Tag: bedtime

Wasted

I wonder what it is that has people do the whole ‘hard core party scene’, filled with drinking, sometimes marijuana, and even the occasional illegal drugs.

Is there something we are seeking, and we search in the self-losing experience of extreme alcohol consumption?

Is there something that feels inadequate, but seems to be fulfilled when under the influence of increasingly strong effects of alcohol?

Are we afraid of or hating something in our lives, and we avoid the thoughts of it through alcohol’s removal of clear thinking?

Are we full of worries, and the alcohol pushes them out of our mind so well, we keep drinking more and more, until the law of diminishing return has been ignored so long that we hardly even function anymore?

Is it something else entirely?

I had a brief time of drinking in certain settings as a sort of camaraderie, or a group participation activity… sometimes even as group participation with ‘the cool kids’.

(I say ‘the cool kids’, but am definitely talking about adults… I wasn’t into law-breaking when I was under 21, and I definitely am not now.)

However, it didn’t last very long.

The worst of it, which was really only a matter of being tipsy in certain group drinking settings, not even drunk, was when I was very much hating something going on within that group setting, and I kind of wanted to avoid it while, at the same time, getting to be one of ‘the cool kids’.

(I did have a wonderful time of regular alcohol consumption at one point in life, and I believe the traditional German (and European) attitudes toward alcohol could prove quite helpful to the US… Biergarten evening drinking in summer in Germany is wonderful… but I didn’t even always drink then.

Anyway, the reason I was mentioning the Biergarten is that I do have positive memories and associations with alcohol… I just don’t much care for it.

I can have it, sure, but I wouldn’t be in the least bit concerned if I never had it again in my life.)

I’ve never understood what drives people to the degrees of drunkenness at which they are not functioning human beings, but merely stumbling babies all over again, twenty-plus years after the original state of babyhood…, but I have wondered much about what drives them to such a point in alcohol consumption.

And I’ve wondered, too, about if there is something comparable for me and my life… I haven’t come up with anything, but I haven’t looked too deeply into that specific piece of the idea.

We even call it being “wasted”…, yet do we consider that it could be a small piece of life that we have, indeed, wasted by being in such a state?

Just a thought, but it’s getting to me tonight…

Anyway… happy life, happy night

Post-a-day 2019

Some sort of workout

We did some CrossFit tonight – or, as I sometimes like to call it, XFactor.

I also started menstruation today.

Not that I initiated it or anything, of course… it just began.

Usually, if I have any pain, it is right at the beginning of menstruation, Day one or Day two.

And, naturally, Day one this time around opted to give me a bit of pain.

Not much, but some pain, nonetheless.

Add to this my significantly lowered energy level – yes, this is totally normal for menstruation, in case anyone was unsure – and the high humidity and heat of this afternoon, and you can imagine a tough workout ahead of me when I arrived for the class.

So, the sprints for the first fifteen-ish minutes were tough, but I made it.

And the weight stuff was okay – I was just generally weaker and shorter-winded than usual.

But the plank stuff at the end – by the way, plank is usually no big deal for me at all – was one of the oddest experiences I’ve ever had with all of this.

You see, plank was fine… it was when we continued from regular into what light have been called a marching plank, where you put one arm stretched in the air in front of you at a time, while keeping your back flat, legs wide, and butt still low, that I hit a tiny bit of trauma…

For that part, followed by mountain climbers (still with the butt low), a lot of the lower abdomen ends up being used.

… a part which had not clicked for me ahead of time…

And so, as I struggled through my second round of the plank combo, and was on the marching plank things, I actually had to stop – something I’ve never done in plank work – for the extreme and intense pain that felt like my ovaries and uterus were about to explode forward out of my lower abdomen… I skipped over the rest of the marching things and just finished the mountain climbers before stopping, but it was still enough to leave me almost rather paralyzed when I sat back, crying.

I’ve never cried in the middle of a workout before, but I did it about three times today.

Yes, the one cry could have been enough, but I had to make sure I wasn’t just being lazy, wanting to get out of the hard work simply because it was hard, and using the excuse of my menstruation to get out of it… and it turned out that it was a combination.

So, I did a few of the marching things and all of the mountain climber things each round afterward, thereby still putting in the work, but not putting myself in unnecessary and useless pain.

I know I have lower energy at these times, and so I have aimed recently to allow for that (and rather successfully for the most part).

Tonight was just the first time I had to factor that into my goals of becoming more fit – I always push hard when my fitness is on the line these days, and it was surprisingly hard to scale back tonight, despite the fact that it was necessary and good for me to scale back.

Anyway, speaking of all of this, nature calls, so I’m off.

Sweet dreams, World at large.

Post-a-day 2019

Aaaaahhhh, those blasted housemates!

Well, they’ve done it alright… the raccoons have overstayed their welcome.

It is official now that my poor bathroom, the place I must go in my home and cannot avoid, has fleas(!!!).

The raccoons have been living in the wall there the past couple weeks or so, and they seem to have brought fleas with them… the vent in the ceiling seems to be the culprit for how they’re getting into the actual bathroom from the walls.

Naturally, I despise it – nearly a year ago, I had a dreadful encounter with fleas while housesitting in this very street… any attempt at a repeat is to be obliterated, thank you very much.

And so, I suffer ever so slightly more tonight, acutely aware of the surprisingly marge number of freckles I have on my lower legs, ankles, and feet – indeed, I had no idea how many freckles I actually have down there (on my legs, of course, I mean).

I have covered my ankles and shins/calves with some essential oils I read about quickly online just now, ones that seem to be flea repellant and flea life-enders, and I have placed two bowls in the bathroom with soapy water and lit tea light candles… we shall see what the morning brings, but I have already dropped two or three in the bowls since I set them down just a short bit ago…

And yes, I am aware that that is not quite how the bowls and candles work, but, when they attack my ankles just because I’ve entered the room, I’m not apt to let them hang around on me…, and so I pinch and drop them directly into the soapy water of their future.

Ugh… you darned raccoons – I allow you a place to stay while you raise your babies, and you bring in this rubbish… how unkind of a houseguest this is.

Now, here I am in my room, panicking at every hair twinge and bit of air that brushes any part of my legs, worried at what it might be… I struggled falling back asleep this morning after I got the (I think) flea bite (hopefully) in the bathroom… I now worry at my being able to fall asleep at all tonight, or at least to sleep well and awake rested in the morning.

It seems sadly unlikely… :/

Darn raccoons… and, of course, fleas(!).

Post-a-day 2019

… And so I did

Today, I accomplished money-earning work that helps others, I learned something, I trusted my instincts, I interacted with and chatted with smart, kind people, I did someone a big favor, I completed one of the assignments from school (the one I had most nearly despised), I ate quite decent food (and twice!) for myself, I talked with my cousin about useful things for the both of us, I patted and got licked by a dog, and I got licked and leaned against a bunch as I learned about and helped care for and rode horses (which included detangling a bunch of hair).

Then, while showering and running my fingers through my own hair to detangle it, I felt something strangely similar to the feeling of the horse’s hair – recall that my hair is dirty blonde and just about as opposite in texture from horse hair as is possible – and eventually discovered that the slightly knitted area felt similar due to the fact that it had hay in it. 😛

Totally chuckled at that, if only on the inside of me. 😉

I did many things today, and they all contributed to my day being beautiful for my life, and even extremely helpful for my struggle-filled mood of the past couple weeks… I don’t want to do lame work, but I can always find something interesting within it, once I get started on it.

And so, as I suspected, getting going was what I needed most to get on track with things – resisting, evading, and avoiding, as I already knew, were definitely not the beneficial path for me. 😛

So now, preparing for bed, I’m not even attempting to turn on a film or anything, despite the fact that I needn’t actually be up until around 1pm tomorrow, because I am exhausted in a good way and I feel good, and so I want to go ahead and read and sleep.

Super signs of a good day, a day well spent. ❤

Post-a-day 2019

Mommy, let me skip tomorrow, please

I have schoolwork that I need to do tomorrow and Tuesday, but I find myself already feeling that old dreaded feeling of Sunday night at the end of Spring Break in middle and high school… I don’t want to go back to school tomorrow…. Mommy, can I just not go to school tomorrow?

Obviously, she always declined, but I never truly meant it – some part of me always wanted to go back… I just didn’t necessarily have all the work finished by Sunday evening, and so really just didn’t want to do the work I needed to have done by class the next morning… much like this time… 😛

Life has offered me so many awesome things this past week, and I’ve grown so accustomed to them – and quite easily, I dare add – that I don’t want to go back to that other routine from before Spring Break…

A small part of me is saying that things will be good once I’m back to it, and that it is only tough because this has been such a good break, and that even the break would turn bad, if it didn’t have an end, and that, at that point, I would start to long for my previous schedule of school and work…

But the key word up there is “small”.

And so, I feel like curling up into my bed with my stuffed animals – duh – and ignoring morning tomorrow, and sleeping in, instead… though, I know I’ll be up around eight or nine at the latest, desperately needing to go potty, and guilt is likely to settle in within me, if I try to avoid the day by going back to sleep. 😛

And so, (I say again) I think I’ll not bother figuring out anything right now… I’ll go to sleep and rest myself in all aspects for the night, and then see how I feel whenever I awaken… hopefully, I’ll be prima for going to a coffee shop to work, and then I actually do that, because I really do have a decent amount of schoolwork to do by Tuesday and Thursday evenings. (Yikes.)

Sweet Dreams, and Good Morning (to those across the planet right now from me)!

Post-a-day 2019

Music tonight

I pulled out my guitar tonight and played.

I had thought that it had been maybe a month or so since I last played, and then another couple weeks or few since I had been playing regularly.

However…, I did some calculations and checking (mainly here), and discovered that I have played my guitar a maximum of a handful of times since September, the most recent one being in December…

It’s mid-March right now.

That means that I was absurdly off on my passive calculations, and it has actually been almost half a year since I played guitar regularly, and only a max of five occasions in there – though, probably more like three – have found me playing it for, say, ten minutes.

Granted, I have played a bit of ukulele since then, but that has been rather sparse, too… and my last regular playing of ukulele on the daily was actually a year ago.

I did a while of playing/making music every day for myself, no matter what, back in early Fall, but I somehow stopped…, which I usually don’t do, when I come up with something like that… (I’m thinking I reached my goal of 40 days, or else I hit moving and the absurdity that was involved with that, and so I didn’t have any instruments with me for a while, and was too distracted and exhausted by everything else either to notice or to bother with it, if I did notice.)

Part of it is as I have known for years: If I don’t have the guitar out (e.g. on a stand, from which I need only to pick up the waiting guitar in order to play it), I end up rarely playing, with the reverse being true, also – if the guitar is out, I will play it often.

Another part of it is that I miss my other guitars, and somehow feel something like being unfair to them, or like I have abandoned them, and therefore am cautious about spending too much time and energy with the Japan guitar I have with me.

Granted, the idea is totally absurd… however, that in no way changes the fact that I am experiencing it.

So, I sent a message a bit ago to the person who took temporary charge of my guitars when I moved to Japan.

He lives here in Houston, but is gone during the school year, so I might have to wait for summer… hopefully, though, his spring break will be the same as mine, and we’ll get to have coffee and then go pick up my guitars from his home, to take them to my new home.

And maybe I’ll get to pet his family cat then, too.

(On a related note, I have been missing my cat all evening, yet also totally not missing having a cat – I love animals; I just don’t want to live with any right now. I mean, let’s be real, I think this raccoon is enough for the time being.) 😛

Anyway… I played parts of two Shake Russell songs tonight, and they both were awesome.

The guitar totally needs new strings, but that is for another day’s/night’s tasks – for now, it has done its job of getting me strumming around and creating music again. 🙂

I’m hoping that, while with family tomorrow, my uncle will play some Shake Russell songs with me, since we often all end up doing music stuff, anyway, when together, and our families (my mom’s and her sister’s) love Shake Russell music.

Okay, I’m stopping now, before I continue on to talk about how I love Shake Russell’s concerts, where here are only sixty-ish people, and how that’s my kind of concert, and how Japan was like that at times, too, and now I’m suddenly super sentimental, and tears this and tears that, another hour has passed, and I’m still not asleep in bed. 😛

Therefore, I bid you wonderful nights and days and mornings and evenings and everything in between. ❤

Peace

Hannah

P.S. (Aha!) I’ve remembered: I stopped the daily music because it was something I was aiming to do daily, but not something I’d committed to doing daily… it is a small distinction between the two, but it is important to note – life got busy, and I opted for sleep over music… :/ …, but I didn’t break my word on anything there. 🙂 (Phew!)

Post-a-day 2019

Evening Rest

Pressure, pressure, pressure

Pushing from the inside, pulling from the out-

side

My head turning every which way, wondering where to take me,

where to head

head-on

And then I curl up after my shower, just letting it all go,

including the gas,

and I feel intensely improved,

almost great

Now just ready for bed, to rest my head

before I consider more intently what my next steps will be,

where I next shall leap

full-on, head-on, full power

of me propelling the energy around me, like magnets at work in this swirling world of life and such

Post-a-day 2019

Phone crush!

Are we allowed to crush on people we meet over the phone?… on a help line?…is that a thing?

Certainly not, but that’s okay – I have a mini crush anyway.

I think it was his chuckles that got me… we were talking about how somebody messed up delivering a package, and yet somehow we both ended up chuckling a lot during our 14-minute phone call… that and his real warmness every time he said my name, calling me “Miss Hannah” in an uplifting way (as opposed to the near disrespectful and demeaning version I have heard on many a helpline).

I just got off from a phone conversation with an adorable Bradley, who happens to be living in the future (by eight hours) in Cape Town, South Africa.

Sometimes, the whole outsourcing of help lines is terrible, and nothing seems to work out, due to language and culture barriers, combined with a terrible phone connection, or something else absurd.

And sometimes, it works out wonderfully – I’ve already had one of my absurd fairy-tale-like stories play out in my head, where adorable, chuckling Bradley in South Africa and I end up meeting in real life and becoming besties or something – maybe even marrying…. ‘How did you two meet?’ ‘Well, it was an outsourced help line phone call that brought us together… Hannah called, and Bradley answered… and it turned into true life, half the world apart.’

😛 hashtag guffaw 😛

It is things like this that make me feel confident in my ability to produce absurd and entertaining stories that nod to Sophie Kinsella books – silly and goofy and crazy things already go down in my life, and then my mind takes them, in a mere moment, to a whole ‘nother level… truly.

What’s really fun to me about it all is the fact that I had called in to the hotline already, but the person had somehow messed up the call, or something, and had just disappeared… so Bradley was my second call in to the hotline.

Boy am I glad my call was messed up the first time. 😛

I really do love my life, and I am grateful for it, with all of my being.

🙂

Post-a-day 2019

Uninvited overnight guest

Not the messages you want to be sending anyone at three in the morning:

Not great news: 80% certain that there is an animal in the attic right now. I went out front to look on the wall, and saw no creature there (just some old vines). There is a hole in the roof by the porch, though, and I can hear it going crazy right now.

It sounds like it is genuinely destroying boards inside the wall. I hear things falling down the wall.

And yet, I just sent them.

And it is terrifying me just a little bit, because this creature sounds totally capable of breaking through the walls within definitely a few hours…. so I’m nervous to go to sleep, and risk having a creature fully in the house when I awaken with a jolt at its entry.

……. 😦

Post-a-day 2019

Time to get up

The struggles of not being an early-morning person… Tomorrow, I don’t have to be in until around 10am…

If I go in at the regular time (i.e. leaving home right at 7am), I can accomplish a lot of my writing and photo stuff before classes.

If I go in for 10, I won’t have time to accomplish anything except teaching and tutoring and regular working stuff – I’m booked through the evening.

But I would get to sleep in…., which is awesome, especially since we’re hoping to do or first workout class tomorrow night.

…However, I might get stress-y about the potential of showing up late for some reason, if I wait for 10…

So, I’m guessing I will schedule myself for the regular wake-up and get ready times, but just take my time doing them, as I find necessary… if I show up half an hour later than usual, due to increased traffic on the roads, that’s okay – I’ll still have enough time at that point to do my personal work before I have a class.

Good plan.

Yep.

…

Yeah, I’m definitely planning to leave at the same time as usual. 😛

Haha… I’m quite glad I can laugh at myself with this; laughter is good medicine. 🙂

Post-a-day 2019