The Sunshine Blogger Award!

[graphic source]

Seems Hannah nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger Award! Thank you so much ❤ It’s been a rough year for me, so I’m really grateful you thought of me ^w^

(I’m embarrassed to admit this, but it took me a second to connect the name ‘Harley’ with me anymore – I’ve been switching over to ‘Vincent’ recently. Nice job, brain xD)

Anyway…

“The Sunshine Blogger Award is given to those who are inspiring and bring sunshine into the lives of their readers and fellow bloggers” and that just makes me so happy, especially since this year’s been really difficult, and I know it’s not an official ‘award’ (it’s more like a meme or a tag), but it still made me smile.

The rules are:

1. Thank the person who nominated you.
2. Answer 11 questions set by the person who nominated you.
3. Nominate 11 bloggers to receive the award and write them 11 new questions to answer.

The Questions:

How many books have you read this year?

I’m hanging at 49 right now.

What’s your favorite genre?

Overall? Possibly Sci-Fi or Mystery/Crime novels, especially if there are hackers.

What’s your favorite pastime (aside from blogging)?

Reading, binge-watching shows, and I’m starting to get into making tumblr themes, which is really fun.

Who is your one true book love?

Still kind of crushing on Colton from Lead Me Not, honestly.

What was the last movie you watched?

Probably Cowspiracy.

What was the last book you bought?

If I’m remembering correctly, I can’t tell you because it’s a gift for someone who reads this blog. (Hi, Mom!)

How often do you blog?

Not often, honestly. I’ve been meaning to work out a proper schedule for 2017 though.

Do people in the real world know that you’re a blogger?

People in the real world probably don’t care. *laughs*

Do you hate the word ‘blog’ and ‘blogger’?

Surprisingly, no.

What’s your favorite curse word?

You know, I’m honestly not sure. I tend to lean unconventional with my insults (ex. describing a bad situation as ‘a bag of dicks’ or an obnoxious and uninformed person as a ‘hefty bag full of coleslaw’), but barring that, the word ‘fuck’ is always a good go-to in ridiculous situations.

What’s your average reading time?

Varies wildly. I’ll either read a book in a day and have the next one lined up or I wait about 38 years and two wars between books.

And now, the Flailing:

I am bad at coming up with questions. Almost as bad as I am with tagging people. Though, to be fair, that last part is mostly just because I’m a loner even on the internet and I hardly ever talk to people, therefore I don’t really know anyone well enough to tag them.

As a result, I’m just going to use this space to send a virtual hug to anyone who bothered to read this to the end and wish you all the very best in the new year. I know 2016 was hard on a lot of us, but even terrible things can’t last forever. Something’s always about to happen. I think it just might be something good.

Yrs, always

V. Awkerman

On Lost Time

So. I ended up crying until I fell asleep last night.

I’ll tell you why, but first, I think some background information is probably needed.

There’s a show currently airing called ‘Yuri!!! on Ice’. I might ramble about it properly in another post before too much longer, but for the sake of shorthand, here’s what you need to know:

It’s a short little romcom figure skating anime that basically took one look at the rule book for sports anime, laughed, and tossed it out the window. The two main characters are both near the end of their competitive careers rather than the beginning, emotions are handled realistically (like Yuuri’s anxiety and self-doubt), the writing is layered and well-crafted, the characters are lovable (even if you love to hate them), the animation (at least on the deeply important scenes) is stunning… Oh and those two main characters, Victor and Yuuri? Canon queer couple. Canon queer couple with a realistically written relationship.

This show is pretty important to me, is… is sort of the main bullet point you should be taking away from this little presentation.

And the crying really didn’t have much of anything to do with the show itself. The crying was mostly tied to an odd chain of events that was somewhat related and that I’m going to try to retrace now.

My sleep has been a bit finicky lately, which I’m sure didn’t help much.  I don’t feel like I really rest when I sleep, I just sleep. Though, honestly, this whole year ‘doesn’t help much’ in terms of my stress levels.

BUT ANYWAY. I stayed up a bit to watch the newest episode, as you do. (For the record, I’m sure this will end well, but at the same time, fuck that cliffhanger.) It was stressful in the way that good shows are, and afterward I was a bit less tired than I was before.

So, I was clicking around tumblr and reblogging gifsets and things, and I found a very interesting blog about actual figure skating (scoring, how competitions are structured, all of that). I’m still kicking around the idea of writing something with a character who is actually a professional skater, so I still think it was a really good find, but of course there were a lot of people asking ‘Am I too old to start skating?’

Of course, the mod is kind and decent and tells them ‘No, of course not’, at least for general questions. And that’s very true. If you’re able-bodied and in decent health and you want to learn, you get out there and you go learn. That really goes for anything in life.

But here’s what started all this for me:

Even if I took up skating right now – like right now, today – I could never qualify for Nationals.

I don’t why, but that really upsets me. Granted, it’s not like there are no options for someone who comes to the sport later in life – there are plenty of options – but that all sort of falls beside the point in my mind.

I look back and I think ‘God, what have done with my life, and what did it get me?’ I find something I think is beautiful and then I realize that door’s been closed to me for years now. This has actually happened several times in the past, it just hasn’t hit me this hard before. I can’t be a skater. I can’t be a dancer. I can’t do a lot of things at my age.

And for the rest of my life, I’ll probably be very aware of that. I’ll probably always be scrambling a bit, because I should have started earlier, but I couldn’t, not just because of the fact that Mom and I were running with 10 dollars in the bank sometimes when I was a kid and we lived in small towns with limited options, but because of the depression.

I spent most of my childhood in a mental fog, and when you’re depressed and sort of passively suicidal on your bad days for most of your formative years, you don’t think about this kind of stuff. It doesn’t occur to you that you’ll be an adult one day and that starting something now is important. Then one day you wake up and find yourself in a world that you never really planned to be in and you’re in over your head and what then? I think what happened here is that I’ll just… always be very aware of the fact that ultimately, I am running out of time.

And that’s really hard to swallow right now.

But I’m sure I’ll be fine in a few days.

I have a plan when it comes to writing, and there are a few other things I’m starting to learn now, which helps me feel like a bit less of a failure. One of my gifts is rapid skill acquisition, after all.

I just need a direction, I think. Something beautiful and difficult that I can dig my claws into and feel like I’ve managed to do something impressive and useful and honest by the end of it.

Books do that. So does visual art. And so does technology.

So that’s my starting point. These things make me feel like I’m learning something, or like I can do something not everyone else can do. Yes, I’m a good 20+ years behind, but the next best time to start anything is now.

I hope you don’t often feel like this. It’s draining and rather terrible and tends to leave me on a hair-trigger for crying. But if you do, I hope you have the guts and grit to change your life where it really counts. That’s the only way to stop feeling like this. I’ll be clawing my way along beside you, if that camaraderie helps at all. I sincerely hope it does.

Yrs, as always,

V. Awkerman

On Changing the World

 

“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

A lot has happened this year and much of it was difficult at best.

Christmas is drawing closer and while it seems almost… borderline insulting to celebrate even a little, we’re still doing what we can to welcome the season. One cannot always be consoled in the face of loss nor can one remain steadfast in the face of needed though unwanted change, but the answer, I feel, is not to be found in locking oneself away from the world. That isn’t to say that no time spent on one’s own is useful – quite the opposite in fact – but allowing the pain to poison you is no way forward.

Celebrate a little this year. String some lights, go somewhere nice, take a day to be quiet and enjoy the fact that you are still a living thing in a world with many reasons to be glad of that fact.

The first holiday season without our fearless leader is going to be hard to get through but if we go quiet and try to find the bright pieces, we’ll all pull through.

That’s what people do, after all.

Speaking of doing things…

‘Changing the world’ is a interesting goal, I think. You hear it a lot. ‘I want to change the world’ or something similar tends to come up when people feel frustrated and need a change but don’t know what direction to take. They just know they want to do something grand – something sweeping that will shake the Earth to its core. Something that will make them a living legend.

Or maybe they’re more altruistic about it. They don’t care about being known as long as whatever, usually very legitimate, ill they’ve focused on is dead and gone before too much longer.

It’s not a bad goal. Though it is a bit… terrifying in its scale and scope.

Something had been bothering me about the standard ‘change the world’ goal for a few weeks now and a couple of nights ago, while I was staring at the ceiling and wishing insomnia had somehow lost my address after so many moves, I realized what it was.

‘Changing the world’ is actually very easy. The world is a little different because you posted to Instagram today. That collection of data didn’t exist before now, and it exists because of you, therefore you have, in some small way, changed the world.

Cool.

But that isn’t what people usually mean when they say they want to change the world, now is it?

People typically mean ‘change’ on the level of Thomas Edison or Alexander Hamilton (or any number of terribly important names I’m forgetting in my caffeine-addled state), and that kind of change is hard to come by. It’s certainly not impossible, but it is difficult.

Because it means writing the book.

It means throwing your weight behind your decisions.

It means being smart about your choices, your plans, and your goals.

And it means work.

More than that, it means work that no one may ever thank you for.

To change the world the way most people mean, you must be willing to work for years with no acknowledgment of your efforts.

To change the world, you must be honest to a fault when facing the public.

To change the world, you must know what needs to be changed and then set about studying – cutting guy-wires and pulling nails and maybe even hacking into thermostats until the whole thing collapses at the word ‘Go’.

And it is hard. It is exhausting work, and in then end? Well, sometimes all you can do is hope that you’ve started the water down the proper path through the rock.

Most of us will never know if we’ve ‘changed the world’ in any real, lasting way, or if we do, we won’t know if we’ve changed it the way we intended to. Maybe that’s not the point of it though. Maybe the point is the change, not what comes after it. Maybe the change is proof that we can do better than we are if we’re just willing to listen.

I don’t know what the world will be like when I’m gone. I hope it will be a place I’m sad to leave. And, moving forward, I hope that I remember my part in making it so. I can’t say how successful I’ll be, or if any of my ideas will actually work, but, as Hemingway said, the shortest answer is doing the thing.

This year has been quite a trial. I can only assume that the next one will be as well, though in different ways. This was the character-building year for my family, I think. But that means that 2017 is set up to be all action and plot-progression, so that’s something to look forward to as we close in on the end of 2016.

For the moment, the house is slowly coming together and I have some things to put in order – research to do and a book to write, you know, standard stuff. The rest of this year will likely be spent planning and trying to put together a workable schedule for the next year. Both my mom and I have plans for 2017 and since they overlap in some places, it might be nice to have a concrete, ‘official’ road map of some type or description. At least now we have a kitchen table to sit around.

I hope the holiday season is less stressful than you’re afraid of and that 2017 is easy on you when you need it to be. As always, if you think it would help you at all, you’re welcome to comment here or send me a message on other sites. I’m not always the best at knowing what to say, but I can certainly try to help you feel a bit less alone in this vast world of ours.

Yours very sincerely,

V. Awkerman