Dear Diary: Just trying to work through my inconsistent working habits...

December 3, 2018  11:08 am


Yo.
So, it's Monday and I have the day off. Actually, I had today and tomorrow off and then a guy at work, KJ, wanted to see the Sabres game tomorrow night. Anyway, after some schedule switching, etc. with another guy, he asked me if I wanted to work tomorrow from 7:30 am - 4:00 pm and I said sure. I work part-time but I like to have at least 30-32 hrs/week, and more if possible. This week I had three days off, so an extra shift, especially during Christmas month, is excellent news.
Coincidentally, I got a call this morning asking if I wanted to come in for a few hours because the person working today's 7:30 - 4:00 had availability issues and couldn't come in. So, they wondered if I wanted to come in for a few hours just to give some back-up for the two guys on already today.
I told them I couldn't because I had to do stuff today and I already got a shift for my other day off tomorrow. So, I had to turn them down, which I felt really bad about, but they understood.
Which brings me to my topic of today: how I invest my energies.

After working yesterday, a Sunday, which is typically pretty busy throughout, at least until 1:00 when the Bills game usually starts, I came home very tired, filled with the knowledge that I worked hard and consistently so throughout my shift. In general I think I'm a good worker, but yesterday I thought I worked particularly hard throughout the day. I think I have a reputation already for being a good worker amongst my colleagues and the management, but yesterday I thought my performance throughout the day underlined that fact, at least to me. I'm not saying all this to say how great a worker I am, but yesterday was just a solid fucking working day.
Having said that, I am nowhere NEAR as consistent applying the same productive energy to my own personal life: artwork, creative projects, household responsibilities, etc. And that's something I really need to address.

12:00 pm

Hmmm... if midnight is the "witching hour," what is noon?

1:20 pm

Well, so much for trying to work through chores and occasionally taking "little breaks" to write here a little bit. I've been pretty much goofing off on the internet for the last hour and 15 minutes.
Nuts.
Well, I was also FB messaging a friend, so that was constructive.

Man, all I want to do is eat and goof off.
ARGHH.

1:59 pm

Okay, dammit.
I put the wash in the dryer and put the underwear in the wash. But, I also made some Uncle Ben's Creamy Four Cheese Ready Rice! This Uncle Ben's Ready Rice is great! It reminds me of when I was a bachelor living at 78 E. Oakwood Pl in Buffalo and I would regularly eat Rice 'n' Sauce or make spaghetti but without sauce (so I didn't have to clean a pan!) and I would just use seasoned salt and hot sauce for flavoring. This Ready Rice is really awesome because you just microwave the package for 90 seconds, let it sit and then eat. You don't even dirty up a pan! Amazing! And they have a number of flavors, too.
NOTE: Alas, the house in Buffalo is no longer there. About five years ago I was shocked to discover the place was completely GONE. Poof! I drove over there just to check the place out and it was just a grass lot! Holy crap. So much for revisiting childhood memories.  :(

2:39 pm

Goddammit.
I am NOT getting ANYTHING done. Jeez, thank goodness for machines being able to wash and dry clothes or I wouldn't have accomplished anything today.
FUCK.
And oh yeah, so much for not swearing too much in my blogs.
ARGHH! Okay, I'm going to do... something...
*stomps off crankily*

3:15 pm

Okay, I cleared the kitchen sink, meaning I put the dirty dishes, etc. in the dishwasher or manually washed them, depending on whatever it was.
Next!

5:21 pm

I also folded some clothes and stuck a load of wet clothes in the dryer. Then I went outside and grabbed our extension ladder and trimmed some branches that were hanging over our front gutter. When they load up with snow, they dump the snow straight into the gutter and plug it up. Last year, the gutter seemed to be frozen in parts and overflowing. So, we assumed it was plugged a bit where the, uh, bush/tree/thing was hanging over it (I have no idea what kind of shrubbery it is, dammit!).
Then I dragged the trimmed branches to the back. We also had collected some branches from over the year and piled them in front of the garage out back. So, I picked those up as well and brought all of it to the way back and dumped it off. Then I hung up the extension ladder on the garage wall again and came back in.
Anticipating negotiating that extension ladder sort of kept me from jumping into doing this chore, but now that it's done, it really wasn't too bad and I'm glad I finally got it over with. Plus, I managed to, more or less, accomplish it while there was still overcast daylight outside.
Yay!
So, that was good.

But, it's dark now and my original plan to do some chores here before heading out to our old house and clean it some more didn't happen. I mean, I'm not going to the old house now. So, that was a fail on my part.
I'll have to try and make it up later in the week.

Meanwhile, while fucking goofing off on the fucking internet like a fucking fuck earlier today, I saw that Sam Qualiana, a local filmmaker, was selling on eBay an autographed copy of the script for his latest film, POST-APOCALYPTIC COMMANDO SHARK, including a magnet and DVD of the film as well. Or so I thought.
Now, in the last month or so, I've been talking a lot to Sam because of a number of creative accomplishments he recently had. In November, at the Buffalo Dreams Fantastic Film Festival, Sam premiered his latest film, the aforementioned POST-APOCALYPTIC COMMANDO SHARK (PACS). But he also revealed he had written a sci-fi fantasy/adventure novel called Journey of the Avenger and he was doing an Indiegogo fundraiser to raise the cash to pay for hiring an artist to do the cover and also to pay for self-publishing the book.
Anyway, cutting to the chase, both of those events kind of got me communicating with Sam far more often than I normally do. In fact, I was kind of going out of my way to see if he'd be interested in working together on some projects. And he was definitely interested.
One of the projects was doing a comic book adaptation of PACS and I thought that would be fun.
So, in an effort to both support Sam the filmmaker and also get a copy of the script to get some ideas for the comic book, I decided to bid on the script he had on eBay. Well, it was after I bid 26 bucks that I realized he was actually offering only the autographed script COVER PAGE, not the script with it.
Whu-- wait. What???
ARGHHH!

So, yeah, four hours later and the auction's over and I won the bid.
I then FB messaged Sam and said I was actually looking to buy the script and then realized my error, so I just straight out asked him for a copy of the script. He laughed and immediately sent me the files.
D'oh!
Buyer, don't make assumptions and read the product description better!

Whatever.
Anyway, I'm sure I'll elaborate more on my involvement with Sam and his Metroshia Productions film empire in future posts at my film blog. Stay tuned!

6:11 pm

Finally, I did ANOTHER impulsive thing today. I don't even know why I did it TODAY. I had been thinking about the idea off and on now for several months but there was no real reason to initiate anything towards fulfilling it today, but that didn't stop me because I'm compulsively impulsive.
Anyway, there's a young woman I know who is a big horror fan and she regularly participates in a local haunted house during the Halloween season. She also is an actress and that's how I first heard about her. She's starred in a couple movies made by local low-budget horror auteur Emir Skalonja (which is where I really first heard about her), but I made a point of contacting her after she did a short film with John Karyus last year, made by Rochester filmmaker Curt Markham. I'm friends with Curt and John and I loved Curt's short film, so that prompted me to FB friend request her and she accepted. Anyway, I had this art idea percolating in my brain for a few years but I actually thought about using another local model, but for some reason I was going back and forth about it. But after seeing this other actress and hearing how enthusiastic she was about the horror genre, she seemed a better fit with my idea.
Anyway, I happened to be commenting on a FB status she made today, and I think that's what arbitrarily prompted me to propose this project to her. Since I haven't heard back from her yet, I'm going to hold off revealing her name.
But, stay tuned for that as well.

Alright, I'm gonna end this.
My wife's home and I should eat. Plus, I could probably do something else constructive tonight.
Oh! Actually, I have to watch a movie and then review it. So, I do have shit I have to do!

Later!

Dear Diary 2018 - #1: A Blog Post of Miscellaneous, uh... Stuff

March 2 - 10, 2018

Friday, March 2

Dear Diary,

Well, yesterday was a pretty good day.

Busy as hell, though.

I worked from 8:30 am – 2:00 pm and got there on time, too! (Day 11-in-a-row!)

Afterwards I went to our old house and did some more cleaning. Managed to bring home my drawing table and bulletin board.

And then I finally finished editing the chat about the Rolfe Zanefsky flick, THE BLACK ROOM (2017), between Mermaid Heather, Zombie Dawn, and myself and posted it to my film blog.

Also cleaned one of the litter boxes and put away some more books on my increasingly crowded and double-stacked bookshelf.

Alright, I need to go to bed. I have to be at work at 8:30 am and it’s been snowing. So, tomorrow’s drive in is going to be a non-stop party, dammit.

But, again, the most important thing is: yesterday was an EXCELLENT day.

Saturday, March 3

Holy crap! It’s 1:25 am! What am I still doing up???

Okay, so it definitely snowed last night. I thought maybe all the doom and gloom weather forecasting about the incoming several inches of snow was going to be a bust. Which would’ve been fine because my wife had to stay late at work (9:30 pm) which meant she was going to be coming home in the middle of the predicted snowfall (it was supposed to start around 7:00 pm Thursday night and continue until 1:00 am Friday).

As it is, due to the persistent weather announcements, the school where she works postponed the event and she came home early.

Still, I thought the snow was supposed to be preceded by rain, and that didn’t happen (not that I’m complaining), so when I went to our old house, it was still relatively good weather.

But it did finally snow and this morning I had some digging to do.

Also, at work I had some digging to do.

It was a good day at work, but physically exhausting. The majority of the snowfall we’ve had this winter has been fairly fluffy snow, so even large or extensively accumulated snowfalls haven’t been too bad to shovel. But today’s snow was wet, slushy and heavy.

Ugh!

It was a workout.

So, here it is 1:32 am now, and I have to be at work at 7:30 tomorrow, so dammit! I need to go to bed!

But let me finish this post first.

So, let me do some thinking out loud.

This particular blog is supposed to be my (arguably/theoretically/supposedly) “introspective”/catch-all blog and I’ve yet to post something on it this year.

So, a sporadic “Dear Diary” post seems fitting for this blog.

With regards to blogging more frequently I’ve also been thinking of setting an ambitious goal of trying to match 50% of my friend Mermaid Heather’s blog-post output. Heather is a writing machine and I… am definitely not that. So, I thought maybe I should use her persistent output as in incentive to produce more content myself. Hell, I’m usually starting posts, just not finishing them. So, it’s not like I’m arbitrarily thinking of writing in the first place. I’ll just try to finish some of these damn things.

Anyway, this “50%" is based on the number of reviews she posts at her own self-named blog, Mermaid Heather, and NOT including her Top Horror Movie Blogs reviews, etc. Even with this narrowing of her output, that’s an ambitious if not impossible goal already. Well, for me, that is. I mean, hell! She’s already at 16 posts this year!

So, we’ll see how this works out…

In general, I’ve been slowly trying to initiate some other incentives this year for myself in order to accomplish more besides writing/blogging as well. Although one of those incentives also involved Heather and my blogging. I asked her if she’d be interested in doing a movie club sort of thing with me as a way to get me to write more. So far, it’s working. You can read more about it here.

But, now I’m trying to crank up the pace a little, hence the “50%” idea.

Saturday, March 10

Well, it’s Saturday, 8:49 am and I’ve been up for almost 2 hours. I fell asleep on the couch after watching this month’s Netflix Connection selection picked by Zombie Dawn, THEY LOOK LIKE EVERYBODY. I liked the film, and I have to write a review and post it before the end of tomorrow. I actually liked it a lot and hope to watch it again, but I think writing the review will be a challenge. Well, it usually IS a challenge, but in addition, this is one of those films where I think the less revealed the better. The complete OPPOSITE of one MY reviews, dammit! Holy crap! I’m like, throw in the kitchen sink and then look for more stuff lying around in the garage when it comes to my latest reviews, cripes! From that perspective, I’m envious of Dave B.’s film reviews at 2,500 Movies Challenge. His reviews are economically written word-count-wise, but I love reading them. They're informative but don’t give away too much, and I know exactly how Dave feels about the movie. I’m TOTALLY envious from a wanna-be writer perspective. And on an additional envious side-note, Dave’s goal of reviewing 2,500 movies almost up! As of this writing, he’s at #2,487!

Anyway, that’s going on this weekend.

This morning I changed the title of this post. I decided not to make it specific, because I feel that there’s no one subject to this post other than impulsively describing what’s going on in my life on a certain day.

But, if there were any unifying theme, or if I had a desire for a unifying theme, it would be a unifying theme, but not for this post alone, but also for my life in general: How I’m Trying to Take Specific Steps to Become a Better Person (whew!).

Originally, I wrote “…to Improve My Life,” but saying I want to be a “better person" makes me accept more responsibility.

And what does that exactly mean?
Uh... okay... 

I’m trying not to react but to act through my daily life, being more assertive about my goals daily and in life.

I’m trying to follow through on my various creative ideas, which I think are usually worth following through on or exploring. Hell, some of these ideas I think are outright awesome.

I’m trying to consistently establish new daily habits or life changes in order to yield better, positive results towards my quality of life. For instance, getting a job as a parking lot attendant at a grocery store. This was a two-fer: 1) I got a job after being unemployed for over a year and 2), I walk so much at work during a shift, I’ve lost weight. 

So, re: “new daily habits/life changes” brings me back to those “incentives" that I mentioned about earlier in this post. One such incentive includes building on a relationship with a colleague at work to do more drawing. That’s been proceeding very slowly, but I think it is happening. We both seem interested in doing this, now it’s just a matter of both of us finding the time to sit down and do the actual drawing. Tim is younger than me and has an ambition to get into tattooing, plus he’s a big fan of anime and turned me on to Crunchyroll. NOTE: And yes, I’m still meeting Pam semi-regularly as part of the Apple Corps Comic Book Club, which has been going on for over 15 years (at least) with no real comic book, whole or in significant part, to show for our efforts, but we’re not giving up, dammit!

And as I’ve also mentioned above, I’ve started this monthly movie review “film club" with Mermaid Heather and Zombie Dawn in order to methodically increase some of my writing/blogging, and so far, that seems to be actually working. But, I’m also trying to step on the gas with my posting ambitions with this new “50%” idea. We’ll see how that works out...

But, my biggest challenge currently which started months ago when we moved is getting our old house ready to sell. That’s a MONSTER task. More on the specifics of that later [NOTE: We moved into our new house last August. And no, we still haven’t finished wrapping things up with our old house.]. But, in a nutshell, what makes this task so daunting is that I have to address some self-destructive personal behavior in order to do it: 1) stopping my disorganization as I continue to move my personal possessions to the new house and do so in a way that isn’t just shifting a massive amount of clutter from the old place and simply installing clutter in the new place and 2) also attempting to neutralize my hoarding tendencies as a default lifestyle. Yeah, right. I’m attempting to undo/change 58 years of deeply ingrained behavior, and that is not a pleasant process. That’s still a wide-open issue for me and source of incredible stress (for me and my wife), but the bills continue to mount for maintaining two houses now so I really need to do this.

Okay, that’s enough for now. These topics and themes will continue throughout the year.

Oh! And also coming to grips with my mortality!

I mean, I’m old enough now that that’s a real consideration in terms of career and life goals. I mean, we’re talking math now, not philosophy. If I lived to be as old as my dad did - 90 - that means I have only 32 years left. That’s not much. I mean, okay, that’s a lot of time, if I don’t waste it(!) but it all goes so fast. SO fast. But if I’m serious about wanting to create comics and movies and write..! And, of course, 32 years is only IF I live to be 90..!

Alright, I’m going to get depressed or freak-out if I talk more about this.

But... more to come.