Posts Tagged ‘life’

Moving Sucks And Other Banal Observations

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Things have been some­what hec­tic in Casa del Tolbert over the past month.  In late June, we learned that we would not be able to renew the lease on the nice lit­tle house we were rent­ing because the own­ers had decided to put it up for sale.  We scram­bled to pack and find a new place to live.  Luckily, the rental agency we go through had a nice lit­tle condo in the cen­tral part of Fort Collins, a place with cen­tral air, a pri­vate pool and pri­vate lake access.  To adopt the par­lance of the time, it’s pretty swank.  Monday, we drew on the awe­some might of our social net­work and moved house;  three pickup trucks and one A-​​Team van (for serious–it’s painted the same!)  fer­ried our belong­ings from the old and busted to the new hotness.

Moving is prob­a­bly my least favorite life activity–with a caveat that ‘dying’ will prob­a­bly suck more, but I hope not to know for sure for some time yet.  I am always astounded by how much we own when it comes time to pack. I use very lit­tle of my belong­ings on a day to day basis.  I could prob­a­bly sur­vive with only a few changes of clothes, a tooth­brush, a cell phone, and a lap­top to my name.   If I wanted to save a lit­tle more money, I’d prob­a­bly need a microwave and a but­ter knife too.  Everything else seems mostly extra­ne­ous, espe­cially when you’re lug­ging it up a long flight of steps in 90 degree temperatures.

Early on, I man­aged to pawn off half my books and all of my graphic nov­els on Paul and Mo Hummer.  Suckers!  I’m a big con­vert to the Kindle app on my iPad, and real world books seem almost vul­gar to me at this point.  I still have an affec­tion for them, but with space at a pre­mium, my affec­tion only goes so far.  Honestly, if there were some kind of Netflix-​​like ser­vice for ebooks (an ebook lend­ing library? Lendle doesn’t count.), I would make the leap and get rid of every­thing that doesn’t have a strong emo­tional attach­ment (books from my child­hood, signed copies by favorite authors–that sort of thing).

We go through life accret­ing belong­ings like a cad­dis fly larva builds its shell of stream peb­bles.  An inher­ited table here, a box of books there, and the next thing you know, you’re 33 and your belong­ings take 3 trips in 4 dif­fer­ent vehi­cles to move from one space to another.  It feels like only yes­ter­day that I moved every­thing I owned from Lawrence to Grinnell in the back seat of a Jeep Cherokee.  Of course, now I’m mar­ried and my belong­ings are really the pos­ses­sions of two peo­ple.  And she’s pretty attached to that table in the same way I’m attached to my signed copy of Perdido Street Station.  What’s a few peb­bles on the back in the name of love?

If I’m lucky and not-​​lazy (fat chance!), we may get every­thing unpacked in time to move again.  Not that I’m plan­ning to do that any time soon.  Three times in four  years is plenty, thank you very much.  But life has a way of zig­ging when you expect a zag.  There’s no sense in fight­ing it unless you enjoy being frustrated.

In that last sen­tence you can see a bit of a shift in my life atti­tude, actu­ally.  Railing against the injus­tices of the world was prac­ti­cally my num­ber one hobby. If “get­ting angry at things you can’t change” were an Olympic sport, I would be on a box of Wheaties in a super­mar­ket near you.  But you can only stay stressed and irri­tated for so long before you finally real­ize that get­ting frus­trated, angry, and so on is often a choice.  You can choose to roll with things as best you can instead.  And it’s the health­ier reac­tion most of the time.  Pick your bat­tles, because your time is lim­ited and nobody has ever said “I wish I had spent more time com­plain­ing about my life” when it enters the final act.

Photo: Glowing Exit

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My life has turned into one long series of argu­ments with the cat over eat­ing, inter­rupted with occa­sional bouts of work.   Prior to the week before last, any dis­cus­sion with my cat about eat­ing would be about him eat­ing too much.  Now, he’s sick with unspec­i­fied liver prob­lems, prob­lems that would cost a min­i­mum of $500 to diag­nose further,possibly more. With the vet’s agree­ment, we’ve decided to take a more con­ser­v­a­tive route with him and see what we can do with just  get­ting him stuffed with food–part of the prob­lem, he said, was that he wasn’t eating.

Now, he doesn’t throw up any­more, that’s a good sign.  But get­ting him to eat con­stantly is like argu­ing with a tod­dler. You can’t explain to him why he needs to eat.  You can keep try­ing to trick him, but he catches on and I’m run­ning out of meth­ods.  We even have this high calo­rie paste that we’re sup­posed to be able to get him to lick off his paws or what­not, but we put some of that on and he just got pissed and let it stay there until it dried up and flaked off.  Despite this, he seems to be act­ing fairly normal–certainly not act­ing as sick as he did when we took him into the vet first.  I just don’t know what to do with him.  He feels bony.  When the vet calls today, I guess I will make more arrange­ments to have him in and weighed and given fluids.

Anyway, here’s another canyon photo.  Last one, I think, until I go back some time.  Which at the rate this cat is cost­ing me money, will be 2015.

Lest I Focus Solely on the Negative, And, Project PhotoRoadTrip

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve veer­ing into neg­a­tive blog­ging ter­ri­tory lately, so I think it would be wise of me to make a post talk­ing about the pos­i­tive things that have hap­pened recently to remind myself that life isn’t all bad.

  • 7 of 10 pho­tos sub­mit­ted to iStock­Photo this past week were accepted.  That’s a new record for me.  Of the three rejected, I some­what expected it might hap­pen.  I’m slowly learn­ing how to shoot for them. I guess I have more time to pur­sue this now too!
  • My photo Clouds of FootHills I on Flickr reached a high of #25 on Flickr Explore for the day.  It’s moved all over the place, but see­ing it hit the Flickr Explore front page was a high­light of my pho­tog­ra­phy career so far.  Thanks to those of you who gave the photo love.  It cur­rently has 911 views, 108 favorites, and 63 com­ments.  It’s by far the most pop­u­lar thing I have ever shot.  And I thought I couldn’t shoot land­scape photography.
  • I sold a story a lit­tle while back.  I don’t think I’m allowed to say which and for what, but I will let you know when I can.  It is nice to know that when I put my mind to it, I can still be a writer. Maybe I will get more writ­ing done thanks to my unem­ploy­ment status!
  • The out­pour­ing of help from my friends, espe­cially you guys on Twitter, has been noth­ing short of astound­ing.  Thank you.  It’s times like this that you real­ize how good your friends really are.

I’m slowly pulling myself out of my slump and set­ting my goals, sketch­ing out projects and tasks, and think­ing about where I want to go and how I want to get there.  My goal of pro­fes­sional travel pho­tog­ra­pher is cer­tainly going to have to take a back-​​seat to some­thing more prac­ti­cal. And then there’s this:

ProjectPhotoRoadTrip

I think I’m a pretty decent pho­tog­ra­pher at this point.  I think I write pretty well too.  I have all this time on my hands sud­denly and I was think­ing that maybe I could put it to you all to fund a lit­tle project I’m contemplating.

I’m think­ing about tak­ing 2 weeks and tak­ing a road trip somewhere–maybe the Southwest?  Arizona, New Mexico.  Some place where it’s not freez­ing cold right now, and some place that offers inter­est­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for pho­tog­ra­phy.  I’ll stay off the inter­state and use the old high­way sys­tem, look­ing for unusual sights and vis­tas along the way.

I’m think­ing of launch­ing a Fundable project.  I’ll bud­get it all out very care­fully and post a trans­par­ent account­ing of what money I need and why.  In return for spon­sor­ing me, I will post daily blog updates, inter­views with peo­ple I meet on the road, por­traits of said peo­ple, land­scape pho­tos, and any­thing else that I can man­age.  I will write and doc­u­ment a trav­el­ogue in the way that only I can.     Donors  above a cer­tain min­i­mum amount will receive a print of their choice from the product’s pho­to­graphic results.  And if that’s not enough, then maybe I can offer to pay every­one back once I’m gain­fully employed again.   Photo Essay, NPR style.

I’m not sold on the Southwest.  I’d like to poll you all for your opin­ions.  Remember that I live in Colorado, so where I go should be within 2–3 days dri­ving dis­tance at most, and it should prob­a­bly be some place not cov­ered in snow and ice in February/​March.  Or you could be masochis­tic and com­mand me to go to Yellowstone.  There would be amaz­ing photo oppor­tu­ni­ties, I will just freeze to death.  It’s all good.

What do you think?  Crazy enough to work?  Interesting in see­ing what I can do?  Share your thoughts. Later, maybe, I’ll ask you to open your wallets.

My Life as of Late

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’m not spend­ing nearly as much time in the blo­gos­phere lately.  Clearly, bore­dom at old jobs was the pri­mary moti­va­tor there.  I still like read­ing all your blogs and LJs, but with a job that takes 8–12 hours of my day, with­out breaks in vol­ume, my energy for spend­ing time read­ing web­sites is low. My energy in gen­eral is low.

My activ­i­ties out­side of my day job have been win­nowed down to a few things.  I watch TV.  I will never ever crit­i­cize any­one for watch­ing TV over other forms of enter­tain­ment.  When you are men­tally drained, it’s sooth­ing, and helps you unwind.  The qual­ity isn’t that bad these days.  And it’s eas­ier for my wife and I to have a shared expe­ri­ence via a TV show or a movie than it is via a book.  Part of the rea­son I think fic­tion fan­dom is so frac­tured com­pared to the old days is that there are too many choices and we hardly never read the same things.  So lit­tle over­lap in inter­ests anymore.

I’ve found my inter­est in SFF short fic­tion wan­ing quite a bit since tak­ing on the new job.  Roundbottom oddly enough is the only project that inter­ests me.  I haven’t missed actu­ally writ­ing as much as I thought I might.  I guess that’s because I’m writ­ing as much as I ever did, just in one big con­sol­i­dated storyline/​lump.  One post a week is about all I’m good for, see above rea­sons.  I’m not even read­ing since get­ting back from our trip.  Shame, because I was finally start­ing to get into Sam Henderson’s novel.  Maybe I can this week­end.  I need to force myself to take computer/​TV breaks just for the sake of my eyes.

I also think I under­stand now why peo­ple take up drugs like meth.  The idea of get­ting my energy back after a gru­el­ing day fix­ing bugs is tempt­ing.  Meth itself isn’t.  Hell, I don’t even drink caf­feine and have not for over a year now (it messed with my anx­i­ety dis­or­der).  But if I could find a safe, non-​​panic attack induc­ing  method of restor­ing some men­tal energy after a long day, I would do it.  I’m still aim­ing to try Yoga.  I just haven’t had time to enroll in the gym.  I think we’re plan­ning to do that this com­ing weekend.

I feel behind on every­thing and out of touch.  But finan­cially, things have never been bet­ter.  So I can’t com­plain too much.  It’s funny, because I was afraid other peo­ple would stop talk­ing to me because I was tak­ing a break from writ­ing. The real­ity has been the other way around.

The other thing I’ve had energy for is play­ing com­puter games.  For a while, it was Spore, until I got tired of being invaded by unstop­ple alien forces.  I really enjoyed mak­ing things in the cre­ator though.  Now I’m into some Warhammer Online.  I think it’s an iter­a­tive improve­ment on the World of Warcraft model of MMORPGs.  I don’t get too bored run­ning around like I did in WoW.  I like the art and the twisted sense of humor.  I’m play­ing some­thing called a squig herder, a gob­lin class.  I make this lit­tle mon­ster run around and attack things.  It’s the hunter class, basi­cally.    But can the hunter class even­tu­ally jump inside its pet and ride around in its mouth? I guess that ‘s entirely pos­si­ble. I  haven’t played WoW in 3 years. But I doubt it.  I spend a ridicu­lous amount of time in game grow­ing seeds into alchem­i­cal ingre­di­ents. It’s get­ting to the point where I can’t pick up proper loot because I am car­ry­ing so much of that crap around.

We’re still debat­ing about where we want to go next year.  Kansas or Oregon?  Family?  or Friends?  A house? Or apart­ments and rentals.  I think the whole debate is tabled until closer to the date when we know bet­ter what our finances will be and what the state of the var­i­ous economies are.  I’m mak­ing bet­ter money, but Sarah still mostly needs to have a job.

In the mean­while, I’m going to use my time as best I can.  That weird sense of urgency I’ve had for the last sev­eral years has really faded.  Maybe I’ve given up writ­ing for the short story mar­kets for good. Maybe my future really is just in web archi­tec­ture.   I can live with that I guess, so long as the rest of my life is inter­est­ing.  Good friends and con­ver­sa­tion.  Fun is fun, what­ever the form.  Writing stopped being much fun, so it was a good deci­sion to make.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there is a squig that needs herded.