the glob

I was eleven when the Chernobyl disaster happened. At the time, I remember hearing a lot about it, but it wasn’t something that frightened me. I was halfway around the world, and despite a nuclear power plant being situated fairly close to where I lived, I didn’t give it much thought (as seemed to be the case with a lot of things that happened to me around that age).

Over time, I read more about what had happened, and over the course of the past couple months I’ve especially taken in a lot of essays and photos about it all. Despite the waste that it creates, nuclear power is still one of the best solutions for creating the large amounts of power that the human race needs, but human errors at Chernobyl caused something so catastrophic that it’s almost hard to look past.

Of all the things I’ve read in the past couple weeks (and years even), this map, narrated photo essay, and timeline is one of the better pieces I’ve seen. It broke my heart.

It seems that every couple months (or perhaps only once a year), I go through an almost crippling period of self-doubt. I think it might just be part of my personality type (the only time I took the Myers-Briggs test, I ended up an INTP), but it doesn’t help that I never feel like I have enough time to get everything done.

There are several projects I’ve been working on lately that have brought this doubt to the front of my mind, and I’ll try to explain one of them below.

Despite what it looks like on the surface, I’m always trying to think of new ways to make my website a little bit better. Many times, this involves me thinking about whether or not I should re-design, but about two months ago I had an idea that I thought was very original in terms of adding value to the music reviews site.

Right after I thought of this idea, I almost immediately scrapped the thought as the time committment involved was pretty massive. As time passed, it kept creeping back into my head until a couple weeks ago I did a little test run to see if my idea would work. During this test process, I found myself alternately loving and completely hating the idea, even going so far as giving up before calling myself names and coming back to it.

As it turns out, I stuck with the idea and if things go as planned, this new feature will hopefully be made available in the next month or so. That said, I’ve still gone back and forth several times in the past week about whether it’s a completely stupid idea or not.

Most of the above probably makes no sense because I’m being purposefully vague, but the thoughts I had while working through the above process unfortunately aren’t limited to it alone. It seems to happen often, even going so far as having dreams where my ideas are laughed at by some sort of offscreen greek chorus.

I know that I have to be content with sleeping six or so hours a night, because when I start cutting closer to five for more than a couple days, my body really starts to not like me, especially when I’m coupling that shorter amount of sleep with lots of exercising. I don’t mind feeling a bit of an ache in my muscles, but an ache that turns into a complete body and mind drag is no fun.

I haven’t gone out and shot photos for fun in well over a year. I haven’t yet gotten back into video editing like I wanted to. I don’t work on music enough. I haven’t spent any time writing anything other than reviews or blog entries in a long time. There are hundreds of amazing books that I’ll never get around to reading. I haven’t sat down and done an ink drawing in years. There are tons of movies that I still want to watch at some point. It sure would be fun to get into woodworking.

Sometimes I think about things like that and I wish that I didn’t have to sleep at all. If I could just keep going and going, maybe I would have enough time to do some or all of the above things that just sort of sit on an unchecked list in the back of my head at all times. As it stands, I have to budget, budget, budget, when all I want to do is fill my head with new ideas while at the same time spilling out my own into various mediums.

Would I feel this same way if I’d lived 100 years ago? Would I be worried about having enough time to learn leatherworking, hunting, and better riding skills while trying to invent some sort of new devices? Is it a problem with me specifically? Am I just wanting to do too much when I should be focusing on and advancing my skills in a couple areas alone or are my symptoms a microcosm of the the oversaturated culture that I grew up in?

It’s times like these that I want to say something profound, but instead I just start dropping f-bombs and wondering where all my time went.

Fuck. It’s time for bed.

Instead of wondering why we’re having such warm days in the middle of the winter, I’ve decided to embrace them a little bit more knowing that the cold will come back eventually (it has to, right?). I’ve tried to make a conscious effort to at the very least get up and away from my desk at lunch, even if I’m busy, and go outside and walk around a bit or sit in the sun and read for ten or fifteen minutes.

This small change in my routine has helped me out a lot lately. I’m not sure if it’s just getting a little more fresh air or the sitting in the sun itself that’s helped me steer away from dwelling under a grey cloud lately, but for the most part I’m keeping on a nice even keel. It’s supposed to actually get truly cold later this week, so I’m going to do my best to soak up as much sun as possible while I can.

I think I wrote about it at some time in the past on the old site, but sometimes I get to feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the world. I rarely get depressed and stay depressed, but I often have daylong (or more) down periods that I have a really hard time shaking. Like a good little self-analyzer, I try to focus in on just what is bothering me, but most times it comes down to not much of anything (and actually, things are going pretty well for the most part) but a general concern that things are just not going right in this world.

Perhaps it’s been on my mind a little more lately because the weather here has been more than strange. January in Nebraska does not usually bring extended forecasts of 50 degree fahrenheit days (with some reaching nearly 70). With the massive blast of hurricanes and storms that hit the United States this last summer, I often feel like we’ve flat-out broken earth and there’s really no way of fixing them. As weird (and cheesy) as it sounds, I sometimes feel like the earth has been around long enough to deal with a lot worse than us humans, and we’ve finally pissed it off enough that it’s decided to start putting us back in our place.
So anyway, this post doesn’t really have much of a point other than to say that this weekend found me in one of those deep blue funks that I find it hard to escape from. I seem to get a brief moment of peace from my thoughts when I work out until I nearly collapse (according to the elliptical trainer I’ve burnt 1600 calories in two nights), so that’s at least one plus. I sometimes wonder whether I’m the only one that feels this way, and think that maybe I should just quit reading the news for awhile, then embrace the absurd and entertaining.

How do you get by, human?