happy simple things

Yeah, the past couple days I've kind of been looking for those, because there are two things (at least two) in my everyday life that are low-level concerns right now. Each one isn't likely something to go bad on an urgent basis; it's more kind of a long slow slide kind of thing. And they're things I have really no control over, in the sense that, there's nothing I as an individual can do to stop or fix them.

So I've been watching Spitfire fly around Equestria to the tune of "Come on Eileen" a lot. And I've been playing Moby Dick: a Destruction Game a certain amount. (This is a little free game where, as they say, "You're a big whale and you are always hungry." It's not entirely biologically accurate because while you do have to surface to breathe air, you also are shown eating fish, squids, and also whalers you knock out of boats. Most whales, at least the baleen whales, eat krill and krill only....) But the Moby Dick game is kind of fun especially if you're in an annoyed mood.

I'm trying to come to terms - again - with one of the fundamental things you learn as an adult, that sometimes no matter how hard you work for something, no matter how much you want something to work out a certain way, it may not. And there's nothing you can do. You can't blame yourself, because you worked as hard as you could. Sometimes there really isn't anyone or thing that can be blamed. But it still stinks.

How do other adults manage this? How do they live with something uncomfortable nibbling at the back of their perception without being totally undone by it? I suppose throwing oneself into one's work is part of it. Or having a hobby.

(No, this is nothing health-related, for me or my family. It's just STUFF. Stuff related to what I see as the slow loss of many good things in our society)

I'm also slightly unsettled because at the eye appointment, in passing, they asked me to give an estimate of my height and weight. I did.....and when they sent me the link to my online records, they'd put it on there, translated into a BMI. I'm really hoping that doesn't mean somewhere down the road I get lectured at at the freakin' EYE DOCTOR. (I am sensitive to this because twice in my life - first, at a podiatrist's I went to because I could not exercise well because of foot pain, and second, at a GP's when I went in for a flu shot - I got long lectures about my weight when I hadn't even brought the issue up. With the podiatrist it was particularly annoying and upsetting because I was seeing him to get help SO I COULD EXERCISE. And he couldn't hear that. YES I AM FAT. Yes I would do well to lose maybe 40 or 50 pounds. But you know? That's not going to happen short of me restricting my eating sharply for well over a year, and I can't do that. I can restrict eating enough to lose weight for maybe 2 weeks tops. I work out, I strive to eat healthful food (I probably eat more healthfully than about 75% of people) but I don't like walking around hungry all the time which is what weight loss takes for me. So I have real issues with the whole, "Hey, did you know you're fat and that's bad for you? Why don't you lose weight?" lecture. (If it were as easy as "why don't you just" I'd be a size 6, I promise you that.)

(And also, in my case, I suspect big weight loss would also mean loss of muscle mass, and I'm not so sure I want that. I'd rather be fat and robust than skinny and weak.)

One of the things I kind of hate about adulthood - I know I've said this before - is how we're all expected to make it up as we go along. (Someone I follow on Twitter posted a link to The Definition of Hell for Each Meyers-Briggs Personality Type and while the one I normally sort out as (INFJ) is pretty accurate:

"You are eternally damned to working for a morally corrupt company that aims to exploit the weak and generally degrade conditions for all of society" (Though I might not word it quite that way, I would word it more as, "You are forced to work at a place that does many things you are deeply morally opposed to. No one will listen to your complaints or suggestions, and what the company does makes things worse for everyone, both the workers and society at large.")

I could equally be horrified by the ones for

"ISFP – You have to listen to rude people criticizing your personal choices, your appearance and your art form all day long. Nobody cares that they’re hurting your feelings." (yeah. Sometimes I'm maybe a little sensitive. I wouldn't SPEAK UP that my feelings were hurt because that just makes it worse when people are rude, but yeah. And really, it would be more like, "You work very hard but never receive a bit of positive feedback; you are only told anything when you have screwed up royally. And other people make fun of your hobbies.")

or

"ISFJ – Everyone you love is yelling at each other and it’s all your fault." (Been there, except not in a case where it was literally my fault, though I almost felt like "You couldn't corral these people's feelings well enough" so I kind of felt like it was)

 but especially:

"ISTJ – You are expected to complete a highly esteemed project with absolutely no guidance as to what’s expected of you."

That's my definition of adulthood: "Here's an important project you have to do. Don't fail at it. We're not going to tell you what we expect or how to do it. Good luck."


I'm also doing stuff like looking up annotations for the chapters of Moby-Dick I've already read (Reading Sparknotes isn't immoral when you're reading the book too, and especially when you're not being tested or having to write an essay on it). And doing stuff like trying to suss out what exactly Ishamael/Queequeg's relationship is. Ishmael definitely has a man-crush, but it's elided as to whether it goes further. (Though I admit, in the lingo of today, I'm kind of inclined to say "I ship it." Heh. Ship. In a story about whaling).

I also got to thinking yesterday about what a modern "reset" (sort of like the resets of some Shakespeare plays but looser) would be. The best I could come up with is this: Ishmael is a disaffected hipster type who decides he needs some "physical work." So he goes to the South Dakota oilfields (I know, that's already a little dated as the "boom career." But they have a similar level of danger to what whaling did, and perhaps, given the role whale oil played, occupy a similar niche). There he meets Queequeg (likely the name would have to be changed, and other details), a Central American-immigrant roughneck. (Queequeg could be a very devout Catholic, which could be as foreign to a modern hipster type as the original Queequeg's animistic religion was.....the modern Queequeg, for example, could venerate Mary, which modern Ishmael could find unfamiliar given that he grew up in a largely agnostic household). Of course given the housing shortage there Ishmael and Queequeg would wind up sharing a trailer.....I'm not that far into the book yet (they have just shown up at the Pequod), but I suppose Ahab could be the crazy multiply-injured rig boss.....the pursuit of the "big strike" could be the white whale. Maybe.

(Surely someone has done some form of this already? And anyway, I'm really not up for trying to write something like that. I offer it up to anyone wanting to do it, I'd just ask you credit me for the original idea....)