Weekend Blues

"The mind of an introvert is like a hurricane that never ends."

- my last roommate, Sang. (or something along those lines as my memory's hazy.)

This blog is full of thoughts. When I'm not actively or passively thinking about some particular topic, I wind up thinking about how empty my mind feels, like it's been dulled or distracted or aimlessly meandering somewhere. And I end up feeling like I'm not really here right now, like I'm actually in some other world mentally, or some other plane detached from reality because I'm not capable of paying attention to anything around me.

Of course, it took a rather humiliating first snowboarding experience for me to actively notice this trend of thinking that's been cropping up every so often. Well, it's not like I hadn't noticed it before- I've probably mentioned it a bunch of times on this blog or something- but to connect it with the feelings of wounded pride, my tendency to overthink things in every situation, and another offhand conversation just earlier about the disconnect between what goes on in a person's mind and the words that come out of their mouth, it all kind of came together to the surface as I lay there in the snow, unable to get up because it hurt too much to. Snowboarding can be fun, but not so much and rather much more exhaustingly so when the only way you know how to stop sliding is by crashing and falling onto your arms and knees and then occasionally somehow flipping over and landing roughly on your ass [because no one really opted to take lessons and you have no physical intuition for these things].

At the end of a run I'd find myself spacing out at the bottom, not really able to do much else. I was running through my head all sorts of random explanations and scenarios, what kind of things I would say the moment I saw people again cause they'd all finished first. That part in the brackets above is my "official" explanation so to speak, the one that I finally came down to as a logical response to people asking how my experience was, because it's actually true for the most part and makes sense and if anyone actually asks me I'll probably say that. But it wasn't the only reasoning that came to mind.

The first one: "I'm not evolutionarily fit for this most physical activities." Mainly because of how slow I am in general to pick up on sports of any kind, and because having exercise-induced asthma limits the extent to which I can try. I am easily discouraged when I can't breathe.

Second: "I'm averse to physically risky activities and don't really enjoy this." Which then led to the inevitable question, "Why am I even doing this if I don't enjoy this?" To fit in because it sounds logical to try snowboarding at Tahoe in the winter if you've never done it before and most of your other friends are doing it? To be honest, in the days leading up to this I wasn't really looking forward to it or dreading it even - I just felt more apathetic overall.

Third: "I just naturally fail at this, like many things at life." I was reminded of my friend who likes to call me out when I fail at things (last time it was parallel parking, when I usually don't have that many problems parallel parking except for this time when this friend was in the car, because like all of my other failures in life, it had to happen only then) and who I may or may not have an unacknowledged grudge against in this respect. 

Fourth: "I didn't sleep enough, and my body feels sluggish right now and isn't really responding to what I want it to do." Which is kinda true; after each of the first two runs it took me awhile to just muster the energy to unlatch my boots from the board and get up. I couldn't even unhook it properly the first time and had to ask a couple of passerbys for help until one of them finally figured out that I was pressing the wrong object to unhook it. And then after the third run it took me a while to figure out how to take my helmet off after having already done it several times earlier. 

[I also didn't notice the first time around that there was a bar you had to lower over you to prevent yourself falling off of the skilift. Or rather, I was wondering why there wasn't a bar because I was sitting alone and didn't see it behind my head and mused 3/4ths of the way up that it would be really easy to just fall off right there and break my legs or something. I resisted the temptation to do so.]

Fifth: "There are too many damn people here." Which was also true; the line grew excessively long over the course of the day and from the very first part of the course onward I spent most of my time crashing because I was trying to avoid running into people, even as I got crashed into several times, once in the arm and another time in the leg from behind by a skier who fell while getting off of the skilift. And then another time as I was trying to walk back up the course a little bit to avoid sliding through the course boundary.

Sixth: "What have I been doing with my life?" When I think of my other friends who do this more often and enjoy it, and those who talk of buying snowboards and going again, when the thought of that doesn't really evoke much desire or interest in my mind.

Seventh: "I can't recall any of the how-to-deal-with-anxiety exercises we did." So much for small group. Or rather, I predicted this would probably happen because it's a lot harder to recall such things when you're really feeling anxious.

It feels sillier looking back on it all now. But in the heat of the moment when you're exhausted from crashing too much and also experiencing what feels like a rather shitty not-your-day- not to mention...

- failing at attaching my ticket to my jacket several times with the un-reusable latch thingies

- thinking I'd lost my goggles while I was wearing them

- having the skin on my knuckles get chafed off by the wrist guards I was wearing
- having dust and snow blow around my sunglasses into my eyes in the parking lot 

- witnessing a neighboring car door smack my car while I was inside it

- experiencing that evening what felt like the effects of a worsening alcohol allergy from a single Fireball shot: palpitating heart/head, difficulty breathing, shivering without feeling cold, and then a headache. Not that this hasn't happened before, but it happened a lot faster this time. I may just have to give up alcohol altogether (not like I'd be missing it much).

- "why are you always like this, Ryan?" 

  "I feel too hot; I just need some cold air right now."

...it just makes the doom and gloom depression feel all too real. I can say with a straight face in the midst of it that I'm just being overly dramatic and making a big deal out of everything and yet still continue to fall prey to my emotions and stress and pessimism, all over a simple snowboarding venture that would otherwise barely faze the likes of most other folks. It makes me wonder why I feel so out of place and disconnected from the experiences of everyone else, like I'm not really here (and then end up aimlessly thinking about that), and why I couldn't simply just fit in and enjoy this trip like everyone else. And of course why I think so damn much, when I don't really want to, because it makes me start to do weird and erratic things that make other people worry when I'm really just trying to clear my head.

It'd be easy to just focus on my raw emotions immediately as they happened, to end up calling this day one of the worst experiences I've had in a while because of how unenjoyable it may have felt a lot of the time and how much of it I spent worrying over how I might respond to people when they saw me. Would I be able to cover all of this up with a straight face, to play it off with the excuses I came up with, to convince them that their worries were really unfounded all along? (I was surprised at how much I was able to play it off, anyway... kinda.) 

But over the course of the day, I was pleasantly surprised by a friend reaching out trying to help me when I didn't realize I'd needed it, even if just for a brief moment. People who were willing to stand outside with me in the middle of the snowy dark night and just talk for a bit, who were nice enough to ask how I was doing (even though it might've felt a little redundant after a while... I hope I wasn't too worrisome), and a friend who was willing to stick it out with me on the course for a bit while I was trying to get up and failing... and then somewhat ineffectively coach me to go "LEFT! LEFT! LEFT!" when I had no idea what LEFT meant [with respect to my legs]. 

I don't regret the experience, or the chance to be able to share it in some way big or small with the other folks that went; I'm really thankful for it. But too often I am prone to focusing just on the bad moments or rather on the sheer weight that they seem to take on in my mind, as a way of centering my life on my own immediate emotional well-being, when there is so much more going on around me that I'm not even paying attention to. It's times like these where I wish my mind weren't so overactive, so that I could just relax and focus on the good for once. But that's just something I'm still learning to deal with even now.

It was difficult to consciously resist the temptation to just blow up at everyone and everything and make a scene or something like I might've done in the past- well in my case that tends to lead to me running away more than anything- but now, it all feels like a brief moment or footnote in time, and like the majority of thoughts it just goes by unnoticed mostly... which is fine, honestly. Just as this life is but a moment... or a dream.

"...to realize that all your life-- all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain-- it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person."

- True Detective

This has been on my mind often lately - the sense that I place too much emphasis on the details of my own experience without acknowledging how much of it doesn't really matter that. As Cohle says on the show, we would like to think that our own lives are really that significant, that meaningful, largely in part because this life lived through our own eyes is the only thing we know. And a good deal of what I really felt this weekend amounted to me just selfishly wanting my own misery to be acknowledged by other people, as if that really mattered, and then worrying about how irrelevant my life felt when I couldn't communicate that and was afraid of alienating others. And this wasn't the first time either; it happens fairly often when I'm in social situations... only that it was more poignant this time around. Why do I get so hung up over these little things? 

I guess it's because... I'm human.

[And yes, I realize the length of this post is in itself a likely product of my overthinking mind, but that's just how I roll.]

of late (abstract thoughts and not).

More arbitrary and a bit longer than usual. Or maybe I'm being more blunt about what normally goes through my mind on a regular basis this time around; there is no method or order to the madness, or proper grammar usage because I just caught a sentence fragment in the first line of this post, and I don't care. Come to think, I'm not usually properly observing grammar in these posts anyway, so I don't know why I brought that up.

- Posters. After finally putting a few posters up that I've accumulated haphazardly over the years (Stars; two of Yo La Tengo; Homestuck; One Piece; and Nausicaa), I suddenly feel this compulsion to acquire more posters and put them up on ALL THE WALLS. I can't help but just stop and look at a poster sometimes, so I guess it's fitting to just surround the living area with them so I can just stare at them mindlessly whenever I feel like it... and I guess it's a way for me to express my favorite things upon my personal space, although I can't fathom a possible good poster for Planescape: Torment... other than the symbol of torment I guess.

(But I could easily create a shrine museum room dedicated to One Piece if I had the space and materials for it...)

- The auto-pilot won't stop. Or that is to say that I can't help but notice in the back of my mind how automatic more than half of my motions are these days. Routine becoming so second-nature that part of me wonders how it is I'm doing so much without actively being aware of what it is I'm doing. This is what it's like to live a life without reflection.

- I don't like the sound of my writing half the time that I read it. I'll probably dislike what's written here at least one out of the next 5 times I re-read this entry, probably more. Just like my somewhat excessively long goodreads reviews.

(I know that probably isn't actually the expected value if I dislike reading it half the time, but whatever. Ignore what I said if you haven't learned probability.)

- Had a discussion the other day about panic attacks, and after hearing a formal definition of what exactly a panic attack is, I realized that those few times I ran out of the apartment/club/etc. etc. in the past were essentially panic attacks. They say you shouldn't give in to the impulsive desire to escape wherever you are because it actually makes the attack worse, but uh woops, can't reverse that now.

- As much as I would like to think of myself as "open," there is a layer of thoughts that I apparently refuse to write here or even in my own personal physical journal- which I guess is partly why I don't feel anything whenever someone happens to grab my journal out of the blue. It's not like I really have anything to hide in there that I wouldn't be willing to talk about in person anyway. I'm aware of the existence of these other thoughts, but the idea of actually writing them down has never actually crossed my mind or even come close to doing so... although I am more aware of them whenever someone says something that causes them to cross my mind during conversation and I don't say anything, which seems to happen a lot these days.

- "You're good at being there for things."

I suppose it helps that I find it difficult to say no to people unless I already have a real reason to say no.

- Is it normal to be confused about being invited to one thing but not another involving the same group of people for the same related event? Even though I already had plans during the second one anyway, so it didn't matter...

- Sometimes I get the impression that there are other things I could be doing with my time. Take today, where I had no plans during the day and wound up not feeling like doing anything.

Well, other than take care of a few health issues that wouldn't really be appropriate for conversation with anyone other than a doctor...
and then put up the new Earthbound poster I acquired at the retro video gaming convention yesterday...
and then a map of the lands of Ice and Fire...
and then figure out how to get the late 1990's Carmen Sandiego games working on my Windows 8 laptop after randomly reminiscing about them while walking through the streets of downtown San Jose yesterday.

Protip: Windows XP virtual machine (the steps of which to get working would entail another blog post if I could still remember them). but anyway, THEY ACTUALLY WORK! and it occurred to me that these games are actually educational even for an adult; I didn't realize that Zaire had changed its name to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and not the other way around, because in 1996 it was still called Zaire and the game didn't know any better, but wikipedia did.

But I suppose I cheated by resorting to wikipedia in the first place, whereas elementary school-age me had no such resource and somehow managed to capture 50 villains and the elusive Carmen Sandiego on a first try anyway. but not the second time around because I didn't realize that EVERY suspect in the final area was identical to Carmen.

The point being, give me another carefree day and I'll clean the house for once. Probably.

- Note to past self: next time you open a brand new game case with a poster inside, put the poster back inside the case so that your future self six years later won't waste several hours tearing up his house looking for the damn thing, even though the very first thought he had was that it probably was in socal even though the case is up here and somehow that doesn't make any logical sense with his memories. Sincerely, your future self.

- We started a new series on anxiety in small group this past week, which feels hard to apply at the moment because the last time I legitimately felt anxious was more than a year ago when I was going through that panic attack-situational social anxiety phase, whereas lately I've been feeling anything but stressed. Granted, I've also been purposely not actively pursuing actions that would potentially add anxiety to my life that would otherwise be seen as desirable in the future, like say more schooling or a change in jobs or a sudden realization that would lead to a mid-life crisis. Maybe I should change that so this series would be more relevant-

but really, I feel like a more relevant series for me would be on a topic that wouldn't be as applicable to as many people (like some straight up basic fundamentals of theology that aren't directly related to apologetics, but I guess that's what seminary is for...?), so I rest my case for now anyway. I just think we take for granted something that most people can't really afford to do the same for, and it would be good reason to explore why.

- The reason why my posting frequency has gone down so much lately is that I don't have much novel things to say or write about lately that haven't already been said here before, or else I'm in the middle of another distraction already. Bravely Default and Pokebank and the new Wolf Among Us just came out, and I still haven't finished New Vegas yet...

- What do you live for, what do you believe, what do you need, and what do you want.

- I feel like I've already hit the point of being content with the status quo, except that it's really more of a fear of change from the status quo.

What I'm really afraid of is living with certainty on things I have no business of being certain about.

- The longer you [implied: 100% introvert] live alone, the harder it is to fathom the likelihood of wanting to live with another person again. Well, bar for some exceptions, anyway.

- It re-reoccurred to me the other day that the majority of what I feel like saying (in my head and written) doesn't really have much worth, except that there is value in the things I have to say sometimes. Whether or not this is one of those times is another story.

Well, in the greater scope of things it's all meaningless to some person anyway.