There’s a new theme because…reasons. I don’t know. I planned on creating my own, but I just haven’t had the time to do it yet. Working on HA tonight. Yesterday I went to an open stage to work out details for a stand up showcase I’m putting on with a friend. No one showed up but us so we got to just pick the tech’s brain. It was a pretty cool salvation for what would’ve probably been a disappointing night for the tech.
We got a fair amount of information from them and we’re ready to finalize some of our plans. Just got to cross a few T’s and dot a few…lower case j’s.
It’s been another revolution around the Sun which usually creates the opportunity for inward reflection and desires to make big changes and reorganization. But let me tell you, I am long overdue for some organization.
I have been holding myself back lately. I’ve also avoided writing on this blog as well. I’ve noticed a small pattern emerging here where I’ll blog when I’m really upset or feeling dramatic then I’ll feel embarrassed and avoid writing for a while. I’ve been, kind of, doing that in my actual life as well. I have too much going on. I need to make some structural changes. I’ve planned it out (for the most part), I’ve discussed it with my partner, I’ve gotten ready to trim the fat, then I just…don’t.
IDK. Maybe I’m afraid of the future. Maybe I’ve gotten too comfortable. Maybe I’m just tired. But right now, I feel hopeful and ready to push the buttons I’ve been hovering my fingers over. I’m ready. I just need to fuckin push.
So here goes nothing. Next week. Things will be different.
It’s the week of my wedding, y’all! Today, the future-spouse and I are having a spa day. I just wanted to point something out though. I woke up to shower and start my work day (I’ll be playing hooky at noon, don’t tell anyone) while my partner stayed in bed. I started working, chatted with a few co-workers and went to check on her. I peered inside the bedroom and saw my beautiful fiance and our adorable puppy both slumbering in our fluffy bed. On the tv, Big Momma’s House was playing. I love this woman.
I have a few things to get back on track after this week. My small chat with my coworkers, however, made me realize that one thing needs to jump to the top of this list of things. I need a new fuckin job, man. I’m in a group chat with two other coworkers. Let me paraphrase how it went.
Person A sent a video of someone reading funny OOO statuses.
We all 😂’d together over the video and I mentioned that I was considering stealing one or two and setting up my status to either “404 Error. Luke Not Found.” or “BRB. Getting Married”.
Person B, who is verbose and comes off as neurotic to me sometimes, shared a story of when they had a supervisor who was strict about OOO statuses and how they never found out if the entire company was this strict or just this one supervisor they had. I shared that I would like to use a funny OOO status, but I probably wouldn’t (mostly out of laziness).
Person B said “Yeah, non of these sound really COMPANY X safe”.
I said, “Not COMPANY X safe as in people will roll their eyes or something more serious?”
“Depends,” Person B said. They went on to explain that if the person doesn’t like you, it could cause friction. If you’re well-liked it’s refreshing and fun. If not, it’s “off-key behavior”.
I told Person B that I believe them, but I hope they are wrong. Because they just described a really unpleasant place to work. Their response?
“Every place has really unpleasant people.”
“No excuse for a culture that frowns upon fun.” I told them.
“Everyone has different ideas of fun.” That was the end of it for me.
I’ve worked in a lot of toxic places. I just don’t really care for politics or nastiness usually. At the end of the day, people can point to my work and see that it’s good (great, if I may). I try not to get wrapped into things outside of that. I’m usually going to try to make things fun. If people don’t accept it, I’m not going to change. This isn’t something I’m doing on purpose either. This is just who I am. I’d die of boredom far quicker than dying of embarrassment.
The thing is that I settle at this place. I settle for mediocre work that I don’t care about. I settle for mediocre salary because it’s still very high in comparison to other professions. I settle for being under-utilized and overlooked constantly. I capitalize on the freedom and fill it with other endeavors. I work a lot outside of my main “job”. But there have been many moments at this workplace that remind me that I don’t belong here. This…should really be the last one. I’ve had enough moments of nastiness. I’m worried that the next place won’t have as much freedom. But it’s time to find out.
I had pf on my left foot in 2022. It lasted an entire year. As it was finally healing, I started to feel pain in my right foot. That pain turned out to be pf. So as soon as I was finally getting over it, I got it on my other foot. It has almost been a year since that happened. In other words, I’ve been dealing with plantar fasciitis for almost two years. I have to say, I am so tired of defending myself. Sometimes it feels like people just don’t believe me that I am in pain. Pain that makes me limp to prevent putting weight on my foot. Pain that forces me to sit down and rest for a bit in the middle of a mall or farmer’s market. I have special sandals I have to wear at all times when I’m at home. I’ve worn orthopedic shoes for two years. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on compression socks. I’ve had physical therapy. I’ve had a frozen bottle of water in my freezer for two years so I can ice my feet twice a day. I have a special board that I use to stretch my calves and feet.
It usually hurts the most in the morning when I first wake up. I limp to my sandals for relief. By the time I take my dog out it’s usually better. I’m not trying to complain too much. I just keep having to defend myself. I sometimes feel like the kid who is legitimately sick and needs to stay home but everyone still assumes he’s faking it. Another annoying thing is that anyone who has ever had a touch of this inflammation seemingly only had to deal with it for a microsecond. They will always give me this advice like, “you should roll a frozen water bottle on your foot.” Oh really???? I SHOULD??!?! I’ve had this TWO FUCKING YEARS YOU DON’T THINK I TRIED THAT? I cannot wait to be over this, mostly so the pain stops. I’m tired of the pain-both physical and emotional.
Lately, I feel like my brain hates me. I’ll have the intention of doing everything I want/need to do. Then I’ll sit down at my desk and just open my emails. I’ll be like “Okay, I’ll start working on that right after I google “graph theory”. Then graph theory somehow turns into me reading Wikipedia pages on the early Greek Empire. My brain is all over the place. Fuck, even this paragraph is hard to follow.
It never used to be like this for me. I think I just have too much on my plate. I need to start clearing some of it off. I need some breathing room. FUCK. The problem there is that I’ve been saying this for almost a year now. At this point, I may be afraid of what the future holds. Why? I used to have dreams of making it. My next step was never certain. But now, this uncertainty feels different. Why does this plunge scare me more than all my other ones? I’m a fucking artist, dawg. I never gave a fuck about my future. Shit.
I’ve been thinking about true randomness recently. I was thinking of a way to explain to somebody in layman’s terms and I came up with this.
OMG it’s a plinko board! So we all know what this is, right? Whether you’ve seen this as a game in Mario Party or a live streamer trying to farm viewers, the point is that you drop a marble in one of the open slots and it will drop down, bounce around on the pegs and land in one of the spaces below. But how come the marble doesn’t land in the same space every time you drop it from the same location? Well…I don’t know actually-physics or some shit probably. There’s probably many variables why it isn’t always the same. But the point is that this board can represent how random numbers are generated using code. So now you see the limitations, right? Good!
Last night, D’s softball team ended their game in a tie. It was fun to watch and everybody loved the dog. The dog had tons of fun as well. The game was delayed because of rain so when we got there everyone was wet. So that was fun. But things took an interesting turn towards the end of the game.
You see, we’ve been doing this fitness challenge in which we have to drink a lot of water. My beautiful partner isn’t very skilled in, how can I put this delicately, holding in her pee. Suffice to say, when she has to go – she has to go. So she approaches me and tells me that she has to pee. I walk with her to some structure in the park that we were in to see if there was a bathroom and if it was still unlocked. You never know when you’re in a park after dark.
Also, parks after dark are not the most chill places to be strolling about. So I made sure to go with her. We walked around the large structure and found doors at both ends. In the middle, there was a trio of water fountains. D went to check the doors while I filmed the water fountains because I’m weird like that. For some reason, whether it was kids playing a prank or just poor assembly, all three water fountains were running. This was one of those park water fountains in which all three bins and spouts protruded from each other on different levels for different sized humans. Here is an image for reference.
The wild part about this image is that I was scrolling through an image search and I finally found this fountain that looks incredibly like the one we saw last night. The image led to an article about a “giant pond” that was finally fixed in a different Chicago park not too far from us at the time. So it appears we stumbled upon a new pond in development.
Anyway, all three bins were filled and overflowing and there was a manhole nearby. I like to find the beauty in such things. Like a dumpster covered in graffiti. I’m weird like that I suppose. But this story isn’t about a dumpster or even a water fountain.
As I stood there filming the water fountains, D came back up to me. She had checked both doors and they were locked. We walked back to the field and one of her teammates said she thought there might’ve been a port-a-potty on the other side of the park. The dark and gloomy side. You know, oppose to the wet and slippery side we were on.
So we ventured in that direction. D, the dog and I walked around this little path and went through the park in a circle. I was making sure we stuck to one side because there were people on the other side sitting in the dark doing who knows what. We walked toward the end of the park and there was no john. We could kind of see the other end of the park, where the people were, but D wanted to be sure. So she started walking down this darker path in-between a public pool and the edge of the park. I quickly caught up to her and told her to stay by my side. She doesn’t always have the best street smarts, especially when she’s in a hurry. We get to the edge of the darkened pathway and we both can see there is no john in this park at all. I look back at her and she’s hopping on her feet, seemingly ready to burst. She says to me “I have to go!” I look around. We are at the edge of the park, behind a structure, around the corner there are two people sitting at a table doing what people do in parks after dark. Behind us is the fence to the park with a street beyond it. Not an empty street either. No cars were driving by but plenty were parked…in front of homes. But it looked quiet enough. The people at the table couldn’t see us, didn’t see a lot of action on the street. I turned back to her and said,
“Then go!” She pulled her softball pants down and squatted in one motion. I turned away and sort of moved in front of D to try to block her as I heard a XXL Super Soaker 9000 unleash it’s tank onto the concrete. The rate at which urine left my partner’s body was extraordinary. The splash back on that cold wet night was superfluous. I immediately took a step back to make sure my calves would remain piss-free. The whole thing took maybe 4 seconds but it was loud and large. She went to stand up and asked me mid-pants pull if I had any napkins on me. I slowly shook my head as she finished pulling her pants up. Everything happened so fast, I’m entirely sure if this was related or not, but the people on the table started making some noises of their own at the same time. They started stirring around a bit. So I grabbed D by hand and quickly got us on our way. She told me that we should wait to come back so no one suspects anything.
As soon as we went to leave, we hear a cop car off in the distance. We look over and about a block away, the lights are swirling above a police SUV. It was so far away that it was obviously unrelated, but D immediately got nervous. When D panics, she stops listening, responding, etc. She starts walking quickly back towards the softball field. I try to keep up with her, asking her questions that keep getting ignored. I finally catch up and ask her to stop for a second. We made it back to the water fountains and wait there for a minute. We watch as the shady figures from the park table leave the park as the cop car rolls by. D lets out a sigh of relief. “I thought that was for me.”
“Why, on earth, would that be for you?” I asked. We chuckled and wait a few more seconds. The plan was to tell her teammates that there was no john and she just held it for now. After she did a quick spin so I could verify there was no visible piss on her, we headed back. No one questioned anything and I watched her team almost win, but settle for a tie (a favorable outcome).
Afterward, because I took a cheat day, we went to Portillos and I got me a burger, fries, and a shake. I ate all that shit. It’s been a while since I had that many carbs and that much sugar. We went home and I enjoyed most of it. The dog had a good amount of the fries.
We went to bed after D had a quick shower. This was not the first time D had peed herself. In fact, she peed on herself a little bit earlier that day. This probably won’t be the last time I write about her peeing on herself. That is just the way life goes sometimes. I suppose.
