I ATEN'T DED YET

About a month of silence. A little worrying in some ways, given the recent trend of posts and the subject matter in them.

But I have a valid excuse: honest! I was working on my NaNoWriMo 2020 entry. And it had been a rather weird month. For one, my usual writing time was no longer that of the lunch hour, but at stupid o'clock in the morning before work (it's more like 0630hrs to 0745hrs, so not really stupid o'clock). For two, I have not been having enough sleep for several weeks now, often turning in at around midnight, and waking up nearer 0530hrs.

Why? I don't know. I suspect dis-stress. I only claim that conclusion because I would often be nursing a tension headache from around 0900hrs till whenever I stopped work at the end of the day. I was really wired, and I am not referring to the amount of coffee that I was drinking. Before, I had been downing like four or five mugs of that thing before noon, but I had since cut it back down till like two or three at the most.

No change---the headaches still came. I've just learnt to live with it. I don't think any amount of sick leave or medication will help me deal with it. There were some fundamental things that needed to be addressed, and as long as they weren't going to be addressed, I would continue to have these headaches.

Anyway, back to waking up at stupid o'clock in the morning. One moment I would be dreaming, and the next moment, my brain would be running at full steam, jerking me wide awake. I dragged myself up only through the sheer power of will and prayer, praying to God and thanking Him that he had allowed me to live another day (I wasn't dead yet), and praying that He would bless me with wisdom to get through the day.

He hasn't disappointed me so far, and I have no reason to believe that He would disappoint me ever.

And at the end of the day, I just give a little prayer to God, thanking Him for the day that had gone, and asked Him to grant me good rest so that perhaps I would awake again the next day with renewed vigour to do what I do to bring glory to His name.

But all that aside, this year's NaNoWriMo entry is named The Lost Year, and is a real-life inspired fictionalised re-telling of all the nonsense that had gone on in my life for this year. In a meta sort of way, I had talked about it in the novel itself. Allow me to bring it up here to avoid having to re-think how to present it:

I had a rough plan of the story structure for this year's entry for NaNoWriMo---I had observed that the whole year had basically been shot down to hell for whatever reason, and that just trying to keep track of what had been happening in real life was already more dramatic than any form of fiction that I could come up with; this year was just that bad. There was of course the obvious relationship status change on my end, and my discovery and acceptance of Jesus Christ as my personal saviour, but there were also other bad things that had been happening, like the wild fires in Australia, the droughts in Africa, the overly severe hurricane season within the month, and of course, the once in a lifetime experience of living through a true blue pandemic during the era of technological supremacy guided by the most mal-organised of the natural world hegemon, the United States of America. With that in mind, the structure for this year's novel entry was straightforward---set up twelve months' worth of stories and events into individual chapters, and divide out the fifty thousand evenly among them, leading to roughly forty one hundred and sixty seven or so words per chapter. Given my usual rate of about two thousand words per hour, and limiting myself to an hour of writing a day (given my rather punishing work schedule for now), the numbers worked out to about twenty four days total time of writing, well within the range of the duration provided.

That of course was the basic plan. And so for the twenty or so days, I would diligently put in my two thousand or so words per day, completing one chapter roughly every couple of days. The more I wrote, the more amused I was seeing that I could actually find enough odd or bad events that had occurred to fill up the spaces---for what it was worth though, since it was fiction I took the liberty to alter the source event information in ways that I felt was more conducive to story telling, shifting time periods a little, changing the names of the guilty and innocent, and using inspired events to create fictional ones. Calling this novel ``The Lost Year'' was starting to prove prophetic---it was the lost year for me and world because it was the year where almost all of our plans were rudely stopped and forced to be reconsidered anew, as though there was no progress whatsover throughout the year. In fact, in some ways, it could even be thought of as the world undergoing a regression instead of a progression instead.

It was definitely a sobering thought.

And that was how this year's entry was completed.

Consider it a catharsis for myself as a new chapter begins once again.

Oh, the not-so-new website is still as bad as before, but I suppose we just need to make do with what we are given---it is not as though they are going to fix it anyway, considering that it has been a year already, and nothing has changed.

------

In other news, I'm back to doing a lot of reading once more. Part of the reason is to re-saturate my brain with knowledge as I keep it soaked deep with the wisdom from the Bible, and the other part of the reason is to fill in the apparent copious amount of free time that come about from not having another person whom I need to spend time with, considering that I am single now. It's funny how quickly I got over things this time round, not ``got over'' in the sense that I am ready to date again, but ``got over'' in the sense that I was not drowning myself in alcohol or any of that sort of nonsense the last time something serious was seriously marred that way.

I am either getting more jaded, or just have found better coping mechanisms. It is hard to tell.

Knowing that God is there and is with me helps keep the darkest thoughts at bay, but there is still a sense of hollowness that is not easily filled in. It is not spiritual hollowness---that has been filled with the lovingkindness of Christ---but some kind of physical/interactive hollowness that drove me away from my original thoughts of slugging it out alone some fifteen years ago, and into the experimenting with being in intimate relationships with people. I suppose as one gets older, the concept of ``No man is an island'' will hit harder and harder until one of four things happen: I eventually settle it by having a spouse and starting my family (no matter what size); or I eventually settle it by having a robust community network of friends (regular or church family---it doesn't matter); or I eventually settle it by being overly engrossed in some kind of mission/vision that it did not matter to me any more; or I eventually settle it by being dead corporeally.

I still think that Ecclesiastes 3:1--8 is applicable. God will guide the way when I choose to listen to Him. I'm not as spiritually endowed the way some other believers are, but I believe that He knows the best way to get His message to me, and I have seen some of the ways that he is doing that. I just need to listen, and obey. So far nothing He has told me to do has gone against what is essentially my nature, and for that I am grateful, as it is a personal validation that God is indeed who He is.

Alright, that's all I want to write here for today. It's just a quick note to show that I'm not dead yet (thankfully perhaps). A semi-regular update will happen from now on, since there isn't a NaNoWriMo to absorb all the writing that I can do.

Till the next update then.