Day 2 of my rebooted Insanity Max: 30 workout regiment is in the bag, and I feel good. I forgot how confident I feel after working out. I guess I only noticed it when I felt bad about myself these past few weeks, and I was able to compare that with how I’ve felt the past few days. It all starts with fitness for me. A good workout makes me happy and motivated enough to do more. I want to start writing again, even though I want to wait until late August at the soonest. I will be done with fire season by then, and I’ll be able to ensure a long streak of uninterrupted productivity for a good ten months or so. That should be enough time to rewrite my novel and hopefully apply to grad school. Shit… I need to work on my writing samples.

I’m having trouble with my car again. The damn power steering pump is acting up again, the same god damn issue that caused problems on my trip to and from California last December/January. I’m going to have to take it in this weekend to get it checked out. It doesn’t feel as bad as before, but I know the more I drive, the more it’s going to worsen. That’s more money I’m going to have to spend on my car. Jeesh. AND, to top that off, my packages didn’t come today because FedEx needed a signature from me, so they left me a note on my door, which I signed and will ensure my packages get delivered tomorrow. I was really expecting them today.

This also marks the second day since I’ve deactivated Facebook. I’m still finding myself compulsively checking my phone but quickly realizing I don’t have that outlet to waste time on, so I shut my phone off and get on with my day. This happened at least a dozen times today, but I’m quickly getting used to the fact that I don’t want Facebook in my life anymore. I just don’t. It’s a waste of time, and it causes more harm than good. I still have Twitter and Instagram, and that’s enough for me. Also, as I wrote about who knows when, I quit reading RSS feeds, and that habit to check my feeds on my phone has gone away, so I know it’s possible. Speaking of that, I replaced some of my sources to email newsletters, and their newsletters are better than the RSS feeds. Most of the sites send a newsletter once a week, while others send them a couple of times a week to daily. I feel like I’m learning more and reading more by doing this, and it feels like I have more time to devote to reading than before. So I know quitting RSS feeds has been super beneficial to me, so I know quitting Facebook will be, too. I’ve also bookmarked and visit those other sites that don’t have newsletters on a regular basis, so I guess I’m not entirely shutting down my compulsivelycheckingtoseewhatsnew tick. I did rediscover the pleasure of visiting websites and noticing their design and style more so than a generic and uniform style from whatever RSS app I used. So another win. Yay.

I don’t know what the point of this entry was other than to prove to my readers that I’m still alive. Still here, you guys.

There he is! I’ve missed him.

I’m happy right now (I’m literally dancing in my seat right now to some Janelle Monae) because I performed my first Insanity workout in over a month, and I feel GREAT. I’m definitely going to be sore tomorrow, but it’ll be a good sore. I know I’ve praised health and fitness here before, but again, oh my god, I forgot how good it feels. I’ll say it: it’s orgasmic.

Okay, okay… seriously, it’s orgasmic.

I’m not back to my stuffed to the gills insanity of before, and I won’t even say that I’m back to some sort of a routine because I’m not. I did wake up this morning at 5 AM (I thought we were being bombed), made my coffee, and I did begin to read the New Yorker, but then I wanted to watch some TV so I watched some TV. I made breakfast, drank more coffee, and went to work. Came back from work, watched another episode of TV, worked out (!!!), showered, made dinner, ate dinner, watched more TV, read a little bit, played some Alto’s Adventure on my iPhone, and now I’m writing. It was a simple day. I hope to do a bit more reading tonight before watching yet another episode of TV (I’m watching the Americans and holy crap it’s good). Maybe tomorrow I’ll do more reading in the morning. Who knows.

I expect to receive two cookbooks and my food processor tomorrow. I don’t know why I thought I would immediately start cooking awesome Paleo foods tomorrow, but I did, and I feel silly. I will examine these books, though, ensure I buy all the ingredients and equipment I need, and then start cooking. I want to cook things I’ve never cooked before in ways I’ve never even thought possible. I want to develop this foundation as best as I can because I want to fall back on it when I don’t feel like working out on any given day. When I feel lazy, I don’t want to go full-lazy, just half-lazy. I still want to be healthy and feeling good. Is that too much to ask?

It’s raining right now, which is kind of ridiculous, but whatever. I kept hearing it was supposed to be an intense fire season this year, but they say that every year it seems. I’m honestly not too antsy to go out, not like I have been in years past, and that’s mostly because I don’t necessarily need the money. It’ll be awesome to pay off some debts and whatnot, but I’m not in want of money. But if I get called out, and I make a a grand here and a grand there, I won’t be complaining. At least I’ll feel good going into it.

God I feel good. I’m going to do this again tomorrow. Hell, I should do this every day. What was that? I did this for over 200 days straight? Shit, well… day 1 is in the bag. Only a shit ton more to go.

Tomorrow I’m going to try to eek out every last ounce of productivity I can get from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep. I’ve been too complacent and lazy these past couple of weeks, and I’m, frankly, fed up with it. I know I’ve written about this a lot only to fail quietly and without any fanfare, but I really hope to change things tomorrow. The few things I’m planning to do is working out, eating better, and reading more. I don’t plan to write yet because I’m in the middle of fire season, and I don’t want to gain momentum only to lose it once I’m called out on a fire. And I don’t feel ready to tackle the rewrite of my novel yet. So many other areas of my life need work and attention before I should delve right into the biggest project of my life.

I cleaned up my phone, my iPad, and my Mac really nicely, and I like the simplicity and focus of it. I deactivated my Facebook account today. I’ve done it many times in the past, but every time I reactivate it, I feel like quitting it again. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s the waste of time it is, its addictiveness, its futility, or something else, but I don’t like it. Granted, I do have that twitch to check it every few minutes, especially when I turn on my phone, but that’s just something I have to slowly control. I’m re-starting Max: 30 again tomorrow. I’m going to go until I’m called out on a fire, and then I’m going to start over again. I’m going to stop starting over once I go through both months without an interruption. While I’m doing that, I’m going to figure out how else to be healthy and fit by doing a lot of research and watching a lot of videos and trying out a lot of things. This needs to be my new lifestyle, and I have to do all the work to make it so.

I haven’t set my alarm for 5 AM for a long, long time, but today I set it again to 5 AM. It’s back to start the day early and well. Instead of writing, though, I’m going to read. That’s why I subscribed to the New Yorker magazine, to read it every morning with a hot cup of coffee and the whole day ahead of me. It’s also why I have so many books, to read them while I can. And since I’m no longer packing my mornings with tasks, like transcribing a book and meditating, I can spend more of it reading, and simply getting a lot of that done in the beginning of the day so I can spend the rest of it trying to live healthily. I’ve also been thinking of writing at night, but I will start experimenting with that later.

For now, I have to regroup and refocus on being the best me I can be. Ever since April, when shit hit the fan, I haven’t been myself. It’s time to buckle up, stop being such a pussy, and get on with it. Hoorah.

I went ahead and bought a food processor along with a couple of Paleo cookbooks. They should arrive on my front door by Tuesday. That should be good timing because I plan to reboot my workout regiment on Monday, and I hope to start fueling my body tasty and healthy meals. I’m going to try to be as serious about cooking as I’ve ever been with anything important in my life. If I need a tool or an ingredient, I’m going to acquire whatever I don’t have and not let anything stop me from cooking. I haven’t weighed myself since June 1st, over a month ago, and I’m afraid to step on the scale since June was very passive fitness-wise. I know, though, that the numbers won’t be too kind on me.

I’ve been in a very minimalistic mood today. I get like this when I need to focus and get more disciplined than I have been. I began by trying to delete as many unnecessary apps on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I like the streamlining process of doing this every now and then as it makes me focus on what I find most essential. I’m even going to try and use the default apps that come on all of these platforms instead of third-party alternatives, just to see if I even need any of these extra features or if a simpler alternative is just fine for my needs. One of those apps is replacing Vesper with the default Notes app. Vesper is iOS only, while the Notes app is available on iOS and the Mac, and that appeals to me more right now. I know the new Notes app in iOS 9 and El Capitan received massive updates that aren’t in the versions I’m using now, but it would be nice to go into these upgrades with momentum.

I guess this only applies to my digital world. In the physical world, I’m adding more stuff, but more stuff that will be beneficial and useful. Books and kitchen gadgets seem necessary. I still don’t have a TV… yet. My mind has been dwelling on moving for so long now that I think it’s going to happen, and today I even considered LA as a viable option. Yes, it’ll be more expensive, but if I find a good IT job there, maybe things won’t be so bad. But it’s LA and there are millions of people there, a good fraction of those looking for jobs in the IT field, so maybe that won’t be a viable option. I don’t know. If only things didn’t require so much money…

Oh, before I forget to mention, I’m fazing out all non-Paleo foods from my diet in an attempt to go full-on Paleo for the foreseeable future. I’ve been eating a lot of wheat this past month, and, although delicious, it has made me feel very bloated and soft. Time to go back to an all-natural and very physically active lifestyle. It’s time to settle down and focus.

I spent the first half of my day at work unpacking and setting up 22 new desktops for one of the computers labs we have at school. I spent the first hour or so unplugging the old computers and cleaning up the surfaces they were on. It then took me a few hours to simply unpack everything and plug them all in. I then had to join them all into our domain, set them up properly in Active Directory, and finally make sure SCCM worked correctly on all of them. It did. This was the first time I’ve ever done this, and it was easy, after it was all said and done, but it took me a long time. Well… the new superintendent thought I did it really fast. All about perceptions, I guess.

I started to watch Wayward Pines on Hulu, and I was hooked immediately. It’s about this secret service agent, played by Matt Dillon (!), who’s investigating the disappearance of two agents. He tracks them to Wayward Pines, but he’s involved in a car crash, and he wakes up in a hospital, and that’s where things start getting weird. It’s an amazing mystery show, and it’s so much fun getting caught up in the mystery and how all the answers they give us only make us ask more questions. It reminds me a bit of Lost and Twin Peaks, which is awesome.

One of my favorite songs on Miguel’s new album is “what’s normal anyway” simply because it describes exactly my feelings from the past few weeks. I don’t belong here; hell, I don’t know if I’ve ever found a place I truly belong in. College was the closest thing, but I was such a different person back then, so shy and quiet, that I didn’t live it up as much as I wished I did. Now, I’m in Montana, not sure what I’m doing anymore. I like my job, and I like the money it gives me, and it sure beats McDonald’s, but this is not a place for me to set down roots in. This is more of a town you pass through than settle down in. It’s even on a damn highway, so even its early settlers thought so.

I know I should stop bitching about that. I’m slowly trying to figure out what to do. Grad school is always there, but I don’t feel as confident as I used to that I will get in to any school. I still need to go through the process of applying, and I don’t even know how well I’m going to do with that. No, part of me wants to stuff my car with all my stuff, rent a U-Haul to shove the rest of it in, and drive somewhere new. Chicago and Seattle are close and New York City seems so tempting. These are just feelings, though, and I know how fleeting they are. I know that about myself, which is great. Not many people know themselves. I guess not everyone’s normal.

I’ve been up since 2 AM because I drank a full bottle of wine last night while watching my friends new movie Dude Bro Party Massacre III which was insanely funny but it didn’t help my body not feel dehydrated which is why I woke up at 2 AM and wasn’t able to fall back to sleep but it turned out to be okay because I watched Beyond the Lights on Netflix and I loved it especially Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s magnificent performance and beautiful voice and then my alarm went off at 5 AM and I made my coffee and made breakfast and tried to take a nap afterwards but I didn’t feel too good so I couldn’t really nap before work which I went back to today and I was tired and cranky but happy to be back and going through my old routine again which is what I needed especially after the horribleness of the fire I got off of earlier this week and I’m listening to Miguel’s Wildheart album right now and holy shit it’s amazing.

I took a nap a few hours ago and it felt good but it just made me even more tired and all I want to do right now is slide underneath my blanket and fall asleep in my bed but I have to write this entry first and I also just started watching Catastrophe on Amazon Prime and it’s one of the most hilarious shows I’ve seen in a long time so I’m going to watch one or two more episodes of that before closing my eyes and calling Day 305 lived and done which turned out to be a day with few revelations other than the fact that I should never ever drink a full bottle of wine in one night regardless if I’m watching my very talented friend’s new movie.

One recurring thought that’s been dominating my mind lately is how much I don’t belong here. I need to be somewhere creative, with other artists, with people to talk to about my craft and their art and a place where I can simply create and be in an environment that cultivates that while I’m also out there trying to make a living. I really want to move to New York but I haven’t thought it through completely, and I’m afraid I don’t really want to go to New York but simply want to leave my current home for something different. My decision would be easier if I didn’t have such a good job. If I still worked at McDonald’s, this decision would be much easier. But I don’t, and I need to make a living to pay off bills and loans and debts. I don’t want to be one of those adults who said goodbye to their dreams simply because they wanted to live a certain way or could only live a certain way. I want to write and be published and get paid for creating. That’s what I want and that’s what I’m going to fight for.

I’m better than them. That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot for the past few days, with them referring to pretty much every member of the 10-person crew I was out fighting fire with the past two days. There was nobody on that fire I actually liked, and it all started with the crew boss, who wasn’t even a qualified crew boss but a trainee, with this being his first fire out on his own. Last year, he was involved in a drug bust of sorts where him and another firefighter were taken to take drug tests. This trainee was able to procure urine from another firefighter, which helped him pass his test. The other man, not so much. But this man didn’t go down without a fight. He said he wasn’t the only firefighter doing drugs, which prompted the administration to require a drug test from everyone with one caveat: if you refused to take the test, you would be banned for only one year, whereas if you took the test and failed, you would be banned for life. Around ten firefighters refused to take the test, so they were all banned to fight fire this year.

Everyone except this trainee.

He was lazy and useless and completely oblivious over what to do, and his lack of discipline and laziness permeated throughout the crew, causing us to, I think, leave the fire early over incompetence. We could’ve been up there longer if we were more competent. But we weren’t. That pissed me off. Another thing that pissed me off was the fact that our small 10 man crew contained 5 rookies, 1 lazy crew boss trainee, 1 man who had spent the last 5 years in prison, 1 man who has been doing this for years but liked to hear himself talk more than work, 1 second year veteran who intentionally made himself vomit after every meal because he wanted to lose weight, and me. I tried to teach these rookies — who had zero experience on a mountain since their rookie class didn’t have any training on the mountain due to new restrictions enforced by the government — how to fight fires, but they were either too stupid to listen or too stubborn to listen to me. I would teach them something and the very next second they would do something I explicitly told them not to do. I would teach them again, but I could see in their faces that they didn’t give a shit. Eventually, I didn’t give a shit either. I went off on my own and worked the fire my way.

The fire pissed me off, so when I came home last night (like I said yesterday) all I wanted to do was rest and watch TV. I completely forgot about my obligation to write. I don’t know if this misstep will color the rest of my entries in a negative light, but I hope it doesn’t. I simply forgot. Life got in the way. I didn’t intentionally miss my writing session out of laziness or whatever. It simply slipped my mind.

I go back to work tomorrow. I hope a return to my regular routine — with hopefully a renewed focus to do more — will bring a sense of normalcy back into my life. Fire season is heating up, and I don’t know what I want to do. The only reason I want to keep fighting is for that extra influx of cash that I can use to pay off some debts. I don’t know if going out there on the mountain and camping out with a hit-or-miss crew is enticing anymore. The shit these men talk about all the fucking time is mind-numbing. Drugs, bitches, or crime. That’s all. If not crime, then about how masculine they are. It’s juvenile, and I’m so damn tired of it. This is definitely not my crowd, and it only took me four years to figure that out. Damn.

I have this overwhelming amount of guilt weighing on my shoulders right now because I completely forgot to write Tuesday’s entry once I got home from the fire. The fire ended with a whimper and not with a bang, and the quality of the crew matters a whole lot more than I imagined it would. This was the worst time I’ve ever had on a fire, and it made me severely question my continued involvement to firefighting this summer. I came home tired and sore and cranky and all I wanted to do was shower and lie in bed watching the Good Wife. I did, and I completely forgot about my authorial duties.

But…

I’m going to give myself a pass on this one. I’m posting this entry as if I wrote it the night I was supposed to when in fact I’m writing it at 9:17 AM on Wednesday morning. I will write tonight’s entry tonight and continue with my goal of 365 straight entries. The entry I wrote on Monday I actually did write on Monday, in my tent, after coming off the mountain tired and sweaty and stinky. I will have more to say about this tonight, but for now, I’m sorry. I really didn’t make it to 365 days, and that sucks because my mind was somewhere else. Firefighting does that. Man…

It’s 8:21 PM on the 6th of July. I’m somewhere in Jocko fighting a paltry 1 acre fire that we lined, contained, and pretty much finished today. It looks like we’ll be going home soon, most likely even tomorrow. There is zero reception up here, so I’m unable to post an entry tonight. Rest assured, dear readers, that I’m truly writing this on the day in question on my phone using my beloved Vesper app.

The first fire of the season is always a struggle because your body is not used to hiking up an arduous mountain while you’re geared up with 45 pounds of weight. We all had to stop every few minutes to simply take a breath and regroup. Once we finished the hike into the fire, though, we all seemed to get used to the physicality of the job. At least I did.

The fire was small. As I said earlier , it was only 1 acre, but it didn’t mean we had nothing to do. Digging line around a 1 acre fire is still digging like around a 1 acre fire. Some of us, which includes me, had to carry a 45 pound bladder bag with us, but as we used it to spray down hotspots and the like, the weight reduced and lightened. Carrying one of these suckers for a few hours inures you to the pain, and you actually get used to it pretty quickly. When mine ran out, I felt so light that I felt like I was going to float away.

My last fire was about ten months ago, and for about 8 of those months, I was in the best shape of my life. It’s been the last few months where I regressed tremendously on all my progress. Either that, or I’m getting older. I should’ve been in better shape, but I wasn’t and I still worked my ass off to get the job done. The rookies, on the other hand…

There’s nothing like a hard day’s work. I feel tired and achy and wonderful. I feel good. My muscles are hurting and I’m all sweaty and stinky and I know I’m going to have a great nights sleep on this very hard and uncomfortable ground. I’m going back to working my ass off when I go home because I know how good I’ll feel afterward. I know how wishy-washy that sounds, but if I can only remember how good I feel right now (and after every workout) I know how much I need to earn that. We’ll see.

All in all, first day of fire season was fun and I can’t wait to see what the rest of the season will bring.

Well… here we go again.

I’ve been thinking a lot about food. I’ve been thinking a lot about food because it’s the one area of my life that I’ve always struggled with. I keep thinking that if I simply ate better during the past few months, particularly during my non-workout weeks, I wouldn’t have gained much, if any, weight. If I also ate better during my workout months, I’ve been thinking, I probably wouldn’t have stopped working out since I would’ve felt and looked better than I did. Food is the most important force in the universe, at least to me. My whole life revolves around it, for better or worse.

So I’ve been thinking about my kitchen. During my shopping sprees, I’ve been focusing on my living room/bedroom. I’ve been neglecting my kitchen. I’ve been cooking on a degrading and very frustrating to cook on frying pan for almost three years now. I need a new frying pan, and I want a high quality one, and that’s going to set me back over $100. I’ve been yearning to start grinding my own coffee beans and making different types of coffee, but a good grinder will set me back over $200, and purchasing whole coffee beans will probably cost more than the cheap stuff I buy at Safeway. New gear, new reusables and perishables, more money. I’ve also, for the longest time, wanted to buy a food processor, but again, a good one is expensive, over $100 in this case.

I’ve read a lot of diet and exercise books, and in them, many people keep saying that gear does not matter. Don’t not run because you don’t have the right running shoes and running shorts and you don’t have the right size and color headband or the best route to run in or whatever. Excuses. Just run. The same argument can be made here with me: just cook. I have been just cooking, and I’ve been doing okay, but I want to do more. I want to build up, and that costs money. For the past three years, I’ve cooked, I’m guessing, 95-98% of all of my meals. Now I want a frying pan and a food processor and a better potato peeler and can opener and a handful of other utensils and tools because I want to be more comfortable in the kitchen and not fighting myself.

I want to cook through entire cookbooks, like Julie from that Julie & Julia movie. I want to make sauces and entrées and salads and breakfasts I’ve never made before. I want to know that when I get hurt or I’m just not feeling a workout on any particular day, I can always fall back on my diet and ensure I’m not hurting my health or myself in any way. I don’t want what has happened to me these past few months to happen again, and the best way to do that is to build a foundation that is rock-solid and unimpeachable.

But, again, it all comes down to money. Everything does. I shouldn’t let money impede me from living a healthy and happy life. I simply can’t. So once fire season starts and ends, I’m upgrading my kitchen. It’s a done deal.