I feel like I start off every post by saying "things are alright", haha.  But like, the overall average of my life usually tends to "alright", the more interesting bits are how exactly all the different things are going and how it all averages out.  I guess I'm not the kind of person to have life be going really well, and then really terribly, or like feel really exhausted one week and then really ready to go the next.  I try not to, at least...that sounds like the kind of life I wouldn't enjoy that much...

My sleep has always been pushed back pretty consistently to like 3 or 4 AM kind of as a general tendency, but lately it's been even slightly later.  On the "plus" side, I've been able to have a couple of days here and there of just sleeping in until the afternoon; I think these days are probably really helpful for my body to catch up not just on raw hours of sleep but also REM sleep, I feel like.  I started feeling bad for my chickies to have to wait so long to be let out, so I've been keeping their inner coop door open overnight, which seems to be fine -- it's more of a double-precaution anyways, since their outer run area is fenced off and protected to begin with.

I'm going to try to talk about things other than videogames this time, but I'm sure there will be mention of that too, haha.  Somebody at dance (I really couldn't read them, like why were they talking to me about the things they talked about??) randomly asked me about how much time I spend on videogames on average.  It's hard for me to quantify easily but the figure I gave was probably about 2-3 hours per day...I'm not entirely certain, though.  Like, an average ALTTPR run is 1.5 hours or thereabouts...it's not like I do one of those every day, but I feel like I usually do =something= each day, and it ends up adding up?  I dunno.  Somehow I got the sense that this line of questioning was sorely misguided, though.  It's not like playing videogames prevents me from being a high-achieving person...you could argue the opposite...

Anyways, besides sleep, I feel like my overall health has been some weird mix of good and bad.  I feel like this past week in particular I've been paying the price for a few bad decisions sometimes; I mean sleeping late is the obvious one, but even things like snacking a bit too much, these are things that I can end up feeling the effects of later sometimes.  On the other hand, there are these small victories here and there (the best kind...!) where I do simple exercises and take care of my skin or whatever.

Some days recently have been a bit of a slog, I think work this past week was a little rougher than average, so I'm a little miffed in that way, but then there are just random things here and there that can brighten my day.  Even really silly things like the feeling and sound of one of my keyboards, or the sound of the rain, or whatever.

Kanon is on hold since I need to do a writeup on Shiori's arc (sometime...), and in the meantime I've been watching more Initial D since it's such a low-stress watch.  I watched Third Stage, which was a movie, and I have mixed feelings about it; I feel like I can say just as many good things and bad things about it compared to the first two anime seasons.  On the one hand, the animation and rendering got a lot better, so that's nice.  But on the other hand, it felt like the car racing "battles" were much less interesting this time around.  Maybe it's a pacing thing, but it just felt like the winning and losing of the races, or whatever cool tactics or even learnings they had during them, didn't really have as much interesting parts or impact as before.  Perhaps it's because you can only have so many car races before they start kind of feeling same-y, but I feel like it's really just because these ones were less interesting than the other ones that came before.  On the other hand, some of the slice-of-life / character development parts here were a lot better, like the scene where Natsuki (the protag's love interest) comes over (despite the two of them having been on kind of rocky/uncertain terms) and brings a mini light-up Christmas tree and celebrates with Takumi and his dad, that was really great.  Something about how his dad was both kind of awkward but also kind of understanding, and how the trio was kinda totally mismatched but also heartwarming at the same time.  That was a highlight.

But I think at the end when Takumi is like "racing is my passion, I want to go pro and be number one", that was a big let-down for multiple reasons.  I already mentioned before that part of what made Takumi interesting was the way he related to racing in a different way than the others.  I feel like it makes sense that he would get more invested in racing somehow as the series went on, and I think the way that he gets more interested in how to work with his car actually was really great because it was motivated by a very personal and emotional experience that happened in season two.  But I think his thought at the end of "I wanna go pro and be faster than anyone" really doesn't feel right, like why?  I think it ought to have been something more suited to his character, like he feels like he understands life better when he races, or he just feels innately drawn to it, or something like that.  Because he was never interested in being number one before, it feels inauthentic to his character that he just changed his mind about it.  At one point he also says "I don't like to back down from a challenge", which I also feel like is a 180 from how he felt about racing before.  Sigh, well it's not like I didn't expect this.

Rhythm Quest is going OK, like always I'm just continuing to peck away at it when I can.  This coming week though there are one or two other things that I need to get done -- specifically, I still need to do my pixel art drawing for the month.  I also have a new album/CD release that I've been working on, which I'm basically finally ready to hit the button on, so probably tomorrow for that.

I stopped by Jammix last week, that was nice!  It's been a long while since I went dancing, like always it's good for me to put myself in that sort of situation, just to like...remind myself of who I am I guess?  It's hard to describe succinctly.  There's this weird sort of thing where I feel like by putting myself into a situation full of social pressures, I feel that I can be more true to myself by engaging in the practice of resisting those pressures.  I mean, I wish I could go to dance and really further my experience of dancing, but it's just not in the cards for me right now, and it's sort of out of my hands.  There's only so much I can do by myself, right?  On the plus side, I shared a nice dance with somebody, I feel like I really made them smile and enjoy themselves, that's always a good feeling!

I've been on a nice string of cooking recently, not just making the old standby foods (mushroom pasta, roasted brussels sprouts, sous vide lamb chops, blahblah), but more recently stuff like loaded fries, mushroom farro risotto, jerk chicken, cauliflower masala, and then I have to mention I roasted a huge cut of pork shoulder and have been putting that to good use in burgers and tacos.

It's already almost time for another trip of mine, which really snuck up on me!  I'm looking forward to it, but need to push through two more weeks or so before I get there.