Been on the hunt for a good Boxing Day deal on the CPU I want, though I know the odds are pretty low of finding one.
Big ticket computer components generally don’t go on sale. Their price is pretty much fixed by the manufacturer, meaning the retailer would have to risk taking a loss on the sale if they sold for less.
The CPU my fuzzy friends recommended is the Ryzen 7 5800x3D.
It’s around $420 CDN. Yikes. And that’s not including the cooler and the motherboard I will need to buy with them, which adds another $80 to the price for a cool $500.
So I might just have to save up for a while before I get it.
Oh well, it will give me a concrete reason to try and get some freelance work so I can get my dream computer sooner.
Me want zoom zoom box for the pew pew games!
Which means I either have to jump through UpWork’s hoops to establish my identity to modern excruciating standards, or find another freelancer site that is not so picky.
I hear fiverr (not a typo) is working out well for some people.
I know the world needs my incredible talents. I know that I have much to offer the world in exchange for precious legal tender. I am an amazing guy who can do so much that it’s like I am a wizard.
I just need to get past this stupid “too many options” thing.
I know it’s an illusion created by my depression as a final firewall against me actually getting my shit together and that my challenge is not to “solve” it – which is impossible – but to learn to think around the problem.
I think the key solution involves being willing to make a final decision even though that means leaving a whole lot of other possibilities behind.
After all, there’s no point in “keeping your options open” if you’re never going to actually do anything. Then they stop being options and start being merely the ghosts of possibilities you keep around to preserve the threadbare illusion that you are actually going to do something at some point.
But when? What set of circumstances would lead you to act? And how likely are those circumstances to come about without you doing anything?
Like I always say, it’s just a target painted on the horizon, never getting any closer or further away, just sitting there reassuring you that “some day” things will change.
Nope. That day will never come unless you take an active part in making it happen.
Me, I am going to die an ignominious death stuffed full of tubes, living a silent nightmare 24/7, if I don’t pull myself together and get the fuck up off these train tracks before that big black train kills me.
Which also means definitively defeating the part of me that wants that to happen. There are a lot of ways to kill yourself, and simply letting everything fall apart while you cower in the dark away from the very idea of taking responsibility for your life is one of them.
Something has to break this eternal stalemate. Something big and powerful, far bigger than my puny self, has to come and shatter this freeze state so that my soul can finally live and breathe and feel the sun on its face.
And that means growing up and making choices and not worrying so much about making the “right” decision.
It is far better to make mistakes and learn from them than to rot in place while your world falls apart with you in it.
You hear that, deeper self?!?
More after the break.
A priority message
I have also been pondering how to stop taking silly things less seriously.
I think for normal, healthy people, who did not at any point lose any and all life momentum, this kind of thing just works itself out as the hurly burly hustle and bustle of life teaches them how to prioritize things, at least along functional lines.
After all, taking the wrong things seriously while driving at highway speeds is a top notch way to get killed in traffic.
“As near as we can tell, sir, he let go of the wheel to alphabetize his shoelaces. ”
But for someone like me, who became jetsam on the sea of life after falling through the cracks of whatever system is supposed to stop that kind of thing from happening and ended up washed up before ever becoming anything, our lives are so devoid of meaning and content and events that we just kind of float forever in eerie silence without life happening to us at all.
Nothing ever happens here. We just keep on drifting like astronauts floating through interstellar space on just that tiny bit of thrust they got long ago from being hit by a basketball sized meteor.
Man, my metaphors are detailed.
Anyhow, back to taking little things less seriously.
When you float like I do, it’s hard to keep any consistent sense of scale. The smallest things dominate your internal landscape while enormous issues get downplayed as being no big deal because you are too weak to handle the real thing.
In such a mess, things default to seeming as big as they feel, and that is one crazy ass way to measure things. Perspective is impossible in that situation, and without it, you have no way to anchor yourself in reality and put some solid ground under your feet.
No wonder I ended up so crazy. There is so little reality in my mindscape.
And I want to reach out and grab hold of a piece of reality then hang on for dear life until the storm passes, but I don’t feel capable of it. My arms don’t reach that far.
And, I think, part of me is well and truly terrified (there’s fear again) of what will happen if I truly stop spinning and have to finally take a good look around me.
I can’t imagine I will like what I see. My life is crap. My prospects are terrible.
But somehow, I will fight my way through all this mishigas and find a way to stand on my own two feet and face the fucking world.
Until then, I will just keep drifting towards that big ol waterfall, I guess.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.