Bank Holiday Monday
The rest of the family are out for the day – leaving me here to wallow in my own silence, and hopefully get a bit better. My body still hasn't got the note about stopping the epic snot drive that's been going on for several weeks now. I took some pretty powerful medication last night, which allowed me to sleep, but also resulted in some of the most impressive snoring in recorded history. I woke up at 5am to the rather guilty discovery that my other half had retreated to the sofa at some point in the night.
So here I am – nursing a cup of coffee, listening to Spotify, and quietly tinkering with this and that.
I decided not to stop using the bullet journal after all. I'm not sure if I wrote about that or not. After emptying my head onto the printed page for the last couple of years, it's a hard habit to break. Sure, mobile apps are very clever, and they can remind you of all sorts of things you might have forgotten, but in a strange sort of way setting aside the time to check what you might be doing over the coming days, weeks, or months has become the most important part of the whole thing. I suppose some people call it “being mindful” – I call it “reminding myself continually”.
I suppose I should really go read “The Bullet Journey Method” now – the book by Ryder Carroll about the various ways you can integrate a Bullet Journal into your life. I've fallen into using mine only to record what I have done – not so much to plan out what I have to get done. I tend to shy away from planning too much because my life doesn't tend to follow any sort of prescribed path. Most people's “total chaos” seems quite orderly compared to my own experiences.
In other news, I wiped Linux from the old desktop computer at home. I got fed up with the computer running so slowly, but forgot that Linux tends to cause the temperature of the motherboard to erupt (don't ask me why) – which in turns causes the fans in the case to turn themselves up to eleven. It sounded like a box full of cheap hairdryers all turned on at once – not that I've ever heard that, but I have a good imagination.
We voted in the European elections at the end of last week – deliberately voting against the wave of nationalism that seems to be sweeping the nation. Apparently 40% of the electorate bothered to vote, and of those, 30% voted to burn our bridges. I guess all it takes is apathy, time, and a general lack of education to cause the events that led to the second world war to happen all over again. It's quite dispiriting really – the very same people that grew up in the shadow of Nazism and Fascism in the decades following the war are now playing to the same songbook. There's a stunning level of hypocrisy going on.
It seems to me that we are surrounded by hypocrisy most of the time. People are all for socialism while they have nothing – and then as soon as they have something, they don't want to share it any more. People are also all for reading books about benevolent creators in the sky – until they need hospital treatment, and then the typical rubbish they spout flies straight out of the window as they grasp at anything the last few hundred years of scientific research might offer to help them – you know – the same research that got people burned, or locked up. Don't even get me started about the growing army of rich old white men writing laws in the US to dictate what woman can and cannot do to their own body. I guess we also learned last month that being seen to help re-build an old church is far more important to billionaires than feeding anybody.
I'll stop there. I could go on. Ranting about the state of the world makes me no better than the army of idiots that post all over social media complaining about their lot instead of doing something about it. I'm going to go fuss the cat, and hang some washing out.