I slept in about an hour and a half this morning, which felt amazing, but once I woke up and started my day, I remembered that I had set up an appointment with the mechanics at 8 AM and I really didn’t want to honor it. Once eight o’clock rolled around, though, I decided that I have to take my car in because of the issues I’ve been having with it. So I get dressed, pack my bag with my laptop and the New Yorker, and I go outside.

A Sheriff’s car was parked in our parking lot, perpendicular to my parked car. I could still pull out if I backed up, pulled forward, backed up, pulled forward, backed up, pulled forward. It was the Sheriff’s, but I was still pissed. So I walk up to my car, and I see two officers get out of the car. They had just pulled in, apparently, and when I see the main sheriff walk out and we see each other, I saw that I recognized him. He’s the cop in charge of my school where I work. He makes fun of me for living where I do, and he tells me he’s here to kick one of my neighbors out because someone has a restraining order on them and their home is inside the unauthorized distance of the victim or something. He goes up to talk to them and I go into my car.

I turn the ignition and nothing happens. This happened yesterday, so I thought I’d repeat what I did then. I let the car cool a bit, a few seconds, then I tried again. Nothing. No lights turned on and there simply wasn’t any sign of life. I keep trying for the next few minutes, pumping the gas, pumping the brakes, trying everything I could to get it to run. Nothing. At this point, the Sheriff walks out of the apartment, his partner still inside, and he comes over to talk to me. “What’s going on?” he asks. “Don’t know,” I say. He takes a look at my car, notices that nothing happens when I turn the ignition, and tells me it could be the battery. So he pulls around and parks his car near my hood, pulls out some jumper cables, and we hook them up to my battery and his battery.

After letting it idle for a few minutes, I try the ignition again and stuff starts happening. Lights turn on, the car seems like it wants to start but doesn’t. The sheriff tells me to wait about 5 minutes so the battery can charge. We do and still nothing. All my lights are on, and I can play radio and whatnot, but the car won’t start. During all this time, I noticed this solid red light at the top right of my dashboard every time I go to turn on the car. I call the mechanics and tell them that I had an appointment but that I wasn’t able to make it yet because I can’t get my car started. They tell me it could be the security system.

When this happened to me yesterday, I noticed everything in my car was reset. The clock on the radio read 12:00, so I assumed something was up, but I, for some reason, assumed it was the computer system and not the battery. This morning the same thing happened, the clock on the radio read 12:00. Maybe, the mechanic said, when the battery shut off and reset everything, it reset the security system, too. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do anything about it because my car fob doesn’t work, which I bitched about all way back in December. I told the sheriff what the mechanic told me, and he thought we should disconnect the battery cables and then try it again. By this point, we both noticed that the cables looked really corroded, and it took a bit of effort to disconnect them, but once he did, we waited. After about 20 seconds, he connected them back, pinned the jumper cables back onto the battery, and I tried again.

The car started beautifully. I thanked the Sheriff profusely for helping me out. He said it was fine for all the times I helped him out with his computer at school. We said our goodbyes, I drove to the mechanics, and I dropped my car off. About 4-5 hours later, I returned with a working car. Sure enough, the thing they had to do was replace those battery cables because they were too corroded to work well anymore. It cost me $86, which is a far cry from the $690 I paid a few weeks ago to get my power steering pump and switch replaced.

I hope this really is the last time I have to take my car into the mechanics this year. First California in January, then Montana in January, then two more times in July. I’m done with these car problems. It has motivated me, though, to do regular maintenance on my car. If I simply popped the hood and looked at the battery, I could’ve noticed the corrosion. I didn’t. I need to learn more about this. I’m tired of feeling so helpless when it comes to my car.

I’m taking the next two days off from work because the floors outside of my office are being redone, which means I can’t use my office until they’re done, which won’t be until Friday.

A few updates:

Insanity Max: 30 is still going strong. I finished Day 16 today. Tabata Strength. It was fun and hard and sweaty. I seem to be stuck around the 177 pound mark for the past few weeks, which I don’t like. On the bright side, my weight’s not going up.

I’m still cooking, even if I haven’t posted any pictures or anything about what I’m eating. To be honest, the meals I’ve made haven’t looked too pretty or anything. Maybe when I make something new, or when I make my next thing, I’ll take a picture of it and post it. I like the few pictures I took a few weeks ago of my food, so it’s just a matter of trying and doing it.

My Headspace meditation went well today, but I’m a bit disappointed that the sessions are only ten minutes, but then again, I’m not. I could definitely go for longer, but then I like that they’re short because it’s easier to stick with it. I’ll reconsider my options once the ten days are finished. Will I subscribe to Headspace at $95/year? Or will I simply use a timer and meditate on my own? Don’t know.

My car is having more issues. This morning, I stuck the key in the ignition and turned it, but nothing happened. All the lights on the dash flashed but they disappeared quickly. I turned off the ignition, tried again, and still nothing happened. So I turned the key to off again and just waited. While I did, my radio turned on. None of the lights were lit on the radio, but my radio was able to play music from my phone. It freaked me out. After this, I turned on the ignition again, held it for a few seconds, and the car finally started. The drive to work was a little scary but I was able to make it safely. I’m probably going to take it to the shop tomorrow (again) and have them diagnose the issues. I really want this fixed. I daydreamed on the drive to work that my car would stall or roll or turn off somehow and I would get into a crash and that would be the end of my story. It was morbid, but it was a valid fear. I’m in debt, but I don’t care: I want my car fixed if it means I’ll still be alive. Don’t want it to end just yet.

Other than the time spent at work and the half hour of so of playing games on my phone and reading the New Yorker in the morning, that was my day, in a nutshell. Windows 10 comes out tomorrow, and when I get back to work, I’m going to see if I can install it on my work laptop and dual boot it with Windows 8. Fun times.

It’s raining, and that pisses me off because my fire season is almost over and all this rain isn’t doing me any favors.

Week 3 of Insanity Max: 30 started off without a hitch, and I feel good right now. Yesterday I made guacamole from my Nom Nom Paleo cookbook, and it has to be the best thing I’ve ever made in my life because OH. MY. GOD. was it tasty. The flavors just exploded in my mouth and it made life totally worth living, and it was a little bit chunky, which I love, and damn, my mouth is salivating just thinking about it. I’m really enjoying these new recipes, especially when it comes to using my food processor because it’s easy to make some really healthy and delicious dishes. Sometimes this week I’m going to try to make this recipe, which looks amazingly delicious but kind of involved to make. We’ll see what happens.

The end of yesterday’s post made me think about my routines again. The original plan a few months ago was to “start over,” in a sense, by removing my regular routines and slowly introducing things back, just to see what it was that I felt I needed back into my life. I’ve been reading a lot more, and that just came naturally. I didn’t have to force it or anything. Then working out came back, and that I did have to force because I knew that I wouldn’t want to work out until I was 50 pounds overweight and feeling sorry for myself. So I worked out again, and I’ve written before about the pleasures of that. And a few days ago I reintroduced meditation into my routine, and I’ve already started noticing the changes in my attitude. What hasn’t left is writing, in a sense, considering I haven’t written my novel since finishing it in May. Some old routines that I used to do that haven’t come back are transcribing A Farewell to Arms, writing three things I’m most grateful for, writing the top three things I want to get done in my notebook, and a few other things. Will they ever return? Only if they naturally come back.

As things stand now, I’m happy with my habits and routines. I don’t feel too overwhelmed, which is good because I don’t feel like I’ll burn out soon, but I also don’t feel like I’m producing a lot like I did when I had a novel to work on. Granted, I did want to take the summer off to regroup and come back at it with some amount of time away from it. I used to write my novel in the morning, in the afternoon, and then journal about it right after working out. That all might come back later, but I doubt it. I don’t think I want to write in the morning. I’ll try doing it in the evening, during the time I used to write these entries. By that point, I hope to rethink my whole journaling habit. Read some books, some journals, and see what happens.

The countdown continues: a little over 40 days left until my one year project ends.

One of the few things I started to do when I first began this blog was to meditate every morning. I had been meditating off and on for a few years up to that point, and I’ve racked up some pretty impressive streaks. A couple of hundred days here, another hundred there. So when I knew I wanted to build my new life with a bunch of habits and routines, I knew meditation had to be a part of that. For months and months and months, I woke up every morning, did my daily routines, and I ended it with 15 minutes of meditation. Sometimes I had good days, and sometimes I had bad days, but for the most part, I enjoyed the process of slowing down and trying to quiet my mind for 15 minutes out of the day. So when I stopped meditating last month, I found myself with more time to do less. In fact, I’ve been trying to find all the time in the world so I could do less that I’ve been cutting out habits and routines left and right.

For a while, I felt fine. I can watch TV in the morning again! Oh, how I missed that. I missed drinking a cup of coffee with something to watch. It was one of those old routines that I did so much when I lived with my mom that it reeks of comfort and relaxation. Recently, I tried to sneak in some reading every morning, but that’s been more hit and miss than a solid foundation to rely upon. Sensing the futility of it all, I decided to start meditating again yesterday. One of the new things I learned by reading the New Yorker was about this new app called Headspace. The New Yorker did a profile on the founder, and I found it super interesting because it’s been able to grow to a pretty big user base by word of mouth alone. It offers a subscription service after a free 10 day trial, which I wanted so much to scoff at, but a paid meditation service intrigued me for some reason, so I downloaded the app.

The app sat unused for about two weeks before I finally launched it for real yesterday. The app offers a free 10 day introductory course of 10 sessions of 10 minutes each. So I put on my noise-canceling Bose headphones, sat on my meditation cushion, and opened myself up to be guided by the British founder of Headspace. It didn’t hurt that he had a very soothing voice. The exercise contained nothing new to me. I’ve been a part of real guided meditations before, not to mention all the audio files I’ve downloaded over the years of expert meditation teachers guiding me along with their soothing voices and relaxing sessions. But after finishing the first session, I felt a familiar feeling that I hadn’t felt since quitting last month: that of peace and confidence. I felt confident in my skin like I hadn’t felt in a long time. So I started session two today just to see what that would be like, and this session was even better. It was still only 10 minutes, but there’s something new he does at the end of each session that I’ve never done or learned before, and that’s to let my mind do whatever it wants. So much of meditation is noticing when your mind wanders and having the discipline to focus it back onto your breath. There’s a lot of that in the first 80-90% of the session, but he understands that meditation is an exercise, and exercise depletes willpower. So this little act of letting go helped me feel better and even more confident than before.

And now I’m seriously scared that after I complete the free 10 day trial that I’m going to want to spend the $95 yearly membership fee just to get exclusive content and hundreds of hours of content that is broken up into specific categories, like Focus and Stress and Sleep. Meditation is important to me, and it’s one of those things I’m glad I cut out of my life, if only for it to teach me how much I need it. As I’m slowly reintroducing a lot of these old habits and routines and beginning entirely new ones, I’m learning a lot about myself, and that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

For the past few days, I’ve been writing a lot about technology, from Apple Music to why I don’t like Windows to why I love Apple’s devices. I’ve written about how much technology has changed my life, ever since I was a little boy, but I haven’t really written about how technology has sometimes made my life worse. In fact, how technology has made modern life a little worse for wear.

Technology can blind us from some practical realities. Yesterday I watched this video on YouTube about kids reacting to the first ever iPod. I was in high school when the first iPod came out, and I thought it was the most magical device ever created. At this point in my life, I was super deep into Napster and downloading as much music as possible, but hating the fact that I had to burn them onto a CD to listen to them outside of my computer. So the iPod was an excellent solution to a very real problem. Cut to over a decade later, and we’re living in a society where people feel obligated to have access to all the music they would ever want to listen to. If there’s one little problem, people start bitching. I’m with Taylor Swift: artists should get paid for the work/art they produce, and people should in no way feel obligated to their work, especially through free streaming tiers that sites like Spotify and Pandora offer.

Technology has made us crying, obligated little bitches. God forbid we have to read a very tangible and very real map when our GPS isn’t working. Hell, we shouldn’t be pissed off when we’re out in the middle of nowhere and our phones don’t have any cellular service. These are the very definition of first world problems. There are kids today who have no idea how to write in cursive. They’re being taught how to type on a fucking touchscreen instead of being taught cursive. What kind of fucking shit is that? People are falling too quickly and too willingly into the shrine of technology. They think technology can cure all of society’s ills, and if only they’re always connected and always plugged into the grid that their lives will mean more to them than some lumberjack living alone in a cabin he built at the top of some fucking mountain.

A big part of this rant is directed at me. A big reason why I started moving away from third-party apps and toward Apple’s stock apps was because I didn’t want to care so much about the apps I used. I really don’t want to be so dependent on technology when deep down I know am. I don’t want to care about where I type my notes into since I love writing in my paper notebooks more, but I know that the best notepad is the one that’s right there, available to take whatever input you want it to. I spent so many hours of my life in front of various sized screens doing nothing close to finding the cure of cancer, but instead consuming consuming consuming and doing nothing that will move humanity forward. I can wax rhapsodic about how much I love my Mac, iPhone, and iPad, but at the end of the day, they’re technological devices, run by circuits and processors and designed by humans and built by machines in order for one company or another to make money. As humans, all we have is ourselves. By ourselves I mean our singular selves. I have myself, you have yourself, he has himself. We’re all alone in this.

I’m also kinda buzzed on some Pinot Noir and I have no idea if any of this makes sense.

I bought my first iPhone in the fall of 2012. It was the iPhone 5, the first iPhone with the 4” screen, and my first smartphone ever. I loved it immediately. So much, in fact, that I annoyed my sister by all the time I spent on it instead of, I don’t know, helping her raise my nieces or cleaning the house or whatever. At this point, I had my mom’s old Acer laptop that ran like shit and felt like shit and was simply shit, so my new iPhone was my newer, shinier, and better computer. It transformed my life. Up to the time before I bought this magical device, I was so fed up with Windows that I was super into Linux and open source software that I was seriously considering adopting the entire open source software movement. You know, Ubuntu Linux, Firefox, GNUCash, OpenOffice, etc. But once I bought my iPhone, I was quickly converted to the shrine of Apple.

For the next 8 months or so, I struggled to reconcile these two competing forces, having a Windows computer with a phone based on the Mac OS. At one point, I simply gave up and took a gamble: I would buy the best MacBook Air I could buy by applying for my first credit card. I spent the $1,800, received my Mac, and for the next two weeks, prayed that the world would burn so I can go out on a fire and somehow pay my balance off. Fortunately, I did, by going on a 12 day fire and earning over $2,000. When my Mac arrived, and I opened her up and started playing with it, my world changed forever. Everything was gorgeous. The design of the machine, which is so light and thin and beautiful, from the best trackpad and keyboard in the world, to a great (albeit non-retina) screen, to the beautiful Aqua design of OS X Mountain Lion, I was hooked. But that wasn’t the best part. The best part was when my iPhone talked to my Mac for the first time ever.

The best thing about owning a Mac and being a Mac user is the interactivity between it and the iPhone. All my iOS apps that had Mac counterparts, apps like Mail and Safari and Notes and Music, synced over seamlessly and quickly. I bought Tweetbot on my Mac and saw how my tweet read position synced over from its iOS app and was like, wow! I bought more Mac apps that had iOS companion apps and saw them all talk back to each other, and I knew I couldn’t go back, nor would I want to. There is no Windows machine out there that can talk to any non-iPhone phone the way a Mac talks to an iPhone. And this was 2013.

We’re now in 2015, and with OS X Yosemite, Apple introduced one of the best features of all time: Continuity and Handoff. With Continuity, I could take phone calls — phone calls!!! — on my Mac. Same with SMS messages, particularly from non-iPhone users. With Handoff, I could be reading a page on Safari on my iPhone and open it in Safari on my Mac with a single click and vice-versa. I could have a photo I’m editing on my Mac and, with a simple swipe up, can open it on my iPhone right where I left off. These devices aren’t isolated little islands, but extensions of each other, and this companionship has changed my life for the better.

And shit, I haven’t even mentioned my iPad.

Two years ago I bought my first Mac. It was the mid-2013 13” MacBook Air with 8 GB of RAM, 256 GB SSD hard drive, and a 1.7 GHz Intel Core i7. It was the most powerful computer I’ve ever owned, and it’s still going strong, even with its 3rd major OS update. After two years, I have not once had to reinstall the OS because everything is simply reliable. I have not had to tweak any setting to make it run “faster,” I haven’t downloaded any utility to maintain my computer, and I’ve stuck with the Mac’s stock apps for most of the time I’ve had it. That means no Chrome or Firefox, no alternative Mail client, no alternative Calendar client, no alternative Messages client, no alternative Music client, etc. My machine has been running great right out of the box, and the fact that I have not had to worry about finding the best app in whatever client I wanted because the Mac had a great one built-in or having to worry about maintaining my computer in any way has meant that I’ve had more time to simply enjoy the benefits a computer brings to modern life, stuff like writing a damn novel in 9 months in the best damn writing program known to man (Scrivener) or using Time Machine for stress-free and worry-free backups. It’s all there and it’s all amazing.

But I’m just scratching the surface. Here are a few other things I love about it.

Keyboard Shortcuts. This one feels weird to include at the top because I remember struggling with it in the beginning, but now I can’t go back to Windows. I learned the benefits of keyboard shortcuts while using Windows, so muscle memory became a huge part of my computing experience, but when I converted to my Mac, I had to retrain my muscles. In Windows, the Control key is the main instigator of keyboard shortcuts. Control+X, Control+C, Control+V being the major ones in Cut, Copy, Paste. The Alt key would be the main modifier, as in Control+Alt+Delete, for example. Then the Shift key would be thrown in to add that tertiary layer of keyboard shortcut modifiers. Control+Shift+Esc for the Task Manager. On the Mac, the Command key is the main key for shortcuts. If you look at a Mac keyboard versus a Windows keyboard, you’ll notice the discrepancy right away. On Windows, the Control key is in the bottom left and right corners of the keyboard. So if you wanted to Cut some text, you would move one hand over to the corner and use the other hand to press down the X key. If you had bigger hands or a bit more dexterity you could use one hand to do it, which I did. But on a Mac, the Command key is right next to the Space bar. You know what else is right next to the Space bar? Your thumbs. Your thumbs are almost always hovering over that long horizontal bar in charge of emptiness, and with a slight movement of one thumb to the edge of it, you can manipulate the keyboard faster and more efficiently. The corners of the keyboard are keys that aren’t used very often or aren’t used in combination with many other keys. This has sped up my quickness and efficiency on my Mac exponentially. Shortcuts like Command+Shift+Right (selecting a whole line of text) is much more comfortable and quick than the Windows equivalent (Control+Shift+Page Down). Try that on a Windows keyboard. It’s unpleasant.

Trackpad Gestures. This one’s almost unfair to include since Microsoft has not been in charge of the quality of the trackpads used in machines running Windows, but holy shit this is such a big deal. Apple is Apple because of how much of their attention is focused on details. They’re in charge of everything when it comes to their products, and that’s what makes them so incredible. Gestures provide another layer of interactivity that keyboard shortcuts can’t bring, or can but not as pleasantly. Where do I even begin with gestures? The one app I probably use the most on my Mac is Safari, and Safari has built-in support for so many gestures. I can pinch to zoom in on a page, like some text or a picture. I can use two fingers and double tap my cursor over a block of text to zoom in on just that text. I can do a two finger swipe from the left to the right to go back a page, from the right to the left to go forward a page, two finger swipe up or down to scroll the page like a boss, a three finger tap over a word to look it up on the dictionary, etc. It’s amazing. In the Photos app, I can pinch to zoom on a picture and I can twist two fingers around to rotate a picture in whatever direction I want. With four fingers, I can swipe up to activate Mission Control, which gives me a visual representation of all my active windows and desktops, swipe left or right to switch been full-screen apps, and a five finger pinch to bring up Launchpad, which shows me all my installed apps, like an iOS screen. The amount of gestures and the versatility this provides for my computing experience is mind-boggling and awe-inspiring.

In fact, there’s so much more to praise about the Mac that I’m going to have to continue this series tomorrow, in Part 3 of To tweak or not to tweak.

I spend a lot of time in front of technological devices. I’m always on my MacBook Air and iPhone 6 and iPad Air, and when I’m at work, I’m using Windows 8.1 Pro on a variety of different devices. It’s safe to assume I’ve formed an opinion on what I like and don’t like about these devices. For the most part, I love all of Apple’s devices and dislike most devices running Windows 8, but I don’t dislike Windows 8 in general. It’s actually a pretty good OS. There are things the Mac simply does better than Windows, and it’s these things that have forever converted me to the Mac.

I used to be a Windows user. My first exposure to Windows was Windows 95 sometime in the mid to late 90s. I was in awe of it. I remember opening WordPad (or whatever the equivalent was back then), and typing (typing!!) into it and changing the font and making it big and pretty and different and then printing it out on our dot matrix printer and simply being like, cool! Then Windows 98 came out, gave us some access to the web — 56k modem, anyone? — and that’s when I began to learn more of the details about how Windows worked. I mastered the Control Panel, keyboard shortcuts, how to hack the registry, stuff like that, so by the time Windows XP came out, I was proficient enough in it that I taught teachers at my school how to use it. I remember spending so much of my time trying to figure out how to tweak the system to squeeze out as much performance as I could. I remember wanting to play Tony Hawk on the highest settings but failing because it wouldn’t run at a high FPS smoothly enough. That frustrated me, but I grew used to it.

Then I bought my own computer when I was in college, and it came with Windows Vista. This was my own computer, a Dell Dimension 5100. It was awesome. I could play semi-modern games at pretty high settings, and I remember pirating as much software as I could, stuff like Final Draft 7 for my screenwriting, Office for my school assignments, Adobe’s Creative Suite for my never fulfilled aspirations of creating digital art, and countless other programs, like AV software, video games, and computer utilities. God, how I spent so much of my time researching software that could take care and optimize my machine. Disk Defragmenters and disk cleanup utilities and software to increase Wifi speed and software that tried to hide all my illicit downloading. I spent more time on my computer than doing homework. When Windows 7 came out, I was knee deep in shit’s creek, and I hated it.

I hated maintaining my computer. I hated downloading software because it did something cool and provided an illusion of productivity. I hated filling up my hard drive with music and movies and comics that I would never consume (even though I spent one full year systematically consuming everything I downloaded in the previous 5-7 years). I was a slave to my computer and I knew it but I couldn’t do anything about it. I was dependent on it. My life revolved around it. During college, I discovered RSS feeds, and for the next 8 or so years, I would spend most of my time on the computer consuming these feeds. I would try to quit them every 8-12 months, but I would always come back to them. I would cut them back and just have a few feeds in the hopes that the extra free time would make me do something more productive, but it never stuck. I’m in the middle of that right now. I quit RSS feeds a few months ago now, but I think it’s going to stick this time, and a big reason why is Apple’s ecosystem of devices.

Here’s a first for this blog: stay tuned tomorrow for Part 2 of this weirdly geeky post, where I talk about my first (and only) Mac, and why I think it’s the better device.

I’ve been trying Apple Music since it came out a few weeks ago, and in the beginning, I added about half a dozen albums into my collection that I’ve since listened to many times. Just now I added two more albums into my collection, and I’m listening to one of these albums now. It’s amazing how easy it is to add something into my collection and immediately start listening to it. It’s a lot like Netflix or Hulu or any other video streaming site. You pay a monthly fee for access to a vast collection of media. But unlike movies and TV shows, the idea of renting music doesn’t gel with me that much.

The Apple Music trial ends in September, so I have a few more months to think about this and see if paying $9.99 a month (or $119.88 a year) is worth it. That’s 12 albums I could have bought versus the possibility of listening to something exponentially higher than that. I could listen to albums I used to “possess” before the great hard drive crash of 2012 or I could buy an album or two a month, and simply listen to them over and over and over again until I start craving them. That’s how I like to listen to music, and that’s something that I don’t think Apple Music can provide in a worthwhile way.

I don’t have this urge to buy all the movies and TV shows I watch from Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime, but I’m spending close to $300 a year on all these services¹, yet I don’t feel like I’m wasting that money. Back in the old days, we could go to Blockbuster, chose a few movies to rent for $3.99 each or something, go home and watch them with the family, and then return them a couple of days later. We’ve been conditioned to treat video this way, and that’s a good way to experience this. Hell, we can only watch movies on the big screen for a limited time, and that’s how we’ve been experiencing movies since their invention over 100 years ago. But we’ve always bought music. Music is something you possess, whereas movies and TV shows are something you experience.

I know it’s not as binary as that (listening to a great album for the first time is a magnificent and irreplaceable experience, for example), but music is something that strikes a chord deeper within us, causing us to form this relationship with it that runs deeper than simply listening to something once and never listening to it again, like you might with a movie. The Godfather is a great movie, but I’ve only seen it once. If I ever get the chance to watch it again, I will, but I’m not craving it in any way. Whereas with music, I’ve listened to Miguel’s Wildheart album eighteen times, but I don’t own it, and I know I would be extremely sad once I don’t renew my Apple Music subscription and sadly see that album removed from my library.

So I’m in this struggle with opening up the floodgates and having this opportunity to listen to albums I’ve never would have thought to listen to, but then there’s that risk of being overloaded with music that I’m listening for quantity rather than quality. I won’t listen to an album 18 times anymore, but simply once or twice just to say that I have, like I can say I’ve seen the Godfather. I don’t know if I like that. I would rather own my music and proudly listen to it over and over and over again than dipping my toe into the vast stream of Apple Music’s catalog.

Week 2 of Insanity Max: 30 didn’t go very well. I was winded really quickly, and I dripped more sweat than I’ve ever done before. It was a ridiculous sight. But I finished my Cardio Challenge, took a shower, and went right back into my kitchen and made a very tasty and healthy dinner. I used my food processor (again!) to make cauliflower rice. I seasoned it with salt and pepper and mixed it in with diced onions that were browned in butter. The “rice” was amazing. I mixed in chopped pork chops in a bowl and made a very simple stir-fry type of dish, and it was delicious. I loved it.

I love that my recipes are increasing. I was getting tired of making the same old shit day after day after day. A little variety is the spice of life, or whatever.

I talked to a co-worker about my culinary pursuits during the weekend, and she was very interested in everything I had to say. I found that funny because before that, she was talking to me about something that happened to her over the weekend and I completely found her conversation uninteresting. I noticed that whenever this happens, I try to gesture or motion or something that it’s time for me to go, but they continue talking and brought right back into their conversation. They won’t let me go. After I was done talking about my culinary aptitude, the superintendent walked in and started talking about something. I honestly don’t even remember. I just remember not caring, so I simply walked away and left.

This would’ve been unimaginable before a few months ago, I think. At least in the last few weeks. Now, I really don’t care. Life’s too short to be around uninteresting conversations, and I know exactly how much this makes me sound like a dick. I. Don’t. Care. Not really. If I’m a dick, then I’m a dick. So what. Right? So what. If you’re interesting, or if I find you interesting, then that dick side of me won’t come out. We will have a very interesting conversation, and things will be right with the world. But if you’re droning on about something that I simply don’t give a shit about, then I’m sorry, I’m going to leave.

And I totally expect people to do that to my blog, if it hasn’t already happened. Shit, I’ve wanted to walk away from this thing for months now, but blah blah promise to myself blah blah. I’m on day 316, which means I have a little under 50 days left. I’m in the homestretch now. I’m a few pounds away from getting back into regular shape, and I think I can get there next week or the week after, if I’m not called out on a fire. By that point, I’m sure I’ll be over 180 by the time I get back. I think by the end of this blog, I’ll be back to rewriting my book. What a way to bookend this thing, huh?