Small Victories
Last night I cooked two hamburgers from my ancient collection (dating back to December 2010) and, while they cooked badly (took forever to cook and, since I was paranoid about the inside being uncooked, I overcooked them), I didn't get sick today so they weren't rotten. (There had been a small white spot on one of them that made me concerned.)

[Mexico has gone from being down 0-1 to being up 3-1 vs. Venezuela in the past five or ten minutes.]

Today I went for a walk during "prime time," that being between 2 and 3pm, when there's plenty of nice afternoon sun. It was about 50 degrees, too, so it was a pleasant walk.

When I got up I had a breakfast of cheese and crackers, which was a kind of victory. I bought a circle of spreadable Swiss cheese the other day for the specific purpose of using it with my crackers and having something to dip them in or spread on them. I don't need to eat much in the morning (or, uh, when I wake up) so this was perfect. (The truth is that I have a bunch of fruit, both frozen and a couple of fresh apples. Unfortunately, I've had the frozen fruit for between 6 months and a year and I just can't get into apples. It takes a lot for me to convince myself to eat an apple. That feels like a victory.)

After my walk I took a shower and hung out and watched British game shows. Then it occurred to me that I hadn't done anything and that deflated my day. There was no solid, productive action accomplished. I didn't do anything that could be measured or considered in any real way. Things like clean my room, apply for a job, put together some statistics for myself regarding my spending, clean the living room or even just do some real writing. I also forgot that I've made a couple of cards for my nieces and I meant to send them last night and I didn't mail them today, either.

Of course, the biggest fail began last night when I didn't sleep and screwed up the whole schedule for today. Second, for me, is not having sent an applications to any jobs, even though I've collected a whole passel (check me out!) of them in the past few days.

A kind of simultaneous victory and failure was the fact that I discovered I had $20 on one of my credit cards. I was happy (and it was a victory) because I had just pledged ten dollars to Planned Parenthood. Unfortunately I then went to the store and spent another ten dollars.

Which brings up the whole issue of credit and how much I am in debt. It's small in general American terms but it's still a bunch of money I owe.

What about tomorrow? What do I plan to do then? What am I going to accomplish then? What am I going to promise to do? (I had a hard time even writing those words because I'm so reluctant to pledge to do something. I've gone back on my word or plans so many times that I don't like to promise anything.)

Here are three things I'd like to do, each of them involving leaving the house.

1. Go to the gym. I could use some exercise and I need to break the cycle of thinking the gym is just too far away or too much of a hassle to get to.
2. Go to the movies. There are so many movies that I'd like to see and I always hate that I miss so many every year. It's hard for me to go to the movies by myself but it would be a good reason to go out and might make me feel good for a while.
3. Go to the local college library. This one is just a basic exercise in getting out of the house. It's thought of with the hope that it will break me out of my patterns and open me up to something or give me an energy I don't have otherwise. I don't know that it necessarily works because I can be just as lame and isolated out of the house as in. There are more opportunities but that doesn't necessarily mean I'll take them or make anything of them.

The real thing I need to do is send out resumes and cover letters. I need to get over my fear of rejection and failure and just do a bunch of them to get it done and open more lines of possibility.

"Possibility" is something I need to work on. For most of my life, the future hasn't existed. For the first third (or fourth, depending on how long I live) of my life, I did what was expected: I went to school. As soon as things were left up to me, I was kind of lost.

Right after school, I had a girlfriend, so I had someone to influence me and help me keep on track in some way. I didn't really do anything challenging because I didn't really have any sense or belief in myself. I applied to graduate school because it was relatively easy and I didn't really have any other plan. The most challenging thing I did that year was take a chance and go live with my friend who was in graduate school and take a short course in the subject I was going to be in graduate school for. That was one of the first times I struggled because I couldn't find an easy job - but that was mostly because I wouldn't consider certain types of work. There were probably restaurant jobs and I think for certain there was a job in hot dog and fry joint but I didn't want to take that type of job. It would have been the easiest (as it was right on the bus line) but I just wouldn't do it. I went to a temp agency looking for office work but I got nothing. I eventually got a job at a warehouse but I was terrible at it and I might have been let go after a week or so. That might have been the first time I asked my father for money.

That summer was a miserable experience. I came back from there but things didn't get much better. I lived on credit for a few months and with my girlfriend. I was looking for a place to live but wasn't really excited about it because I didn't know what I was looking for or how to assess it. Then my relationship with my girlfriend ended.

In some ways, that was positive because I was able to have my own independent life in graduate school. On the other hand, my life went downhill because I didn't know how to live by myself and I spent a lot of time doing nothing all by myself. I would go out to eat at a local diner two or more times a week (I don't know where the money came from) and I read books but I didn't have any real friendships or any kind of structure in my life. I had a school and a part-time job but not much else.

School burned out because as it came time to finish up I needed to do an independent project and I didn't know how to organize myself or lead people, which were important skills in my particular field. Because of this lack of confidence, I slowly abandoned school and just started working part-time at the university. For a while I had that job and another part-time one at a professional society where my ex had worked. (She helped me get the job.)

Then I decided to quit that job and get something else. I think at the time I imagined I would do some temp work for a few weeks and then do some creative projects. Unfortunately, temp jobs didn't turn up, so when I saw the phone number of a former employer in the paper, I called up. I got another part time job - something easy that paid well enough - and I just went to sleep. I slept through that job for ten years and now here I am. I developed no real skills; I built no networks; I did nothing extra-curricular to make myself special; I just slept. I slept and I ate; same thing I'm doing now.

So now, with a poor economy and little in the way of skill, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to support myself. I don't have any grand ideas for myself because I feel grand ideas are silly at my age; I missed the window of "grand ideas;" at this point I have to work on just being "employable" and/or "professional."

And I worry about that because I don't have a vision for the future. There is no future, as far as I'm concerned. I'm just floating in the river of Now.

Of course, part of what makes us human is our ability to think beyond Now. I do this all the time when I think about the past but I don't do it for the future; I don't trust the future.

I need to start trusting the future. I need to start thinking about Possibility and being open to possibly positivity instead of just thinking of myself as a dumpy, useless dumbass. Thinking that way doesn't help my situation and it closes me off from things I could be doing if I left myself open to them. In recent days it's become clear to me that someone with Hope is someone who functions very well because they're always following a guiding light somewhere out beyond them that promises only good things. I need to find something like that so that I can move forward with some confidence and happiness instead of fear and bitterness.

[In a side note, I just want to say that part of me would half-like to try hallucinogens in an effort to change my way of thinking. There was a guy in graduate school who believed that everyone should try it at least once so that people would experience a complete change in perspective. He seemed like a hippy-dippy fool at the time but I understand his point now.

While writing this, the National Geographic program "Drugs, Inc." was on and the episode was about hallucinogens. One part of the episode was about a new clinical trial of LSD helping people deal with their impending death. Listening to one of the participants talk about the experience, I wish I could participate in something like that, something that would free me of these chains of fear and shame that I let rule my life. Therapy is great but is it really helping me to accomplish anything? It doesn't really feel like it. Of course, someone else could say that it's my fault for not keeping up my end of the process and trying to take steps that the doctor recommends to me. I don't do my homework. We talked about me applying for a particular job. I didn't do it. He lowered his fees since I was unemployed with the idea that we would re-assess when I got a job; but I never really tried to get a job. I found other ways to get the money I needed to pay my bills but I didn't really try to get a job. My brother called today to ask about the job search and I told nothing was coming of it. What I didn't tell him was that I haven't applied to anything lately. Maybe I should - well, here's another thing the doctor has suggested that I haven't followed up on: asking Best Friend to sit with me and help me apply to jobs. That's something I should take steps to do in order to make progress on the job applying front. I need to get a job - I need to - so I should be working on it. Avoiding the issue isn't making it any better. People try to tell me this but I - ha ha - avoid it and don't listen to that voice, from outside or inside.

Sigh. Just continue to live. Try to accomplish something tomorrow.]