Lately

I haven't been feeling like myself lately. Morosity.

I think it has to do with dreams. I don't dream much anymore.

It's a conscious decision not to: I know I could just quit MJ and I would eventually dream again. But for some reason, I prefer the daydream reverie moments over the possibility of having nightmares. And I know that nightmares and dreams are good, because they allow the brain to process things while you sleep. And I generally don't have nightmares when I do dream, but now I'm afraid I have a backlog of nightmares because again, I don't dream anymore...

It sounds kind of sad, right? But it's not. It's not, because when I did dream, long ago, well, those dreams are becoming reality. I'm actually enjoying playing music with my piano, djembe, & Rockband drumsticks. I'm actually enjoying fixing my Yu-Gi-Oh cards into various combinations to make the perfect deck. I'm enjoying the hell out of cooking while I can still afford good ingredients. I even made a coconut/tapioca-base pizza last night that I couldn't eat (I'm going dairy-free for a while - acne has cleared up so far) for my housemates that was, according to them, absolutely delicious. All these things feed into my reality and my reality is anything but solipsistic, which was a grand fear of mine when I was younger.

I lost my job this week. 

I'd been working at a grocery store for over a year, stocking shelves and directing traffic. Taking expired food home and not getting sick from it. Being content that I wasn't working a typically "stressful" job - relishing in that fact, actually. I think that was a mistake. Thinking: "oh, this isn't a stressful job, so I don't need to worry about stress". I did try to eat well, but... the ice cream. The doughnuts. The sugar-laden breakfast cereals. The bread. The juices. The cheap sugary bacon. The chips, oh god, the potato chips... The vast majority of it, I didn't buy; my housemates did. I cannot blame them - I understand those things are at an equivalent level of addiction to heroin. But, I think I finally need my own space, a space where the toxicity cannot enter and where I leave on my own accord.

I must apologize for my somewhat unclear writing. Like I said, I haven't been feeling like myself lately. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I didn't snap this time. I didn't snap. I was fired, but I didn't snap. I was fired because I took one too many sick/personal days, not because I sucked at my job. Can you imagine how horrible it would be to feel like I got fired because I sucked at placing objects on shelves? It was actually a decent part of the job, the placing of the objects on the shelves, because in the moments between the cart and the shelf, there was silence. A tiny moment extending beyond infinity until... the yogourt was stacked.

I'm afraid of publishing this. What if my next employer uses an algorithm to sort through things a potential employee has said online, and it comes across this post, and it sees that I took one too many sick/personal days? And yet, now that I write this out, my mind changes perspectives. Would I want to work for an employer that fires me for trying to take better care of myself? No!

But I understand, capitalistically, why I was fired. People need their food, and if there's no one there to deliver the food to the place where they can then pick it up to take to the cashiers, well, no one has a job.

I will miss the people, and because I didn't snap, I'm totally able to go back and shop for bespoke food items here and there, and I'll probably do that because it's one of the reasons I wanted to work there in the first place. To be around quality food.

For now, I'll take better care of myself. And I'll leave you with an overdue SotD (Song of the Day), and a singer that I haven't written about in decades: