The kids have school off today, so naturally I’m taking a day off from my blog, too. (It makes sense because I say so!)
Please enjoy this festive winter scene:
I hope your day is a fun one!
Category Archives: My Life
Gratitude
Keeping a daily gratitude journal is one of the cheapest, easiest, and most well-documented ways of improving your overall happiness and mental well-being. (Like most people who know this fact, I don’t keep a daily gratitude journal.)
I don’t keep a daily gratitude journal, but when I was young my family did keep a yearly gratitude journal: every Thanksgiving, we’d take some time together to volunteer things we were grateful for and write them down. Sometimes they were things specific to the past year, sometimes they were more perennial. Sometimes they were serious, conventional things–friends, family, health, and so on–other times they were small, lighthearted, or even silly. (I recall one year saying I was thankful for “God making the Big Bang that created the universe that created the Milky Way that created Earth that created humans so they could invent the Super Nintendo so I could play videogames.” I think I was about nine?) As holiday traditions go it was pretty subdued, but it was still one of my favorites. Even just reading through what we’d written in past years never failed to put a smile on my face.
I don’t keep a daily gratitude journal, but I do have a blog! So this year, I’ve decided to revise an old tradition and share with you some of the things I’m thankful for–large and small, silly and serious. In no particular order:
- The little foldable keyboard I’m using right now to type this post on my phone.
- My close family–those I’ve chosen through friendship and marriage, as well as those I’ve been gifted by chance.
- In particular, my father. I’m writing a song for you, dad. I can’t wait for it to be finished so you can hear it.
- Having a stable job I don’t hate with a good boss who doesn’t hate me.
- The three best gifts I’ve ever bought for myself: my ErgoDox EZ bespoke mechanical keyboard, my Kensington Expert trackball mouse, and my turquoise Nintendo Switch Lite. (Yes, I’m still in love with videogames.)
- Bandcamp!
- Fulfilling my childhood dream of living in a mobile house (although my house doesn’t have an elevator or big-screen TV like I wanted–oh well).
- Finally diagnosing and treating my ADD.
- Getting my heart broken and having no regrets.
- Being converted to toe socks and minimalist shoes (regular sneakers look way more absurd to me than shoes with toes, now).
- My spouse’s sorcerous powers of cookery.
- My favorite (nonfiction) writers: Autumn Christian, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Paul Graham, Tevis Thompson, and Scott Alexander.
- Good porn.1
- Costco!
- My new favorite (nonfiction) writer, Chris Ferdinandi.
- Discovering that Stephanie Myer wrote and published a gender-swapped version of Twilight to prove a point, reading it, and finding it works at least as well as the original. #TeamEdythe
- Restarting my blog!
- Making an effort to get back in touch with some friends I’ve been missing.
- Seeing my writing improve enough to produce something I’m truly proud of (and which didn’t take me years or decades to finish).
And of course, I’m thankful for you, my wonderful readers. It’s hard to overstate how rewarding it’s been having an audience, even a small one. Knowing that someone other than my mom is actually reading and enjoying my writing (love you, mom) has been not only motivational, but also wonderful soul food. As always, I love you, and I hope your week finishes with a special treat and some unexpected good news. Joy and Health to you all!
- You may well ask, “What makes porn good?” or even “How can porn ever be good?” And I may well answer, “I think I have an idea for a future post…” ↩︎
Acronyms, Novel Gags: Surprisingly Tough
Tomorrow I’ll be posting…I guess you could call it the finale of my “Angst Saga.” (I don’t think I’ll be calling it that, but you certainly could.)
A poem about heartbreak might seem like an odd choice for Thanksgiving, but I truly am grateful for the experience. I’m not one of those people who thinks pain is intrinsically valuable–it’s not–but there are some valuable experiences that wouldn’t be the same without it. For example: moments when you’ve taken a big risk that didn’t pay off, but you know it would have been a mistake not to try.
There are important lessons you can only learn from experiences that test you–times when you failed, when you grieved, when you lost, when you made an ass of yourself. If you never risk losing, you’ll never be great; if you never risk grieving, you’ll never fully love; if you never risk looking foolish, you’ll never be wise. I’m thankful I finally took an opportunity to be foolish and heartbroken for the right reasons. It’s a scar I’ll cherish.
On Friday I think I’ll say more about the other things I’m grateful for. Until then, I hope those who celebrate have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and I hope those who don’t have an equally wonderful Thursday. I love you very much.
Joy and health to you all.
Actually, New Grief Sorta Tempting
I don’t think it will ever be “fully” healed (although it got a lot better once I was able to stop picking at it). That’s okay, though; I have a pretty big heart. There’s room on there for lots of scars.
…and for some reason, saying it like that makes me want to get another? I guess it’s like getting a tattoo: once your first has healed, you immediately start thinking about your next one. Or maybe it’s just another way grief is like exercise: sometimes it’s addictive!
I think that’s okay, too. Remember, grief itself isn’t a bad thing: it’s just your mind’s immune system working to heal the sort of hurt you get when you lose something important. You can’t get that kind of hurt unless you let yourself be vulnerable in the first place; let something outside yourself reach in deep and grab hold. To never grieve would mean you’d never fully loved.
I’m proud of myself for being vulnerable, it felt good to open up, and even though it ended badly this time I still want to do it again.
I’m doing a major rewrite of that poem I mentioned a while back–some of the things I wanted to say then aren’t true anymore, and there are things I want to say now that didn’t need saying then–but once it’s finished, I think I’ll finally be ready to post it.
I suppose I’ve grown.
For the Record
Happy National Coming Out Day!
It’s not exactly a secret, so I don’t think it counts as “coming out,” but for the record my spouse and I are both polyamorous and have an open marriage.
…and no time, energy, or money for dating, so it’s completely irrelevant. But still true!
Filed under Microblogging, My Life
Poor Excuses
They say it takes money to make money: wealth compounds when you use it wisely. Unfortunately, it also takes money to get out of poverty–poorness compounds, too. Here are just a few of the things currently costing me money that I can’t afford to get rid of:
- With my 2-3 hours of commuting per day, I’m spending roughly $400 a month on gas, because I can’t afford a more fuel-efficient car.
- This means I can’t afford extra gas for the multiple trips across town it would take to empty out our second storage unit–meaning we’re paying $250 a month for storage we don’t really need.
- We can’t afford to buy our own land to put our tiny home on, so we’re spending $800 a month on a lease that might go up or get revoked at our landlord’s whim, instead of investing that money in land that will appreciate over time, which we could choose to sell if we needed the money for something else.
- …like moving to a country with a lower cost of living (and/or better LGBTQ+ protections), for example.
- Debt. Just…debt.
- I spend, on average, about an hour a day washing dishes (valued at roughly $40 an hour, given my current salary), because we can’t afford to have a dishwasher installed.
- Speaking of the value of my time, did I mention my 2-3 hour commute? When we were looking for a place to park our home we found several that were closer to my office, but we couldn’t afford any of them.
- Every time my bank account gets overdrawn, I’m charged a $35 fee–putting my account even further in the red and making it that much more difficult to keep it in the black between my next two paychecks.
For these and other reasons, we often struggle to make ends meet–even though our household income is well above the poverty line.
I am strongly in favor of the social safety net–one of the responsibilities of government is to alleviate poverty among its citizens. But our current system, aside from being grotesquely underfunded, is managed by a lot of small bureaucracies, each one specializing in a different type of need: food, shelter, health care, debt, energy, and so on. This results in a lot of waste, overlap, and inefficiency for the government; and a lot of hoops to jump through, missed or wasted opportunities, and band-aid fixes for the people in need.
This is why I am also strongly in favor of replacing much of our current social safety net with a Universal Basic Income. Poor people have a lot of problems, income alone is not enough to determine whether someone is in financial distress, and the expense that would make the most impact is not necessarily the most obvious. In my case, for example, if we account for time, uncertainty, and hassle as well as money, by far the most cost-effective intervention would be…a dishwasher!
Leave the decision of what help is most needed to the people who actually need the help!
Are You Sure That’s a Dog?
What is this? What even is this animal??
Filed under Microblogging, My Life
My Top Ten Rains
“Rain is a very special blessing,” my mother says. Even when I was little, she’d already been saying it to my sister and me for as long as I could remember. Just as my grandmother had said it to her, when my mother was not my mother but only herself, in the dry Texas summers of her own childhood. Eons ago and continents away, as children reckon these things.
Continue reading“Wrong Idea” Idea
If you’ve been reading regularly (love you, mom) you might have noticed I was dealing with some relationship problems last month. Very, very abridged version: I told someone I loved them, they didn’t love me back (oh well), later on they decided I was a manipulative creep (for understandable but mistaken reasons), and among other things said “You don’t love me, you love the idea of me.”
(Side note: I get what people mean when they say this–that you’re in love with an imaginary person that you think or wish they were, instead of loving the real person the way they actually are–but I kind of hate that phrasing? Like, love happens up here–*points to head*–and there’s nothing in there except ideas. What am I supposed to base my feelings on instead? You gonna open up a hatch and climb inside? I wish there were some nice, snappy ways to say specifically “I’m not the person you think you’re in love with, they don’t exist” or “you think I’m going to change into someone else, but you don’t love the person I truly am” or “the fantasy you have of us being together is completely unrealistic, actually it would be a disaster” so we could just say those things instead. Which of them is it?? My un-shutuppable inner pedant demands precision!)
It…well, it hurt. It hurt a lot. I feel like a whiny, privileged baby saying that because it was the first time I’ve ever had my heart broken and there are people who’ve had to deal with that feeling, like, dozens of times, and also there are way worse problems that other people (including the one I love) have had to overcome and I worry that if I had to face one of those truly awful problems I would just fold in half like a piece of damp paperboard and–
*deep breath*
Um, anyway, I recently figured out a trick that helps a lot. Maybe it can help you, too! Whenever I start feeling down about how “they hate me” or “they think I’m a creep,” I just say to myself instead: “they don’t hate me, they hate the idea of me” or “they don’t think I’m a creep, they think the idea of me is a creep.” Because it’s the same logic, isn’t it? If someone has feelings toward you, but their idea of who you are is mistaken, then whether the feeling is positive or negative the result is the same: they think their feelings are directed at you, but they’re actually pointed somewhere else. If they had the right idea about who you are, they probably wouldn’t hate you–so it isn’t really you they hate!
Of course, you’ve got to be careful using logic like this, since you can also be mistaken about somebody else being mistaken. Maybe you’re the one who has the wrong idea about who you are, or maybe their feelings wouldn’t change even if they did get to know you better, or maybe they’re wrong about some things but right about others that are still important–and if you dismiss those possibilities you might lose a valuable opportunity for growth. (For example, I’ve since noticed myself doing a few things that, while not on the same scale as the misunderstanding, actually might be a bit creepy, and I’ve been grateful for the chance to catch and address them.) But if you have good reason to believe someone has completely the wrong idea about you, explicitly making it less personal goes a long way toward being able to let those hurt feelings go.
Okay, that’s everything. I love you all, and thanks for reading!
Nature Can Also BEE Terrifying
Filed under Microblogging, My Life
In Search of Secrets 
