I thought of writing about the concept of being burnt out, but as I kept thinking about it, I totally changed my view on it. I’m tired. I came home from work today ready to watch some TV and then work out after, but as soon as I lied in bed, I grew tired. My eyes would not stay open, and all I wanted to do was sleep. And I did. I took a nap for about fifteen minutes or so, and it felt good, but I knew I had to work out. It was Day 17 of the Asylum program, and I knew I had to see this through. I worked out for about twenty minutes, and I was dead tired and my performance sucked. But then my landlord knocked on my door, and we talked for a good five minutes, giving me a well-needed break. When I got back to my workout, I noticed I performed better. My energy was high, my body was warm, and my motivation was stronger than it was when I first started.

Being burnt out means doing more than just being exhausted. It means losing interest in whatever it is your doing. I’m definitely exhausted, especially when my body feels sore and stiff, and my mentality is just not focused enough to work out. Except, I love it. I love it when I work out, especially right after I’m done, when I know I just did something good for my body. I also love nourishing my body with a healthy shake and a delicious home-cooked meal. That whole routine is a joy to do every day. I thought I was burnt out from writing for my blog every night, and there are times when I don’t want to do it. Once I start, though, I realize how much I love writing. I love writing fiction in the morning, and I love writing about something personal at night. It’s a good way to both start and end my days. I really fucking love it, even though it takes a lot of energy and motivation to just start. But there’s something to be said about writing when you’re tired.

Finally, I like my job. It can be stressful, especially when I’m the only tech guy at the school, so I have no one to talk to and bounce ideas off of, but then again, I have an office all to myself, and I don’t have to talk to anyone about making changes or trying some stuff out. In total, it takes away about nine hours out of every day, but it is my only source of income, which is awesome since the job is both fun and challenging.

These three things are my big rocks. They’re the main things I have to do every day for me to call that day successful. Everything else is just filler. I’ll be adding more things to do later. Some may become big rocks, and others may be real reasons to feel burnt out. I’ll just have to take that wait and see approach with them. In the end, though, I love what I’m doing, and I know that the work doesn’t start until I’m tired.

It’s becoming more difficult to write something new every day while trying my best to not repeat myself. There will be days like this, where nothing eventful happened or where I was too busy to even stop and breathe. Today was one of those days.

It was the first day of a five day weekend for the students at the school, so I had the chance to do some maintenance on the servers. During this, I discovered how long it’s been since any maintenance was done (mainly because the last guy was useless), so this process took me a lot longer than I thought it’d take me. While I dealt with that, I tried breaking into the NAS (network attached storage) that the last guy (again, useless) password protected with a password no one else knew. During that process, I thought I had screwed up and somehow lost everything in those hard drives. I quickly panicked. Every file from every student and teacher was on there, and I thought I lost it all. Luckily, I didn’t lose anything, and I was able to recover quite quickly and get access to the NAS. Now I know what not to do. While all this was going on, I tuned into the Apple keynote and was utterly disappointed at the announcements. I have the iPad Air from last year, and besides the TouchID, the new ones don’t excite me at all. OS X Yosemite is a great update (one I installed at the end of my shift, and thanks to the great battery on my mid-2013 MacBook Air, I was able to install it in my car while I drove home). And the new iMac is way out of my price range for me to even want to want it.

And that’s kinda it. That was my day. It’ll be more of the same tomorrow, except this time I’m going to learn how to quickly deploy about a dozen iPad’s, and see how my servers are doing after the hours of tender, love, and care I gave them today. I worked out¹ , read some more from my book, meditated for 15 minutes, and wrote another 300+ words in my novel.

If I’m being honest with myself, I could’ve been better today. I could’ve read a little more. I could’ve written a little more. I could’ve definitely watched less TV and maybe talked to people. I could’ve done more, and I feel like that all the time.

One of my biggest aspirations in life is to understand integrity. I don’t mean knowing its dictionary definition. I can read dictionary definitions all day¹, but that doesn’t mean I understand the word’s purpose completely. I want to know its application in the lives of men, to know what it means when someone says this person’s integrity was never doubted. I try to be honest with myself and with others as much as possible. I’m not perfect, and its foolish to think I’ll ever be perfect, but that’s always how I understood the meaning of integrity to be. A person full of immutable honesty.

I’ve been told a lot in my life that I’m a good guy. That I’m trustworthy, easy to talk to, and honest. Since we’re shaped by the people we surround ourselves with, I believed them. I began to cherish this trait, and I would take great care to uphold this image my friends created for me. At least that’s how I thought of it. I doubt everything about myself. I don’t remember all the details but a few years ago when I was in college, my friends and I were going to do something special for another friend. I don’t remember if it was her birthday or what, but it was supposed to be a secret. And of course the situation came up when she asked me a question where I had to lie to her to keep this secret, and so I did. Later on, when the secret was revealed and she realized I had a hand in it, she told me that she couldn’t believe I lied to her. It was a white fucking lie, but I did lie nonetheless. I still feel bad about it. I used to lie profusely when I was younger, mostly because I liked crafting the lie and getting away with it. It meant the lie worked, that it was believable. Lying is fiction, and I love writing fiction. No matter how hard I try to be as honest as I possibly can, though, I will always have my doubts because of the life I’ve led.

I’ve lied before, and I know I will lie in the future. Yet I still aspire to lead a life of integrity. As I understand it, that means living honestly. It means being hard on myself, especially when I know I’m giving myself bogus excuses to not do something when I know if I just start, the doing of it will be easy. It means being honest with the people in my life. Most of them like me for who I am so lying seems pointless to me. If they don’t like the truth, I guess they can just go fuck themselves. It also means living a life that I want to lead, and that’s not dictated by anyone else. If you offer me a drink, I will say no. If you tell me to live a little, I will tell you I’m living a lot. It means being true to who I want to be and coming closer toward becoming the man I know I can be.

Yet I still don’t know what the fuck integrity means. That’s where goal #3 comes in: start building the framework to what my personal philosophy can be. This obviously needs a lot more thought. That’s what I have the next three weeks for.

I call her maybe five times a week, but since she blocked my number on her iPhone, my calls go straight to her voicemail. In the beginning, I kept calling her because I was hoping that maybe she unblocked my number, and we could finally talk. But as the days keep ticking up, I find myself calling her out of routine rather than the sheer desire to talk to her. The same cycle repeats when I’m on Facebook. She blocked me from there, too, and I keep typing her name, hoping that her picture will pop up at the top of the results. She doesn’t and part of me doesn’t care anymore. That’s a good thing — hell, it’s a fucking great thing. Yet, I still feel blue about it.

Change sucks. We are all hardwired to love and desire a homeostatic existence, and we fight anything that threatens that. It’s been 37 days since I last talked to her, but it’s been 83 days since I last saw her. Yes, I know the last day I saw her. It was July 24th. That was the last day we hung out, and I wrote about it in my private journal. I guess it took me a little over six weeks to ruin our relationship. It went from such a great height to a low I never want to experience again. Life without her was hard in the beginning, and I still find myself wishing she was here with me, but I’ve grown accustomed to her absence. Hell, I’m on a journey to be better than I’ve ever been in my life, and that’s been difficult to sustain over the past five weeks, yet I’m still on the road.

I didn’t want to do my duties today because I was tired and unmotivated. Fall is here, and that brings both a colder climate and new television shows. All I’ve wanted to do for the past week is lie in bed, cuddle up beneath my blankets, and watch some TV. I even bought hot chocolate packets last week to satisfy this picture. But I can’t stop now. I’m literally just getting started. I’m only 10% into this one year journey. There’s still so much more to do.

First big thing I wanted to do today was improve my OmniFocus workflow. I’ve mentioned how my whole life is in there. But just like my life, the application was super disorganized. I created a few new perspectives that hopefully helps me tackle that. Only time will tell. I’m excited, though, and I’m sure that’ll last.¹

Reading: The Practice of System and Network Administration (2nd Edition) by Thomas A. Limoncelli, et al. I bought this book today after seeing it come up so many times during multiple sessions of research while at work. It’s huge (at least according to my Kindle), but it contains so much useful information that I’m super eager to get through it quickly. The more I do my job and the more I keep learning about it, the more I’m loving what this job is and what it could be. I feel fortunate and lucky to have found this job when I did.

One day, all this, all these things I’m doing every day, from writing to working out to eating right, will end. I know it is. I’m expecting it to end. I can’t keep it up forever, nor do I want to. I’m getting tired. Sometimes I want to sleep early, but because I have to do things I know I need to do, I don’t, so I pry open my heavy eyelids and push through the fatigue. So, part of my drive, especially recently, after all that excitement waned, has been to push myself as hard as possible so I can take a break at some future date and not regress that much, if at all.

By essentially making my journal public and writing it all on a blog, I intended to make this new exposure a catalyst toward forcing me to change, to keep me accountable to my actions in some form. I don’t want to disappoint anyone, and I’ve learned that that drive is stronger than my own internal drive that cares whether I disappoint myself or not. Call it a personality quirk. For so long I’ve kept many of these actions and methods to myself. Nobody cared if I worked out or didn’t work out today, my past self believed, because nobody knew I set that goal in the first place. Same thing with every other goal I’ve ever set for myself. It’s different now. No matter how much I want to quit — to go have that drink or to lie in bed all day and not do a damn thing — I feel responsible to this somewhat imaginary public I’m spewing my words onto. I know most of you guys reading this are friends or family, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that I’m opening up so much of myself to an essentially anonymous readership.

I gained 2.8 lbs in the last week. I’m 99% sure that most of that was muscle, but I still feel bad about it. I’m going up when my goal was to go down. I feel stronger, and I feel fitter than I have in a long time, but I don’t see that right now. I’ve always had body image issues, and now I see this bigger weight when I look at myself in the mirror. It’s ridiculous, I know it is, but it’s a genuine emotion I don’t know how to handle. Going back to pushing myself as hard as possible before I inevitably regress, I’m going to keep working out and drinking my protein powder enhanced shakes so my muscles can benefit with that pure influx of extra protein. My first check should be coming in on Wednesday. I can use that peace of mind to focus myself on bettering my diet because I know it’s not as good as it could be. I also want to buy stuff for my house because… this actually deserves a new paragraph.

I have no idea if I’ll ever see her again, but I big reason why I needed to start this blog and needed to start improving myself as much as I can is because if we ever saw each other again, I wanted to show her that I didn’t need her. I want to make her jealous. I want to look amazing, I want to be amazing, and I want to show her that I’ve moved on. Part of that means furnishing my stark home with some expensive items and some creativity. And that my new job is amazing, it pays way better, and I can actually afford some of these choices. It’s petty but oh so human.

And if I’m nothing else, I’m human, flaws and all.

One of the key people that I looked up to when I first started on this journey five years ago was Bruce Lee, the philosopher. Years before, when I went to college, I bought Bruce Lee: Artist of Life, a book that collected his essays on all facets of life, primarily self-improvement and spirituality. In it, he writes about the beauty of water. He talked about this in an interview from 1971. Basically, water is fluid, and it becomes whatever it’s contained in. One of my biggest problems — and one of my goals to improve upon — is that my lifestyle is rigid. It’s not fluid. It doesn’t flow like water. If something happens where I’m away from my house during the night (I get a girlfriend, I’m out late with friends, or something else), I won’t be able to do half of my habits and routines. I work out, read, and write in this blog at night. Since I wake up so early so I can write in my novel, I need to go to bed early so I can get my sleep. But I’ve packed so much into my days that there’s no room for variation.

I talked to an old friend today who I met during my college days. I’ve known her for over ten years now, which makes me feel old. I expressed this fear to her today, this rigidity in my life, and I started to brainstorm some simple solutions. I’ve been meaning to write these blog entries in the morning, most likely after writing my novel. I’ve always wanted to work out in the mornings, but they’re usually always so packed already that I can never fit it in. And I can read throughout the day, regardless of where I am or what time it is. These are easy because these tasks, although essential and important to me in so many ways, are really my default tasks. They are my big rocks that I have to do every day. Like I’ve mentioned before, I’m afraid that my life will turn monotonous. What that means is that I won’t improve upon what I’ve already built because how my days are currently structured aren’t fluid enough to change.

How can I live a more fluid life? I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself (how many times have I written that?). My friend expressed surprise when she said that she can’t believe I’m really trying to write 365 consecutive entries on this blog. “That’s commitment,” she said. I don’t want to skip a day writing, but should I be more lenient in other facets of my life? Can I not work out one day?¹ Can I eat out once a week or so and not be so obsessive about my weight? My gut tells me no, and frankly, I don’t want to. I’m afraid if I let go of one thing, I’ll let go of others. Maybe I’ll think drinking is a good idea again. Maybe I’ll try to get back in touch with her in some way. One bad decision will lead to many more, and I know I have more control over myself than that, but that’s my fear.

What exactly am I afraid of? Regressing, maybe. I don’t want to be Sisyphus. I want to better, whatever that entails. And part of finding out is studying water and seeing how I can be more like it.

I thought I was done with Windows. When I bought my MacBook Air last year, I decided to go all in into the Apple ecosystem. I was tired of troubleshooting Windows, diagnosing BSODs, error codes, sluggishness, etc. I wanted something that just worked, where I didn’t have to focus on any sort of troubleshooting and just get on with my life. For the most part, that plan actually worked. I barely do any sort of maintenance or troubleshooting on my Mac because everything has just worked. I’ve bought so much software that do various things, and my life — geekily enough — has just felt better. And that’s just on the Mac. With iOS 8 and the upcoming release of Yosemite, the integration between my Mac, my iPhone, and my iPad just got better. I love being able to take phone calls on my iPad when that’s the device I’m using. I love closing tabs in Safari on my iPad from my iPhone. That’s just cool. However, because of my job, I have had to jump back onto the Windows train.

And I kind of like it.

I’ve been doing so much research the past few weeks on advanced level, Windows-only topics like Group Policy, Active Directory, network protocols, and even some scripting and PowerShell, topics I have no use for on my Mac yet mean a lot on Windows, and I’m really loving every minute of it. A few days ago, an English teacher came to me and told me she wasn’t able to access the internet. I went to her classroom and checked out her laptop. While I was having trouble connecting to the internet myself, the teacher told me a few of her students weren’t able to logon either. Curious, I checked my laptop and my iPhone: both devices connected to the internet just fine. Other students connected just fine, too. Intrigued, I tried a few things. First, I logged out of her account and logged into the admin one. I opened the Command Prompt, tried a few commands (ipconfig and the like), and nothing. Nothing seemed to be wrong with any of the settings, the adapter card was working just fine, it just wasn’t connecting to the server. My next course was Google. For the next half hour or so, I researched the symptoms, formed my own hypothesis, observed other people’s similar problems, experimented with their solutions, failed to connect, so I tried another hypothesis, tested it, failed, tried again. Since I knew it was a network problem, I thought maybe the laptop’s wireless card — even though Windows told me it was fine — was at fault somehow. So, I went to my office, grabbed an ethernet cord, walked back to the classroom (which ended since I took so long troubleshooting), hardwired the laptop to the internet, and voilà. It worked. Again, curious, I disconnected the wire and tried the wireless. It worked, too. The teacher thanked me and I left. I was unsatisfied, though, because I didn’t know why that worked. This problem might come up again, and I want to know how to fix it and know why that solution works.

I miss this. I miss being a detective. I know that might be corny or whatever, but I always felt good when I solved problems like this. I love using the scientific method to test and try out new things and new ways of looking at things and seeing how it works. And this doesn’t just apply to computers. I stopped experimenting with myself. That might sound kind of cold or something, but listen: how do you know what you’re capable of if you don’t push yourself past your limit? How do you know what your limit is without testing yourself? For years I knew part of my weight problem was because of my diet. I spent years reading health books and researching diets and recipes and whatever else I needed to do to eat right, but for those years, I failed. Nothing seemed right to me, and there was always too much friction when it came to eating right. That is, until I discovered the Paleo diet. The Paleo diet is the simplest diet to understand because it just makes sense to me. Eat what our ancestors ate: fruits, veggies, meat, seafood, and nuts. No dairy, no wheat, no processed foods, no trans fats. I read a few books, the Paleo Diet and the Paleo Solution, and I gave it a shot. I lost a lot of weight. Since 2011, I’ve lost over 60 pounds, and I believe a good chunk of that is a direct result of my trying the Paleo diet. I wasn’t a perfect Paleo eater — far from it — but I focused on the basics, tried my best, and saw the results. I’ve been struggling with this diet recently, though, but I’ve been curious about something.

What if I’m perfectly Paleo like 80% of the time, and I eat some comfort foods the other 20%? Will I gain weight, lose weight, or stay about the same? I won’t know unless I experiment. That’s the fun part. That’s the part I miss. I’m afraid of monotony. Monotony breads complacency, which means I’ll just stay the same forever. I don’t want that. I want to keep pushing myself. And the best way to do that is to troubleshoot my life. Geeky, I know. But if it works for me, it works for me.

Organization is important to me. I don’t just need to know where everything is, I also have to know that everything’s organized in the best and most efficient way possible. I would love to have every aspect of my life follow these parameters, but I don’t. It seems like once I get one thing organized just the way I want it, I have to inevitably start using it in some way, causing it to become disorganized unless I’m actively maintaining it. Maintenance is one of the worst things in the world. I hate maintenance with a fucking passion. For example, my todo list. No matter how much time I’ve spent organizing these tasks into just the right lists with just the right contexts, the system requires I keep adding tasks because life keeps going. Every new item needs to be processed, and if I don’t spend the minimal time-cost upfront, I’m going to be expending so much time and sanity, as each unprocessed task nags at me, no matter how minimally. So how can I remedy this?

One thing I’ve found that works for me are habits and routines. If I make it a habit to process each item that comes into my todo list just as I’m adding it, then I don’t have to worry that my todo list is disorganized. Since those tasks are all processed, my mind is free to think about other things, like sex and shopping. Unfortunately, I’m not always good at this. And I’ve unfairly singled out my todo list. My OmniFocus database is arguably the most important system I have going for me since my whole life is in there. It’s really my personal assistant, always telling me what to do next. What made me bring this up is work. My predecessor left me a list of IP addresses for every single device on the network, and he typed it up in a simple Word document. I hate Word with a passion. Sorry, with a fucking passion. This is a screenshot of Scrivener in Compose mode (how I write all my blog entries):

Notice how simple that is. Just me and my text. Nothing else. And here’s that Word document my predecessor gave me:

It’s atrocious. Yuck. And look how dense all that information is. My eyes glazed over when I first saw this. Fortunately, thanks to another program by the same makers of OmniFocus, I can organize this information in a very readable and effective way. The program is OmniOutliner. All OmniOutliner focuses on are, simply enough, outlines. Here’s the same IP Schemes document in OmniOutliner:

See how I can collapse and expand rows to show me just what I want to see? See how I can also customize it with colors and different fonts at each level in the outline? Dense information should be broken up into smaller pieces, and it should be organized in a way that helps you understand the information rather than producing friction. The same thing for life.

Here come the three pillars again: mind, body, spirit. Three areas, each with a different focus than the other, each with its own organizational structure. That’s how I try to organize my life. I’m not good at this yet, but I have noticed how much more focused it makes me feel. When I’m disorganized and unfocused, I’m aimless. When I’m aimless, I get depressed. When I’m depressed, I contemplate suicide. That’s a path I don’t like being on. Am I saying this organizational fetish I have is a life or death situation for me?

Yes.

No, not really. But it helps me stay happy if I keep working at it. So I just have to keep moving because if I stop, I die. Like Crank. But not really. Well, maybe a little bit.

The process of creating all these entries, even going back to when I journaled privately, has always been the same: me, a blank page, and no idea what the hell I’m going to write. I’m not sure if this is a thing, or if this describes all writers by some inherent property in the actual act of writing, but I feel like I’m a writer that discovers what I’m going to say by actually writing. I don’t outline, I don’t plan, I just write. That’s actually how I’m writing the second draft of my novel, even though I really, really wanted to outline and plan the shit out of it. I think I’m doing okay, though. I think this trait — personality trait? — describes me, in a sense.

When I’m with people, I like being quiet and simply listening to them talk. I’ll contribute something if I have something to say, but mostly, I just like to listen. I usually don’t like contributing, especially when I have nothing to say, which mostly means, I have nothing of value to say. Most people will say that when they talk, they usually don’t think whether or not what they’re saying has any value. They just say what’s on their mind. I’ve definitely been in those situations when I talk, where the words come out of my mind faster and before the actual thought forms in my head. This happened a lot with her, which is why I still miss her. Is it a form of comfortability with people? I’ve been embarrassed (not sure if that’s the right word — ashamed?) of my shyness before, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve adapted and actually consider it one of my more valuable traits. Is that arrogant to say? Well, fuck you, I don’t care. I think it’s one of my more valuable traits because how many people actually just stop and listen? And how many people just say shit just because they want to say something?

Obviously I’m not saying I’m perfect at this. I’m most definitely not. I bring it up because I’m growing more comfortable with my coworkers at work, and I’ve noticed myself opening up more, joking around and stuff. I feel happy right now, and I have felt happy all day, and I think this is a strong contributing factor affecting my mood. Another one is working out. And yet another one is that my novel is just clicking right now. At least I think so, as well as one other friend¹. I’m happy, and that is such a precious joy to me because I’ve been unhappy a lot these past few months. Days like this, where I just feel good, are valuable to me. They’re moments and feelings I try to tap into when I’m down, and I can never build up a large enough stockpile of them. And this blog…

I have readers! I still can’t believe that shit. Thank you everyone for reading. That has contributed a lot to my mood these past few weeks, and for that, I want to thank you all. I know we’re not alone as we struggle to live our lives the way we want. We all face the same hardships and obstacles, but we also face the same euphoric highs and long streaks of plain happiness. One of my favorite quotes of all time is by Socrates²:

The unexamined life is not worth living.

I wrote that on the front page of my first Moleskine journal, and it’s something I’ve tried to live by and continue to live by for the rest of my life. I think it’s so important to understand ourselves first before we attempt to understand the world, and it’s always going to be a struggle balancing both. But as long as we try, we’ll be the better for it.

I almost didn’t workout today. On my way home from work, I remembered that I forgot to pick up my MacBook’s power charger from my office. I figured I didn’t need it, so I left it. While at home, I realized how much power-intensive tasks I do, and I didn’t want to run out of juice and not be able to write tomorrow morning. So I drove back to work, which is a twenty mile drive round-trip. Half an hour later, with power charger in hand, I returned home, tired, annoyed, and very unmotivated. I thought about not working out. I felt like one cheat day wasn’t going to kill me. It was also the Asylum’s Back to Core workout, which is one of my least favorite workouts because it’s one of the toughest. For those that don’t know, these Asylum workouts average around 45 minutes apiece. It was already close to six when I got back. My bedtime’s ten. I still needed to shower, eat, read, and write. I have to pack so much in such a short amount of time. Since I wake up at five every morning to write, I need some time to sleep. In the end, though, I worked out, and I performed really well. I really feel stronger, and the only thing that’s changed are those whey protein powder shakes. I think they’re really making a difference. Not so much aesthetically, however, but I’ll get there.

I haven’t made any progress on the goals I made with myself yesterday. I don’t feel too bad about that yet. They’re in my OmniFocus inbox, ready to be processed. Today was just busy at work. There seems to be a new problem with Infinite Campus every day, and those usually take priority over everything else. It’s really the school’s heart. Everything happens there: grades, attendance, rosters, etc. I’ve also been learning and getting into the Group Policy Manager in Windows Server 2012. This is where I manage all the users and all the computers on the school’s network. My predecessor organized this in a weird way, and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it. There are some groups he should’ve created, and others that don’t mean anything or are redundant. There are some rules that he thinks affect only a small subset of users (hence those groups he should’ve created but didn’t), but instead affect all authenticated users. He was smart enough to pretty much install the whole network while he was here, so I figured there was a reason for his madness, but I’ve yet to figure that out. I’m also not a Group Policy ninja so there might be something I’m missing. It’s tedious work sometimes, but I’m having fun. I get to geek out at work and get paid for it.

This is another one of those entries. What did I learn today? I have a mind, and I have a heart. They are two entirely different entities and should be equally respected. I’m a heart guy. I didn’t feel like working out, but I knew it would’ve been detrimental to me in my future if I didn’t. So I did. I also know the more I lean toward my mind and ignore my heart, the worse that’ll be for me. I have to find a balance.

How? No fucking clue.