Tag Archives: complaints

Finding Happiness In Being A Hermit

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Been staying close to home lately.  Still sleeping more than I would like.  But I guess I need it.  I enjoy the longer nights.  Won’t be too long and the leaves will be turning and the weather will get cold.  Spend much of my weekends watching football and grilling my own home based tale gate.  Made bacon and cheddar brats last weekend.

Been feeling more stable lately.  Might be because I’m sleeping more and enduring less stress lately.  Haven’t heard from my neighbors much lately.  Sometimes drama gets started in these tight quarters and people have too much free time.  Even though I’m on disability I try to stay busy.  Some days it’s nothing more than reading science articles online or messing with my computer.  I still lift weights three days a week at least.  I’m noticing a difference after a few months of this.  I’ve been stable enough I haven’t had to adjust my meds for almost six months now.

So far this fall has gone pretty good even though I don’t socialize much in person.  It gets boring hearing my neighbors complain about things they won’t or can’t do anything about.  I have my problems, sure, but I don’t feel I have a duty to share them with everyone whether they want to listen or not.  I can only handle a few minutes of complaints, gossip, or drama before I’m ready to go back home.  I spent much of my younger years as a pessimist.  I’m not going back.  If I have to be a hermit to avoid negative and toxic people, so be it.

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End of Winter, Maybe

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Getting out of the apartment more than once a day now.  For awhile during the fall and winter, there would be times I’d go entire days without leaving my apartment.  But I guess that spending my days chatting with online friends, reading articles, and messing with computer games and programs gets stale after awhile.  A change was due.  Right now much of my region of the country is getting bad blizzards.  I personally have only a couple inches of snow, some ice, but terrible winds.  Fortunately it isn’t as cold as it could be, otherwise it would be Ice Age revisited.  And this happened right as most of the snow we’ve had since before Christmas was melted.  But, this being a late winter blizzard, should be melted soon.  Then we’ll worry about flooding.  So it goes.

Now that I actually want to leave my apartment and venture out, I can’t because of weather.  I’ve been bound to my town all winter just because it was too risky to travel.  My car doesn’t do well in snow.  So I pretty much stay inside most of the time.  I do force myself outside every few days just to get what little sunshine and fresh air I can.

Been having a few minor flare ups of irritability and depression lately.  Fortunately I’ve been able to constructively deal with these.  I do have to sleep more and severely limit my caffeine.  I haven’t had coffee in over a week.  While I do feel less irritable, I do sleep more and feel more scattered.  Fortunately I don’t get much for back pain anymore.  Maybe I have lost more weight.  I exercise some every day.  And I make it a point to stand up or lay down every couple hours so as to break up the boredom and long days.  Been a tougher than usual winter.  Physically it’s been tough because of the snow, cold, wind, and lack of physical activity.  It hasn’t been too terrible mentally.  The last several days have been the toughest.  But I’ve been socializing more too.  And I admit I get more irritated with rude people than I should.  I almost never respond to rude people except to avoid them at all costs.  I have enough going on already without dealing with unnecessary rudeness.

The unexplainable aches and pains are becoming less common.  I guess I’m taking more preventative measures now.  I no longer sit for more than two hours at a time. I sleep in my recliner half of the night to rest my lower back.  I sleep lying down so not to get leg cramps from sitting too long.  I take hot showers at least twice a day now, mainly to keep my joints warm and loose.  Sometimes a few minutes of hot running water on my knees, lower back, and hands will work more wonders than even a couple Advil.  And making a point to get up every couple hours to do even simple things like walk to the kitchen to get a cup of water or walking to check my mail every evening can keep my joints loose.  I think one of the problems I was having with my back and unexplainable aches was that I didn’t move around enough.  I went through a state of excessive paranoia and anxiety for much of 2017 and all of 2018.  I was scared to drive my car, I was scared to talk to my neighbors, I was scared to leave my apartment after dark, I was scared to walk my neighborhood, and I was even scared to check my mail.  Most of my mail is junk mail now that I do everything online almost.  The 1 percent that wasn’t junk mail was usually from social security or my landlady.  I always felt a tinge of anxiety with those letters, and any time I was called before anyone in authority.  I’ve had too many bad experiences with short sighted, heartless, and irritable people in authority over me.  I just don’t trust authority to not abuse their power and influence anymore.  And, yes, it is unnerving and scary.

Winter is almost over, at least according to the calendar.  And it isn’t happening too soon.  I’m beginning to get cabin fever real bad.  I guess even strong people have their breaking points.  I am convinced I would feel much better when the weather warms up and there are options to how to spend my days.

Socializing With Rude People While Mentally Ill

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Been trying my hand at being more social in person and online the last couple weeks.  Turns out it’s causing me more frustrations than anything.  I try to talk to people in my complex, all they want to do is complain.  I try to talk to my friends and family online, all the want to do is complain about anything and everything.  And I’m burned out on socializing after only a couple weeks.  I’m going back to hiding out with my books and computers.  At this point I don’t want visitors in my apartment at all.  I don’t want to socialize in person anymore, at least until normal people stop complaining about anything and everything.  Socializing is supposed to be fun, remember?  Does anyone just take a night off from their troubles and have a few laughs?  Certainly doesn’t seem like from my friends and family and friends of friends anymore.  I have better conversations with several of the members of my science and futurism groups than I do with most people I’ve known my entire life anymore.  And I’m never going to meet any of these people in person.  It’s quite sad, at least I think it is.  I’m not delusional enough to believe if I moved to a larger city that my social prospects would ever change.  It’s not that I fear stupid and rude people in themselves.  I am scared that eventually I will become stupid, rude, and jaded myself.  I don’t want that to happen.  I don’t want my heart and soul to die because most people around me allowed theirs to die long ago.  If isolating from other people is going to keep me humane, than so be it.  It has been said that men go insane in herds and only come to their senses one at a time.  True, too painfully true.  Too bad pessimism is the spirit of our age, at least it is for most people I deal with on a regular basis.

Thoughts on Normal People and Bad News

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Just been in the mood to avoid people as much as possible the last several days.  I leave my apartment only a couple times a day and check Facebook only once or twice a day.  It’s not that I think I’m on the verge of a mental breakdown, it’s that I want to avoid planting the seeds for one.  Listening to most people lately is like listening to a skipping MP3 (or broken record for my readers over fifty).  I don’t want to hear about the weather, or how much you hate your job, or how much of a thoughtless jerk your significant other is, or how everyone who doesn’t agree with you on politics or religion or economics is the devil’s minion.  I just really no longer want to hear it.  I’ve had my fill of negativity and snark.  Talk is cheap and snark is free but wisdom is ignored it seems.

One of the reasons I got back into science in a big way was that I got tired of hearing how bad people sucked and that civilization was going to collapse any day now.  I also watched all these doomsday scenario shows like The Day After, Red Dawn, Armageddon, Independence Day, 2012, The Terminator series, etc. that said we were all going to die any day now.  At this point  in my life, after seeing “88 reasons for the return of Jesus in 1988”, Y2K fizzle out, 9/11 and the resulting never ending wars, the Great Recession, the Mayan Apocalypse of 2012, Occupy Wall Street come to nothing, and the election of our current crop of politicians, I just yawn and laugh at every other predicted end times or end of civilization b.s. I see every other week.  You normals really have an amazing ability to believe any type of nonsense that gets repeated enough.  I find it tragic because many normals are worrying themselves sick over things that never come to pass or are easily solveable.

After years of hearing nothing but doom and gloom, I wanted to hear what was going well for a change.  Growing up, I rarely heard anything positive about the world from my elders or teachers.  I had heard from about second grade on that American students were the dumbest in the industrialized world.  If that was so, I reasoned, then why don’t we improve the school system and stop blaming the kids.  The looks of anger I got from my elders were like I just said the Ten Commandments were bogus.  I never did get an answer from my elders.  I also never got answers from my elders when I asked if things suck so bad, why doesn’t anyone do anything to change them.  I swear, the mark of a chronically sane individual is to gripe and moan about a problem but not do any thing to solve said problem.  I’ve seen it my entire life.

Even today when I try to tell people about what is going right in the world (often through science, technology, humanitarian efforts, etc.), I’m usually met with deafening silence or people telling me I’m a liar.  I’ve been called a liar my entire life, especially when I was right.  So it’s nothing new.  Not even my close friends really respond to the good things I tell them.  I’d get more responses if I took pictures of what I had for dinner it seems or posted some snarky stuff about how people that don’t think like I do are the devil’s servants.  I know things are going better in this world than most people think.  Even after Hurricane Harvey knocked out most of the Houston area, there were people from all over on the way to clean up the damage and help those in need within hours of the storm hitting.  It’s a pity that it takes a calamity for many people to see through their petty illusions of what is wrong and actually do something right.

I have decided I’m essentially unplugging from the illusions that the press and social media present.  I’m keeping my interactions on Facebook and other outlets to a bare minimum from now on.  I don’t want to hear political sermons or diatribes about how bad young people suck worse than ever anymore.  I signed up for Facebook because I wanted to keep in contact with my college and high school friends, not to listen to people gripe and moan about whatever grievance is popular this week.  For my younger readers, try not to take the garbage the press and your elders say about you personally.  They were saying the same thing about my cohorts and myself twenty years ago and we turned out just fine.  Their elders said the same things about them back in the 1960s during the Vietnam War protests and race riots.  And sadly, come 2030 or so, many of you will say the same idiotic things about your kids.  I swear our species is the only species that actively despises it’s own offspring.  Yet despite our hangups, we are advancing.  That is why I think, in spite our petty squabbles and complaints, I think humans in general are pretty cool.  I just think the illusions our squabbles create are tiresome and I’m content to watch our species advance from a distance for the time being.

I just don’t want to be bothered with it anymore.  I don’t want to hear that civilization is heading to hell in a hand basket when all the data (for those who will actually do a few minutes of google searches) says other wise.