Mindfulness

May 7th, 2018

Three things I learned today:

1) My inability to focus on things runs deep.

I attempted a simple mindfulness exercise today: lay down, breathe evenly and think of an apple sitting on a chair and hold that thought.

Not only did I fall asleep multiple times, but when I snapped myself back awake to refocus on an apple/chair, I literally fought to maintain that simple vision. Either it was clouded and I couldn’t reform the vision, or I easily shifted into another thought. It was a battle that demanded I keep repeating “apple on a chair, apple on a chair” multiple times. Even then, I lost the image. Drifted. Constantly.

The answer to this problem: I’m going to fight through this and practice meditation each day until I can focus on one thing. First, ‘an apple on a chair’. Then grow from there. Sounds silly, but let’s see how long you can do it. This will help me understand why I drift from project to project, thought to thought and lack of real focus in my school work.

2) When absolutely calm, I can feel the approach of someone I care about even from a distance.

When my mind is still, and it isn’t often, I get this ‘sinking’ feeling. Not a negative one, but a feeling like the volume of my airspace is shifting, or being filled. That’s usually when I can tell my wife or children are within range. It’s not about footsteps, hearing the car or loud noises. I’ve felt this way before and even announced someone’s arrival before they got there. Not everyone. Just people close to me. Like it’s rare they can sneak up on me. But then it’s rare that my mind is as still as it needs to be for my body to get that feeling.

The answer to this: Well, it’s not a problem. What it does is confirm if I can quiet my mind, I can feel a lot of things more than I do right now. What those things are? I have no idea, but I can probably use it to not be angry and miserable as I have been over time.

Which leads me to three …

3) I can solve ‘who I am’ without medication

I’m going to tool around and try to ‘hack’ my mind. I think I have a strong mind when unclouded, and I think much of my reality was shaped due to its inconsistency and inability to stay focused.

What would I expect? The brain is a muscle that needs a specific type of workout and I have let it drift for years—as a source to claim to be creative with its randomness and originality — when it also led me astray.

Something to work on.

Sunshine

May 1st, 2018

No complaints. I think turning off social media and spending the last week not looking at the news, or listening to the news, has been very therapeutic. Just mostly listening to music on Spotify, doing classwork, self-teaching myself Bootstrap, PHP, and a little Javascript. All of it is going well and I’ve been focused.

Interesting: Once again, cutting off people is a good thing.

Even writing the third installment of that novella.

Working? Not yet. My choices are to get a bullshit job and get paid nothing or keep applying for the right job, for the right pay that I qualify for while working toward my degree. The pressure on my wife bothers me, but this is the usual churning mire.

Just overall, mentally and productively, it’s been a good couple of days.

Re-Sensitize

April 24, 2018

I’m going to come off of two things for a few weeks and see how it feels: I’m going to stop watching and reading the news … and I’m coming off all social media except posting here.

I’ve mentioned before that I felt that the social media narrative was clogging my perspective and so is the news. I have a project I’m working on and suddenly, as I pursue details on building it, all I get is news about other well-financed companies building the same thing, so I’ve developed negative feelings about building my own.

I wake up and the first thing I do is see what’s going on in the news. A recent shooting at a Nashville Waffle house that killed four people a few days ago. The White man and his automatic rifle was stopped before he killed more, was on the run…naked … for those past few days, but the cops somehow managed to find and NOT kill him. Remember: cops kill Black people for far less.

Plus I hear he’s out on Bond or something like that.

I was so mad with yet another example of fucking cops and White Privilege, I barely got my day started and I was already mad at the world.

Last night, I thought about cutting off these sources taInting my thoughts and now I’m sure of it. I’ve stopped using Facebook before for close to a couple of months. I remember it was the ‘clearest’ few months I ever had. Facebook is so ingrained into the things I use, to contact a few important people, I don’t delete it BUT if I can go six months, I’ll go longer and then delete it.

So I delete the app and took off all my news apps. It’s a start. The need to ‘check’ #Facebook will subside once the availability is gone. Same with the news.

Here is where being anti-social has its rewarding skillset. I don’t NEED to talk to everyone online. I’m not a narcissist. I’ve long since stopped posting personal pictures. I don’t want the attention except toward my novels. Since I barely get that, I’ll vanish.

The downside, I liked listening to NPR. Ahh well. All of these news programs just trigger me. It’s not the news but the injustice you hear constantly.

This may sound troubling, but I think it’s time I listened to my own thoughts for a while. That would be considered a negative at times. The plan is to hear my positive voice speak me forward and not to let social media and new media push the negative voices my direction.

Depression Defined

April 23, 2018

https://www.simplypsychology.org/depression.html

“Depressed people usually become much less socially active. In addition depression can also be caused through inadvertent reinforcement of depressed behavior by others.

For example, when a loved one is lost, an important source of positive reinforcement has lost as well. This leads to inactivity. The main source of reinforcement is now the sympathy and attention of friends and relatives.

However this tends to reinforce maladaptive behavior i.e. weeping, complaining, talking of suicide. This eventually alienates even close friends leading to even less reinforcement, increasing social isolation and unhappiness. In other words depression is a vicious cycle in which the person is driven further and further down.

Also if the person lacks social skills or has a very rigid personality structure they may find it difficult to make the adjustments needed to look for new and alternative sources of reinforcement (Lewinsohn, 1974). So they get locked into a negative downward spiral.”

Moody

April 22, 2018

What’s happening right now? Nothing.

I have classwork to do, a novella to finish, JavaScript to study, employment to seek but I can’t focus on any of it.

Is it what I’m eating? Not eating?

I think I solved the problem by exercising so I think I’ll have to get back on that.

My GPA dipped to 3.92 … after that damn environmental science class. I got a final grade of B+. The issue was her petty demands in my reports. At first, I was angry, but knowing I’ll do better moving forward, it will climb back to 4.0 status by the end of the psychology class.

But right now. This moment. It’s a cross between depression and cloudiness in my brain. The inability to really concentrate and no desire to do anything.

I hate this.

Digital Deoxyribonucleic Data

April 21st, 2018

Right, So what is that.

I had a thought today about Artificial Intelligence and the way things are going lately. A lot in the news, worrying about robots coming to life and killing all humans.

As it stands now, AI is rather stable and prevented from even getting close. A lot of AI is still ‘man’ governed.

So, I had this idea about the missing component to make AI sentient. Absolutely self-aware.

A form of DNA.

If DNA is what makes us who we are, I had this idea for something that reacts like a communicable computer virus that is an individualistic set of random commands that fill in the awareness for the AI.

Think of it this way. The simplest description:

Either you like cats or you don’t like cats. Clearly, if you are born, and today is the first day you ever saw a cat, you can either be a cat person or you’re not. It’s in you for preference.

In your ‘code’ it’s one or the other.

As such, your cognitive response to a situation regarding cats will either be positive or negative. At some point, your ‘opinion’ about cats becomes more of a bodily, physical repulsion or intimate, passionate need to be near it. These are hard coding we do every day about things and people. Which is why racism is hard to defeat: many people prefer to NOT change and build cases of negativity to stay hardcoded.

My proposal is kind of like a peer-to-peer seed (if you’re familiar with torrents) that would have to be combined with an AI process. Maybe not. I’m not sure. Anyway, this strand of DDD has holes of specific things it needs to fill: Feels about cats. Feels about nights. Feels about days. Feels about this, that, whatever. Like rolling the dice with a human, it can fill them and hardcode its preferences and thus be aware of its own personality, not one given by humans.

In short … ‘free will’.

Now, in terms of God, which seems hardcoded us with the desire to SEEK a God, I suppose we could hardcode the strand with the desire (i.e., pre-set the empty hole (request/need) for human guidance.

Yet Another Example

April 19th, 2018

Remember my discussion about Adderall? How I thought it was pathetic that when I had a prescription, I couldn’t get one in this neighborhood?

Well, my wife had a Gall Stone issue recently and she was in terrible pain. She went to the emergency room and over the time she was there, the stone passed through where ever it had to pass, but she was still in pain. She was given a prescription for Oxycodone and sent home.

I went to all the pharmacy’s nearby to get her prescription filled and each and every place was ‘out of stock’.

So, I decided to pin Rite Aid down and ask them to order it and I’ll come back. They said to come back mid-week.

I just called today and they STILL didn’t have it.

Now, here’s the thing: my wife is a nurse. She had her hands on Oxycodone already but needed to fill the prescription to justify her recovery; which made sense.

But what if she wasn’t a nurse?

What if she DESPERATELY needed that medicine. Rite Aid and all the pharmacy’s I went too couldn’t possibly be out of a medicine the local emergency room doctor was prescribing. Impossible.

Meanwhile, if I were to take the hour trip into a more White, affluent neighborhood, I bet I can get it filled within 20 minutes of being there.

On one hand, that’s pretty fucked up for the White neighborhoods that are currently supposedly going through an ‘opioid crisis’. Addicted to whatever they can get their hands on and the pharmacies are straight giving it to them.

In Black neighborhoods, first my Adderall and now my wife’s Oxycodone, it seems quite suspicious that these places can’t fill an order …. then wait a week, and they STILL can’t fill an order for a legit prescription? So how are people to truly get pain relief?

If I was ‘that guy’, I’d sell the drugs and get it to people who need or don’t need it, make a profit and fuck the system because clearly, the system is fucking legitimate needs.

One thing I have to say about gaining an increased education: your awareness of how much you’re getting fucked silently gradually becomes revealed.

I’m telling you: I cannot hate the underground of services and criminal activity. I see and understand why they exist. Makes me hate law enforcement even more.

The question is, even if I get this bachelor’s degree, will it matter when the only way to achieve anything of note will be to lie, cheat and steal?

No Way To Live

April 16th, 2018

How do I even begin?

I signed up for this “no pay” school to study Computer Science. It’s one of those current “Study now and when you get a job, we’ll deduct your tuition later” things. LambdaSchool to be exact.

Basically, you spend time doing the online course as a preliminary, you schedule an interview to see if they want you in the course and they make a decision.

So I get the phone call for the interview. The first thing she wants to know if I plan to put AIU on hold in favor of doing the six-month course with LambdaSchool.

I said “No”, but I plan to succeed as I am currently with AIU.

First thing out of her mouth is, “I don’t think you can do both LambdaSchool and AIU at the same time.”

I tell her the time at AIU is flexible, which it is and compare her asking me to quit AIU to asking me to quit a full-time job. My current situation allows me a lot of time and no matter what schedule she gives me, I can accomplish both.

She wasn’t hearing me, telling me it was impossible. Meanwhile, if I had a job, I wouldn’t technically have time for any of it, but would you ask me to quit my job?

In the end, she said she’ll submit it to admissions and give a decision later. which really means she will deny me. Before we hung up, I asked her not to swing the vote by her feelings on the matter — that not everyone works the same way. She claims no one who is the program is also going to a fulltime school. I suggested maybe they lied.

Anyway, I expect to be declined. If I’m accepted, it will be because someone might call her out on her assholism and it already left a bad taste in my mouth and I’m likely to decline them.

This is exactly why the earliest part of my life was spent learning things on my own. or why I stopped trying to submit my writing to agents. Dealing with gatekeeping fuckers burns me every time. Every. Fucking. Time. I don’t sell myself well because I strip ANY resemblance of begging the next person to “choose me”. Here are my qualifications. If you don’t like them … move on.

This is yet another example of my hate for begging. You know that bitch is going to slant her opinion to the decision, without knowing me. What she does know of me now has I rejected her assessment.

The whole purpose of going to this extra programming course was to achieve a certificate in computer science and get job placement sooner than the three years it will take to get a bachelors from AIU.

I’m mad.

I’m mad that I allowed myself to think the playing field would be fair.

I have MONUMENTAL amounts of free time to probably work two jobs if I can find them PLUS continue to maintain the current GPA. Even with the ONE I had, I still did well and that was full time.

So fine, I’m not working right now, so I have time to take this course and this bitch is telling me It’s impossible? Impossible for her so it must be impossible for me.

This experience is yet another “hating people” moment brought to you by assholes you have to beg for things from. I’m struggling with the concept of dealing with Assholes. I just can’t live that way … nor can I live THIS way unable to deal with people.

This is what I have to look forward to going back to work? Only to get fired because I have to tell someone I can do the work when THEY think I can’t? Or get fired from a job because I call them out on being assholes? Or allow people to just talk or say anything they want in order to keep a job?

Oh, and fucking guess what I just got in the email. I mean, exactly right now. Like God was soothing me for going through this hassle with a cunt. This is my second one. Look at what’s deemed impossible. Fuck Lambda School. I’ll be fine without them.

VPN – Opening Eyes Everyday

April 15th, 2018

Do you know what owning a VPN (Virtual Private Network) has done for me?

I’ve had one that I faithfully pay for every year for the past few years. Having one has taught me, once again, what you see on the internet is purposely maneuvered.

I get the idea that the people in the UK don’t need to see all the information from the US and vice verse. But did you know, until Netflix stopped allowing people with VPN’s to watch with them on, people in other countries get to see WAY more films than those in the US? There were films that, in the US, you can only get from their DVD service, streaming in Germany or other places. Netflix clipped that ability with a VPN and now you’re only given what you’re supposed to be given.

It goes even further. Some to a benefit. I have a crappy internet service. But when I use my VPN, the speeds are a little faster and I download movies and things faster without the service provider sending emails telling me I’m using too much data. Which I thought was always bullshit. I remember getting an email from them suggesting I NOT watch Netflix. Then what the fuck was the service for? Instead, they wanted me to pay another $50 for more data.

Instead, I pay $40 a year and tell them to go fuck themselves.

Granted, I can’t use it to watch Netflix, but the upside is I download all the movies I want anyway.

You know? Each and every exceeding journal entry here is proving that survival and to have ‘more’ necessitates going around ‘the system’.

How sad is that?

How’s he doing in school?

Just fine. Still GPA 4.0. A little choppy on the past few reports but I’m still doing better than well. Psychology is coming up next week.

How appropriate.

The Worst

April 9th, 2018

Nothing hurts more than not having the money to do for your children. You can talk all day about saving and investing, but at a certain level of living, there is an impossibility of saving or storing anything when either the income is NOT coming in at all, debts pile up or you get a small income and debts STILL pile up.