Or rather, so randomly inspired as to be worthless enough to be uninspired.
I'm a fairly casual fan of many things. I'm not a hardcore fan of anything, but I tend to know more than the average person about just about everything which interests me.

For instance, Star Wars. As far as I'm concerned, fuck the new canon because the new movies are trash, I'm more interested in a question I came up with regarding the old expanded universe/Legacy canon and more or less knowing:

"Okay. This is something where there has to be an explanation for it. I know there must be an explanation for it. But in spite of me knowing more about Star Wars than most people do...I'm not a hardcore enough fan to actually know it."

In this case, I'm combining two of the most basic force-users (hereby referred to as Jedi even though Sith can use these just as easily) powers.

As early as The Empire Strikes Back, it has been more or less established that a Jedi can more or less utilize the force for superhuman feats of athleticism. The extent of these feats vary in how impressive they are, and I don't know the exact science behind how it works, but more or less a Jedi can do stuff like fall fifty feet unhurt, jump a hundred feet in the air, perform acrobatic flips on a dime, you get the idea.

Things which no non-force-sensitive person can do, and even those who are theoretically force-sensitive and yet untrained can't do. (For instance, think, say, Princess Leia; she can't do these things in the shown films in spite of her explicitly being just as theoretically gifted as Luke.)

So while I may not know the exact explanation, it can be reasonably inferred that it involves more or less utilizing the force to manipulate their own body, such that they are capable of doing those things.

As early as The Empire Strikes Back, it has been more or less established that a Jedi can more or less telekinetically move objects of significant size and mass--and in most material, said objects match or even exceed the size/mass of a human being.

So the question which has been bugging me all day, because I know there MUST be an answer...just not one I actually know of, would be...

...Why aren't the two combined? As in, why can't the Jedi use the force to actually fly on their own? They are always shown to (borrowing a phrase from Samurai Jack here) "Jump Good", in that they can make leaps which give them impressive amounts of air time to the point where they might as well be flying. But it's not actual flight.

They can make use of objects which are flying, and use more or less amazing grip strength to hold onto these, or manipulate these, and so on and so forth. They can ride flying objects, such as a speeder. (But there's nothing superhuman about that.) They can more or less use the force to sense when a flying object will be where, and from this, determine what they need to do in order to utilize the flying object.

But in all the material I am familiar with.

The Jedi don't actually fly using the force, unaided. In of itself, without jumping (which isn't flight), without balancing precariously over small objects, dangling from small objects, or piloting some flying machine. Just utilizing telekinesis to levitate themselves. I've never seen it done.

And it bugs me because by my understanding of the theory, it should be possible.

So I know there's an explanation somewhere for why it's not. And a more hardcore fan would have an answer for this. But like I said, I'm a filthy casual of the worst kind: informed enough where I can form these questions (whereas those completely uneducated would never stop to think about such a thing), but not informed enough where I know the answer, and this isn't exactly something I imagine there's a way to google an answer for.

So it kinda just bugs me, and this has been a major thought on my mind all day.

Like I said.

It might be, by some certain definitions, "inspired".
But by every pragmatic definition, that's a rather uninspired thought as it's pretty much utterly worthless to have.

That is, when I call myself trash. Often, I am. Often, I can be excused temporarily from a task, so long as I actually follow through on it. Have that happen, no harm done. Not trashy of me, just real life ensuing.

What makes me trash is when I am excused temporarily from a task, promise to do it, and then break that promise, making another promise which could just as easily end up breaking. And doing this with multiple promises at once, such that when I choose to fulfill one, I am breaking another because I only had the time to fulfill one.

That is pretty much an accurate summation of what's happening right now, and if not trash, what would you call a person who did that? To some extent, it can be justified. Yesterday, work left me physically, mentally, and emotionally drained--and then after that, on top of it all, I had other things to do once home. (Among them, desperately-needed girlfriend time, which while eating up time, is one of the only ways to recharge me emotionally because sometimes I just need to have that interaction in order to not feel dead inside.)

It turned out to be worse than I thought; I was actually coughing (albeit very subtly) by the time I would be going to bed. Because I was pushed past my physical breaking point. Meaning, while I wanted to fulfill some unfulfilled obligations which I had promised to do...

...I couldn't. I just couldn't. Not with how I was. It'd have been utterly impossible for me to do.

...So I was planning to do it today.

Except most of today was spent sleeping (see also, needing to recover), and once I was awake, I was informed of something that was 50% me not remembering, 50% me having no way of knowing in advance. Those two might seem like they contradict, but they don't. What happened is, we knew our parents might be gone overnight. (And when our parents are gone overnight, on Saturdays, my brother comes over for an anime night.)

Until today, I had no way of knowing that in advance. I could have still planned for it in advance, though, simply by remembering it; I was in fact the one to bring up the subject on Thursday before even my sister did so I was literally the one who basically was indirectly planning for it, and yet I didn't remember this a day later on Friday.

And now it's basically midnight, with me working my same Sunday shift early Sunday morning. With a chance of family night tomorrow (though I don't think so).

At least one promise I made for Friday was a result of an earlier broken promise, too, so I am breaking a promise that was breaking a promise.

I am pretty much. Becoming the worst of the worst kind of failures. The one who has so much potential to succeed and you can see it and you see the promise of success, only to see it dashed, but you maintain hope...only for it to be dashed, but you keep on waiting, because you have belief in them...which keeps getting shattered, over and over again, until eventually you give up on them and accept that they failed to deliver.

There's no more painful way to fail than that.
Yet that's what I'm doing.
​Which is, pretty much. Trash.

It's a day filled with fun stories. Meeting my brother to buy fireworks, and for the first time ever, testing out his new car--a pickup truck--or rather his new truck's ability to carry four people.

He told us that it was a four-seater.

This is a technically true statement.

It is not a four-door truck, though, and those rear two seats are...well. They're not the soft seats all cars use. They're four solid blocks: two square cube blocks for seats, and two square cube blocks for the...back thingies. (What's the back half of a seat called? I'm sure it has a name.)

Additionally, while the passenger side door will open just fine and well from the outside...from the inside...you can do absolutely nothing as the inside handle is broken. (A fact he wouldn't know, as he'd have no reason to use that handle.)

Once home, we planned events. Parachutes first (7 recovered, 1 had a parachute deploy but became a POT--prisoner of tree, in that we know exactly where it is but can't retrieve it; miraculously, there were no MIA, but there were 4 KIA due to 'chutes not deploying), then food. LOTS of food.

I had what is almost the ultimate double cheeseburger: potato chips, green beans with bacon strips, and actual slices of bacon (four of them), with ketchup, four slices of cheese, on two burgers. I had half of a bacon-wrapped hot dog. The first half tasted delicious! But then, it began to just taste like fat wrapped around fat...and with conflicting flavors of fat that did not compliment one another. I eat bacon; I eat hot dogs; eating both at once was not for me, at least not also with ketchup.

I also had extra green beans with bacon strips.

Corn on the cob was available, but I tend not to have it, mostly for a petty reason: my preferred method of spreading butter on my corn is the melt-in-microwave method and utilizing a special brush dipped in the melted butter to spread it over; I am the only one who likes it that way, so it's never done anymore, meaning I rarely if ever actually have corn on the cob anymore, even when I have room. (This was one of the rare instances where I would have had it.)

Oh, also, prior to that, we had coffee. I put ice into mine to slightly cool it and make a makeshift iced coffee. It did ever so slightly dilute the coffee (I could taste the water), but it also worked; instead of overheating because it was hot with coffee making it worse, I ended up at feeling the perfect temperature, so I'd say the slight loss of flavor was well worth the tradeoff of cold coffee (which frankly tastes better than warm coffee anyway) and better internal temperature regulation from digestion.

We then watched a film, Lucy. Wasn't exactly anything I really was that invested in, but wasn't exactly terrible, either. Then came the S'mores. Last time we used the charcoal grill: "I think we might have used too much lighter fluid." (That was for Memorial Day weekend I believe.) This time when using the charcoal grill: "I think we might not have used enough lighter fluid."

Not a single marshmallow caught fire this time--a first!

Granted, not a single marshmallow was really as well-done as we prefer them to get, except for those who spent an enormously large amount of time on the task.

Then came the fireworks. We use a $80 pack of fireworks we buy, in conjunction with a few (in this case, 4) Roman Candles, and if necessary, mortars (though it's rarely needed as most of the time, mortars are included in the pack including this year).

That probably doesn't perfectly sum up the day, but it hits most highlights.

That is.
I don't make a second entry for a day when my previous first entry was already past midnight.

Mainly because of the risk that I'll have chronology issues on the blog that I don't know how to fix.

But I'll make an exception.

I am typing this immediately after my "all my days are the same" entry. It's 1 am, that entry was started at like 12:45 am.

But.

One of the things I wanted to talk about is how people give inquiries into my life.

Often times, they will give the fluff questions. "How are you doing?"

I am often conditioned to respond automatically: "good", "alright", and the like.
Sometimes, when I pause to think, but am in a position where I don't or can't talk about it, I'll lie and give the response manually in spite of knowing it's not right. (I do give an honest answer when I think about it, can talk about it, and such.)

Yet there's a third type of situation, more common than both.
I pause to think, but no matter what I try to think about, I don't actually know. I don't have the details. I don't have the ability to think, "What's actually going wrong right now?"

In that.

Say someone asks me how I'm doing.
Say I give a fluff answer.
Say they prod further, or that instead of giving a fluff answer I hesitate.

Then I'm put in the position where I'll probably just answer with the fluff responses of "good", "alright", and the like...even though those aren't the truth. And the issue is dropped right there, because they don't go further. But they need to, because I require prompts.

I don't know what goes on with me. I don't know what's good, what's bad. I don't know how I'm doing. I need others to frame things for me, give me a reference point. "How's your day" isn't a good starting point, nor is "What's happened in your day" for that matter, and those are some of the more creative ones that just don't work.

I don't actually know what does work. I know a bunch of ways which don't.

But often, I find myself in a position where I would love to talk to people and talk my heart out but I don't have any coherent thoughts and I need something a lot more specific than most people can really give. In fact, it's even a little bit of a catch-22:

The only way to really learn something meaningful about me is to get me to open up and talk about the truly important things. The only learn to get me to open up and talk about the truly important things is to engage me in a meaningful way. The only way to engage me in a meaningful way is to have first learnt something meaningful about me to get the right response going in the first place, and thus the cycle continues.

My girlfriend is just about the only one who can actually consistently accomplish the feat I'd say, in spite of numerous others from close friends to coworkers (both long-time and well-positioned) to family attempting the feat. Even I can't really do it to myself; I can't really just ask myself, "how am I doing?" and come up with an honest answer.

That may sound stupid. How could I not know how I am doing when asking myself?

But it's true.

I don't actually know.

The times I do know, it was never because that's the questioned I asked; it was because I stumbled into the answer to an unasked question completely and entirely accidentally. 

All my days seem to be the same. So I'm not really feeling great. And yet in spite of that if you asked me how I was feeling I would say exactly that. Because I don't actually know what I'm feeling, if that makes sense, and you'd need to forcefully prod it out of me to get me to actually know it myself.

It's the worst kind of bipolar, and yet the description I am going to give is something I think might be relatable even to those who aren't, so I'm not even sure my BPD is to blame. It's just that.

Whenever I go to bed, it's always the same. I feel ashamed of myself for having wasted the day. I know that, given the circumstances, for whatever reason, I do need to go to bed, but always long for having done something other than that in the day.

Come the next morning, I'm usually busy preparing for work, but when I have the time to think, I always think of the ways I will manage to do better during the day.

And then, at work, I get lost in thought--I develop new, brilliant ideas, or revisit old ideas and give them nuances, or even just plan out the rest of my day. I'll plan activities, activities which would be me not wasting the rest of my day. I do this, over and over and over again, planning them and how to turn things around.

And then, when I get home.

I am burned out enough that I just.
Don't do any of it.
Or what little I do is as little as is humanly possible to do it while still being considered doing it.
And then the time disappears.
And soon, it's bed time again.

And the cycle repeats.

Over.
And over.
And over again.

The same loop.

The same sequence.

Never-ceasing.
Never changing.

I have a passing awareness of dates, because I just am generally fairly good at on some level tracking that stuff.
Yet at the same time. Days blend together. Weeks blend together. Even months are starting to blend together. Where one is the same as another. It's already the last week of June and yet I have just as much feeling as I did when it was the last week of May, and the same amount of feeling as first week of June, and midway through June, and so on and so forth.

It's just all the same, where I'm not doing anything.

​And you wonder why I see myself as a failure.

When you're as ambitious as I am, you get these really, really big ideas which take on lives of their own. Your mind races as the ideas flow together and you build something--mentally--which is absolutely beautiful. And then you try to actually double-down and make it beyond the notes your scribbled down, only to realize...

...My god this is a lot of work.

I'm starting a bit of a personal project which if I can pull it off will be absolutely AMAZING.
Getting there in the first place is going to be a bit of a challenge, though, because to get there...first I gotta actually do the work, and not only do it but do it in a coherent fashion.

​I've laid down the skeleton for it, but I got exhausted; I'll try to flesh it out tomorrow.

I'm kinda in a zone where I want to just do nothing that's really labor-intensive. Like, if I was asked to play a game, I could do that; if I was asked to watch someone play a game, I could do that; I could watch any sort of video. So I can do things. Even things which are, strictly speaking, laborious, taking effort. I could read, for instance, which you'd be surprised at how much effort it takes. (A lot! More than games!)

But in spite of that. If I had a way to describe it. It'd be "zen-out". Zenning out is similar to zoning out, in that it is me just doing things which are :feelgood: things. Or rather. More specifically. It is avoiding doing things which are passionate, energy-filled tasks.

That's why I can play a game; that takes little energy. I can watch people playing games; that takes no energy. I can watch videos; still no energy. I can read things; takes some energy, so probably only done in a short burst (for instance, a couple chapters of a book), but I can still do it.

I can't really blog though because blogging just takes a certain amount of passion. Of drive. That's what I'm looking for, the word describing it. I lack drive, but this is not in the negative context, so much as it is a "I need to recharge" context. Where basically my body is telling me that I need to chill out, relax, take time to recover from all the passion my manic mind produces.

So in a sense, I'd be depressed, I suppose, but it's a strange type of depression that's actually not really depressed?

​I have no clue how to describe this feeling. Just, I have it, so the blog about my story idea will have to wait until tomorrow.

For a beautiful story idea.

I don't have the time to post it today! (Work, so sleep. Also, health.)

​I'll get to it tomorrow, though.

And while I had the time to make a blog entry, I've been spending the last two hours or so looking up signs/symptoms/etc. of secondary infections. That being, I know that viral infections turning bacterial (in layman's terms at least) is a thing which happens; I was more or less looking up to see what the odds were that my sickness had turned from the flu into a bacterial infection.

This stemmed from a few factors. My cough feeling like it had changed. The fact that I felt like I was getting much, much better, and yet now feel sick again. The fact that I've been feeling like I've been burning up. (Though, apparently, that doesn't mean anything because according to the thermometer, my temperature is approximately 98.96--a little high, but I'm fairly certain that's not only within the margin of error but also practically expected of my family because if I'm not mistaken our temperatures always run just a little bit above the norm.)

Conclusion: uncertain. It remains a possibility, but not a probability, if that makes sense. It's something to be on guard for, certainly, but at this point I wouldn't be too worried about it. I don't have most of the symptoms that would be expected of a bacterial infection following the flu. I have a cough. And a runny nose. But that's it; I'm otherwise feeling healthy. Plus, we're not out of the zone where the sickness began, especially not for me.

My immune system works in a particular way: I don't get sick often. I really don't get sick often. If most people got sick twice a year I might get sick once every two years. In that I do get sick, it's just that it's so infrequently compared to how frequently others get sick that I might as well not get sick. My body does a really good job at rejecting the germs, I guess.

...The problem is. When I do get sick. I get sick badly. My symptoms are often much worse than typical...and it lasts much, much longer than it by all rights should. So say the average length of a cold were one week; I might have it last three to four. A flu can last up to two weeks (so, circa this Thursday is when it'd be done for a normal person), so for me it wouldn't surprise me if it took six weeks to fight off.

So in other words. I get sick a lot less often than normal people do, but when I do get sick I get sick a lot worse than most people do; my immune system seems to be trained ridiculously well to prevent being compromised but have only minimal training in how to respond when compromised.

What I'm getting at here is, there's a large chance it's just the flu right now, so I'm not too worried. Also, I hate the thought of taking antibiotics in general. They kill all the good bacteria which is a pain to replenish with probiotics; I don't like the process. That, in addition to the obvious risk of administering antibiotics unnecessarily and thus increasing the risk of bacteria developing immunity to them.

I feel like those are fairly justifiable reasons to not just automatically take antibiotics here. So for the moment, I'll just put the possibility aside and assume it's a stubborn flu. It could be a bacterial secondary infection, bacteria infecting me after the flu taking advantage of my weakened immune system. But it's not that likely at the moment.

Anyway.

​I did that instead of blog; I could blog now but I should be going to bed. As-is, this is a way longer entry than I was intending to make.

So my mom has stated that I have been far more depressed lately, and I can't even be sure of the (in)accuracy of that so she might be right on that.

And then for my biannual psychiatry appointment, I got the results from the biannual blood draw lab test which is done for my bipolar disorder medications--and the results indicated there might be a problem with my liver. So I need to see a doctor about it. (Appointment is scheduled for about twelve days from now; that's the closest we could get.)

And now, I am feeling sick, with a sore throat.

​All-around just a bunch of unpleasantries.