ceponatia

Feeling decent today. Getting out has helped a little bit. Motivated me to finish cleaning up and getting a ton of school work done yesterday. I'm behind on my music class... my whole first project is pretty much a wash because of a mixture of procrastination and technical difficulties. It's just something I'm doing on my own, not for a grade or anything, so it's not the end of the world but I'm a little bummed. Still, there are two more projects and I plan on going strong on the second one. I'm still going to TRY to get something done for project 1 but it's really not realistic time-wise. I still learned a lot.

I'm lucky that I live in the midwest and nobody here goes outside. Lol

I definitely agree that having a set time to wake up is important. I let that slip during lockdown and my life has been a mess. I thought I was depressed and unorganized before but I had no idea what I was in for. Lol

Yeah, I recently relapsed hard. Started with just an hour long session in 2 days and then all of a sudden it was all I was doing. Took a step back and reexamined my life and was able to stop again. Definitely don't recommend moderation. Even though moderating wasn't even my goal... it still worked its way in.

You've motivated me. I'm going to commit to walking every day, especially now that it's somewhat nice out. I've been really unwell mentally over the past week and a half at least.

Great advice, I've seen similar tutorials on a lot of sites. When I genuinely gave it a good effort I had better than abyssmal results but overall online dating is a soul crushing experience for me. I only ever get messages from extremely fat women and whatever your opinion on them, they're not my type. Lol. It's all kind of common sense though when you think about it. If you just throw a profile together in 5 minutes with whatever photos you have on Facebook that don't look absolutely embarrassing, that's how you're going to come across. I've seen so many profiles that had a lot of pictures on them, but they were all just different poses in the same bathroom-selfie session. And they didn't even wash all the spit and toothpaste residue off their mirror first.

Pretty surreal few days. Not that anything out of the ordinary happened, just in that time is passing very... strangely. My sleep schedule is all out of whack and I'm having a great deal of trouble sticking to my lesson plans both in college and in the extra-curricular classes I signed up for. Fell way behind in the Andrew Huang production class but I'm catching up. Switched to Ableton Live instead of Studio One... it's just vastly better in every way and right now there's a free 90 day trial of the complete $700 suite so no better time to learn it. Working a lot from home to try to regain some sort of normalcy. Soul crushing to read all of the unemployment emails though. We get about 100 emails a day and I'd say 80 of them are about people losing their jobs and no longer able to pay child support. It's a given that some of those are liars but the majority probably are not. Health-wise I'm not doing well at all. I'm not sick but I'm not taking care of myself like I should. I have no motivation to work out and have been eating like crap. My house is just not a great environment for productivity. It's strange, my mother has gone totally nuts and is convinced the virus is crawling all over every surface so she bleaches the whole house every day... but at the same time it's still technically just as dirty as it's always been. Every flat surface is just a place for her and my brother to pile trash and food, like I said before. My room is like a fortress against entropy right now, lol. I have some clean laundry in a basket sitting in my corner and it is driving me crazy so I'm about to put that away. That's the extent of how dirty I get. I'm still working one day a week and working from home besides that, which helps. It appears as though the lockdown is starting to work so hopefully this won't carry on much longer, but our view in the government, despite being optimistic and positive in the news, is that once spring really kicks in people are going to totally ignore social distancing and it'll come right back stronger than before. Time will tell but I lost faith in the good of humanity a long time ago. Lol

Still hanging in there. Kind of depressed lately from all the isolation but just letting everyone know I'm still here, still doing well, and hoping for the best for all of you.

Thanks a lot for checking it out! Still lots of work to do on it but that's the skeleton at least. 🙂

Today's my day at work and it looks like we'll be getting remote access to our desktops so I'll be able to actually work from home next week. Just in time, I think. Pretty extreme chest pain today and much more coughing than usual. I'm alone on my floor so not in danger of getting anyone sick if I am actually infected. We'll see what happens! I'm not just assuming I have the virus like I have in the past but I definitely feel like something is wrong. The regular flu is going around but I was vaccinated then there's also allergies. Just too hard to know at this point in time. No headache or fever so that's a good sign. Hopefully I do have it and this is the extent of how bad it'll get. Lol. Would be great to be immune so I could go back to normal life.

I've been wracking my brain over the last 3 days in this class. I have spent on average 6 hours a day writing music and have thrown away about a dozen ideas... but I finally have one I'm somewhat happy with and will continue working on.

First day of music production class went well... got a lot of positive feedback on my first little demo assignment so I guess maybe I know what I'm doing. Today's assignment is much more difficult so will take a few days but I'm looking forward to getting some actual music written!

Kinda pissed off right now. We've been quarantined in our home for about 3 weeks... I go out to do the shopping and all that because I'm at less risk but despite all of that, my extremely mentally ill aunt came over yesterday and I left right away because I just can't deal with her on a mental level. She's the kind of person who always has to be right about everything even though she's an extreme hoarder and chain smoker who has never been in a romantic relationship once in her life. So by the time I got back she had left and I went about my day. Well today, 24 full hours later, my mother tells me my aunt was coughing the whole time she was over and refusing to cover her mouth because "it's just allergies". She texted my mother earlier today saying she now has a fever of 103. So despite doing everything right, being as careful as possible and washing my hands like a maniac, I probably will get sick. Even though I wasn't around when she was here hacking her lungs up, she probably got spit and shit all over everything in the house and coated it with virus. I'm not a hygiene freak or paranoid about microbes but it's likely. Even though I'm low risk I did have lung surgery when I was in my early 20's so I am a little worried about getting the disease. My mother is definitely high risk and my aunt, if she actually does have COVID, is in all honesty probably going to die. She's smoked for 40 years, has high blood pressure, and like I said is a hoarder so she just breathes cat feces and dust all day. She had me feed her cat while she was out of town once and I couldn't spend more than 5 minutes in her apartment it smelled so bad and the air was so thick with god knows what. I wish I could say I was upset about her potential demise but that is the level at which I don't like her. Lol. So we'll see what happens. It could take up to 5 days for me to start feeling really sick and that's exactly the day I'm supposed to do my one day this week at work. I should know by then if she has COVID and if she does I'll just quarantine myself regardless of how I feel. That's the ethical thing to do, I think.

Oh yeah no worries, guys, I have no illusions about moderation. The whole idea of moderation was beaten out of my head when I quit drinking. You can't do anything in moderation if you were once addicted to it. I take it as part of the process. It seemed unfair at first when I thought I'd never be able to drink a beer again but now 2 years on I don't care one bit. I'm sure that'll happen with gaming, eventually.

Oh god that drives me insane! Even beyond jokes, when I have to hear someone say something over and over to different people I get really annoyed. I know that's kind of an overreaction because when something happens to someone they want to tell all their friends... but damn have a meeting or something and tell everybody at once. Lol, jk I know that'd be crazy. I guess it only really bothers me when the joke or story isn't even that interesting. Like "oh here we go again Debra is telling the 5th person at work that she had spaghetti last night and spilled it on her shirt. What a riot."

I always feel like I could be doing more but you're right, the days where I've been really productive that feeling is certainly lessened.

Lol I'm with Books, it's been so long since I've seen another human being that I've actually wanted to talk to. Tried chatting with a friend from the other side of the country on Discord but it just felt weird. I've never been the kind of person to talk on the phone, either. I need a face. I wouldn't be talking to people without the social distancing either, though, so it's really not very different. Lol.

It's been many more than a few days since I've last written anything. I'm still here, I had a pretty rough past few days. I think all of the isolation and lack of any real direction while on lockdown finally broke me. I'm better off than a lot of people... I live with 2 members of my family so it's not like I'm completely alone. I don't particularly like them, though. Haha! These past couple of weeks have really strained my relationship with my mother but I'd already written my brother off a long time ago. My mother is just so clingy and nagging, it's unbearable. She's gone full blown psycho with the pandemic situation, watching the news 24/7 and making me do insane things like take my shoes off outside if I go for a walk... what are you afraid you're going to lick my shoes? Then she said she had to wash her hands in bleach because we got a letter from the White House about what we should all be doing and she said it was probably infected because "Trump wants us all to die". Jesus Christ. I'm not a fan of the president but that is pretty fucking crazy. It's been 2 days since I've really practiced piano but I'll be doing it again tonight. I won't lie, I played about an hour of Minecraft on Friday and Saturday. Such a bizarre game for me to play, too... I think it was just the fastest thing I could download and wouldn't involve me reinstalling Steam or anything like that so I could just get my "fix" and uninstall it... which I'm happy to say I did do. There's plenty of other stuff to do, I don't know why I craved a game so much. Maybe just something that didn't involve any thinking whatsoever... or rather the opposite... it kills my thinking. Yeah that's probably what it was. The biggest issue with living at home with my mother is that I don't have a place I can just work on stuff. My computer is in my bedroom and it's just not a good mental space to work. I'm probably going to ask today if I can use my other brother's bedroom as an office (he moved out about a year ago and keeps saying he's coming back but who knows. Wouldn't be hard to take my computer out of there if needed anyway). But then on the other hand it butts against my mother's room so if I was working on music or studying with Spotify on she'd just whine all day. Idk. Kinda ridiculous complaint for someone who is almost 40. I grew up laughing at men who lived with their parents in their 30's and 40's and now here I am, lol. To be fair, those guys were pathetic for lots of other reasons but I definitely don't feel great about where I'm at. Gotta remember, though, I'm working through college and I'll have a much, much better job once I graduate. If Covid doesn't kill me first!

I can relate to a lot of what you said in your lengthy post above. I'm a pretty funny guy, myself, and agree that we're probably funnier than many stand-up comics. What you said about it is right though... it's not that they're necessarily funnier than anybody else, they had the guts to throw themselves in front of people and get torn to pieces for years before they finally had a break. That combined with skills in marketing and all that jazz. I've thought about maybe taking improv classes at some point but I already have so much on my plate there's just no more room for another helping. Sounds like you know you can do that you just have to force yourself to do it regularly whilst coping with the reality that you won't always kill it on stage. When it comes to styles of humor, you also gotta remember that not everybody in the world is even remotely as intelligent as we are. Not to sound conceited, but it's true. There are some people with IQ's so low that they are unemployable even at McDonalds and the armed forces (not talking trash about the military but they do generally take just about anybody who enlists). I'm also not trying to sound like one of those ridiculous cringelords who think you need to be a MENSA member to understand Rick & Morty... just saying that there's an audience for fart jokes and it's surprisingly large. Tina Fey once said that you can judge a person's intelligence by what they laugh at... amusing, really, since I consider her humor to be pretty banal. Alternatively, you could try what I'm trying... write comedy. Even stand up comics have to have a certain level of this skill even though the mechanisms by which reading and speaking affect us are different. It's surprisingly difficult... I can make anyone in a room laugh almost on command but when I read over my blog posts or short stories I've written I think they're absolute dog shit. Other people have told me they're good and I'm judging myself too harshly but I don't know. I feel like a lot of the time I come across as being really cynical and angry at the universe when in reality I'm just joking. That's kind of how my in-person humor is too though. Very similar to yours... dry and straight faced but quite cutting. I can only say great things about getting into music more. My class with Andrew Huang on audio production and engineering starts tomorrow and I can't wait. The speed at which I've been learning piano is even impressing me and I usually never think I'm doing anything well enough. Wish you lived closer because we have an electronic drum set here that nobody uses. It's technically my brother's but he bought it two years ago, played it for a week, and put it in the garage where it's sat since. Once I'm proficient enough at piano and theory that I can branch out I plan on taking it up. All hobbies that are worth it are expensive. I spent probably $1000 a month on video games and related things like in-game currency for Warframe and other shit like that. That seems high, maybe $500. But then my PC cost me around $2000 on top of that which I don't regret really because now that I'm into photography, video, and music, it's really beneficial. But yeah... gaming was expensive. Now that I'm learning music it's arguably more expensive but it's such a new hobby it's difficult to project into the future very far. I'm sure at one point I'll have enough synthesizers lol. But so far in 2020 I've spent probably $2000 on equipment and lessons, and I'm already planning on spending $700 on a new synth. Fortunately my living situation allows me to do this... it's one of the main reasons I still live with my mother. I could get an apartment but I'd basically be working just to pay bills at that point. I won't tell you that you have to go easier on yourself because it honestly just sounds like you're frustrated right now and honestly are being pretty realistic. I think many of us are going a bit crazy during this lockdown (I'm assuming you're under one too). I hit some pretty low lows the past few days and couldn't even bring myself to write a journal post here. Hang in there, though. You're still kicking ass and sometimes we have to hit the bottom to sort out what we need to do to move forward. Either way, we're here for you.

I'm angry for you after reading your recent entry. You illustrate pretty well why I've never had very many long-term relationships: I have no patience for childish behavior or selfishness (which I have, ironically, been told is childish and selfish). Using something that belongs to you despite you specifically telling her that you don't want her to borders on theft. That's an exaggeration, of course, and we'd never accuse our loved ones of stealing from us unless they actually stole something but if a roommate or casual acquaintance had done that I'd be fuming. I think that you're right to feel a little betrayed. She can't accidentally just trip onto your bike and then use it instead of hers. Who knows, if she had asked you if she could use it you might have even said yes. Then the way she behaved afterward sounds like something a toddler would do but that's just my limited understanding of your explanation. Props to you, I'd have already dumped her. Lol.

Absolute waste of time for most of us, especially men. The competition on a dating app is so high (the ratio is something like 10 men for every woman and that's not even cutting out the women that, let's be honest, nobody wants to date) that you're unlikely to attract any attention unless you're unreasonably good looking. The majority of people on dating apps look at your first photo and decide whether or not they want to talk to you, they aren't reading your profile to see how talented, insightful, or charming you are. About once a year I fall victim to the pull of online dating and every single time it absolutely shreds my self-esteem despite being a reasonably attractive guy with an education and decent job.

Yeah, gaming in moderation is fine but I think most of us here have come to accept that we can't do that. Maybe one day if you really get your life together and find your purpose you'll be able to just sit down and play 30 minutes of a casual game and then stop to do something else but I know that's not where I'm at! It's really hard to avoid gaming right now, I think we all know that too. Most of us, if not all of us, are on lockdown with no social contact. We can do it though!

OK, that's better! Got back on a decent sleep / wake schedule today and already have accomplished a ton more than usual. Reinstalled Discord so that I can talk to some friends while under quarantine... funny that we're all no longer gaming but still found a use for an app that is almost exclusively designed for gamers. Tomorrow is my shift at work and it seems like it's going to be pretty slow... they're not delivering mail at the moment so that's a big part of my day gone. I'll probably end up leaving by 2 or 3 unfortunately. Oh well, I am grateful to at least still have a job and health insurance when I know of so many people who are either off without pay or completely unemployed. Also I have a pretty persistent cough and some chest pain right now. Not going to freak out because I've thought I had COVID twice already and I haven't been in contact with anyone who is sick as far as I know... but we'll see.

One thing we talked about on this forum a while ago is that gaming saps your energy almost as much as work does. You're still engaging your mind and motor functions even if it feels "relaxing" (tbh I was usually stressed out most of the time I was gaming, haha). So that might help you eliminate that idea of gaming until you get motivated to work... by gaming you're actually virtually guaranteeing you won't work afterward.

It's a good point though, those of us who are single finally have a good excuse for not getting out there and meeting people! 😉