Tag: #Changes

  • New Stress

    I have been gone for some time, and the reason is that life has become a little difficult.

    Mainly, my wife lost her job. She was laid off the week we returned home after being evacuated for the wildfires, so that was a particularly awful week. We have been dealing with it.

    It has made us face some of the very harsh realities of living in California. Unfortunately, we aren’t in a position where we can get by unless we are both working. They gave her a little severance, which has made things easier, or at least manageable, to get through the Holidays.

    What this feels like is that we have been under constant stress for a solid month now. First, the thought of losing everything we owned, then being faced with the fact that we don’t have a support system in the place where we live. It made us feel very isolated, and that feeling has been shucked off still. With her job gone, and that was one of the big reasons we moved here, it has created a “come to Jesus” moment for us; why are we here, and is this really what we want to be doing?

    It has been a month where we have been fighting more than normal. Nothing serious, but we have increased the frequency that we pick and nag each other. I even noticed that the kid has also started acting up, when she would never do that before. The stress has affected and infected all of us.

  • Trump or the Emmys?

    These are the first two thoughts that popped into my mind when I thought about writing a blog today; do I write about Trump or the Emmys?

    I could say that writing about Trump, again, will do nothing but make me feel defeated and powerless. Yet again, we have another situation where Trump has gone and done something illegal, and then ho goes and gaslights the world into believing that he was doing everyone a favor for doing this thing, which in his opinion, wasn’t illegal at all. I think Bill Maher had the best reaction this past Friday which was that this will follow the same cycle of denial, then admitting to it but it wasn’t wrong, and then starting another scandal to make everyone forget about the first scandal. I also expect this to happen, which is why I feel defeated and powerless.

    Speaking of defeated and powerless, I watched part of the Emmys, and it was a rather dull affair. The only take away I had was the free broadcast television was now officially dead. SNL was the only over the air broadcast show to win, and the rest went to cable or streaming. This is the new entertainment world we live in. It is a little sad that free tv is no more, as what I mourn for are all the great 15 and 30 second commercials we will never see, as no one watches commercials. All of those jingle writers will be out of a job. Sad.

  • Sleep

    I never said I was smart, but I have always hoped I would be one day.

    With all the changes that have come my way in the past year, I have noticed two major developments:

    1. I don’t sleep well
    2. I have put on 20 lbs.

    There are other things that have changed, and not necessarily for the better, but I have these two are the most important, should be addressed relatively soon, and interconnected.

    My sleep problems have become more severe over the year, I am up later, and I find my self mindlessly eating. (Ice cream and chips are my biggest weakness.) If I were to sleep better, then I wouldn’t be eating at 2am, right? That seems simple. I should be able to address this easily.

    And you can figure out that I haven’t been able to get my arms around this.

    I had been thinking that I don’t have enough time to get all the things done that I desire to do. I even said that to myself the other day as I ate chocolate ice cream and watched “Drunk History.”

    That’s when it started to dawn on me; it’s not the lack of time, it’s the bad management of time.

    There is a psychological factor here. Planning out my sleep, and all the other things in my life doesn’t feel fun, or spontaneous.

    But is being out of shape and having no energy, and watching my life pass me by fun and spontaneous?

    This will be a long slow process of getting my life back on track. I will have lots of setbacks, and screw ups, but when I woke up today, I had to admit that the way I am living now isn’t making me happy.

  • Adjusting

    Today was my first day of a little depression. With the huge Camp Fire burning to the north of us, we have been covered in smoke, so we can’t go outside as the air is unbreathable. The wife goes to work, the kid goes to school, and I am at home looking for a job, and trying to write.

    It was fun for the first few days.

    Today, clearly, I hit a wall.

    I felt unmotivated, and couldn’t get going on anything. I mean, I got groceries for the family, but then I couldn’t do anything else.

    I watched the news, and just spent the day thinking about everything that could be happening to me in New York. Social media doesn’t help, because I can see what all of my friends are doing in NYC. And that kicks in the “fear of missing out.”

    But they are in there, and I am here, and 3,000 miles separates us.

    Another part of this is that I was talking to an old college friend last night, and he was asking me about how I was doing, and why I moved to California. It wasn’t in an accusatory way, more along the lines of “help me understand your decision so I can support you.”

    Why did I move?

    Well… I wanted a better life for my kid. I wanted to go on an adventure and try something new. I wanted to focus on writing. But as I was talking to my friend, I found myself saying something that I hadn’t expressed before, which was I was becoming the type of person who couldn’t celebrate other’s successes without trying to pull them down. The theatre world isn’t very nice, and I was beginning to take part in the bitter middle-aged actor stereotype. And to be that person made me a crappy father and a shitty husband. Maybe that was New York’s fault, but it was really my fault.

    I needed to change things.

    I needed to reinvent myself.

    Today was a day that I started to doubt that decision.

    Not that I am changing my mind.