't have time to air dry. You all know what I'm talking about. Peeing as a female is such a freakin ordeal that many of us are masters of holding it all day. Bladders of steel, yo!

The point of all this was really to say that there is a level of trust one needs to have with their fellow crew members/humans or your poor bowels or bladder will explode. When you are in the middle of a plowed field with not a shrub, tree, or even a weed in sight for miles and you have to go, you trust your crew mates to turn around, walk away, and wait till you're done, before continuing the job at hand. Those of you who were on the Maricopa Solar project know what I'm talking about. I'm at a point now in my life that I am (I wouldn't say comfortable) but comfortable enough to "go" just about anywhere and around just about anyone. So thanks, archaeology for teaching me how to poop and pee in public.

Also, I thought about this while sitting on my awesome flushing goddess of a toilet in my house. You're welcome.