So on the first I sat down to write my new years resolution post, similar to the one that I posted yesterday. It's not exactly the same, because I got 3/4 of the way through the post and my computer shit the bed.
Granted, I sat down to write it at 11 pm, so not ideal for the first day of the new year. What can I say, the rest of the day was quite lazy, and to be completely honest I actually forgot about doing a blog post until I was about ready to go to bed. All of this lead up to me trying to get the first post of the year out in less than ideal conditions. Mix that with my 6 year old laptop that has been acting up lately, and we have a recipe for disaster.
Anyone reading this at the time it goes up is probably a family member, so you know about my temperament when it comes to electronics and anger. I have a problem where if something isn't working the way it should be, I get incredibly angry and more often than not end up breaking something. I've lost countless phones, game controllers, monitors, and other devices to this character flaw. Lately, in the past year or two, I've really been focusing on controlling my anger, mostly because I think it's a terrible flaw that could have some serious consequences in the future, but also because I was spending a fortune on replacement electronics.
So last night I started to write around 11:10pm. It was going well, and by 11:25 I had the bulk of the post written and I just needed to write out my resolutions. The computer had been a little slow up to that point but it was nothing major, and nothing I couldn't handle. Once I started opening up new tabs though, to get links to my new twitter profile and the read harder challenge, things really started to slow down. I was tired, and I was literally spending minutes watching the clock tick closer to midnight as the little rainbow pinwheel that mac users hate spun away. The fans on the computer were running in overdrive, and things were freezing up badly. I was getting worked up, and it was exacerbated by the fact that I needed to be quiet, since my mom had already gone to bed and the dogs were sleeping in their kennels beside me. When stuff like this starts to happen one way I vent my frustrations is by swearing loudly, or just letting out an exasperated grunt or sigh. I know lot's of people think this is ridiculous, and it's just a placebo, and lot's of other reasons why I shouldn't do it. It helps though, but I do agree that it's probably not the best way to deal with frustration, so I've been focusing more on controlled breathing exercises to calm me down. So far these have been really effective.
Regardless of the tactics I employ to calm myself down, they weren't working. The computer was getting slower by the second, and I was starting to get really angry. I felt like I might have an anxiety attack, and several times I cocked my arm back to punch the screen, or grabbed both sides of it with the intention of snapping it in half. I managed to calm myself down though and stop myself from breaking anything. This is the part I'm conflicted with. Do I feel proud of myself for controlling my emotions at a basic human level? It seems weird to pat myself on the back for that.
I decided to just save what I had as a draft, and finish it on my phone. It was too late though, the blog post page completely died and I had to force quit chrome. I reopened it again immediately with the desperate hope that some cache was able to keep all of the data that included my writing, but it was a fruitless effort. In the end I lost everything at about 11:54 and, defeated, went to bed. I actually started up my laptop to write yesterday's post and it was still being slow and freezing, so I shut that down immediately and switched to my phone. I wrote yesterday's and today's post on my phone, and I'll probably be writing many more of them in the future until I get something figured out for my laptop situation.
So that's why I didn't have a post up on January 1st. I really wanted to, I would have loved to have 365 posts in 2017, but it's clearly not going to happen now. That's ok though, because the main message of that post was focusing on my ability to get back on the wagon when I fall off, so I'm not going to dwell on things like that. Nothing can ever be perfect, it can only be as good as I make it, and the more I work at this blog, the better it will be!