When given the opportunity to write something, I invariably draw a blank. Far too much freedom. Especially when saddled with the anxiety of considering what other people may think. Do they like it? Is it trivial? Does it belie some aspect of myself that I’ve kept hidden away for fear of judgment?

I’ve spent a good deal of my life trying to be what other people want me to be. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. But it has left me this contorted, twisted semblance of a person. Bits and pieces patched together like a metaphysical Frankenstein’s monster, awkward and lumbering…naive. Every move, deliberate, thoroughly thought out and agonized over. Right leg forward, now left leg. Swing your arms. Nod and smile. Now laugh. Breathe.

Honestly, it’s all worked out well by most measures. And yet…

I may vocally deny that that I’m pretty smart in most social and work settings, but in my gooey insides, I often smugly proclaim “I am so smart.” This sometimes conflicts with objective evidence to the contrary, and then my ego goes “owie!” and slinks away to lick its wounds. Do you like how I abstract away my ego when it suits me? Like it’s not at all a huge facet of my being.

I’m bad at so many things. It’s a wonder I can feed myself.

Today’s fiasco was this website. I like to run it pretty lean. It’s not fancy. But system requirements grow as upgrades happen, and the database finally outgrew it’s school clothes, and it was time to add additional memory. That’s another couple of bucks a month for my vanity.

Since we’re upgrading the hardware, why not the OS, too? That actually goes pretty well.

Now it’s time to check the websites. That one little dumb one. Check. The serious one. Check. groink.net? groink.net? groink.net? Hmm…

Let’s bump the web service. No joy. Kick the database service. Nope. But all the other sites are working. Why? WHY? The configuration looks ok — like I said, its pretty simple. php-fpm? Yep, the right version for what’s installed. Grrr.

I mindlessly restart services and reboot the server several times, more for self-soothing than hoping for any positive result. Maybe I’m getting DDOS’d, my ego chimes in. I check stats; unique visitors is below 1k for the month. My fanbase is primarily bots and scrapers. Back in your hole, ego!

I’ll save you further reading of an already boring story: it was the AAAA record. For some reason, Cloudflare prefers the IPv6 address my hosting service provides. When I updated the host’s memory, it was shuffled off to another rack and got reassigned another IPv6 address. IPv4 stayed the same. Guess what I only ever look at?

The last bit of chagrin: I’m writing about my website…on my website.

…

Fuck.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit dramatic.

I don’t have any friends in meat-space.

That’s not quite true either, but I don’t want to define the relationship I have with that person as “friends” because I’m not sure if they think that way, although we are “friendly”. Maybe we are growing into friends, but perhaps it’s too soon to say. I will find some way of sabotaging it eventually, so let’s not count that.

I jettisoned my long-time best friend because he was a narcissistic psychopath, and it just took me that long to realize it. It wasn’t that he was 100% evil — he did nice things, moral things, but just not as often as not. At some point, you do the calculus and realize, wow, this isn’t good for me, and I’m just enabling his behavior. A little like The Banshees of Inisherin, but not as dramatic.

For the old-but-not-quite-that-old, it can be difficult to make new friends, especially if you don’t already have your base set of friends. All my meat-space friends either turned into cyber-friends or weren’t friends anymore once I moved away from the west coast to the east coast. There were a few folks that I thought I might make friends with, but…it…was…kind of…clear they didn’t think so. Is there a “just friends” category for friend-type relationships? Like, “say hi at the grocery store” guy.

A large part of this is definitely me. Trying to fake the norms of social interaction is tiring. It becomes apparent after awhile that I just can’t keep up with the socializing to make to past the point of being an acquaintance (wait, was that the word I was looking for?). It isn’t that I don’t like you, I’m just tired.

My face doesn’t help either. RBF-for-life.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. Perhaps I just want to bemoan this particular facet of my existence. It strikes more so when I have something of great interest that I want to share, and there’s nobody there to share it with. That does suck.

Song of the day:

I was trying to remember what internal crisis I was inducing last night. Then I remembered this morning: today is the last day of my very lovely two week vacation. Which means that tonight when I lay my head to rest for the night, it will be filled with an onslaught of thoughts about work, the issues that I left behind before vacation, how to solve them, how I am really just a very mediocre technology worker, and probably a few dreams about my teeth falling out, missing a final exam, or being naked while looking for my 4th period classroom.

I don’t have a problem with work, per se. I do have a problem with keeping schedules, working under the real or imagined threat of having to never make a mistake for fear of losing my job, dealing with end user complaints about… whatever. If you are ever feeling good about yourself and your work, go visit your company’s forum/channel where the product devs/engineers hang out.

I came to the not-so-surprising realization that all things being equal, not working trumps working 100% of the time. Note that I didn’t say “being unemployed”, which is fraught with it’s own perils. If I could just figure out how to maintain my current income stream and not be subject to the aforementioned negatives of working…that will have to be a “thought bone” that I chew on in the background for a bit.

That said, vacation was relaxing and productive. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get all the things done that I wanted to, but a decent number of things did. I did fuck around a lot, which I will defend, is the point of time off. It’s disheartening that people use “vacation” as a period to catch up on the other work of maintaining their lives.

My brain stopped outputting data. Guess I’ll end it here.

I was looking at my website on the shitter, which I don’t usually do, but the mobile version of the WordPress theme I stole/modified doesn’t look half bad. Except for the site title. It’s hard [for me] to predict how a font will render on different browsers and platforms. Anyway, I’m keeping the look for a while. I’ll to try and fix the title, hopefully not by just make it a JPEG or PNG or something lame. No promises, though. But that’ll have to wait because…

I got a new television! This is my first major audio visual purchase in ten years. I’m oddly excited for having purchased a thing that will enable time-wasting and consumption of the 24 hour news cycle, but here I am. It is one of those fancy-pants “The Frame” televisions from Samsung because I’m a fucking grown up and make like I don’t want a TV so I get a TV that looks like an art frame so people will think I’m grown up and go all “Oooh! Look how sophisticated that man named Groink is who has a poorly written website where he talks about his excretory habits with his cellphone”. The extra fun part is that I have to run new electrical and data cabling. Brand new chances to ruin my house! I’ve already drilled an unintended hole into a joist. Life is amazing.

At first, I wanted something reminiscent of an old monochrome terminal. But I ended up going something vaguely CGA looking. I think some people might think it is some vaporwave aesthetic. My front-end dev skills are…lacking.

AHHH…elections! AHHH…Twitter! AHHH…Powerball! Sorta ahhh…Meta/Facebook!

…that those who are unabashedly fervent in their support of religion and the police are those who believe others and themselves lack a moral compass to do the right thing without threat of punishment from the Heavenly Sky Father or by the muzzle of a weapon.

● Nobody wants your 10 year old, used, ratty, rained on, left out on the edge of your driveway raccoon love nest of a mattress. Even if it is free.

● Thank you for the $10 discount off of the MSRP on the kitchen appliance used only “a handful of times” over the last 7 years.