I was in total binge mode last night. I ate around 11PM which is a really bad old habit of mine. I watched four episodes of Eden of the East. I then crashed and predictably couldn’t sleep due to having so much food in my stomach.

I ended up getting up and handling the day’s outgoing shipment.

椅子 isu (chair)

JapanesePod101 word of the day

I’m not mad. I’m not even slightly upset. I think maybe these sort of binge days are a good thing for me as long as it’s something that occurs once in a blue moon.

I have been feeling so stressed out and anxious for weeks and weeks. A binge day seems to have cleared all of those negative feelings and that’s something I can be happy about.

I was thinking of riding down to Albertson’s today. I was thinking of getting some more canned seasoned black beans and lime juice. I bought fresh limes last time I was at the store, but I think it’s inefficient and wasteful for me to buy actual limes when what I’m really after is just the juice inside.

Grocery stores sell just the juice!

Also I’m really craving some dairy free ice cream. It’s been awhile since I last had some. I’m thinking of spoiling myself one more time before I run out of government food assistance.

I’m feeling stiff and a little groggy. I am not surprised to feel this way as I threw off my sleep schedule last night. It’s 4:00PM and I woke up just minutes ago.

I slept for an hour or two at around 5 or 6 AM. I then woke up at 7:30 and checked my e-mail to see if I had more shipments to prepare. No shipments were ready to go out, so I went back to sleep until 8:30. I felt like a zombie when I walked out to the mailbox. Half asleep, my eyes felt crossed and no amount of walking seemed to snap me out of it.

Oh fuck, I just realized that I didn’t take my vitamins this morning. I’m actually going to skip taking them today, because it’s so late in the day and I know what happens when I take them late– it contributes to my inability to sleep at night.

HAH. Well my sleep schedule is fucked again. I’m not going to beat myself up about it. Things have happend which promoted my schedule inverting itself, and that’s nothing to be upset about.

I used to wake up at around 7AM without an alarm. I would then stay awake for most of the day and repeat the process with ease.

Shit’s become difficult again, and the balance in my life is fleeting.

It’s okay. I’m going to figure it out once again. I’m going to find balance again so I can live with lower stress levels and feel better.

So no vitamins today, because I don’t want to cause myself to have more energy than I can deal with. I hope the lack of vitamins doesn’t result in my video game session with friends to be one without pep.

If it does, that’s okay too. I’m just going to focus on taking care of myself and I’ll try to meet up with them tomorrow.

Today’s agenda! I’ve got a stack of cards on my deck that I want to get listed on eBay. I also have some card organization that I want to address. I’ve been using inventory location boxes which could contain a variety of cards. It could be weiss schwarz, prememo, other, and they’re all in the same box. I think this system is going to be error prone going forward, because it’s possible that I could have two boxes which contain the same card.

I’m thinking of reverting back to my old way of storing cards, which was to used labelled boxes that clearly say, “weiss schwarz pd/s22 japanese” and that’s what’s in the box.

I keep switching things up and it’s casing extra work for me. I think such things don’t, “move the dial” so to speak, and thus I should not go back and correct them until I have my 3000 listings back in place.

I’m laughing about that situation. The situation where eBay changed their policy to where all sellers have access to 50,000 free listing insertions permanently. I’m pretty sure I called that a few months back.

I’m laughing at how I missed the news and I removed most of my listings in order to downscale to the 1,000 free listing insertions that I thought I would have starting in July. I thought sellers were going to capitulate left and right starting in August due to the removal of free listing insertions, but now it looks like that isn’t going to happen. I thought I was giving myself an edge by downsizing, but it turns out that all I did was shoot myself in the foot!

It’s funny and I have to laugh about it because it beats the alternative of being sad about it. These things are going to happen repeatedly in the future as I continue to operate an eBay business, and I just have to take them in stride if I am to move forward and live with it.

It’s just part of the job! It’s not a big deal and it’s going to be okay.

---

I think I’m going to wait on the trip to the grocery store. I did a quick inventory of my pantry and I realized that I’m not even hungry. I’m not hungry now, and I don’t think I’ll be hungry this evening. I still have a bunch of food in my gut. It’s funny, but I can visibly tell such a thing because I’m so skinny and obviously bloated.

I think I ate three meals since I last pooped. My body’s still workin’ on it!

TMI probably, but hey, this is my journal and I can write whatever the fuck I want to write!

I was thinking of cooking some black beans because I’m out of canned, but I’m suspecting that home cooked beans are one of the things that have been causing me digestive system distress. Eh, I think it might be the spices actually, because I often made vegan stews/soups/curries which didn’t have any beans at all.

It’s video game night with my friends, and I don’t want to risk feeling like shit right before I play with them. If I get hungry before video games, I’m going to play it safe with some oatmeal and fruit.

I got kiwis the other day! I haven’t had those in a long time. I’m just waiting them to ripen up before devour them.

I want more fruit in my life! I have been eating a lot of dried fruit, which is great because I think it’s a pretty good deal for a bag of it as compared to fresh fruit. The trick is to eat only as much dried fruit as I would eat if the fruit were fresh. It can be difficult because of their small shriveled size, and delectable sweet taste, but I generally feel pretty good when I have fruit in my system.

I read a headline in my hacker news feed that said, “doomscrolling may breed anxiety.”

Doomscrolling. Huh. That’s the perfect word for behavior that I engage in! Albeit, I don’t really partake in the, “doom” part. The Doom part of doomscrolling suggests that a person scrolls through endless amounts of articles and videos which depict an impending doom in the world. Coronavirus hype, politics, CHINA.

I don’t really engage in that. What I see on those topics is what makes it through my filters and gets to me by word of mouth, or what I hear on JRE.

What I’m starting to call doom scrolling is the behavior I engage in when I’m bored. I get on Hacker News, Reddit, or YouTube and scroll endlessly. I reach the end of the new stuff and I switch tabs. I scroll some more, reach the end, then switch tabs again. The process repeats.

I’ve started to call out, “doomscrolling” when I observe myself starting this sequence. When I get to the point where I’m doomscrolling, I remind myself that I’m not looking for anything that has an answer. I’m looking for something to fill a hole in my soul and such a thing doesn’t exist on the internet. When I doomscroll, it’s usually time for me to go read a book or go to sleep.

Speaking of books, I finished both The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown, and Pulling Profits out of a Hat by GenericBusinessCoach™ people. I’m having a hard time not slandering GenericBusinessCoach™ because of an GenericBusinessCoach™ guy that I met AFK and I thought was super annoying. It’s prejudice, I realize.

I also don’t want to mention the name of their organization on my blog because they aren’t paying me and I don’t believe in their program. I’m sure it’s a great program but all I can think about is shelling out thousands of dollars for them to smile and give me their shpeel of how to accelerate my business. They don’t have any skin in the game. They don’t give a shit if my business fails or succeeds. All they care about is running their seminar and collecting that money. If my business fails, there’s a thousand more business out there that they can teach.

I’m looking at all the negatives. I actually got some good ideas from that book. Good ideas about having a mission, good ideas about a customer rewards system, good ideas about retaining customers and catering to them.

Also that guy wasn’t that annoying. I think I’m just getting triggered by a past situation I was a part of where I was uncomfortable.

I don’t want to talk about it. I suppose I should talk about it.

It’s not even a big deal! I don’t know why I’m having such a bad feeling about it.

I think I’m hungry. How ironic, given how I was just writing how I don’t think I’ll be hungry today.

So the situation was that my dad hired a GenericBusinessCoach™ at the place I used to work. The GenericBusinessCoach™ met everyone and he seemed so excited to get to work with us. We also had business photos taken that day and my dad wanted the GenericBusinessCoach™ to be in the photo with the rest of the staff. There was some, “are you sure?” back and forth, then the GenericBusinessCoach™ ended up being in the photo.

That’s literally all there is to that story. That GenericBusinessCoach™ was a nice guy and I don’t know why I’m so adverse to talking about that story.

OK I know why. It’s because it involves my dad. I’m holding back on talking about it because I feel afraid that my dad will read this article in the future. Ok, how about this. I don’t publish this one. Okay? Okay.

There isn’t even anything in that story that was wrong. I was a little uncomfortable when my dad was convincing the GenericBusinessCoach™ to join in the photo. That’s my own insecurities coming into play. I didn’t care one way or the other if the GenericBusinessCoach™ was in the photo or not.

I don’t know. I think I’m making a big deal about nothing. I think I’m just feeling emotionally vulnerable right now, and any story involving my dad will trigger me.

I’m going to jump into CoDA work because I want to make this a daily habit. I’d like to minimize my shame triggers, after all, and CoDA will help me get there.

CoDA 30q #14

I did the reading. I get a warm and fuzzy feeling thinking about the type of higher power I want to have a relationship with.

• forgiving
• non-judgemental
• non-demanding
• happy
• humble
• loving
• accepting
• tolerant
• flawed
• loving
• ambivalent
• friendly
• equal
• graceful
• non-religious
• spiritual

I like the idea of getting to choose my higher power. I like the idea that it’s not forced on me and there isn’t a universal right or wrong answer.

Am I willing to entertain the possibility that there is power that can do for me what I could not do for myself?

Yeah! I see that idea in action by how I came to therapy and was given all these tools that I couldn’t have found myself. It makes perfect sense that there are powers greater than myself that can help me.

The next prompt of #14 talks about insanity; doing the same thing over and expecting different results. What is my concept of insanity as it applies to me in CoDA?

I suppose being addicted to the internet and not doing anything to rectify the situation has a lot do do with insanity. Doing that was a way for me to suppress the pain of being in a place that I couldn’t stand– subservient to my father, having no sight of a career path that I wanted…

My insanity was trying harder to please, trying harder to do a good job for my dad. Ignoring my feelings and simply doing what I was told, year after year. I would have breakdowns where I was so angry about the place I was at. I would miss days or weeks of work, then I’d simply get back to it. I never did anything to address the root problem.

Thank goodness I’m out of that situation.

Excelsior!