Tag Archives: Morning

Lesson Learned?

Posted on by
Reply

You know what sucks? Losing something you spent a lot of time working on. For example, a nearly-ready-to-publish draft of a short story.

I take autosave for granted. In fact, I’m taking it for granted right now with WordPress, which, if I might say so, is precisely what it’s designed for. Anyone disagree? Not that I care. My blog. My rhetoric. Anyways. The funny thing is, not everything in life has autosave features (believe it or not), even if it seems like certain bits should. For example, Wattpad doesn’t have a native autosave feature.

So.

When one is working on a typed something something, doesn’t matter what it is, if one happens to be doing this using Wattpad, one would be wise to consider manually clicking the save button every so often. Another way of thinking of it is to compare this recommended strategy with one that this author highly discourages: The one who is perhaps not so wise might draft up a lengthy typed document of whatever sort, and even if it falls short of being a masterwork the likes the world has never before seen, it still requires due diligence to proofread and edit the whole thing. After a long day and a late night of typing, such a task might best be served with a fresh set of eyes, as would be the case after getting a good night’s sleep. Wouldn’t want to be hasty, skimping out on a quality clean up prior to publishing, now would we?

However, one might happen to notice an icon in the system trey awaiting their attention in the morning. An icon, as it so happens, indicating that updates are ready for one’s computer. Perhaps, never having any prior issues with installing updates before, one might be tempted to rubber stamp all updates as soon as they are made available. A sensible notion, keeping up with security fixes and what have you. And certainly, just because the updates in question happen to be specific for the browser one evidently happens to be using to type the soon-to-be-published literature, there is no mention that following through on said updating process might cause the sturdy, never-failing interweb-bearing application to suffer, how shall we say? A ‘minor’ hiccup.

What could possibly go wrong?

Ah yes! After a good night’s rest, a fresh batch of updates successfully installed, it is now time to — oh whatever. You already know how this story ends. I didn’t think to save my shit. Not even once. I leave all the data in the text field, let it sit over night, install an update for my browser, everything freezes, aaaaaand…

Gone. All gone.

🙂

Hard Reset

Posted on by
Reply

So, I’ve been meaning to readjust my sleeping pattern for… years? Jesus, k, well… It’s definitely one of my more difficult vices to wrestle with. Maybe this will help: Yesterday evening around 6 pm, I felt overcome by a wave of fatigue out of nowhere. Thought to myself that it’d be a fine time to take a nap. Heck, even slept in my clothes with the intent of getting up again before 9, probably.

Didn’t.

Instead, I slept right through the night, but not without tossing and turning, waking briefly a few times and checking in with myself as to whether or not I was going to keep sleeping or if I felt the need to get up before the morning (proper) came around. I held out. I managed to resist waking up fully right through ’till about 30 minutes ago, at which time, I nom-chomped an apple and then set out to boast to the world that my lazy sleeping habits must surely now be behind me!

Well, that remains to be seen. Sure, it’s not easy to force yourself to sleep an additional 6 hours above the threshold of already being “well rested”, and certainly, having done so will now make it infinitely easier to be asleep again tonight before midnight, but is that what’s going to happen? Even if it does tonight, is that what is going to happen consistently for a period of at least, what is it, 28 days or something?

Anyways, the plan for today at least is to publish this, get a bit more food into me, and then go for a hike in the trails around my neighborhood as the sun rises, ’cause I haven’t done that more than once in years, and the last time was on a drunken adventure with my best friend in Toronto (good times, that). This time, it’s gonna be for my personal enjoyment, with the intent to connect a bit more with what land the city I live in has tried to preserve, and what better way than with a mobile sun salutation while I’m at it?

Maybe I’m still lazy, or maybe it’s smart, but who’da thunk that taking one extended nap would potentially lead to hitting three birds (sleep adjustment, physical and spiritual exercise) with one useful accident?

Title Optional, So Long As It’s About Routiney Stuff

Posted on by
1

I’m still most definitely struggling with getting into a consistent daily routine. I have been trying to get up before 11 am for a number of mornings now, but I never seem to have the foresight or the discipline to place my phone, which acts as my alarm clock, somewhere out of reach before I fall asleep at night, leaving it at the mercy of my sluggish-but-nonetheless-somehow-cat-like reflexes fighting tooth and nail with the touch screen’s “reset” button just for the sake of resuming, for the love of god, that blissful state of sweet dream-filled slumber before the audible assault disrupts and ravages my still barely conscious-level of sensory awareness well into submission, utterly beyond some unfathomable point of no return or other.

Also, I have a thing for elaborate, extended-but-not-quite-run-on sentences, by the by.

Anyways, I am under the impression that most people are up between 7 and 8 am most weekday mornings. How awful. Unless they’re simply morning people, in which case, they’re just plain weird in my books. It is inconceivable to me why anyone would voluntarily torment themselves so, but it’s not my place to judge. I suspect that a great many people abide by such a torturous weekday morning routine out of some dreadful sense of ‘responsibility’, such as being able to get to work on time, in which case, the effort might be considered anything but ‘voluntary’.

Casting my old and deep-seated beef with forced work schedule-related anything (morning wake up times not the least of which) aside for now, I can see a number of benefits for being able to experience this thing normal people call “morning” after waking up rather than the part that occurs at the ass-end of night time before going to sleep. You know, at least once in a while.

On the up side, I have been meaning to change up my diet to something that can remotely be described as “balanced” and “healthy”. Apparently poutine, perogies and pizza (the three P’s) don’t count. I am happy to announce that I have successfully begun to implement some of those long-awaited changes. This passed week has brought veggie matter and my internal digestive fluids together in abundance for the first time in… Gosh, I just don’t have that many fingers…

I’ve been careful to keep existing sources of protein in my current dietary intake, as well as to include some new ones. Also, I’m making a conscious effort to cut back on wheat, which ain’t easy since I pride myself on my ability to happily subsist solely on often wheat-based, sugar-saturated breakfast cereals at all hours of the day. Doesn’t mean I don’t still eat junk, but I do so far, I’m managing to do so far less often as I was.

I’m not what most people would ever think of as being over weight, so it’s not for physique reasons that I’m pursuing these changes. I just want to get my body used to running on higher quality fuel so that it stops retaliating with loads of acid reflux every time I have a coffee, or with irregular bowel movements as a result of me pushing my digestive track practically to the brink of a complete “shitty work” stoppage. Something about union dues for kidney workers, the rising price of gas in the intestinal energy sector, a breakdown in the management of the enzyme department, and just a rotten cultural attitude on the local gut-based microbial level in general.

Other routines I’m trying to get into, with mixed success, include being physically active a little every day. Even a simple 30 minute walk around the neighborhood every day or two would be a huge step back to my old, healthier habits.

And then, of course, there’s a range of creative endeavors I want to become fluently productive with. I’ve been a singer-songwriter for years, but I still have to push myself to practice singing and playing guitar (whether it be original material or covering a song by someone else) for at least some amount of time each day in order to keep my chops up, as well as to hopefully develop further as a musician.

If I can share some honesty with you, sometimes, I’m afraid I’ve hit my potential as a musician rather pathetically short of what I had dreamed, and that all I’m doing now is performing maintenance upkeep on a rotting corpse of what once might have amounted to genuine talent. I’m hoping that that fear is baseless. I’m too stubborn to quit, but I can’t stand the thought of being stagnant forever.

When it comes to writing, I struggle even more so to invest adequate time practicing, but that’s precisely why this blog exists. If nothing else, my goal for writing is to post a blog entry as close to once per day as I humanly can. Obviously that isn’t always going to be the case, but the ‘real’ goal sits more at posting no less than one entry per every two days which, so far, seems to be well within my means to continue accomplishing. Better than nothing.

And, as stated in my very first entry, the whole point of this blog is to provide writing practice. The way I see it is that, ultimately, this is all meant to eventually serve as scaffolding for a major literary project I’m working on slowly but surely. In the meantime, it is also my hope to eventually cultivate something of a community where people can go to to get up to date info on what I’ve been up to in life.

Not that my life is normally ever exciting enough to warrant having online followers or subscribers, but I do have enough of an artistic passion to create content that may hopefully one day be of great interest to a great many people. These are still the humble beginnings. Establishing and keeping to a routine is one of the major keys I have towards realizing my long-term goals, and it ain’t easy. Not for a world-class slacker like myself, at any rate, but at least I’ve begun proving to myself that it’s never too late to get started and make real progress.

[Edit: Nearly 10 years on, and while things have variously been better and high points had been reached, little of what this entry includes differs from what I could describe today. It’s almost a relief: I thought then that I just wasn’t trying hard enough. I can see now that I couldn’t have tried hard enough to make an appreciable difference. I need to focus on other dimensions of self-improvement, since diet, exercise, and sleep consistencies are fundamentally out of the question]