Back To Shore

Today is the first day of my two weeks off from work and of course the cold that I felt various symptoms of in the last few days breaks out full force. Ok, I might exaggerate a bit, after all it’s just a bit of everything: running nose, a bit of a cough, but all in all annoying! I want to enjoy my time off and not need to deal with those (minor) issues. When the symptoms didn’t disappear on the 2nd day, I did take a COVID test (or two) which came back negative. A coworker is out with COVID at the moment, because that fuck isn’t over, even though it’s hardly talked about anymore.

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Over the past few days / weeks maybe even I realized I’m in dire need of time off.

Time off from work, which is a bit stressful at the moment, especially for someone like me who tends to stress out a lot about stuff.

Time off from my digital world to some extent.

Time off from the news. I think and stress and worry and argue (with whom?) in my head way too much about some stuff. I have so many half-finished, ambiguous thoughts and ideas in my head. Terror attacks happening here in Germany not too far from where I live. Politicians and parties reacting to that in their usual “let’s see how can be more populistic” kind of way. Right-wing / populistic parties on the rise. About the war going on in Gaza. About all those other places in the world where horrible things happen right now and the western world isn’t really watching. The war, famine and flood in Sudan for (just one) instance. And yes, I’m aware of my privilege that I can just turn off the news for a few days.

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Taking time to properly read some good books and not just tear through some superficial (turned out to be sort of crappy) contemporary romances I picked from my to-read-list for some distraction form all those stressing-me-out thoughts mentioned above.

Taking time to be with myself for a bit. Introspection. Journalling maybe. Starting to read some of the self-care-books on my shelf. Taking time to listen in at some online “selfcare classes” offered through my place of work in a “Personal Growth Week” next week. Even though I’m off work, I can easily access those classes, and I plan to do.

Taking time for some crafts. Doodling. Photography and photo-editing.

Taking time to listen to music and podcasts and maybe audiobooks.

Where am I planning to do all that? Here….

Leaving on Friday morning for a whole week. I’ll be staying in apartment complex less than 5 minutes from the beach. There is a village / small town near-ish by and of course some restaurants and such all around. It is a tourist destination after all. I don’t plan to make much use of any of that though. I feel like hibernating, not necessarily in my apartment, but on my blanket on the beach.

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This morning, I made a basic (aka boring) meal plan and from that compiled a long list of groceries I plan to bring. I know I could buy some of them there in the supermarket when I arrive, but I’m a bit sceptic (aka worried) about prices and availability. A meal plan also for the reason, that about 10 days ago I gave “intermittent fasting” another try. I did a version of the 14:10 variant for a while last year, where you either miss breakfast and/or don’t too late, so that you fast for 14 hours and only eat within the timespan of the other 10 hours. I lost a bit of weight back then, which was nice but not the motivation as such. At some point the evening snacking habit came back and I gave up on that strict schedule.

A friend recently mentioned doing the 5:2 variant at the moment and I looked into that and a bit on a whim started Saturday two weeks ago. You basically eat normally on 5 days a week at whatever time suits you and on two day you fast as in only consume about 500 calories. Which sounds like not much and it is indeed not much. You need lots of liquid on those days. And / or burn some more calories, which I did on my 3rd fasting day (last Saturday), so I could eat a bit more.

Still not much. Is that cheating? I don’t know. I don’t care, it works for me. I’ve lost about 4-5 pounds since I started about 10 days ago. Admittedly, I also paid more attention to what I eat on the regular days and not overindulge on those either, so that might have contributed to the quick weight loss as well.

I thought about taking a break from that for my vacation by the sea, but then thought better of it and am planning to continue and make the switch from Saturday/Tuesday as fasting days to Monday/Thursday, because that are days I’m usually working from home, which feels like good days because work distracts me during the day. Fasting at the office feels like too much trouble at the moment. Saturday isn’t a good day for it either, but I started on a Saturday and my office / work-from-home days were irregular since then as well, so I need some time off to switch to a 5:2 schedule easier to handle in the long run.

Another super laid back weekend to recharge from another super busy week. Or if not actually that busy but sort of stressful for me personally; work-related and such with so many balls to juggle and the constant fear of dropping some or all of them. As I’m prone to do, I also worried too much over nothing, which of course stressed me out as well.

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In a previous life – so it seems – I used to unwind with watching TV shows on a streaming service or DVD. A variety of TV shows and many many episodes. These days I can’t really be bothered to start anything new. Nothing seems to catch my interest and to be fair, if I have to choose between reading a fictional story or watching a fictional story, the book always wins. Sometimes that makes me feel like a bit of an outsider because a lot of people seem to pick the TV over the book and they have things to talk about and I can’t join in because I’m not up to date with any of the new / hip shows.

The impulse to want to belong and the impulse to feel weird (wrong, outcast) if I don’t, is still going strong here. But I notice it much earlier and I’m mostly able to handle it and not beat myself up too much about it. So, Go Me!

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But I still often I like to have some moving images on a screen in the background when I’m doing other things like having lunch / dinner (I know: not the most healthy habit) or when I scroll through social media or the news or do random personal admin stuff. Again I know, not the most productive, because multi-tasking is a myth. This desire for a background noise led to me having re-“watched” the complete boxset (DVD, remember those?) of “The West Wing” these past few months. Since that ended I did try some other shows, but nothing felt really interesting to me and I seriously considered to just start over with “The West Wing”. At that point I remembered there used to be a accompanying podcast: “The West Wing Weekly” which ran from 2016 to 2019. I think Netflix started airing the show a bit previously? I hadn’t listened to any of it before and thought that might be a better use of my time, even though I realized multi-tasking while listening works even less.

But I definitely enjoy the “Behind the Scenes” insight from Joshua Malina (Will Bailey) and his chatting with his old friend and co-host Hrishikesh Hirway and of course the occasional guest on the podcast; fellow actors, writers, costume designers and such. I’m only at episode 1.08 so I’ve still got a long way to go. It’s been so interesting to hear how the real political Washington DC reacted to the show back then (25 years ago!). They loved it – at least the Democratic Clinton government did – and the cast and crew quickly got all kind of access and invitations. Joshua quoted John Spencer (Leo McGarry), who often used to say “You wouldn’t get that on a cop show” and he was right. Bless his soul.

But the West Wing cast and crew also early on got in touch with a lot of other public service organisations. And to bring this all full circle (sort of): in one of the episodes so far they mentioned Melissa Fitzgerald (C.J.’s assistant Carol), who after the show had ended moved to D.C. to start working for a Veteran Non-Profit Organisation. I had heard that before, but then I googled her again and imagine my delight when I read in the organisation’s news section that a “Behind the Scenes” book about the TV show and all the good public causes the actors and crew support since had been released. Just days ago! 

That will keep me occupied for a while, I guess…

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Some of the podcast episodes made me think a lot about how the people who work in politics are portrayed in such a good light on this show. On purpose, because this show was also meant as a love letter for public service. We need people who want to do those jobs and I don’t necessarily mean the politicians as such but all the staffers, who work long hours on a governmental wage. Who do this because they want to make their country / the world a better place.

I thought about how these days many people probably don’t have a positive view on people working for any level of any government. The distrust in government and polarization of society has reached such a toxic level. We all know why: Russian and Chinese bots, Elon Musk, the Trump-cult in the US… I thought about all the staffers who might join government if Trump wins. They probably also claim that they want to make the world a better place. The thing is, that their idea of a better place and mine are probably diametrical and that scares me quite a bit.

Ugh, this is a gloomy note to end a post on. Can I turn this around? Less than two weeks till I’m back by the sea for a week. Even less than that till I’ve got time off work. I can’t wait. 

Yes I know me being by the sea is only an upside for me and not you reading this, but at least there will be more ocean / beach / dunes content (on my Insta and here) then and that’s hopefully something to look forward to…

I’ts not a Sunday today and I’ve still almost let the evening go by without sitting down to share some thoughts. I really need to get more organized. More organized? Or rather organized at all? I don’t remember being this scatter brained years ago. I definitely spend more time sharing (personal) stuff on the internet. I need to bring that derailed train of thought back on track, so let’s start again.

Yesterday I went to a gig of a German singer (he mostly sings in English) – Sasha – on his sort of celebratory / anniversary tour. I don’t know exactly. Even though I like him fine I don’t consider myself a fan. He had his first hit in 1998! And he’s still doing this, 26 years – half a lifetime – later. More to the point he’s still so good. His music is proper pop, catchy tunes, easy to sing a long. Fun!

And he has always been an amazing entertainer. Very funny, down-to-earth, all around nice guy, I think. He could have tried to distance himself from the pop world and look back on his huge success from 26 years ago with some irony or depreciation, because it was and is “just” radio-friendly main-stream pop music. But he didn’t. He ended the show with his first big hit and lead into it by saying how grateful he still is for this song, because it allowed him to travel all over the world -literally – to perfom this song back in the day.

But he still managed to make it sound amazing 26 years later in a big band arrangement.

We went to his gig at the same venue in 2019 as well and last night tried to work out where and when we had seen him play shows before. I tried to look it up on setlist.fm, but I’m not sure that’s all that reliable for a German artist. I remembered a gig in airport hangar in Düsseldorf, but had to google it to find that this was part of the “Jazz festival” (?!?!?) in 2006! 18 years ago. That kid is old enough to drive and vote. j/k.

I didn’t find any photos of my own, but in the process of moving my data from one computer to the next a few years ago I lost a few month / years of photos and 2006 is among them. I then remembered to have a look at my downloaded blog archives from the “Pre-Wordpress / self hosting” days. And there was indeed a short gig recap – back then still in German. I scrolled through the months of posts and OMG did I post a lot back then. About everything. Books. TV. Life. Politics. Just short vignettes sometimes, but also sometimes multiple times a day. I clearly hadn’t been working fulltime back then.

The downloaded file also included a “blog roll” Anyone still remember what that was? Links to other blogs I had been reading / following at the time. 70% of the links ended in 404 (or something similar”) nirvana.

20% were still online but hadn’t been updated for over a decade. 10% were still going and only one of them was a blog I still read. I don’t even remember why I once read those other ones or that I did read them at all. I once again felt old as fuck. Sasha had a great line about that last night though, more or less translates to “I’ve been 40 for 12 years now”.

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Work is still super busy and I’m doing my best to keep my imposter syndrome in check. Not everything that causes some complications is my fault even if I’m the project manager. There is only so much managing you can do before you venture over into dangerous micro-managing / burn out territory. 

Today I’ve started looking at the timeline for the next big project milestone which is scheduled for the end of 2025. I started working back from then: which steps have to happen when, how long will those take and what will the deadlines will be for all those. It doesn’t seem like such a long time to go till December 2025 when you look at it that way. A bit scary but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. At least it felt good to have some idea of the necessary timeframe for everything. 

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I’ve got a few more notes jotted down on a piece of paper, but right now can’t be bothered to elaborate on all of those. I’d rather keep up some more with my weekend newspapers and less news bits on social media.

And at least share a new artsy / doodling project I did last week. Inspired by Pet Needs singer Johnny Marriott, who does something similar on canvas with a piece of their lyrics. I ordered it! And I thought I give it a try myself. I kind of like it, but I already know where / how to do it differently with the next piece I’m going to work on. Whenever…