Goals

Sometimes I feel a bit like Princess Carolyn from the show Bojack Horseman. I get that feeling, usually late at night right before I go to bed, that feeling of “You gotta get your shit together!” In the show I believe she says it in the morning, and the rest of the quote does not really fit my situation, but that first sentence, I can hear it in my mind for hours sometimes.

Getting what together?

In the evening there’s always these big plans. I’ll go look for a new job, a better job in the morning. I’ll start a blog, I’ll talk about this and that and there is so much to share and so many things I am interested in that other people will want to read about. Ooh I know, I’ll make a service that does this more perfectly than all other services, even though the only programming language I know is PHP and I haven’t used it in literal years other than changing a value in some Nextcloud configuration file. That’ll definitely work! Oh no wait, actually…

I’m glad that every x months I move on to a new note taking app and only take the most important notes with me. If I didn’t do that, there would just be constant reminders of overambitious plans with no way to work them out without a massive capital and a lot of smart contacts. Good ideas are nice but they do need to be realistic, and realistic is hard late at night, right before going to bed. That’s the time I’m extremely emotional and talkative, not a time for rational thought. It is a fun time to write things though, and that’s what I’m doing here.

Some concrete actually achievable plans that I’ve recently set for myself, are some very small ones. For one, I have opened a real physical book for the first time in almost a year. The last time I did that was when my housemate and I went to sit outside and “read”, because we heard some neighbour kids playing outside. No we weren’t being creepy as heck, another neighbour had screamed at them, insulted them and called them names for playing outside a couple of days before. We’re talking about a 5~ year old and a 7~ year old being screamed at by grown adults, strangers. So we went outside anticipating that, both grabbed a pair of sunglasses and a book to read, set a phone down to record the mayhem about to take place and sat there for almost an hour. Screamy neighbour managed to keep their chill this time, nothing happened and when I listened to the audio recording a couple of weeks ago it was just some happy kids’ voices in the background and me and my housemate having a pleasant conversation.

What was I actually saying?

Oh right, book. Yeah I actually opened a physical book again, and I needed to start with something I knew was good so that I wouldn’t just stop reading all over again. I went with The Hobbit. Never seen all the Hobbit movies because I feel like they take too long but the book’s good.

Another goal-ish thing I set for myself is just writing things here. This place could be about techy stuff, doesn’t have to be. I can be as anonymous as I want here and can talk about a lot of stuff if I want. A third goal is being more talkative on Mastodon, having a place to talk to (for now) strangers is fun, haven’t had that in a long time.

The vaguest of goals

At the moment I do not even have a job. I quit before christmas because I was absolutely miserable and financially somewhat okay to hold out for a little while, especially because I’m not going out and doing things because of lockdowns. But right now we’re halfway through February and I still haven’t looked around. I keep telling myself tomorrow. Or next Monday. Next Monday is always a good one because you’re actually procrastinating the procrastination. At one point money is going to run out, that point might have already come because I haven’t checked the bank in 3 weeks. When that moment’s here, I’m fucked and done for so I will have to look for work very soon. The thing is though, when I work somewhere I want to know who I work with, who I work for, and with all the different levels of lockdown going on right now the chance is that we’re not even going to meet in person for a job interview. Thanks I’ll pass if I can.

You gotta get your shit together! So yesterday, you let yourself fall in love a little bit, and you got your heart broken. Serves you right for having feelings! Starting now, you are a hard, heartless career gal. Go to work, be awesome at it, and don’t waste time on foolish flights of fancy. From now on, you are a robot. Beep bop boop blurp bleep!

- Princess Carolyn