If you’ve followed my posts so far, you may have reached a conclusion in the last two weeks. That the lengthy gap between this post and my precious one might have been my prophecy of me losing interest in writing this journal coming true. Surprisingly, this isn’t the case. I’ve thought about posting quite a few times over the last two weeks. It turns out that rambling into the void of cyberspace about whatever crosses my mind is honestly nice. Truth be told, if anything ever convinces me to go see a therapist, it’ll probably be this. I’d be able to vent (like I’m doing now), but also get constructive advice on how to make things better. And one of the things I’d talk about in this hypothetical therapy session would be my thoughts and feelings about the actual reason I’ve not been posting.

I’ve been busy, at least by my standards. Between work and some personal commitments, I’ve had quite a bit going on. And I was pleased when this started to be the case. I often feel like I don’t have enough going on in my life. That I’m wasting the precious moments I have before my time on this world is up. So I decide to remedy that and to get busy with different things. To feel like I’m actually accomplishing something that, if no great and noteworthy, will at least give me something to talk about if I ever need to make small talk. But, like clockwork, that new busy schedule quickly loses its shine. Because, now that I have plenty to be getting on with, I feel tired, depressed and stressed. Maybe I just need to stick with it and let this new routine become more familiar. Or it could be that it’s just my brand that there’s no pleasing me.

Unpacking that will, no doubt, turn me into a reliable source of income for whichever therapist I end up going to.

You may have noticed, hypothetical audience, that I don’t really discuss what’s going on in the news while bouncing between topics as wide-ranged as the origins of cooking and wanting to be left alone on the bus so I can read. This is a deliberate move on my part, and one that will almost certainly continue, at least in the entries of this blog.

I used to extensively follow the news, trying to stay informed and educated on what was going on in the world. As mentioned before, I am very pro-education. Of course, as you’re no doubt aware, the last couple of decades have been… ‘turbulent’ in a lot of ways. So the news often dominating the headlines has often been bleak or upsetting, and quite often both. You’ll probably have guessed, from some of my entries, that I’m a fairly depressive person, so the steady stream of bad news had a pretty hefty impact on my mood in the downward direction over time.

So I decided to take a break from actively keeping up with the news, and it did wonders for my mood, but I’m starting to realize that I’ve overcorrected a bit on this topic. Recently, several major news stories have taken me by surprise, so I’m starting to re-evaluate my position which, I will admit, may have accelerated into active avoidance of the news.

Still, that probably won’t impact what I write about here, since I really do enjoy having a space where I can just ramble on about whatever has caught my interest.

There’s really no getting around the fact that I love meat. The carnivore lifestyle got its hooks into me at such an early age that, for the longest time, the idea of going without it was something I never seriously considered. Burgers are amazing, meat topped pizzas are fantastic and celebrating a success will often involve going out for steaks.

But time has crept on and the idea of having a main meal without meat doesn’t seem quite so crazy any more. There are a number of reasons for this. First is the thorny, but inescapable, issue of the environmental impact. Even if I didn’t believe in climate change (which I do), there’s really no dodging around the environmental impact of the meat industry. It’s honestly a little startling how much of the Amazon is being cut down to provide land for meat cultivation. As long as global meat production is so stupidly unsustainable, I feel like I need to at least reduce my meat intake. If lab-grown meat becomes viable, then I can wave my ethical concerns goodbye, but that doesn’t seem like it’ll happen in the immediate future.

Another thing which has got me considering more meat-free meals is that it’s honestly not as much of a sacrifice these days. Decades of vegetarianism going more mainstream means that most shops and restaurants cater to vegetarians these days. Not to mention that there are a lot of different things you can replace meat with to meet your dietary needs. More than I realized, actually. True, none of them will perfectly imitate meat, but diet soda doesn’t perfectly imitate regular soda, and I managed to live with that difference.

Ultimately, whether I reduce the meat in my diet, or replace it entirely, it’s going to be a gradual process. Trying to go, well, ‘cold turkey’ always backfires, so I won’t be going bacon free in the next day or so.

In my semiregular (so far) posts, since I started blogging, I’ve stated some truly bland opinions. I’ve written about how I don’t like people being rude to me, or that I don’t like people trying to strike up a conversation with me when I’m clearly reading. And I guess I’m doubling down on these ‘ruffle no feathers’ statements with this lemon and herb level spicy take; I like the weekend. I’ll spare you the stock sarcastic comment about how daring I am and just move on.

As someone who has been through the mainstream education system, followed by getting a job, weekends ended up becoming something I thought more fondly of than ‘two days to do what I want’ strictly merits. Now, this does sound like I’m building up to some kind of dismissal of the value of weekends, in a clever subversion of the idea that I’m making non-controversial statements. But no, this is what’s known as ‘padding’, where you add some non-essential components to a piece of writing or media to make it longer than it strictly needs to be.

I’m definitely in support of weekends, but I feel a certain amount of judgement when I don’t do much with them. Because sometimes, ‘what I want’ is to do nothing. After five straight days of attending to responsibilities and getting things done and generally trying to be an adult, getting up and spending a couple of hours playing video games in my pyjamas. It’s not that I fail to see the merit in the criticism that I should use that free time to do something with others, or something that benefits me in the long term. It’s just that I feel that if I decide to do the opposite of those things and rewatch Brooklyn 99 once again, I shouldn’t have to justify that decision.

Maybe, in ten years time, I’ll regret that I didn’t spend my weekends honing a skill which would then benefit me in that situation. But, if I do treat my weekends as work days where I don’t have to leave the house, who is to say that my future self won’t be regretting not spending more time relaxing?

Having a car is super useful. I think back to the days when I didn’t have one, and it’s a mangled blur of desperately hoping that whatever bus or train I was counting on would be on time. The reassurance that I can take myself to where I need to go is definitely a good feeling when planning a busy day. Of course, then I find myself hoping that traffic won’t hold me up, but I still feel more in control. Even as I sit inside my metal box, gripping the currently useless wheel, and scowl in frustration at the immobile metal boxes blocking my path.

Not to knock public transport, which is at its nicest when it’s a choice, not a necessity. When I don’t need to be somewhere perfectly on time, it’s nice to be able to jump on a bus and listen to some music while reading a book. The hard work of navigating through traffic is done by the driver, leaving me free to enjoy the journey. Even the presence of strangers doesn’t really present a problem, because they (almost) always understand that we’re all here to go somewhere, not to socialize. This lets me enjoy my book, or play on my phone, or whatever I’m using to pass the time.

Unless, of course, I encounter the type of person I dread to meet in these situations: Someone I know. It’s not so bad if I board the bus and they’re already there, but if I’m there first, then I’ll be absorbed in my book when they show up. And yet, polite social behaviour expects me to exit the story I’m now super engaged in to make small talk. And ‘talk’ gets worse the smaller it becomes.

But I do it anyway, because I do like people, however often my behaviour calls this into doubt. And I’m not indifferent to people getting upset with me (far from it). Just know that, if we ever meet on a bus or a train, and I keep my finger between the pages of my book, I really want to get back to it.

The best musings start with some kind of related anecdote. Like, someone musing on the violence of the human condition will relate to us a time they saw a kid push another kid over while playing in the park. It helps to give the impression that the muser has a lot going on in their life, which helped to inform the insight they’re about to share with us.

I don’t have such a natural lead in to what I’ve been pondering. It’s just something I often wonder about when I’m doing other things, like filling out my taxes or driving my car. Basically, I often wonder about the start of things. Hugely original, I know. Clearly I’m the first person to ever think about this sort of thing. But when it comes to the things we take for granted, it’s the sort of question which lives rent-free in my head. Some of them have obvious enough answers. Like walking upright. As funny as it is to imagine one ape to start walking entirely hands-free before it catches on with the others, it was obviously a more gradual process which happened over a long period of time.

But what about cooking food? Who was the first proto-human to realize that if you burned your meat a little bit (but not completely), it tasted better? How many isolated incidents of individuals discovering this were there before it just became the norm?

Or alcohol? It’s been speculated by some that the desire to booze it up was a notable motivation in the formation of non-nomadic civilizations and agricultural societies. But who was the first person who figured out fermentation?

It does get you wondering if something one of us is doing in our daily lives will end up having an impact on human civilization that we might not even live to see. Or, like the Earl of Sandwich, we might get to claim the credit for something that existed for a long time before we ever got our grubby little hands on it.

As someone who likes learning about history, I often wonder how I’d manage if I were born in a different era. On my worst days, I sometimes feel like I’m just barely managing this adult thing. In these bleak moods, I darkly suspect that I’d just need a few things going wrong at once for my life to completely fall apart. Which gets me wondering about how well I’d manage in different eras of history. Because, as someone living in a modernized nation in the present day, my life is easier, and more comfortable, than pretty much any ancient king you care to mention.

The fact that I’m living in such a comfortable era, but I still feel like I’m just keeping my head above water sometimes, doesn’t bode well for my ability to survive in, say, the Roman Empire, or Ancient China. If work deadlines or job hunting stress me out, I can’t imagine how poorly I’d handle being a peasant in some feudal setting.

On the other hand, if it was all I’d ever known, perhaps I’d have no problem with it. Perhaps the simplicity of how the world was viewed back then would suit me. You knew what the gods you worshipped got up to, and you knew how the very small slice of the world you interacted with worked. With those things understood, you probably didn’t spend too much time worrying about all the things you had nothing to do with. I’m all for making sure everyone is educated, but understanding more of the world does give you a better idea of how many things you don’t understand. And that can be scary. The only ignorance which is actually bliss is your ignorance of your own ignorance.

Still, whether you’re educated or ignorant, you still have to make choices in life, and those choices have consequences. And education drastically improves your odds of making good choices. And, to be fair, as much as I worry about managing modern life, I’ve been able to keep my head above water so far.

I wasn’t sure where I was going with this when I started writing. And now that I’ve reached the conclusion of ‘I worry about this thing, but I probably shouldn’t’ I can help but feel that I’ve done the written equivalent of walking in a circle. So let’s end this here.

I’m starting to think that maybe, just maybe, I’m a little bit too sensitive when it comes to criticism. This is quite the statement to make on a platform theoretically available to anyone with access to an internet connection. It is a distinct possibility, after all, that not everything I post here will receive universal acclaim. Assuming my wide-ranging ramblings on here are ever noticed, of course. I guess I’ll just have to deal with it should my musings on what I’m going to read next draw notable criticism.

Nevertheless, my sensitivity to criticism was highlighted today when I was given some negative feedback regarding some work I had submitted. It’s not that I don’t understand the necessity of criticism. You can’t really function in general society without being able to accept that not everyone will agree with what you do. Or that they will be right on a significant number of occasions. Not that I agreed with the criticism on this occasion (the work I’d produced was in line with the previous piece, which had been accepted without complaint), but that, I realized after a bit, wasn’t the nub of the issue either.

No, the thing which really bothered me the most was the combination of the rudeness, and the suddenness with which it was delivered. This drive-by rudeness was brief, but opened with a sentence that included the phrase ‘unforgivably dull’. And that sounds like the sort of thing you write when you’re actively trying to be mean, not something you’d put in a professional email. And the suddenness came from the fact that my one previous interaction with this person had been neutral, even slightly friendly. Perhaps they just had a bad day and that turned what would have been a polite ‘no thank you’ into this, but I’m not going to speculate.

Still, I am getting better at dealing with this sort of thing. Aside from writing an entry about it in my online journal, I mostly haven’t dwelled on it too much. In the past, I’d have fixated on it for the entire day, swinging between outrage at the sudden rudeness and obsessing over the fact that someone thinks poorly of me. Instead, I mostly focused on getting on with my day, and the last couple of hours have been spent mostly watching some fun videos on YouTube about Ancient Greece. And writing all of this down does help me realize that if these are the kinds of issues which consume me, then I live a pretty charmed life overall.

I generally like going to bed. When I’m exhausted, that’s a given; it’s wonderful when you get to stop fighting your tired brain’s attempts to go into power-saving mode. But I also like lying in bed when I’m not in immediate danger of falling asleep. It’s a chance to read, listen to an audiobook, or just let my mind wander, all while being warm and comfy. And, funnily enough, it’s not really a sign of me getting older. Even as a kid, I generally didn’t mind going to bed as long as I wasn’t in the middle of doing something I was really engaged in.

Something which is a sign of me getting older is what my anxiety dreams have morphed into over the years. As a kid, anxiety dreams took the form of being chased by monsters, constantly staying just ahead of them through constant, exhausting effort. Real straight-to-the-point stuff. As far as primal anxieties go, ‘run or die’ is about as fundamental as it gets. But now, my anxieties take the more sedate form of my being lost, when I have somewhere I need to be. The gradually-rising stress of not being able to find the place I need to be is torture to my adult brain. The responsibilities of being an adult seem to have left their mark on me and I find myself longing for the simpler days of being chased by monsters.

When I was a kid, I tried to keep a diary on a number of occasions. The word ‘tried’ ought to clue you into the fact that it didn’t really go anywhere. I think I had some vague idea that my diary might one day be discovered by historians and provide valuable insight into the era I was writing in. Ultimately, I wasn’t able to sustain it long enough to do more than write a few entries about my favorite episodes of Power Rangers before I lost interest.

Yet, here I am, at it again, only this time I’m cutting out the middle man by just writing my entries in a publically viewable format. If it works out this time, it’s safe to say that I just want attention. So these entries, however many there end up being, will be about whatever has caught my interest. If the topics end up being deep and insightful, I guess that’ll be a happy accident.

In any case, just to avoid my first post being about the fact I’m posting something, I’m trying to expand my range when it comes to reading, with some factual and, dare I say it, educational choices. So I’ve decided to read up on some history. Not currently any ‘learn from this, or you’ll be forced to repeat it’ history. Instead, I’ve decided to finally learn a bit more about Ancient Greece, and see where I go from there. I’ll let anyone who is actually reading this, how it’s going, later on.