The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Spotify opened its end-of-year “Wrapped” feature aaaAAaand…

I’m not entirely surprised by it! All of these artists and songs are ones that I heartily endorse. Apparently I spent 11 hours this year listening to Sloan alone. I mean, just the band Sloan. Actually I was probably alone at the time too.

However: Lori likes to bug me about being a hipstery music snob, which I strongly deny, but then accidentally confirm all the time by comments I make. Unfortunately she now has hard data on her side, because my top genre is “Indie” and according to their site I listen to “non-mainstream artists 74% more than the average listener”.

Time to embrace the snobbishness I guess!

Listen, to change the subject, these past few weeks have been really up-and-down emotionally for me, and as I did last year I want to remind y’all to be kind to yourself, especially around the holidays. Please. I don’t mind telling you that two nights ago I was in a pretty bad place at the end of the day; at times, while I just tried to go about getting ready for bed, I felt rooted to the spot and completely overwhelmed by anxiety and dread. Part of getting through it was remembering to breathe and use the tools I’ve been gathering for the past few years, like slowing down and acknowledging that yes, you are scared and that is an okay thing to feel

This morning I’m happy to report that I’m feeling a lot better, but I’m not assuming that everything’s sewn up and I’ll be fine forever. So please, find tools you can use and make note of the things that make you happy and recharge you! You’ve got this! Remember:

Thing I Saw Yesterday: Confirmation that same-day game playing on modern consoles is mostly gone. I bought a used game disc for my Xbox One (Titanfall 2) and put it in. The system’s been sitting dormant for a while so it wanted to download and install a 3ish GB system update. Okay, fine. Then it wants to install the game from the disc, which takes a while, and THEN it wants to download a 27 gigabyte patch. Maybe I could have bypassed and skipped all of these things, but geez. This kind of thing is actually how I got the system so cheap from its original owner, a friend of mine who was deeply frustrated with his purchase.

Thing I Learned Yesterday: Jesus had a lot to do in his life on earth, but never hurried. So (according to the podcast I was listening to) you have permission to slow down and take things one at a time. 

I’m Grateful For: Resources to help me improve my mental health.