For some reason, watching this video makes me stressed and anxious.
Before I started watching it, I was worried that I wouldn’t like it because it was so obviously pandering to us Generation X types.
And we are not super comfortable with being pandered to. We’re a lot more used to being treated like we don’t exist. Like we never even happened.
Like we were never here in the first place.
But once I started watching and/or listening to it, I found that I was getting increasingly upset and agitated by it even though it was not triggering me on any conscious level.
It’s not like it reminded me of better times and it hurt because things are so different now. I am a dedicated believer in progress and the future and I think we are a lot better off now than we were back then, overall.
So while I might “miss” some of the things from way back when, I have no desire to go back to those days unless I have the sports almanac from Back to the Future 2.
And maybe that’s the problem., Patient readers know that I have always had a problematic relationship with nostalgia. For most of my life, I thought of it as that weird aberration in people’s minds that makes them remember things as being way better than they were and caused them to think their childhoods were the best.
Well my childhood fucking sucked, and I’d be damned if I was going to let myself forget just how bad it was.
But then one day I came across this picture someone had taken of their mother and their father standing in front of their 1970’s car and looking every inch the 70’s hippies they were and it was a glowingly sunny day and it all looked like my own version of a Ray Bradbury nostalgia piece and that’s what opened the floodgates in my mind and unleashed a great walloping tsunami of nostalgia.
After that, I had to admit to myself that I had tons of nostalgia. Denial and defiance were no longer options. Not after that.
But I am still not comfortable with nostalgia. My mind is future oriented to a fault. So having my memories stimulated like they were by that video makes my self-appointed task of maintaining the truth of how much my childhood sucked a lot harder.
A more sane person would just give up and let nostalgia make it seem like my childhood was a magical wonderland full of pure and innocent joy.
But it wasn’t, god damn it. It had child rapists and bullies and negligent adults who treated me like garbage and airheaded teachers who French fried their brains on drugs before I ever met them and incredible loneliness and isolation and all kinds of other things that should never happen to a child.
And most importantly, I was not happy. I was a very sad and lonely little boy who spent most days incredibly depressed without even knowing it because for him it was normal.
A kid who gave up on himself just like everyone else did. A child without hope or friends.
A child who lay down in a snowbank one day and willed himself to die.
And I cannot forgot all that, or pretend it was different. I just can’t. That would cost me far more than I could ever bear.
For bitter and for worse, I just can’t lie to myself. I am a creature of truth and knowledge and that means I am naked before the truth at all times.
And it’s a damned cold place to be.
More after the break.
And down we go
Well I fucked up big time.
Turns out there was a deadline for getting all that stuff done for that sketchy job and it was 24 hours after I got a certain email and that was March 22, six days ago.
So I completely flamed out on this one. Rocket crashed on launchpad. I somehow completely missed (or completely forgot) that part of the long and complicated and located in many places set of instructions.
I am not good at taking in a lot of instructions in a short period of time at all any more.
Causes me no end of trouble at doctor’s offices.
Oh well, back to UpWork and finding more stuff to apply for. One stupid screwup is no excuse for giving up entirely.
After all, success comes from experience, and experience comes from failure.
I am sure I will find a niche somewhere some day. Or at least get some more scutwork type jobs. There’s a job up now to type in someone’s grandma’s handwritten recipes, and I was totally gonna apply for it but then I read further and the person had this whole list of categories each recipe had to contain, with detailed explanations of the specifications for each, and yikes.
I still might go for it. It appeals very strongly to my love of homestyle old fashioned family things and who knows, I might pick up a good recipe or two.
But that’s going to be a hell of a lot of work. The notice says it will be hundreds of pages with 1-4 recipes per page. The budget for the project is $350.
That’s bound to be a lot less than minimum wage.
I think I might just point these people to the wiki page for OCR and be done with it.
The important thing is that I am not going to beat myself up over my little error. It is, sadly, the sort of thing to which I am prone.
I have a lot of intelligence but not a lot of wisdom. My inward facing perspective often leaves me stumbling around like a fool in the world outside my head and at this point I don’t think I will ever change so if I am to get anywhere in life, I have to learn to take these things in stride and just keep going.
So I am bummed that I screwed up, but I am not going to let it slow me down.
Just gotta keep knocking on those doors until someone opens one for me.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.