I love my iRiver T30 portable player. It holds 512 megabytes’ worth of my favorite music, and does a reasonable job of randomly stringing songs together. (Mind you, I made a point of renaming the 60 files that I’ve loaded so far in such a way as to ungroup the songs by a particular artist. This helps a lot, I suspect.) This morning, however, it seems to have taken my current state of mind strongly into account. Sure, the morning commute started on a bright, perky note with Oranges and Lemons’ “Soramimi Cake” followed by The Space Brothers’ “I Still Love You,” but after that things took a turn for the moody.
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The posting really slacked off, didn’t it?

Which is to say, I’m slacking off. I’m two weeks behind on Mai Otome recaps. I haven’t touched either of my video projects, let alone the LP dubbing project. I need to do one last website conversion. There’s cleaning to be done around the house that I ought to take care of. I’ve not kept in as close of touch with people I call my friends as I probably should. (An oft-quoted motto of mine: To have a friend, be a friend.)

I’m feeling so uncertain and so unenergized lately that it’s hard to work up enthusiasm for much of anything. In a weird sort of way this has worked out for Dawn and I in that our gaming schedule has taken a major upswing… but that’s at the expense of everything I just listed. This isn’t to say that I need to cut out the gaming; indeed, game time is some of our best quality time when we’re “at distance.” I’m also not blaming the game time. I simply haven’t felt motivated to do much else. One might call it a crisis of faith, in that I’ve lost faith in myself, but mine isn’t a faith-based personality to begin with. So, what do you call it? I have no idea… and of course, that doesn’t really help, does it?

(and as I write this, I spill soda on my shirt and pants. I miss the keyboard, thank goodness. I just finished my laundry a few minutes ago, thanks for asking.)

I look around at all of the reminders, empty places where Things I Said I Would Definitely Accomplish should reside. Each one sucks a bit of life out of me, from the basket of garbage that needs emptying (“I Will Definitely keep my room trash-free”) to the little stack of “Day The Universe Changed” DVDs awaiting the last disc to become a complete set. Nevermind my checkbook (“I Will Definitely build my financial buffer back up”) and the cardboard boxes of books (“I Will Definitely get a bookshelf this month”) and the saved emails (“I Will Definitely take care of these things for the people I care about”). Nevermind the big stuff, like “Am I asking my kids the questions that will help them open up to me more?” and “Do they honestly believe I care about them and enjoy their company?” and “Am I a good relationship partner?” and “Am I sticking with this job because it’s truly good for me or because I’m too afraid to try for better?”

Very little in my life has changed in the last year. There were a few significant improvements, to be sure, but I don’t think I have changed much. I may even have deteriorated in some important ways. What’s worse, I wonder sometimes if I’m really being true to myself like I promised myself I would be, back when things went terribly catastrophic. How badly have I fallen back into who I used to be? I honestly believe I’ve not done so too much, but that belief doesn’t erase all of the doubts.

And when you get right down to the core of it… am I willing to do what it takes to feel good about the direction my life is going?

“Gloomy thoughts for a Sunday evening,” you might say, and you’d be right. It hasn’t even been a bad day, truth be told, so it’s not like there’s anyone to blame (but myself) for the state of mind I’m in. As usual, it’s just something I must work through for myself. It happens, yes?

Take a number. Make it something in the upper double-digits or even the low triple-digits. Call it “N”, because we love vaguely algebraic notation. (Those of you who know my sheer unbridled joy at working math problems are snickering impolitely, here.) Out of any given number of days, your number “N” minus one would be the total days on which I don’t post anything to my LiveJournal account.

I only have the silly thing so I can use their oh-so-convenient “friends list” feature, which saves me having to bookmark (and check) each and every one of the dozen (or so) LJ accounts that I keep an eye on, and so I can leave non-anonymous comments. If these people would just post on a decent, self-respecting regular blog system like normal folks (stop that snickering; I can hear you), I wouldn’t have to do this. Necessity is the mother of additional logins, or something like that.

Today is a “-1” day, for I’ve posted another couple of LJ icons, which is just about all I’ve done post-wise with the account since it went up. Hey, if I am going to comment on stuff there, I might as well have some silly icons of my own to do so with, right?

Of course, if I start coming up with more icon ideas I’ll throw off the entire equation, won’t I? Hmm.

I should preface this entry by stating that Portland’s Tri-Met transit system is still among the finest public transportation networks in the country. That is, if I can trust the comments I hear from bus-traveling visitors to our fair, soggy city, and I suspect I can. Your average grumpy commuter from out of town isn’t likely to lie about something like that if his home-town transit system is actually superior to ours. That said, I take great exception to how they handled this particular holiday.

Let’s run through the timeline of my morning:

7:55am: Leave the house with plenty of time to catch the 8:12am #9 downtown on the holiday schedule.

8:22am: Board the #9. Grumble under breath.

8:29am: After a surprisingly brief trek downtown, get off the #9 just in time to see the #35 leave the stop on the next block.

8:30am: Confirm that the transit mall screen schedule and the schedule on my Treo agree that the #35 leaves that stop at quarter ’til the hour, once an hour.

9:00am: Board the #35. The bus driver informs me that, yes, Tri-Met is on holiday schedule today except for the #35, which is running on its normal weekday schedule.

Excuse me, what? Has somebody gone utterly mad? How in the name of the seven lower hells is anyone expected to plan their commute if we’re just picking and choosing which lines to run on which schedule? It should not have taken me the better part of ninety minutes to get to work this morning, not when I was out the door well in advance of the time I needed to be. This is nonsense.

Shame on you, Tri-Met.

I’ve felt under the weather for most of this week, for various reasons. (I still think that’s an awfully silly phrase. Aren’t we all under the weather, technically speaking? Unless you’re an astronaut or riding in a large passenger jet, that is.)

This condition, whatever the hell it was, has put a severe damper on my desire to sit down at a keyboard and crank out lots of readable text. That’s a shame, too, ’cause I have stuff I want to say. I even have draft versions queued up for your future enjoyment. How scary is that? Nevermind the precisely fourteen screencaps I posted days ago in the gallery for the next Mai Otome recap on the anime site.

Luckily for us all, I think I’m finally getting over… whatever the hell it was. I don’t feel like I need to remain tethered to my bed and within close proximity to a bathroom any longer. Whew. Now I need to ramp (carefully, mind you) back up to normal life speed…

You know, I had plans for my evening. Among them were a couple of postings, one here and one on the anime site. But before I dove into that I caught up on a couple of website reads, one of which sent me looking at my own site’s stats and then on the hunt for a way to stop people from hotlinking my image content.

It turns out that a few complete losers on such loser-magnet sites as MySpace and Xanga (I’m not going to dignify their services by linking) found that they could hotlink my gallery content as backgrounds and other incidental images on their own profile pages. This required immediate action. Unfortunately, even with the aid of a snarky image provided by a concerned citizen, the process of locking things down to my satisfaction took almost the entire night. Part of the problem is that Gallery2‘s URL rewrite feature doesn’t provide a way to redirect to a static image. I can block hotlinking there, but I have no control over how it’s done. Imagine my frustration, eh? At least anyone who tries to hotlink content outside of the gallery will be punished appropriately, while in-gallery content will just disappear entirely. That must count for something.

So if you come back tomorrow, maybe there’ll be content worth reading. Right now I just want to at least attempt some relaxation, if not actual decent sleep. Anything’s possible, eh?