Revisiting the Post-Vacation Write-Up With the Long-Ass Title and Promised Life Changes

 

I know that I often go on about my horrific title skills, but that one is a record setter in the field of putrid. The byline for that mess should just be somebody vomiting.

Hi, I’m Troy Mcclure. You may remember me from such posts as A Road Trip, a Mountain, a Hotel, a Coffee Shop and Another Hotel , and my exciting feature film role in Bedtime for Bonzo 2 : Get This Fucking Monkey to Bed!*

Okay okay, so I’m not Troy McClure. But I AM totally the guy who wrote that earlier post that’s linked to up there. The long story short version of that one (FINE, Liam. I’ll put this bit up front this time! You’re welcome.) was me considering aspects of myself that which I felt that needed to change. This is pretty easy to do when you’re on vacation and spending a fair amount of time almost every day hiking through the wilderness and then sitting in nature and just reflecting on things, so I actually came up with a pretty solid list. But what good is coming up with a list of stuff that you want to start doing in a new way if you aren’t going to hold yourself accountable (Though not TOO accountable…oooooo, foreshadowing)? Let’s hop into the wayback machine, take a look at what I said then, and compare that to what I’m actually doing about it three months later.

Hilariously, I actually forgot to include a fair amount of content that was intended to be in there in the first place. What can I say? It wasn’t all reflection all the time. Plenty of opportunity spent on booze, food, and that waitress I spent most of the last weekend with provided ample distraction. I’m going to add in all of that, too (The missing material, not the distractions. Provide your own distractions as you see fit). Plus some BONUS NEW MATERIAL that I’ve figured out since then makes an exciting debut! Hey, I have to toss something fresh in here in a sadly transparent attempt to give you all incentive to actually read this. Think of this as the reprint of a book with the additional chapter or two. I just keep on giving of myself, you lucky, lucky bastards.

*Did you seriously click that? Holy shit. No really, holy shit. What were you expecting to find there?! Also, how was Rick Astley ever famous? He looks like a kid wearing his father’s oversized clothes.

1. Sleep is Not the Enemy My relationship with sleep has been a rather abusive one for far too long. Instead of treating it like the chance to recharge the batteries that it is, I almost looked at it like an enemy who needed to be fought off. I’d rather spend as little time as possible actually sleeping when I could be using that time doing something more fun. This way of thinking absolutely needed to change.

I have stopped brewing up coffee late in the evening, replacing it with herbal tea (typically the non-caffeinated variety). I also now retire to bed once fatigue starts to set in. No more sitting on the couch, watching some third-rate cooking competition show and yawning a lot.

Now, it would be really simple to just say ‘Hey, I started going to bed earlier and now everything is magically delicious!’, but it turns out that my life isn’t actually a bowl of Lucky Charms and that decades of awful night habits don’t just go away in the blink of an eye.

Some of the old pre-bedtime habits I’d gotten in to were actually spectacularly wrong in terms of getting me ready to go to sleep. Chief among those : the late evening hot bath or shower. Horrible plan. Getting your body temperature jacked up just before you turn in for the night hinders sleep. You want the room (and you) to be cool (And I am. Oh how I am). So that one has been tossed aside.

I was also tired of waking up at 4 in the morning because I was completely dehydrated. So now I focus on slugging down more water during the evening, and a water bottle now takes up residence on the bedside table when I lay my head down at night. And yes, there was of course the ‘spill half a liter of water all over the goddamn place while angrily fumbling around in a half-coma’ incident the first night. I’m clumsy enough when I’m awake. It’s worse when I’m half awake and it’s dark.

The other big change involved some major changes to the bedroom as a whole.

You people…good grief…

Don’t deny it. I guarantee that at least half of you deserve that. For shame.

Anyway, the change I WAS talking about was the removal of books from the bedroom. Yes, I still read. Okay, I still plan to read at some point in the future. That might be more accurate as of late. I love books, but I too often found myself still awake two hours after tucking myself in (not meant as a euphemism, but totally could be), starting up my ninth chapter of what was supposed to be a quick read before switching the light off. The other problem is that reading gets my brain all revved up. Now I’m condemned to lie there while my mind is cycling around on about 3,624 different topics. Good luck sleeping when that’s going on. So the temptation of that ‘quick read’ before sleep has been removed.

Replacing the books is a notebook and some pens tucked into a drawer in the bedside table. If I find myself pondering some thought or idea that’s itching my cerebral cortex like a hot needle that will not be ignored, I pull out the book and jot it down. It isn’t really a journal. It’s more a disjointed mess of ideas, thoughts, reminders, notes and barely coherent blatherings. Whatever it is that has my mind spinning away gets jotted down. And once it’s out, I can chill out.

After all of that, I do typically doze off a lot more quickly now.

2. Better Snacking Habits. Oh, is it late? Welcome to the food Thunderdome! Dozens of snacks enter, none leave! All will be eaten! Time to scarf down several pounds of food before going to bed because that makes sense. Right? RIGHT? Wrong. Late night food intake needs to drop.

So, how is this going? Overall, pretty decently. I still have some sort of snack late at night, but that’s more reflective of my current schedule than anything else. When you don’t get home from work until 7:20 or later, don’t have dinner until 8 at the earliest, and generally stay up past 1, you’re probably going to want a little something later on. I’m now A LOT better about making it a much smaller little something.

I also tend to snack a lot healthier. Hummus or something along those lines on sale? I’m buying a shit ton of vegetables and slamming some of that down. Otherwise, I’m making up bowls of Pico de Gallo or mango-pineapple salsa and scarfing it down with some whole wheat chips. Ice cream (frozen yogurt, actually) is now a once a week kind of thing.

Going to bed earlier helped, since everybody usually makes better choices when they’re not tired all the time. Are there still nights where it seems that I’m doomed to step back in to Thunderdome? Yep. And on those nights, I’ve started just brushing my teeth a lot earlier. That seems to just completely shut down the whole craving part of my brain since brushing teeth usually = time for bed. The switch flips in my head and things quiet down.

As for my hope to be under 200 pounds by year’s end, I weighed in between 203-204 this morning after my workout. That is a drop. I also somewhat sabotaged this by starting to use creatine about a month ago. Muscles sucking in more water means more water weight. But as I’ve said a thousand or so times by now, I don’t get too caught up on numbers. The sub-200 plan was really about getting myself to focus on snack habits. I’d have to say that it has been successful.

And now we’re getting into a good segue for some new stuff…

11. Slow the Fuck Down When I’m Eating

Since this is new, I figure it should pick up where the old list ended. So this is how numbers now work. Choke on it, numbering system! I’m in charge here!

When I’m eating, I’m less a human being chewing food and more some sort of vaguely humanistic food intake vacuum system. It must be horrifying to bear witness to. “Hey, now that I’ve finished half chewing this massive mouthful of food, there’s room to shovel some more in there! MORE! MOOOORRRREEEEE!” How I haven’t spent my entire life suffering from a permanent state of indigestion is entirely beyond me. I also likely should have choked to death on half a chicken at some point.

This isn’t healthy. I’ve been wolfing down entire, full sized meals in less than 5 minutes. That’s not normal. You’re fucking up your ability to even properly digest that kind of food intake when you’re gorging on it like a starving person seeing dinner for the first time in days. What good is eating better when I’m screwing myself over by eating it by the shovel load?

The last little while has been spent consciously trying to just slow down a bit and actually enjoy what I’m eating. So far, so good.

3. No More Empty Hours. So much time spent on so little! Surrounded by potentially meaningful pursuits, I was still burning off countless hours on crappy TV shows that I had no actual interest in and not really focusing on anything. Really not a great use of free time.

I didn’t realize how bad this problem was before I sat down and really analyzed what I was spending time on. And it is an area where I’ve seen a lot of improvement. No more sitting up in the living room at 2 in the morning with some stupid baking competition playing on the screen while I mindlessly surf Facebook for the tenth time in an hour.

It doesn’t all turn out to be a productive use of time. After all, some movies end up being shit. Some of the board games I’ve acquired, learned and tried out turned out to be horrible or just not something that I ever want to re-visit again. But at least I’m actually spending much more of my time on pursuits that I’m eager to get to and that COULD turn out to be something meaningful. I’ll take that over hours of nothingness so vapid that I have no memory of what they were actually spent on.

Going better, but more progress needed.

4. Stop Sitting Cross Legged For a Long Time. Okay, so this was kind of a joke entry. But it is something that I do a little too frequently, especially with my feet actually tucked UNDER me. That always ends in wincing as my knees and lower back berate me angrily. I have not done it since. Progress? Who knows.

5. Frustration is so Goddamn...Frustrating. Sigh.

Actually, the frustration thing seems to be something that I’m slowly figuring out. I find that a lot of the time when I get frustrated, it’s accompanied by being pissed off. And when I’m angry I am incapable of even considering anything else. I’m like the bull who sees red. I am consumed by thoughts of goring to death whatever the Hell is wearing that colour.

I’ve already blogged out my workout routine, so I won’t go into detail again here, but that’s helped. If I’m mad, I spend a little extra time at the altar of the church of chin-ups. Not only do I gain a benefit from burning off the rage, but it also lets me move on and start focusing on whatever else is going on behind the scenes in my head. And the whole ‘actually sleeping’ thing is certainly helping, too. Turns out that a rested Cliff is a calmer Cliff and a more capable of making reasoned decisions Cliff.

I also started actually spending at least 15 minutes a day meditating. Yes, meditating. Me. I know. It’s fucking weird. Blame Breaking Muscle (which is a great website to check out if you’re at all interested in fitness). I’m still very early in, but anything that can help me focus and start tossing aside the usual deluge of meaningless thoughts meandering into Hellish bullshit can’t be bad. And it does seem to be effectively chilling me out once I’m home from work, which is when I do it. And no, this new habit doesn’t run counter to point number 4. You can just sit comfortably and meditate. You don’t have to be on the floor with your legs crossed. So shut up.

At any rate, I’m done with just accepting that I’m doomed to a forever spent as ‘overthinks everything until he’s driven himself mad’ guy. So far, so much better.

6. Stop Eating Trail Mix on the Bed. 100% success! Yay!

7. Broaden the Horizons. Job search wasn’t going well, so maybe it’s time to look elsewhere?

Absolutely nothing has happened here as of yet. The local job search has actually led to some decent responses of late, and the fact that we’re stuck dead in the middle of what seems likely to be an ass-kicker of a winter doesn’t exactly have me clamoring to move right in the teeth of it. Then again, the now 9% provincial unemployment rate sucks. That’s a lot of competition. And I DO have an Indeed job search set up in the Okanagan…

A no-go for now. For now.

8. I Need to Learn to Let Myself Off the Hook. I don’t know where I read this quote, but it slammed into my brain like a ten ton hammer of doom. I don’t know what a ten ton hammer of doom would be used for, but it sounds badass.

“Forgiveness can’t change the past, but it can change the future.”

Shit, it might have been on a slip of paper freed from a fortune cookie. I don’t know. What I do know is that it made me think, as did some other things that I read online at the same time. This seems to have happened a few times lately. Suddenly I’m pelted with a small storm of ideas that all focus on the same thing, and that thing makes me think. I don’t hate this trend. And it made me realize a few things, and a big mistake that I need to rectify.

Far too often in the past I would just excuse mistakes and pretend everything was okay. This eventually led to me deciding that the best way to hold myself accountable was to go in the opposite direction. If I always held myself accountable and didn’t let myself off the hook, I’d actually force myself to move forward and change things.

There might be some sense to that…for other people. When you keep overthinking things and have issues letting things go (Hmmm…who fits that description?), it means that you just end up accumulating baggage that you never get rid of. So now I’m actually trying to move forward and make progress. And while I’ve made some, I can only wonder how far along I might be if I wasn’t pointlessly dragging ten tons of regret behind me.

It’s time to cut that tether and leave all of that behind, and that means I basically need to forgive myself. And while this all sounds HORRIBLY like something that would be shared around a hippie drum circle, it actually does make sense. So it’s time to REALLY start moving on from a lot of shit. It won’t be quick and easy, but it’s necessary.

GAH!

9. Stick to Beer When Things Aren’t Great. This is another 100% success rate, even as I’ve changed it to Don’t Drink When Things Aren’t Great. Why go with half measures when you can take an extra step and just go all the way with it?

I’ve already talked about a lot of the much healthier alternatives which are what I now turn to when I hit a rough patch. Working out, writing things out, meditating and sleeping better has been a pretty successful formula. Certainly it’s a much healthier one than going all super-broody. Nobody likes that guy, particularly me.

12. Be More Positive BONUS CHAPTERS, MOTHERFUCKERS!

I’ve always been cynical. I like to question things. I’m always up for a sarcastic comment. But things have gone further this time. I realized a short time ago that I’ve fallen from the ledge of cynicism and into the abyss of outright negativity, and I don’t want to be that person.

2016 has been a rough year that might as well come with the subtitle of ‘Boy, was I wrong about (fill in name here)’. Too many people who I care about have had to wade through too much pain. Personally, I’ve struggled to feel like I’m actually making any headway. I’ve had to make some tough realizations about myself and others around me. And all of that has joined forces to drag me into a much darker frame of mind. They’re like a group of super-villains, such as Hydra or N Sync. I’ve really become that ‘glass half empty’ asshole that nobody wants around, especially me.

But here’s the thing : it hasn’t been all bad. Those same people who I care about are also still awesome people who I love spending time with. I’m lucky to have some really great friends, and I’ve met some amazing people this year. I’ve made those tough realizations and come out the other side a better person. And I’ve had a lot of fun times, too. I want to go back to being the person who focuses more on this paragraph than the previous one. The cynical sarcasm (should be the name of a punk band!) is never going away, but I’ve typically been a positive person behind all of the mockery. Time to get back to being that guy.

13. I Need to Put Myself Out There More. Most people don’t have a core group of friends who they’ve known for decades and still see on a regular basis. That makes me an incredibly lucky person, because I’ve got that. Sure, some have moved away or faded off into the background, but a lot of them are still here.

But in some ways, that’s allowed me to get a bit too complacent in terms of socializing. And since they all have busy lives, that’s led to too many nights/weekends/whatever spent by myself. And while I do get a fair amount done in that time, there are also too many evenings where I’m not doing that much. I need to step out of my comfort zone. This is something I’m slowly working on. I need to become a bit more of Vacation Cliff when I’m at home, because Vacation Cliff gives no fucks about heading out as a lone wolf. I’ve also met a number of people who I probably could hang out with, so it’s time to do that.

This one is getting some serious work right now, actually. So far, so good.

10. Real Conversation is a Good Thing. It’s great being able to bleed out whatever is nagging me online, but being able to discuss things more often in person would frequently be better.

It has gotten better, but if I’m being totally honest, this is going to be a lifelong project for me. But it’s one that I’m always going to work on.

So there you have it. Will I revisit this again in the future? Most likely, when I’m desperate for content. Yay!