Tag: #MST3K

  • Nighttime, My Brain Won’t Shut Off

    I went through a brief period where I was sleeping okay, but now I have returned to not sleeping. I get about five hours of sleep a night. I have cut out snacking, screen time, and nightcaps, but it really doesn’t help. What also doesn’t help is that PLUTO TV has an MST3k channel, but late at night they do show “Manhunt in Space” and “The Wild Wild World of Batgirl,” way too often, which, even for MST3k, are pretty unwatchable episodes. Anyway, I have tried melatonin, and that can help me get to sleep for a couple of hours, but then I will make up again.

    I’m having trouble shutting off my mind. I have tried several different tricks, but nothing is really working. I’m good in the day time; I can stay upbeat and focused, get my work done and support the family. But once I start getting ready for bed, all the doubts and regrets, and fears come alive. To be honest, I cannot remember the last time I had a solid good night’s sleep, but I know at one point I did. All of this leads to the feeling of malaise, and the phrase that I keep saying to myself that, “I haven’t been myself in a long time.”

    In my mind, I feel like I have been this way for three years, but just know when I looked at a calendar, I realize that I have been saying this for three year, so in actuality, it’s been six years. Maybe five. I didn’t start not feeling myself over night, but I did feel myself being pulled away from who I am back then.

    I took a job that I was qualified for, but didn’t want to do, and they paid me too much money to do it. I take responsibility for my actions, and in the short run it helped out my family get out of a financial hole, but in the end, I got good at something that I didn’t like doing. (I was warned not to do that in college.) And I haven’t forgiven myself for that. I feel it was that decision that has led me to where I am sitting right now.

    I wish I was one of those people who could let things go, be a goldfish, but I’m not.

    Well… I’m not right now.

    Even as I write this, I feel very edgy, that even tapping a finger on the memories of the past six years will send me down a spiral of negative thoughts, that I won’t be able to pull myself out of.

    Because all of my emotional roads lead back, not to that job, but losing my mother. That happened in the middle of everything, and it’s, just, derailed me.

    Now, I’m not sure what I need do to deal with all of this, but what I think I should do is just keep trying to find a creative way to channel these emotions. And I do, with this, and all the other things I try.

    But, I would really like to sleep at night.

  • Personal Review: Raiders of the Lost Ark (Part 3)

    This is a series, as I showed this movie to my daughter for the first time over the weekend, and I will share her reactions to it. This might be the last part…

    Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite action movie, in case you missed that from the past two days. Over the past weekend, I showed the movie to my daughter, who is now at the age that I first saw it way back in 1983/84. It clearly is very natural to want to share things with your child that you hold as important, and I also think it’s equally normal for children to want to learn about what their parents think is important. For my daughter to understand me better, she does need to know about Raiders, MST3k, and The Beatles. (Books are a completely different subject, as the kid is just now learning how to read, so we are several years from that subject.)

    As we finished Raiders on Saturday night, and after she told me the melting faces scared her, I knew that she would have questions, as she is a very curious six-year-old. What she asked me was: “What is the Ark? Why does it kill people if you open it? Why did ghosts come out of the Ark? Is it magic like the Infinity Stones? What are the Ten Commandments? Why did the Egyptians hide the Ark?” With these questions, I discovered a very glaring difference between my childhood and my daughters; at her age, I was well versed in Bible stories, and my kid has no idea what is in the Bible.

    I was raised in a VERY Catholic home, and when I was a kid, I went to Sunday school, CCD, and had my own illustrated children’s Bible. I said my prayers with my mother at night, and would even “read” Bible stories from a little red Gideon’s Bible, though I was just repeating stories I had memorized. With this background, when I first saw Raiders, I saw the Biblical implications all over the story. When my daughter watched the movie, none of that was apparent to her. It was just a magic box that you shouldn’t look at when it’s open.

    My wife and I have made a conscious choice to not raise our daughter Catholic. In both of our lives, religion has played a divisive role, didn’t necessarily prepare us for living in this world, and front loaded us with so much guilt, which we are still working through. For me, I really dislike how the Catholic Church, and most religions honestly, treat women, and I don’t want to raise my daughter in a faith tradition that makes her a second-class citizen in the eyes of God.

    I wasn’t expecting that religion would be the final conversation I would have with my kid after watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I am glad that it happened. I am happy that we started talking about what different people believe, we talked about the traditions and history of Judaism, and what the Old Testament and the New Testament are. I want her to make her own decisions when it comes to religion, and they only way for that to happen is for her to ask questions.

  • Covid Weight Gain

    I put on some weight over the pandemic. Let’s say it’s close to twenty pounds. And when I say that it’s close to twenty pounds, I mean that it is over twenty pounds. I have put on over twenty pounds. In fact, I just weighed myself, and it’s 21.3 pounds. Mind you, I was a little pudgy around my middle before the pandemic, but that was due to driving everywhere in California, and not walking like I used to do in New York, But, before California, I had added a little weight after the kid was born, that I never took off. So, I’m thick in the middle. I’m a thick in the middle, middle aged guy.

    And I want to do something about it.

    Part of it is that I have been eating my feelings. Especially eating my feelings late at night when I watch MST3k on Pluto TV. (That’s my happy place.) I used to walk everywhere in pre-pandemic New York, like close to 9,000 steps a day without trying. I just looked at my phone’s pedometer, and looks like I walk about 4,000 steps a day. So, not doing too well there, even for the low hanging fruit. To be successful, I know that I have to change my lazy grazing life style, along with doing some exercise, and just moving more.

    But the issue is just getting started. Getting off my ass and beginning seems like a million miles away. I know all the benefits that will come if I just start working out a little, and I can even go the super vein route and say that I want to look good when I go to the beach this Summer. (Since I will be vaccinated by the start of May, I think I should go on vacation.) And not to mention that I should do things to stay alive for as long as possible, family and kid in all…

    But…

    But… The pandemic sure has made me physically lazy.

    No.

    Actually, the pandemic gave me to opportunity to be lazy, and I took full advantage of it.

  • Watching Movies

    I’m a big movie fan, and I especially love awful, really bad movies. As a huge MST3k fan, that should come as no surprise. But, I still remember the wonder, and awe of going to see “Empire Strikes Back” in a theater with my dad and brothers. When I think back on it, it was like I won the lottery with “Empire” being my first movie. It set the bar pretty high.

    I also love sharing the movies that I grew up watching with my daughter. Some movies hold up really well, and some were not as good as I thought they were. But not all 80’s movies for kids are created equal. I’m not sure my six-year old daughter is ready for a melting Nazi.

    And today, I started to wonder when I can start watching dramas with her. You know, grown up dramas where what all the adults do is talk a lot, and the movie usually ends hopeful, but also a little sad. You know, like “Ordinary People,” Chariots of Fire,” “The Verdict” “The Big Chill” “Places in the Heart” “A Room with a View” “Broadcast News” “The Accidental Tourist” and “Dead Poets Society.”  

    When I was growing up, we didn’t get cable, but we got a VCR, and rented movies. My parents would rent a movie for us boys, usually an action movie like “Jaws” or “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and then the parents would rent a grownup movie, like from the list above. And out of all of those movies, the first one that I remember sitting through, and not leaving after the first boring talkie ten minutes, was “The Accidental Tourist,” which when I think about it, was an odd choice for 11 year old me to sit through, and enjoy.

  • Letting Go of Past Mistakes

    I’m finding it hard to stay motivated. I was able to put a blog together yesterday, but I never made it to journal or work on anything else, which, at the end of the day, I was feeling like I had failed. And with my anxiety started a death spiral of thoughts about, well, just being a failure. Then I started thinking about everything that I had screwed up on in the past three years, replaying the mistakes over and over…

    It’s exhausting…

    Digging myself out of that isn’t easy. The first step is watching an old MST3k on PlutoTV. That helps in just calming my head down. Then I have to start telling myself that tomorrow is a new opportunity to make changes; to get it right.

    But, when it comes to thinking about the things I did wrong in the past, that one is much harder for me to put to rest. I have been told in therapy, by friends and loved ones, and Oprah that I have to forgive myself. You know, I’ve tried, but there I was last night thinking about old work situations, and people I haven’t seen in years. I don’t think there is anything that I can say to myself to enact a state of forgiveness that will cause the exorcise these thoughts. It is unattainable.

    But what I think is attainable is more attune to what being an ex-smoker, or recovering alcoholic is like; It is a daily struggle to choose not to take part. I used to smoke, and it took me about a year to ween myself off of cigarettes, and a good part had to do with changing my behavior. I had to stop having the first cigarette in the morning, or right before I went to bed. The desire was still there, but I had to say no to myself. That was seven years ago, and still I have moments where the craving for a smoke over takes me, but I fight it off. I don’t have to forgive myself for the craving, I have to fight it.