two things I’m changing in my life right now

1. I am going to start watching movie previews, trailers, whatever you want to call them. For years I have avoided them because I feel they often just show the most exciting or outrageous parts of the film so when I go to actually watch the thing, it’s underwhelming because I just end up sitting through an hour and a half of preamble before re-watching a few moments that are cool but I’ve already seen. I still feel that way but on the other hand, over the last several years I have ended up sitting through too many piece of shit films that weren’t worth my time — if I had just watched even a few minutes of a preview, most of the time I would have realized the film was a piece of crap before committing to it. It happened again last night with a film called Deadgirl which I had seen on some ‘most disturbing films’ lists. Almost as soon as the thing started, I realized it was junk. I’ve gotten better at giving up earlier on these things so within 5 minutes I started skipping through it and confirmed my suspicions, and also confirmed it wasn’t even remotely shocking. I’m happy I didn’t waste much time on it but I’d rather have wasted even less time. So now I’m going to watch previews of every film on my ‘to watch’ list and probably remove about half of them from the list.
2. At age 42, I’m finally going to start dusting the house on a regular basis. I always hated dusting, and it’s the primary reason we hired a housekeeper several years ago. But they usually did shit jobs, charged way too much for it, and were notoriously unreliable so we recently gave up on the housekeeper thing. I just dusted the house myself this morning and it only took about 30 minutes and was really fucking easy. I don’t know why I was so dang reluctant to do this job in the past. It wasn’t bad at all. It was actually pretty enjoyable because it was so easy and makes such a difference — I love low effort/high reward activities.

That’s all for this morning.

I’ve been an emotional basket case

Jenn and I are building a cabin on some remote property we own. We have some carpenter friends who made it sound like a pretty easy thing to do as long as you have some common sense and a decent work ethic.

I’m here to tell you that the cabin is slowly coming along — we have a floor, walls, and roof so far — but it’s been a god damned struggle. I now understand why carpenters have to do a whole bunch of schooling and apprenticing. There are so many aspects to building that I simply never imagined, and each one has so many layers and details that it’s impossible to get a good grasp on each one from just a few youtube videos and wikihow pages. Our lack of knowledge and experience (and resources out in buttfuck nowhere) have made the project incredibly challenging and stressful so far.

This level of challenge has had positive and negative effects on the project, because the times when things have gone well, we’ve been elated. But when things have gone badly, we’ve been absolutely miserable. I’m not exaggerating when I say I was on the verge of tears a handful of times, feeling overwhelmed, in over my head, hopeless, etc. There were times when, to console myself, I thought about how even though I’ve wasted so much time and money on this, at least I still have everything else in my life to be thankful for — health, Jenn, good friends, a home I love, a job I’m happy at, etc. To have to fall back on such basic things to comfort myself, I clearly had to be feeling very fucking low. I can’t remember ever doing that before. I can’t remember ever feeling like such an abject failure at something.

Thankfully, we somehow pulled through all of that, got the cabin to actually look sort of like something, and are now at a point where the remaining jobs are generally smaller and less daunting. I hope that our subsequent work trips are just as satisfying and rewarding as this last one (when things went well, of course) but far less mentally and emotionally straining. I much prefer the ‘low effort/high reward’ work model, personally.

I was so fucking happy to come home and see the hens again. They don’t give a toss if I’m a useless tit at carpentry.