It’s that sad song by the Tragically Hip again.
Making that vid was fun, and it taught me an important lesson :
I am completely incapable of knowing whether my singing is any good.
The whole thing was a surprisingly emotional experience and it set off a war between my traditional destructive self-loathing thinly disguised as analysis and my stubborn refusal to let that side of me win.
It’s better than just hating myself but the back and forth between the two combatants makes it impossible for me to settle on an opinion.
There are things that sound good in my performance, and things that sound bad. I know I sang better than some people but not nearly as good as a lot of people. If I do another one of these, I will try to prepare my voice more, because just singing the song all the way through once was apparently not enough.
There was still a lot of rust in these ol’ pipes of mine. I can hear it clearly.
But that’s not what is important. What’s important is that I like singing and it felt good to express myself that way as well and it’s something other than me just talking.
Not that I am not a spellbinding orator, but I wanted to mix things up.
And in many ways it was a lot less work than my usual blah-blah. Less editing to do. Pretty easy to find an appropriate visual.
And the background video was not only royalty free, it was just plain free. I expected the site, pixabay, to want to charge me money for a royalty free vid.
Let that concept roll around in your brain for a bit.
But no, I was able to download it.
I wanted to put the lyrics in the vid too but I ran out of energy. Plus I know what a pain it can be to get the words on the screen and not looking like ass.
At least I have figured out how to center things in my video editor. For some reason the usual buttons just spaz the fuck out now. I click center and it draws a box across the top of the screen or hops to some arbitrary corner or whatever.
And in a previous era I used those buttons a lot to correct for my wonky vision.
But there’s another way. A convenient crosshair that appears to guide you to the center. So my on screen text should look less like an incorrectly loaded slideshow now.
I keep playing with the idea of doing my videos in multiple sessions in order to raise the quality to more than my roughly one hour of editing energy can handle.
But so far I am just too damned lazy and/or addicted to video games.
It’s already making the sick part of me feel panicky and infringed upon just to make a video every day. I am going to give myself time to get used to that before I push things any further in that direction.
But the seeds of progress have been planted. I have been askng myself whether gaming is necessarily the most fun I could be having for a given stretch of time.
Maybe I would be happier doing something creative, like messing around with all the neato AI toys out there, or writing something big and fictional.
Games are fun and they keep me busy but they’re not something I can really get excited about. I am too much of an old and jaded gamer for that.
Maybe I need to do new things more often. Wake myself up inside.
It’s not like I have anything better to do.
More after the break.
Rust in the gears
I had a bad moment earlier. .
I was between activities and about to start playing games (what a shock) when I had this moment of intense physical frustration. Like I wanted to jump out of my own skin, or maybe out the window with a madman’s sanity-shredding shriek.
This happens now and then. That’s not the unusual part. Presumably the urge to get up and move around and express my physical energies builds up behind the dam that is my depression and sometimes that become impossible to ignore any more and overflows into my conscious mind for a moment or two of ARGH.
A moment that playing video games would do nothing to relieve.
No, the unusual part was that this time, I had the wit and the perspicacity to ask myself, “Well, then what WOULD make me happy?”.
I didn’t come up with an answer in those few moments, but it’s a great sign that I am beginning to think along those lines.
I have lived in silent despair for far too long. It was a major breakthrough when I realized that I wanted more out of life – a lot more – than my stable but smothering lifestyle could give me.
But it turned the lowered Paxil dose to make me feel like it was possible. As the numbness retreats, new life springs up in its place, and while the healing spring is sometimes painful to experience, it’s worth it all to finally wake up already.
The time of cold storage is over. I locked myself away to protect myself from a cruel and callous world a very long time ago. It’s the version of myself I was left with after my breakdown in my early 20’s ended and it’s the person I have been ever since.
But it’s… um… help me here, Jean-Luc..
Yeah. Exactly. Well said, mon ami.
And hopefully this spring will be MY spring. The spring where all my permafrost thaws out and all this black and stinking ice that I have mistakenly thought was part of me will melt away and the real me will emerge, like the Iceman from his cave, and step out into this wild and wonderful world he’s never truly known.
And I will be reunited with my long lost other half, and be whole again.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.