Getting Older, Getting Weirder, Getting Better

Okie dokie, so it's been a few more days and not terribly much has happened. Still working on myself, still losing weight, still doing the gardening thing and making sure all my plants are happy.

Obviously I'm still doing D&D. I'm running my homebrew campaign from scratch and we have a game coming up this Saturday that I'm really looking forward to. I think the players are level 5... maybe level 6. Either way, this campaign should take them all the way to level 20 if everything goes according to plan.

The lunch theme this game is going to be a luau. Travis made some really tasty piña coladas a few weeks back during another game night and everybody loved them, so we decided to lean into it. I'm probably going to throw some Hawaiian pulled pork in the slow cooker since it's probably my turn to handle the food again.

Did I mention that I got a hot tub?

I kind of did it as a birthday gift to myself. It was a little on the expensive side, but it's all set up, all put together, and I finally got to use it for the first time this past Monday. Granted, it wasn't nearly hot enough yet, but now it's up to temperature and I can't wait to get back in.

While talking with Travis, I realized that I can count on one hand the number of times I've been in a man-made body of water. Maybe five or six times in my entire life. I don't know how to swim, guys. That's just a thing I never learned.

What I have discovered, however, is that I can float on my back basically forever and wiggle myself around backwards. I guess that's the world's slowest form of swimming. I don't know what else to call it, but at least I know I can keep myself from drowning.

Anyway, hot tub? Absolutely awesome. Love the bubbles. Feels fantastic. We have it set up on the deck under a canopy, and I want to order some little hanging star lights to put underneath it because I think that would look really cool at night.

What else...

I think I'm going to revive my Twitter account and spend some time building up my Bluesky account too. I've been off social media for years at this point. Five to seven years, probably. If I really want to kickstart some of the content I want to create, it helps to have some kind of audience, and Twitter still has the largest following I've got.

I know there's a lot wrong with X, Twitter, whatever we're calling it these days. I still call it Twitter. It has plenty of problems, but it's also where I really got started online. I miss having that outlet. It was a handy place to throw thoughts into the void and occasionally find people who understood them.

Last weekend Travis and I went out to my parents' place. They had some pretty significant storm damage from winds that reached around 115 mph. We did a lot of work. Like, a fuck ton of work.

We climbed trees, ran chainsaws, drove tractors, hauled giant logs, and cleaned up debris everywhere. The property was an absolute mess when we got there, but it looks pretty good now. My parents were incredibly appreciative because it would have taken my dad forever to tackle by himself, and my mom just can't do much physically anymore.

Beyond that, things are moving forward.

I'm still finding myself. Still building confidence. Still figuring out who I am when I stop trying so hard to be who everyone else expects me to be.

I keep seeing posts from people in their forties talking about how they're finally realizing they were right as teenagers about the things they liked. The clothes. The music. The hobbies. The aesthetic.

The difference now is that I can actually afford some of those things.

I find myself dressing more like the person I wanted to be in high school than the person I thought adults were supposed to become. And honestly, I'm comfortable there.

When I was younger, I had this picture in my head of adulthood. Adults were supposed to look a certain way, act a certain way, have certain interests, and leave behind all the weird stuff they loved when they were younger.

Turns out that was complete bullshit.

I don't think there's one correct way to be an adult. I think you just figure out who you are and lean into it.

That's what I'm trying to do.

I want to be myself. I want to love myself. I want to stop apologizing for choosing myself first once in a while.

It's something I've never been very good at. I've spent most of my life putting everyone else ahead of me in pretty much every area.

So I guess if there's a takeaway from all of this, it's pretty simple.

Love yourself.

Go touch some grass.

Stop scrolling every spare second of the day because that shit is rotting your brain.

Spend some time figuring out who you are when nobody else is telling you who you're supposed to be.

I think that's where the good stuff lives.