I feel like I have emotions that want to be expressed right now.

But they are lurking below the surface of my consciousness and eluding my attempts to catch them and bring them into the light, so for now, I will just improv like usual.

Still playing lots of ESO. Finished my adventures in Murkmire, a swamp home to the lizard-folk known as Argonians, or Saxhleel in their own language.

Now I am just kind of bumming around Vvardenfell, the land you start in, while I make up my mind about where to go next.

It will probably be Orsinium, land of the Orcs.

It’s kind of amazing that I have a game I enjoy so much that I can play it for five hours in a row without it even feeling like work.

And while that’s a far cry from actual productivity, at least it keeps me awake, active, and engaged, and thus drains off a lot of the excess energy that tends to make me anxious and depressed if left unchecked.

All that energy has to go somewhere and do something. If not vented externally, it wreaks havoc internally.

And yet, depression makes it so very hard to argue with the energy miser inside me. No matter what the reality of the situation is, depression insists that the only way to be safe is to do as little as possible at all times and in all situations.

I mean, what’s the end game here…. total immobility? Absolute stasis? Living the blissful lifestyle of a quadriplegic?

I’ve tried to imagine being crazy rich and therefore able to have exactly the oral retentive wet dream of a lifestyle I crave.

And it’s not a pretty picture. I picure myself being pushed around in a wheelchair not because I was sick but because I was just that lazy.

And that assumes I haven’t managed to arrange everything so that I do everything I want to do from my bed.

At that point, the only thing that would be holding back a total collapse of all dignity and self-respect would be my refusal to use a bedpan.

I’d like to think that at some point, I would get bored enough with all that passive indulgence and want to do things. Energetic things. Things that exercise my body for a change and not just my mind.

Working out, for example. I would love to have a Universal Gym type set up so I could work off bodily stress and tighten and tone my body whenever I felt like it.

I would lose weight and get a healthier body out of the deal too. But the main thing I would want is the stress and tension reduction and the pleasure of strain.

The bull needs the harness.

And I would hope that I could at least work up enough ambition to have sex. If I have enough money to have a mansion, you can bet your life I am going to be hiring a lot of young men of negotiable virtue for some seriously intense orgies.

After all, I have a lot of catching up to do.

Then again, maybe all I would do is play video games all day.

Just on a much bigger screen.

More after the break.

---

The New Normal

So as you know, I used Foodora to order from 7-11 recently. ^[1]

And it was awesome.

But there were some little compromises, and one of them was that I could not find Diet Coke on 7-11’s Foodora menu. So I ordered Coke Zero instead.

And I grumbled a bit about that. Coke Zero is okay but I definitely prefer Diet Coke. Coke Zero tastes odd to me. Not horrible, just weird.

Like it has cinnamon in it. And a sort of generic berry flavour.

So I got it, and drank it, and it tided me over till tonight’s stop at 7-11 on the way home from our hanging out with Felicity, corona-style.

So of course, I got my usual pair of 2L bottles of Diet Coke. But then, when we got home and were unloading our purchased, I realized that I now felt disappointment that I was going to be drinking boring old Diet Coke and not the new and exciting Coke Zero.

And that was…. strange. Not normal. I was disappointed to get the thing that on paper, I like more than the other. Does not compute.

So I figured I would beg my audience’s indulgence and parse it out here.

Clearly, what we are dealing with is two different needs : continuity, and novelty.

Coke Zero was the new exciting thing, and that made it seem preferable in that moment because right now my life is quite monotonous and this tiny variation has injected some much needed novelty into my life.

I have always done a poor job of addressing my need for real novelty in my life. Sure, there is the inherent novelty in media consumption. A new movie, a new episode, a new book, a new game, and so on.

But as is becoming abundantly clear to me, there is a hell of a lot more to life than media consumption, and if I want to be a happier person, I am going to have to shake things up in order to wake myself up from the walking coma my life has become.

I’ve had this thought before. But before now, it has always gotten washed away by the general chaos of my head before it could take root and result in action.

My mind is extremely good at preventing things from resulting in action.

So that is why I am putting it in my blog entry for today. By typing it here, I will make it more permanent and therefore more real in my mind.

And that will remind me to think in these terms more often.

Everyone needs some change in their life. What persists disappears. We walk around in a daze because we don’t recognize this fact.

Shake up and wake up, people.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.