Double Secret Exhaustion

After a month of young men coming in and out of my front door at will, chattering in Ukrainian and Spanish and English and paying no attention to me at all, things have quieted down. We still have a garage half-full of furniture to move back into our empty basement, no need to wait unless the will is weak. Hey, my will is just fine, don’t know about yours. I’m still gonna have to let John do it when he feels like it.

I’m not running on fumes; I’m creaking forward on the faint memory of energy, and I wasn’t exactly moving refrigerators. I just kept going up and down stairs and back and forth, and now I’m just a zombie with no appetite.

But no complaints from me. It’s so nice (and really hard to explain or show, since other than the new bathroom downstairs it was mostly cosmetic work, much needed and overdue). I walk around barefoot on new floors and carpet and really, it’s a great feeling after all these years. Don’t stop believin’.

I’m fond of the term game changer, apparently, because I use it a lot lately.

Because this is a game, right? The rules are simple — get through the day, and stay alive. It’s essentially Jumanji, although that feels a little dramatic.

Most of this is technology, although it’s not bells and whistles — I like that, but these are functional things that have improved my daily life, even if only a little.

AirBuds were a game changer. So was my Meta Quest headset, Oh Em Gee. I use that all the time, meditation, relaxation, watching videos, virtual traveling — considering I’m not really interested in (literal) game play, it made a big difference.

I bought a countertop ice maker and that was sure a game changer. So was changing to a solid wood cane.

Switching from my PC to a Mac mini definitely changed the game, both making my daily stuff easier (I can switch from phone to tablet to desktop seamlessly; almost too easy) and giving me a powerful PC to turn into an AI machine (if I can ever get it to work).

And I can control that Mac from both my iPad and my Quest headset, which is more useful than you might think (and a really cool way to watch movies/TV, at least for an hour or so until the headset gets uncomfortable).

I got frustrated one day and bought a bunch of Tupperware-style containers, and that was a big game changer — our chaotic leftover situation got controlled instantly, putting us all in a good mood.

So was ROOT Sports Northwest finally selling a standalone subscription so I CAN WATCH BASEBALL AGAIN. Now that’s a literal game.

The above is my recent reading list, although I’m using “recent” loosely — there are times when I can race through pages like the old days, but often these can take weeks of a few pages at a time (I tend to nod off; it’s annoying but I’m managing).

And as much as this is a super-brainy list without a bodice ripper or mystery novel to be found, and as such show-offy, it’s remarkable to me. Three years ago, I would have imagined reading maybe…none of these, seriously. I love history but I tended to stick with American, and some of this would have been baffling to the pre-Covid me (e.g., the medieval English stuff).

This is a gross positive. Somehow I can focus on and retain factual material like this, names and dates, when I can’t give you too many details about the show I watched last night. The brain is such a mystery, and, you know, maybe this is the other door opening. Maybe I let go of a lot because I had to, and got a little more room upstairs to figure out what I really wanted to know….I have no idea, and don’t really care.

If I’d been doing this all along, who knows what I might have done (or avoided). I seriously never stopped learning, at least in my opinion, but I might not have chosen wisely. I know way too much about computers — I don’t need to learn anymore, everything is automatic now, made for a senior citizen who finds himself more interested in the Minoan civilization than GPUs.

As I’ve said before, I’m not interested in the concept of “silver linings.” It’s nonsense to me, a fairy tale, a belief in The Big Plan. Bad luck is part of life, getting ill like this sucks, and it wasn’t necessary in order for good things to happen, good grief. That’s a twisted philosophy to me, an imaginary cause-and-effect scenario that’s kind of awful.

And, of course, has justified atrocities for as long as we’ve been human.

So nope. Good things happen all the time, smack dab in the middle of bad news. Learning new stuff is a good thing. I could have done without the rest of this, but c’est la vie, as I said. Sort of.