How to reflect on a decade

This year ending isn’t just an ordinary ending of a year, because it’s also the end of a decade.  Naturally, a sentimental person like me tends to want to reflect on an entire decade, because much like individual years, a decade is a nice round chunk of time that one might think it would be easy to reflect upon, but in the greater spectrum, it’s ten full years we’d be trying to look back onto.  Now I like to think I have a good memory, but even without the aid of my trusty brog, it’s difficult to really look back at an entire decade.

Regardless, that’s not going to stop all the self-important jobbers of the internet who will try their darnedest to speak with authority and copy and paste all the same milestones the major news outlets will when it comes to trying to summarize and reflect upon the entire decade.  The funny thing is that most of the internet savvy generations probably aren’t that much older or younger than I am, which means that in the grand spectrums of our respective lives, we’ve only really lived through 3-4 decades, whereas I’d probably estimate that 1.5-2 of them are pretty invalid, because we’re simply not articulate and/or educated enough to have the capacity to reflect on entire decades.

So combined with the advent and growth of the internet, and the notion that everyone has a voice, I’d wager this is probably, at the very most, the second real decade of the modern high-speed internet that people really care to really reminisce about; and I’m being generous by calling it the second, because DSLs and cable internet didn’t really flourish until nearly the mid-2000’s; I couldn’t imagine people trying to use streaming, auto-refreshing social media on a 56K modem, so frankly I see this more as the first real decade that everyone and their literal mothers on the internet are going to be writing about.

Anyway, I’m going to attempt to try to recollect from mostly just my own memories, and stick to things that are more relevant to my own little world, and not the big gigantic depressing one we live in.  If I had any readers, they can google any decade in review, and probably find more worldly and probably more high-profile shit than the things I have to say about the things going on in my own little life, like the start and finish of Game of Thrones, Pokemon Go, the sad state of American politics, all the endless mass shootings, and Bill Cosby being outed as a rapist.

And the reason that I disclaim the whole “if I had any readers” because one of the most devastating things that occurred for me is the fact that despite my WordPress going online in 2010, at nearly the very start of the decade, midway through the decade my brog went down indefinitely, when my brother relocated from one part of the country to another.  A lot of hardware changes meant no more place to host my brog, and despite having the supposed backups, I simply haven’t taken the time or allocated the funds necessary to get my site up and running again.

If I were the type to do New Years resolutions anymore, I think I’d resolve to get my site back up and running again in 2020.  TBD on if that will actually occur, and frankly with the things I have on my plate going into the next decade, I don’t want to commit and then fail to deliver.

In spite of the brog blackout, that hasn’t stopped me from writing.  Even to the day my site went down, I have been writing on a fairly regular basis, taking no more than two weeks off before the internal guilt gets my fingers flying across the keys again, and I’ve got at this point, hundreds of folders of dated and timestamped Word docs, all awaiting their day in which they can be posted retroactively to a brog.

Continue reading “How to reflect on a decade”

To prove I could still do it

Among the numerous things I did over Labor Day weekend instead of going to Dragon*Con, I ran in a 10K on Labor Day.  Ever since I installed a rod in my office in which to hang all of my running medals from, I was disappointed at how sparse it looked, and decided that I needed more medals.  The Big Peach Sizzler seemed like a perfect opportunity to do something productive in the sense of acquiring another medal, accomplish something that was exercise, but also to prove to myself that even at the ancient age of 37, I could still run a sub-60 minute 10K.

And at 58:44, I accomplished what I set out to do.

Not bad for an old dog like me that didn’t really prepare that much, other than routine maintenance runs, just to make sure that I can run 2-3 miles at the drop of a hat.  It wasn’t my best 10K time ever (54:09), but given the circumstances, I can’t really complain.

I was actually really excited when I passed the 55-minute pacer, and thoughts of possibly beating my best time began to swirl in my head, and the amount of personal gloating and braggadocio I could do if I achieved it.  But clearly I blew my wad a little too early, and around the third mile, I began to hit a wall of not feeling good enough to continuously run for the rest of the run, and had to drop gears and go into a run-walk for the rest of the run.  Not long after hitting this wall, it was only a matter of minutes before 55 passed me, and it became a personal battle to not see 60.

And fortunately for myself, I never saw the 60-minute pacer, nor did I ever take the time to look backward and try and see.  Given the fact that I finished at 58:44, they probably weren’t ever that far behind me at any point after the third or fourth mile.

Ultimately, this overall positive result, and the fact that I want to collect more medals for my display bar, has inspired me to get more back into running, to where I can, not just improve, but have reason to keep up training, and be capable of getting back to making progress and tackling longer runs, where I can start amassing more medals to display.

Hey, whatever it takes to have good reason to continue to exercise and have a good physical habit in my life, right?

Happy Moloch Day 2019

Anyone who’s been reading my brog with any regularity knows what this is all about.  Frankly, I’m not particularly feeling like going through the whole spiel again about how and why MLK is pronounced “Moloch” in Aramaic, and how Moloch, the ancient demon god most certainly came before Martin Luther King, Jr. and therefore had the grandfather clause rights to use MLK over Martin Luther King, Jr.

Really though, the whole point of this post is the fact that I’m currently locked in a training session at work for a software that is basically the equivalent of using bamboo chopsticks to try to put a car together.  Those people who are unfortunate enough to be around my person have heard diatribes and long-ass rants about my feelings about this, so I’ll try to be less verbose about it in a brog post, but the bottom line is that due to the Benny Hill-cueing music-needed training session that I’m in that’s in a laughable state of disarray, with the leadership that’s mandating all this happening, I have the time to write this.

Teammates are dumbfounded and bewildered at the disorganization of this, and I’ve been keeping notes of just how pathetically bad things are, with how the IT monkeys are running around without leadership, trying to keep on an agenda that doesn’t exist.  The third-party representative of this software is twiddling his thumbs doing jack shit on his phone while people on other teams are trying to figure out what comes next. 

But hey, this has helped chew up some of the time until the end of the training session, to which because of just how unorganized things have been, my boss decided to throw in the towel on the rest of the session, and now I’ve written a lot less than I had anticipated.

Whatever though.  Happy Moloch Day!

The year-end post, circa 2018

As I believe more and more with each passing year, time begins to feel like it moves faster the older we get.  I go to work in the morning, do my thing there, come home, have dinner, tidy things up and do one or two tasks I had in mind, and then it’s suddenly 10 pm, and now I’m at the point of the day where I can’t really commit to anything too time-consuming, lest I put myself into a position of going to bed too late, and then being tired at work the next day, and therefore I usually just end up going to bed at a sensible time.

Rinse, repeat, and suddenly it’s the end of December, and we’re on the cusp of closing out 2018 and entering 2019.

I’ve often said in the past that it seems silly the notion of encapsulating things into calendar years, and having hope that things will miraculously be better the following year for no reason at all other than the fact that the last number in the date has ticked up one.  I say that, but I still find myself at the end of every year putting together these kinds of posts reflecting on a calendar year, and deciding whether it was good, whether it was bad, or more often than not, somewhere in the middle.

As far as two thousand and eighteen is concerned, I’m fairly confident that I can say with conviction that it was a pretty good year.  Not somewhere in the middle, but definitely up in the upper quartile of being good.  To those who kind of follow my life, the reasons for such are pretty obvious, but it kind of goes without saying that I’ve made some pretty big strides in my life in general, with none of them being larger than proposing to mythical gf, and making her mythical fiancée and soon-to-be future wifey.

I always figured there would be marriage in my life at some point, and it’s been an enjoyable albeit steady and deliberate ride, as that’s pretty much how I do most important things in my life, but I knew I was making the right choice moving forward, because as has been often times the case with the things in our relationship, things just felt right, and it was just time to make it more right, and move forward in our relationship to the next logical step.

Before I go any further reminiscing, getting engaged is what sets 2018 high atop years past, and by that logic, 2019 already has the groundwork laid down for it to be hopefully better. 

Continue reading “The year-end post, circa 2018”

Thoughts on a European vacation

So for our 2018 vacation, mythical gf future wifey and I went to Europe.  Specifically Munich, Germany, Budapest, Hungary, and Vienna, Austria.  These are all places that I’d never been to before, but such could very easily be said about anywhere on the planet, because in the grand spectrum of things, the world is pretty large.

Needless to say, the trip was pretty much excellent.  All three places were great in their own ways, and I look back fondly to the exploration, food and drinking of each of them.

Munich, completely redeems the entire country of Germany for me.  When I was younger, I’d often said that Germany was a country that I’d most want to visit in my life, because it seemed like the one country where it was a pretty drastic change to everyday life without having to go into the bush.  In 2016, I went to Germany for the first time, but it was to Berlin, which turned out to be a city that embodied hostility, owned their unfriendliness and was just basically an unpleasant place that really made me question my choice of places I wanted to go.  I was as relieved to leave Berlin as much as they probably bid good riddance, and I really debated on whether or not I wanted to ever go to Germany again.

Thankfully, future wifey convinced me that Munich would be different, and our 2018 European vacation would both start and end in Munich, which turned out to be a pretty good thing in the end.  From the very start, arriving in Munich was arriving in a traditionally beautiful city that had classic European architecture all around, and the historic building and landmarks were stuff like cathedrals and monuments, and not just dingy vandalized wall fragments.

The people of Munich were also way friendlier, spoke more English, which is another thing that I don’t take for granted when traveling abroad, because I’m always impressed and grateful as hell whenever I go to other countries, and there are always people who can speak English as opposed to how it’s like in America where so few people speak anything otherwise.

And the trains in Munich, they actually worked, unlike Berlin, where they were always broken, closed for maintenance, and made absolutely no sense to where they actually went.  Much of our time in Munich was spent walking around from tourist destinations to bier hauses, and in a country where beer is pretty much the same cost as water, needless to say, we did a good bit of bier drinking.  Hofbrauhaus was a fun tourist destination, but Paulaner was definitely of superior quality in food and beer, but if any one place is worth remembering, it’s the literal cave like cellar of Augustiner, which turned out to be a really cool place in the end.

Continue reading “Thoughts on a European vacation”

In remembrance of his lord and tormentor Moloch, circa 2018

In a fit of blasphemy, I almost forgot that it was Moloch Day.  Unlike the vast majority of people I know, I no longer have the luxury of having MLK Day off like I did in previous jobs, and had to drag myself into the land of workspaces and get cracking on some work today.

However, a moment of forgetfulness is harmless as long as I still take the time to acknowledge and pour a little bit out in honor of the ancient demon god, Moloch, for whom the third Monday in January is always dedicated to.  And if this is your first time learning of this, worry not, as my site is still down and frankly, zero readers exist, so it’s no surprise that this isn’t getting read.

But my summary from the year prior should be sufficient at getting my point across:

“But anyway, much the same as the ancient Aramaic alphabet came before the Common Tongue, MLK came long, long, long before MLK; which obviously, if you’ve been reading my brog for a while now, obviously is in reference to ancient demon god Moloch, came long before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

In short, MLK Day is Moloch Day, because Moloch came way before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Sure, King was more or less the antithesis of Moloch, on multiple levels, but the law of the world still goes to “who was first.”  And there’s no denying, Moloch has a few hundred centuries over King, and that’s more than adequate reason enough for MLK Day to belong to his holy god of bad shit.

Happy Moloch Day!