Man... just like me, to have not kept the old blog. It was nice to have. Themed and everything. Oh well. Gotta do stuff new now and then, huh?

I wonder how long ago it was I'd last posted in it anyway. A year? Not likely. If I had to guess.... three months. Six at the latest. Maybe that's the key - maybe I just like to space them out. I could never keep a journal because I could never appreciate the concept of writing in it night after night. I mean... what do you write about, after so long? Especially when you're an uneventful guy like me, yeah?

I suppose I could try to catalog my thoughts - can you believe Chrome doesn't have a correct spelling for catalog if you accidentally add a -ue to the end? - but there's another problem with that: I don't think. Or, well, that's wrong, because that's a really stupid thing to say. If you don't think, you aren't alive, right? Or, no... you aren't living, maybe. Then, I guess that depends on your definition of living.

If you aren't thinking, it's because you aren't capable of thought. Therefor, it isn't that I don't think - because at any given moment I can spontaneously verbalize and generate a thought - but rather, that I do not maintain - and here is where I do that thing where I kinda ramble and define a word while I try to get the one word I want, what is that word, where you're - awareness of my thoughts. I go through as much of a day as possible unaware of my own cognitive process, because meta-cognition is not something I like to engage in. I think - and this is me doing it anyways - that's because it seems like a circular process, one with no room for advancement.

If you sit down and think about how you feel about a matter, that is a thought process that provides advancement, because then you can consider how to avoid that thing if you do not like what it does for you, or you can try to - shit doing it again, that thing where you keep something near you, where you - expose yourself to it more in order to make yourself feel that way you like more often. However, if you then continue to sit and think to yourself 'why does this thing make me feel the way it does', well, then you aren't doing anything rational, right?

I mean, okay, I can certainly see from the standpoint of furthering self-knowledge why you would want to understand why things make you feel the way they do, but in terms of making those things work for you in life, can you say that it helps at all? Let me take it to a more real level.

I like Dr Pepper. Why do I like Dr Pepper? I like Dr Pepper because though I cannot appreciate the suite of flavors it claims to have, it has a sort of acidic burn on my throat that no other drink can provide. Well, you see? Now I know why I like Dr Pepper, and I know I should get more Dr Pepper when I feel I do not have enough. Why do I like that burn in my throat? Well, I don't know. I suppose I could sit down and consider that, but... why? What will knowing 'why I like that feeling' do for me in terms of experiencing it more often?

So you see, there's a line of distinction where self-discovery moves from the realm of fruitful to pointless. That's where I stand on that. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to scroll up a few paragraphs to see what the fuck got me on this train of thought.

Okay, that was all an explanation for why I don't catalog thoughts and therefor why I don't maintain a journal or update/make a blog very often. Because I only very rarely have anything worth saying to say. To be fair, I don't think what I have to say today is worth saying either, but... well, I feel like I need to say it.

I'm sad.

That isn't to say I'm depressed, or that I always feel sad. Right now, today, I'm sad. I'll go on and write down why, I think, but I think before I do, I'm going to put up a disclaimer. What I'm gonna write here, it's kinda personal. Like, there's no really good reason I should be telling any of you this because I don't know any of you except my wife this well, but... I think for some reason maybe it would be appreciated? I dunno. Sometimes I get that feel that I come across as not-a-person to people, and I'm not really very good at making that distinction in conversation, so maybe... I dunno.

Anyway, disclaimer. I'm gonna write personal shit, but I'm gonna put it between headers - yeah, between headers and not in a spoiler tag, you don't like it bite me - so if you don't wanna get in my head, in so far as I'm opening my head for today, just scroll to the other header. Or stop reading, because that shit up there that you got through to get here? All of it? That's me with focus. That's me trying to get a point across. Rambling, off center, no stream of conscious - I hate that word, it and conscience, they're too alike, too different, and both so more difficult than they should be for what they define - because the way I think, it isn't in straight lines, black and white. My head is a cell, my brain a nucleus, my thoughts the free-flowing rapid-firing sometimes-lighting electrons buzzing in an indefinite cloud. Sometimes the ones I want or need to fire, fire; sometimes, no. I think I'm proving that point more and more, as this paragraph goes on.

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I woke up at about 1 PM today. That's my time; that's something like 11 PM central, stateside. I woke up after, I dunno, three, fours hours of sleep, because if I would have stayed asleep, I would have woke up even more miserable than I did otherwise.

I woke up on my left side, my face against my bedroom wall, with my knees at my chest. My arms were curled in front of me, kinda squeezed in, like I was holding something real tight. My left hand was on my right shoulder, and my right hand was digging into the side of the bed, just under the lip or ridge of the top of the mattress, that's there so that you feel it give way if you roll onto it in your sleep so you have something to warn your body either to roll in the opposite direction or to wake up and keep you from busting your face open.

Looking at my bed, that means I woke up using a little over a quarter my bed's real estate. It's a twin, I think, because I think the only thing smaller than a twin is either a cot or a kid's bed. I probably could have fit another me on there comfortably in the position I was in.

I woke up that way because that's how I woke up sometimes in my home, in my bed, with my wife - clutching the edge, holding tight, and trying to be still. There are a few reasons for this. The chief reason goes back to when I was a kid - I'm a fitful sleeper, you see, and I also had I don't know what, either recurring nightmares or straight night terrors, but either way, my mom would let me sleep in her bed when that happened. Until she kicked me out in the middle of the night, pissed off, because I had kicked her a few times too many in my sleep. In order to maintain the comfort of my mother's bed, I forced myself to learn how to sleep as still and tight as possible, to not disturb her. I learned how to be comfortable like that.

Thinking about it right now, it occurs to me I spent a full paragraph describing the fetal position to you.

The second reason is a lot more sane - it's part of a little game Sam and I play, where she goads me to the edge of the bed, saying she's on the edge of her side, and sleepily, I comply.

The reason I woke up after such a short rest was because there was a reason I adopted my modified fetal position - it was because I dreamed I was in my bed, in my home, with my wife. It was lucid; I was aware not only of my precarious position, but of her position as well, back to me, blanket curled around her, clenched in a fist. When I took my hand off the edge of the bed, I reached behind myself and I felt her there, I rubbed her shoulder, and I knew that touch, that feel. She was in my hand, like she was back then, and I knew it was a dream, and excuse me, I can't see right now.

I had my glasses and headphones on when I typed that last paragraph. They're off now. I had to take my glasses off so I could rub my eyes. The earphones I had to take off because the pressure in my ears after I clenched my teeth was getting to be a bit too much. It feels right being able to hear myself type. I didn't have any music on, nothing making noise; I just had them on to have them on. It's a small comfort.

Anyways.

I woke up because it hurt, knowing that my wife in my hand was a dream - it was a really bitter pill to swallow, and I forced myself to wake up so that I could cut the dream short, because I knew if I let myself stay in that dream, I would really only be even more miserable when I woke up because of how much of what I had experience was a lie.

I used to tell myself that depriving myself of pleasure, what I called self-treason, was a way of getting stronger. Is it self-treason to purposefully sabotage an event that you know will make you even more miserable in the future? This is the kinda shit that I get hung up on.

I spent a pretty good while crying, once I was done waking up. I went and ate after, then came back to my room and kinda just stared at my computer for a while. I wish I could say I thought about anything, but I didn't. I stared at my desktop - a pretty cool Princess Luna thing, I'll post it sooner or later - and I was miserable. I needed to fix that.

---

I'm on episode 10 of Toradora! as of about 2020; that means I spent the last four and a half hours watching a romantic slice of life comedy, and I'm further into the series right now than I've ever been before. It's an adorable series about a guy with a mean face and a vicious little tsundere and their mutual attempts to attract the attention and affection of the objects of their affection. The first time I watched it, I got all the way to the second episode before I got misty eyed, because they do an honestly good job of working your emotions in this series - and really play up the comedy, now that I let that be an attractant.

Here I am on episode 10, still waiting for the eyes to mist. I've done a lot of laughing - muffled laughing, you understand, because I don't want to disturb my suite-mates - and it's been hard to contain myself, because really, there are some bust-up moments in here. However, now that I've got my chuckles in - I want to sob a little. I'm hoping the series delivers one of it's heavy-emotion pieces here soon, because if it keeps building up my mood like it is, then when that drop hits, it's gonna hit hard. Like the first time somebody goes a little nutty in Higurashi hard.

Yeah, sure, I have other anime that are sad - Saikano, Chobits, DearS - but they're more cheap-sad than anything else. They try to make you sad by hitting you with downer after downer after downer. They don't know how to escalate. Toradora! doesn't treat high school crushes like the end of the world, or like they have end of the world or even life-altering consequences. Toradora! wants me to root for the kids as they go about their plans, completely unaware of the fact that everybody around them is not only in on the plans, but also see through the lies the characters tell even themselves and know what they really, truly want.

The series doesn't do an especially good job of hiding the real relationship here, but that doesn't stop you wanting to see the main duo realize their own goals and get the job done. They've been humanized really, really well, and that means you feel for them on a human level, whereas in Elfen Lied you only cry for Lucy because god DAMN was there a whole lot of really sad shit happening.

I once saw an anime, name of Potemayo. It was a 4koma-style project, like Lucky Star, and as such each unique episode was broken down into three 'minor' episodes. Usually they didn't have a whole lot to do with one another, and primarily they focused on the misadventures of the kid who discovered the little moe puffball in his refrigerator and the people around him.

There are about four 'episodes' total in that series that made me cry so deeply I couldn't bring myself to watch cartoons for days.

I miss getting things like that, being struck by a mood-whiplash so severe that not even the series' bright, sunshine-sugary ending could help me recover. The first episode of Saikano was almost like that, except all the characters are so damned dead-eyed and flat-voiced that honestly, you can't bring yourself to care a whole lot.

That's my story for today, I guess. If you read this far, I'm sorry you went and did that to yourself. I maybe should put a warning in the thread title - just don't read! - but... fuck it. People should know well enough by now not to tread lightly where not even devils dare.

Oh, and I guess I'll do one of those meta-character sheets next time?

I was going to be on my way to Korea today, a prospect I already don't like because I don't like Korea. I left my room at 1400, because they told us to meet at the lobby no later than 1430 for the bus ride, which as it turns out, got us there exactly ten minutes before luggage boarding ended. So after a supremely mad scramble to make it to the counter just in time, the tech sarge I was flying with and I were told we were, in fact, on the 2245 flight, and as such had about seven hours to kill before we could do anything.

The next five hours were spent bullshitting, until finally, we were gonna be smart and check our bags about three hours ahead of time, at around 1830. Come to find out, I'm leaving at 2245 alright... 24 fucking hours from now.

So I'm back in my room, tired as shit because travel when it goes well is draining, forget when it goes shitty, and doing laundry. Probably gonna shower too, because man, I reek. Seriously, today sucked. Here's to tomorrow.