out of the vortex again
I was just looking over my past posts, and was remembering the night I wrote pulling myself out of the vortex. I had just watched a couple episodes of Smallville, a show I classify exactly as bad tv. Addicting as it is, it is not without any shortage of cliff hangers and flashy special effects meant to draw the viewer in for hours, leaving them anticipating the next episode for a week. I had managed to stop myself that night, to pull myself back to my present moment.
That month was January. 2026 had just begun with a deluge of ice and polar temperatures, that, while commonplace for me, had found most life long residents of Virginia in a state of surprise. I talked with my friend Mike about it, as we were trying to plan a time to spend a few days together between his travels, and he cheerily said I thought we left this weather up north. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina now.
Here I am almost at the end of February, and I'm already handling my screen time better. True, I am looking at a screen right at this moment, and perhaps it would be better if I had opened up my journal to write this entry, but it is at least not a wholly passive experience. I just spent this evening watching Capote again for the first time since I first saw it in college. I was initially going to turn on another episode to cleanse the palate after the closing credits and all the special features of the DVD had finished. Instead, I picked up this laptop and read some words I'd written on this blog. I reminded myself that I had been here before, and that I made the decision before to turn off the tv, clean up the kitchen, and sit and write, reflecting on my day, aspects of life that trouble me, parts I've been proud of. The first thing I noticed in this one particular post (the one quoted above) is that I had opened with some things I was working on, little projects, books I was reading:
i'm currently waiting for a iso to download on my other computer so i can try running ubuntu on my other laptop, as a virtual machine, just to see how it would run on a newer computer. i have more than half of the patti smith book i've been reading finished, and i wanted to take a little bit of time to write on this blog before turning my computers off for the night and turning in with a book (or two, maybe i'll get some outlander time in too).
Fast forward about a month, I'm typing from my "main" computer, running Ubuntu on a virtual machine. I have long since finished Bread of Angels by Patti Smith, and even got through another book, Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing, between that one and what I'm reading now, Life, The Universe, and Everything. Still slogging through Outlander too, though that is "light" reading, and I just enjoy taking it slow, having it as a whole world to enter into.
That all made me feel just a little more accomplished, and I wouldn't have been able to see that accomplishment if I hadn't been blogging as much as I have this year (and journaling!). This has really helped me so much in understanding who I am, who I want to be, and how I relate with the world.