Ooooookay. That's what my favorite podcaster Sam Harris says, and I seem to be picking up his mannerisms. He continues from there, and usually you hear the word "Housekeeping", which means cleaning up.
In the physical world, housekeeping awaits me upon my return, but for now let's do a virtual one. I barely made it onto the bus to Riga, from where I fly to Edinburgh tomorrow. The plans are grand: I will spend ten days there, and then Romania awaits, where I'll spend just as much time, and finally I will return to Riga via Prague.
In total, this trip will take a whole month, and it's unclear whether I should start writing about the freshest stuff right away, or finish up with Portugal first.
I guess I should do everything in order, and therefore start with the current stuff first. I took a huge vacation (more than a month). For this, I handed my project at work over to a new employee, so that my absence wouldn't wreck all the client's plans.
My mental and physical state is terrible, there's a fog in my head, and my decisions are far from optimal. The only good thing is — at least some decisions have been made, and there is a plan. Recently I saw an acquaintance who drearily works as a programmer for a dreary local company, for local clients. The technologies used are ancient, overtime is a normal occurrence, and although I can't know for sure, the salary probably leaves much to be desired. When I say that I'm flying off to travel, I realize that he hasn't done that in a very long time. I suspect he lives with his parents too, though I didn't ask. Yeah, it sounds judgmental, but how else to express my attitude? I sympathize with the guy, I understand how hard it is to change your life, because I've done it several times myself, albeit with massive friction. Still, you only live once — if you don't at least try yourself, no one else will do it for you.
So I'm trying, even though it's tough going.
While I'm gone, the builder will be doing the second phase of renovations — he'll tidy up the hallway and the kitchen. Upon my return, another month or two of torment awaits me, while I shovel through the aftermath, put things in their places, and buy closets and shelves. Some of the ones I threw out hailed straight from the USSR, and looked the part. As we know, in the USSR they knew how to make tanks and spaceships, but with closets and dish racks it was an absolute disaster.
As for the state of my head, I sleep poorly, because of abusing tea, because of medications, and the inability to put aside my phone or a book. Add to this my omnipresent endless pain, the meds for which help only a little (or they do help, but turn off the ability to think and act completely). Due to lack of sleep and the pain, it's hard to focus, you grab whatever is at hand, drop it and grab something else. It was like that before, when I wasn't sick yet, but now it's a total trainwreck.
I don't know if the reader envies me because I can afford a renovation and a month-long vacation at the same time, but I want to say once again that I'd trade all this for the absence of pain and normal sleep in a nanosecond. Everyone gets what providence hands them. Some get a family, some get money, some get wisdom or peace of mind, some get everything at once, and some get nothing. I got this crappy lottery ticket. There are worse ones out there, but that doesn't really cheer me up. There's nothing you can do about it, it can only be accepted. If you do that, then at least your emotional state will improve, based on our current knowledge (or misconceptions?) about the psyche.
Lately I've been constantly thinking about how you need to do what's important, not what's urgent, or what the environment demands. I don't know if this maxim will come in handy, but at the very least the result was that I remembered I love to travel, and since that's the case, I have to try again. Now I have stronger meds, and it won't be as agonizing. On the other hand, I'll be traveling alone, although frequently meeting up with friends in different countries. As Jhené Aiko sings in a song based on Sartre in one of my favorite albums ever (I have a lot of those) — hell is other people (or the lack thereof). With my kind of health, the people around me get the full spectrum of negative emotions — from snarky jabs (often) to downright swearing (rarely). I can only hope that some of my positive traits outweigh this, otherwise all hope is lost.