Scheduling: My Bane

Maybe it's the winter. I don't usually realize how much I get SAD until the summer hits and I wake up one morning thinking, "Life is good!" when the sun is shining and it's warm and green and the whole world seems open. I woke up this morning at seven and it was dark and cold. The sun was just rising around seven-thirty. And it's going to get worse and colder and darker. I tried to think of what one of those annoying optimists would say: "Well, now everyone gets to enjoy the sunrise because it's later in the day!"

Makes me want to throw a shoe at the nearest optimist.

But the winter depresses me. I start seeing a cold, gray world of continuing inevitability. The rat-race, people walking walking walking with umbrellas, the same roads they've walked every day and will continue to walk, seeing the same tired faces they've seen every day, eating the same lunch at the dingy diner or in stained Tupperware in a florescent-lit office break room.

Last winter I had a freak-out moment with the house. Like it was a ball on the end of the chain that held me here, down to earth. This winter, I have a job and in thinking of my schedule, see it repeating Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, over and over and over, living for the weekend just to have it end and start over again. Some people like schedules and reliability and predictability. I think I kind of hate it.

Back to that Myers Briggs personality test. I'm an ISTP. The P at the end means perceiver. One place asks, "would you rather things in your life to be decided and set, or do you like to stay open to whatever options might come along?" Truity defines it as "responsive, spontaneous, flexible, and active."

Oddly Developed Types says "Now that school is permanently out and the 8 to 5 workday is abolished for good, the Artisans will be free to roam the radioactive wastelands hunting mutants, fighting zombies, and generally having the time of their lives."

My fall wanderlust is kicking it and I want to throw off everything that's holding me down and go live the life I imagine!

Then reality kicks in and I don't know where I'd go. To the Halloween event at Worlds of Fun? Just kick off and go. England. South for the winter. But what sort of lifestyle supports my imagination?

David thinks it is writing, after I described my perfect job as having short-term events that I could do when I wanted and not take any more assignments when I didn't.

I don't know. Both of us are perceivers. We both live in the moment, procrastinate, and like the idea of just picking up and going somewhere spontaneously.

We need to get rich.

Post-Apocalyptic Thoughts

My current fad is post-apocalyptic fiction. Well, not even fiction. Maybe just more the idea of fiction. Unless someone has some good post-apocalyptic fiction they want to recommend?

Currently I'm making due with cyberpunk, defined by the Reddit page as, "High-tech, low-life." I describe it as the seedy criminal side of sci-fi. Reading the second book in William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. So far, it doesn't flow as well and isn't as artistic as Neuromancer, the first book.

But anyway.

To get in the mood, here is a cover of Imagine Dragons' radioactive by Lindsey Stirling. In post-apocalyptic theme.

I can't ever decide if I like this better than the original or not. Original has bass drum. Cover has...well...awesome. And no weird puppet arena.

I have had Radioactive play in my head for the last three months. Still cool with it.

To continue on the theme, I got into the Myers-Briggs personality test. I like personality tests. I am an ISTP (introverted, sensing, thinking, perceiving). Which means I'm Harry Potter on the Harry Potter chart. And a cat on one of the animal ones (no, I did not try and manipulate the results to get a cat).

But the best thing I've found so far is called Oddly Developed Types. It starts off with the basics, not a whole lot more information than the Truity. Thing about the Myers Briggs is that they say people are better at understanding themselves than the test is, so you can probably figure out what you are by just reading about it. I match ISTP pretty well. However, Oddly Developed Types decides to have some fun and they come up with all these different scenarios for what happens to your type after the apocalypse.

I am a Vigilante. I spend the first year of nuclear winter in a basement playing video games that hone my reflexes so I can kick mutant and zombie butt once I get out. Then me and the other Artisans (SPs) wander merrily about doing our own thing, like we've always wanted to. The SJs (Guardians) have bunkers, cities, and caves. The NFs (Idealists) mostly become self-actualized and turn into beings of radiant light and go to another plane, where they will fight shadowy beings of darkness. And the NTs (Rationals) will mostly abandon the planet before it happens, but you know they probably caused it too. I read my page. And then the page for the Artisans. And then David's page (ENFP). And then the page for all the Idealists. And then all the main group pages. And then I started at the top and read all of it. It was like reading a story in second person. It was funny and clever and makes me wish I thought of it first.

I'm still trying to figure out what I want from this phase, which is really an extension of the zombie phase (which I partially abandoned after finding the first two episodes of Walking Dead to be more gory than I liked). And maybe it's because so many people talk doom and gloom with all the Syria and government shutdown and so on, it starts to feel a little bit like the end of the world. And I cope with things by making fun of them.

And I'd be a monster hunter. How cool is that?

I am a Jedi, like my father before me...

Jedi's just happen to get their hoods from Aeropostale these days.