Life Update: Trying To Find My Groove Again
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August 11th, 2025
It's another scorching-hot summer day, and I'm stuck inside again because it's just too hot to do anything outside. It's been a few months since I've written a simple life update, so I figured I'd take some time to finally change that. Things have been pretty normal for a little while. Most of my days have been spent working my normal job, spending time with my girlfriend and other friends on the weekends, and dabbling in my hobbies when I get the time to do so. There have been a lot of ups and downs in my mental state recently, and I chalk that up to my pretty irregular sleep schedule. Where I live has been experiencing an unrelenting summer season, and because my house is pretty old, it doesn't have the best central air flow. My bedroom is upstairs, and it gets unbelievably hot up there even when the air conditioner is on. The heat combined with other circumstances has totally destroyed my ability to sleep soundly for almost two months now. When I'm not taking over an hour to fall asleep, I'm waking up multiple times throughout the night. This lack of sleep has had a compounding effect that has taken a toll on my concentration, motivation, emotional regulation, and physical health. I've also been dealing with waves of back and shoulder pain because of an uncomfortable bed and the hours spent in a chair at my factory job. I don't mean to complain so much, and writing all that out makes me feel pretty whiny. But the truth is that I haven't been feeling the best for a while. I've been doing my best to get by and slowly improve, but I think the constant fatigue and physical pains have worn me out for a while.
Because of all of that, I've been dealing with an inability to concentrate and focus on my writing. If you take a look at the Updates Log on the main page, you can probably tell that I've slowed down quite a bit on my posting since I started this page back in February. I started off posting pages pretty regularly, a few times a week, if not every other day. That has gradually slowed down to where now I find myself only being able to post once a week, if that. I really don't have a good excuse as to why that is. Simply put: there are so many days where I just can't make the words come out of my brain. I like to keep a small list of pages that I want to write for this site, like for movies that I've recently watched or thoughts that I want to turn into a blog post, so there's no shortage of ideas of what I can write about. What usually ends up happening is I sit down at the computer, open Word to write whatever it is that I've been thinking about, and the words just won't come out. I sit there staring at the blinking cursor, trying different sentences or phrases that I want to put on a page, but anything that I can manage to get out just doesn't sound right or flow well. For example, it took me three sessions to write my thoughts on Beowulf: A New Prose Translation, and each session was between two to three hours long. That's an absurd amount of time to spend on one small page, and I find that it keeps happening every time I try to write something to post here.
I think it's pretty evident that I need to take a little bit of time to find my groove again. I have a bad habit of turning the things that I do into some sort of challenge to get as much as I can done in a set amount of time, and the same applies to my time spent working on this site. Starting out, I had this idea of writing pages almost every day and being able to complete my Movie Index and Bookshelf in a year's time or more. With the circumstances of everyday life and a full-time job, that's just not feasible for me at this point. So, I'm going to take some time to reorient myself and rest my mind so I can hopefully concentrate better. I plan on playing some casual video games for a little bit, and in the meantime, I have a small list of notes that I will slowly be turning into pages when I am able to. It'll probably take a few weeks to get them done, but I'm just not in the mood to rush anymore. As the old saying goes, slow and steady wins the race, and there's no need to turn a for-fun hobby into some sort of obligation. This site is my only online presence, and I plan on running it for years to come. If it takes me a decade or more to get it fully filled out, then so be it.
On a positive note, I've finally been able to accomplish one goal that I set for myself months ago. Back in April, I wrote a blog post about how I was feeling addicted to my smartphone, and was kicking around the idea of switching back to a flip phone for the first time in 12 years. Well, as of about two weeks ago, I did just that! My smartphone was paid off in July, and I replaced it with a Sunbeam F1 Horizon Finch. I was really interested in Sunbeam's phones because they have several models with varying amounts of features, and they have a chart that tells you what each model does and doesn't do. I chose the Finch model because it can only talk, text and take pictures, but it still has a built-in MP3 player to use at my job. So far, I'm really enjoying it! Re-learning how to text with the number keys has taken some getting used to, but that's really the only struggle so far. I'm getting much fewer notifications, and because there's no browser or app store on it, I don't feel the urge to constantly fiddle with it in my free moments. I think this is going to be a positive change in the long run, and once a month or more has gone by, I'll be writing a longer blog post about the pros and cons of switching back. So, be on the lookout for that!
That's about all I have to say for this life update. I may be slowing down for a little bit, but by no means am I going away. I'll still be posting when I can, browsing the small web, and hopefully connecting with the people who choose to keep the Internet free and expressive. To anyone who actually takes the time to read what I post, thank you so much. I hope you all have a good one! :)