Dear Diary...

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Dear Diary,

I went to the dentist last week. Totally rocked it.

The dental nurse or sous-dentist or whatever they are that does the actual dental cleaning was kinda cute. Not a bombshell, but young and healthy and totally a real person. I started taking ginseng recently, and I felt super alive and ended up chatting about dental stuff perhaps longer than would be normal (although I feel like people from the state I live in now can be a chatty bunch), but she seemed cool and eager to spread dental knowledge. So we start the dental work, and I close my eyes because otherwise I'm staring into the ceiling lights, and/or the dentist for the entire procedure. It feels fine, I've been to this dental joint a couple times and they're the gentlest I've ever experienced. Obviously she needs to scoot around and shift positions a lot to get into all the little nooks and corners of my mouth, and after a while, I feel a warmth near my face, and (with my eyes closed) I think "what a minute, is that her boobs?"

So a nervous anime sweat drop appears above my head, and I'm not sure how to feel. If I were watching an ecchi anime, this is clearly the moment to go all goofy eyed and start drooling, but I'm not feeling these kinds of feelings. If I wanted to advance a relationship with this person, the strategic move would be to act gentlemanly, but this is honestly the first time in the encounter I've thought about her that way. And strategy or not, I don't want to upset a woman with a water drill in my mouth. A story about tigers and strawberries flashes through my mind, and I decide to just sit back and soak it in. Or you know, continue sitting back and soaking things in, what with the dentistry going on. Anyways, she finishes up, and we chat more about dentistry. Now interested, I covertly scan her for any signs of flirtatiousness. Not that I expected any "drilled at the dentist's" situation to play out, but given my hobbies, I can't help but imagine the possibilities. She tells me I've got the cleanest third molars she's ever seen, and we share some comradery over liking the same type of toothpaste, but nothing that makes me think it would be okay to ask if she's got plans tonight.

Huh, did I have a boner? I can't remember. I feel like I would have remembered if I got a boner. But I honestly don't remember.

Anyways, this week, I think I might have seen her at my retail job. I'm not sure because she had a completely different hair style and wasn't wearing dentist scrubs and I'm not great at remembering faces. But she was the same height, build, skin tone and wore glasses. I greeted her in an energetic salesmanly way, as I greet everybody, and she sort of giggled and looked away and said "no, I'm just looking, thanks". I contemplated asking "hey, are you a dentist?" but she left my department before I worked up the nerve. Not that I expected any "checked out in the check out line" situation to play out, but god damn that almost turned into an anime romance plot.

I'm not experiencing any regrets over this, just curiosity. For all I know she's happily married, or a lesbian, or both, and I'm not ready for relationships, since I am afraid to say "I can't hang out tonight, I've got to animate a big-boobed shark girl spacefighter pilot setting phasers to thrust on an alien with an octopus for a dick".

(Man, how embarrassing would it be if she hangs out at LoK?)
(Also, how awesome would it be if she hangs out at LoK?)



EDIT:
Dear The Rest of You,

I'm writing this stuff because I feel like my writing abilities aren't as good as they might need to be and one of thing the things I've heard is that keeping a diary/journal is good for writing ability. But I think it's also greatly valuable to get people's reactions to things, so boom, (haha I typed boob first by accident) compromise. Also apparently I'm desperate for conversation. Feel free to throw in your own Dear Diary stories if you feel moved to do so.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Dear Diary...

It turns out we've got a crazy hot new manager and I'm not sure how to react.

So one of the things that happens when you work in retail is that the managers seem to get thrown around a lot. People can get transferred to new departments or even different stores miles away in an endless brawl of competition for promotions and upwards mobility. I feel like I blinked for a second and a whole new crew is running the store.

I find that it's best to be on friendly terms with management, so I set out to get to know one of the new gals, and it got a little odd for me. Let's give her a fake name, Essie.

To set the stage, Essie is the fourth of what I call the "little girl managers", these ridiculously petite brunettes that look like they barely graduated from highschool, if that. At first I hadn't noticed that they were more than one person, until I saw two of them in the same place at the same time and almost thought I was having a stroke.

I managed to get along with the third "little girl manager" pretty well, let's call her Threedee, mainly from one particular chat at the lunch table. I haven't seen her for a while, but the last thing Threedee said to me was that every time she sees Chrono Trigger at the GameStop, she thinks of me. I always wonder if Threedee was trying to express something more than professional friendliness, and I was really not sure how to respond to her "interest" in me. I try to get along with all of the managers, and most of them get along with me, so I don't know how to tell if a potentially compatible female manager is just showing professional friendliness or trying to hint at something deeper. And let's face it, I haven't chalked up a lot of experience with women over the years.

So with all this in mind, I approached Essie one day with maybe an undue level of familiarity based on her predecessors and started chatting. Hello! The name's Ace. Where did you work before? What's your department? Et cedera, et cedera. With most managers, you'll get about that far and they'll say something along the lines of: "Nice to meet you, valued employee. May we both earn glory on the fields of retail! Get back to work." But for whatever reason, Essie stuck around for much longer, even a bit after I started running out of things to say. Our conversation only ended when she got a call on her manager phone and had to leave to fix something. Call me a narcissistic optimist (cuz I am) but Essie sounded genuinely disappointed that we had to shut up and get back to work.

Essie left saying "it was really interesting to talk to you, Ace," which was actually almost exactly what Threedee said at the end of our first meeting. And I can't help but think that Threedee vanished from my world leaving me to wonder if things could have gone beyond a professional relationship, and I have to choose whether or not that happens again with Essie.



You know, Diary, before I started writing these, I would have told you that I don't spend a lot of time thinking about girls, but I guess maybe I underestimated that. Or maybe thinking about girls is the only interesting part of my life right now...

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Dear Diary,

You may not believe this, but I'm sorta into bird-watching. I have never gone looking for birds, but when I see a bird, it's fun to look up what it is and recognize it. I used to do this with jet fighters, but there are only so many jet fighters and you don't see them quite as regularly as birds.

I am especially surprised by the diversity of birds we get in the parking lot of my retail job, and today I saw every bird I know of that lives there, plus a new one, and I thought OMG I gotta write about this in my diary!

The new bird was actually the first bird I saw today, a turkey vulture. I'm familiar with turkey vultures from other places I've lived, but I rarely see them where I live now. So when I saw a big bird overhead riding thermals, I felt a bit nostalgic to see it. It was too far away to see any distinguishing features, so it might have been an eagle or something, but definitely too big to be hawk. The retail job is near a highway, so it might have been looking for roadkill, or it might have been trying to eat garbage from the mall like all the other birds.

The other exciting bird sighting was a hawk getting mobbed by crows. It was off in the distance and hard to see across the parking lot, but it's a familiar sight in my neighborhood where hawks and crows share space. A hawk is capable of catching and eating a single crow, but multiple crows are capable of wounding the hawk, so crows will gang up and try to chase hawks out of their territory. In fact, all songbirds will do this (yes, crows and corvids are a kind of songbird) they will start by yelling at predators with their "fuck off" call, which alearts all nearby songbirds to the predator. If the predator persists, the songbirds will start to mob it, gathering for assaults and trying to drive it away. Crows are capable of physically attacking something like a hawk, but when it's something small like a sparrow, they poop bomb larger birds. Besides the normal reasons to not want to get pooped on, if a predatory bird gets poop on its wings, it may lose the ability to fly, making the predator bird itself vulnerable to land predators. If you ever feel like a bird has pooped on you on purpose, yes, they can do that.

Sparrows are the easiest to spot bird in the parking lot, and today I tried to listen for the difference between their "fuck off" call and their intraspecies calls. In general, most humans only get to experience a bird's "fuck off" call, because songbirds see big humans as threats, and great us with a hardy "fuck off". "Fuck off" calls tend to have a sharp or shrill tone, not unlike a human's various "fuck off" calls, but in an adorable cute songbird voice. The "fuck off" call that humans are probably most familiar with is the crow's "caw caw!" Crows use a softer voice when talking to other crows. I could definitely hear the difference between the parking lot sparrows' initial "fuck off" chirp and their eventual softer chattier songs as they got used to my presence and went about their business.

Another cool bird that showed itself today were the commuting herons. I see blue herons flying over the parking lot all the time, but I've never seen one on the ground, where herons hunt, so I assume that the flying herons are on their way to work or coming home, thus, commuting herons. Herons are famous for eating fish, but they are capable of taking anything that fits in their mouths, like gophers and lizards, so I could imagine one hunting the various mice and rabbits that also live in the parking lot. However, herons need water to swallow their food, so I guess maybe there isn't a source of water near enough to the parking lot to make that a reasonable hunting strategy. Too bad, cuz I'm not gonna lie, diary, I would fucking to see a heron stab a rabbit with his face and eat it in the parking lot.

Besides the vulture, hawk, crows, sparrows and herons, I got fleeting glimpses of all the other resident birds: pidgeons, sea gulls and canada geese. And actually, while driving in, I caught a glimpse of a bird that almost flew into my car's windshield. I didn't get a good look at it, since I was watching the road and it was moving fast in the opposite direction, but it looked smaller than a sparrow and more yellow in color. So maybe a new kind of bird I don't know, maybe a runt sparrow that found a mustard packet in a trash can.

[kvier]

If you have a smartphone, Merlin Bird ID is pretty cool.

[Trninja2]

Good stuff ace, i was once known for the stories i would write when i was younger but nowadays
whenever i try to draw out that same magic, i fail miserably and it just makes me sick to read.
Perhaps this could help me remember how i felt when writing them back then.
So if i may.......

Dear diary
For about a week i've felt so exhausted from the time i get up in the morning to when i go to sleep and haven't been able
to understand why. This made work even more harder than usual as my job can be pretty physically demanding.
When i came home i would eat a lil bit an just sit in my chair an watch tv till bedtime because i really didn't feel like
doing anything else.
Now what's weird is that for 2 days in a row the complete opposite had happened.
I would wake up in the morning so full of energy and positive vibes and get even more
work done feeling like i was invincible and wasn't even tired after coming home.
The 1st day was a total suprise so i tried to do the exact same routine the 2nd day and
BOOM, i was running around like a hurricane, the energizer bunny didn't have anything on me.
But i guess it had to end sometime.......

Today was my day off, more of the same exhaution and lack of motivation followed.
Tried working on my game but not much progress was made, although i did sonewhat
figure out how to get a spotlight going so there's that. Then i watched some youtube vids
to try and learn more about game maker studio which has been giving
me a headache for a month and still is..........Oh well, tomorrow is another day afterall.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

That's actually how I've felt for a long time, just exhausted all the time, then once in a while I get a jolt and I would have no idea why and couldn't hang onto it.

One of my theories is that it's a protein deficiency. There are many different opinions, but I've read that you need something like 50g of protein per day for a lazy lifestyle and up to 150g protein/day for a very active lifestyle. A lot of food is deceptive, like a hotdog is only like 5g of protein, so you could eat an entire bag of meat and still not have a day's worth of protein. Check those food labels and try to get enough protein every day.

Another weird thing is getting enough magnesium. A lot of foods have magnesium in them, but they tend to not have very much, so it's common to have magnesium deficiency. Magnesium apparently helps you calm down, or a lack of magnesium can cause you to freak out, which can interfere with your sleep. Calcium is also tough to get for some people, and if you've got an active lifestyle, you need more calcium since your body builds and repairs bones the same as it does with muscles.

[Trninja2]

Well darn, if only i could remember what i had eaten the night before but i believe sprite was a factor
because it's all i had to drink and i remember waking up in such a good mood. Now when i tried to replicate
the same morning routine today it didn't work like before so yeah maybe it was something i had the night before.
Interesting theory though, I'll have to remember that when i go grocery shopping.
I sure would like to find how to get that feeling back cuz damn it felt good.
No on to the......

Dear diary
I saw something so cool today and in all my years this is the 1st I've seen of it. A rainbow cloud,
it's like a rainbow that's attached itself to a cloud and moved along the sky with it. I even took a pic with my phone
but it doesn't do justice. I guess that was the highlight of my day, work was rough and no matter what energy drink i had
I just couldn't get that needed boost, i pretty much felt like a zombie. I figure I'll have a bowl of cereal and watch a lil bit of one peice
before i head to bed and do it all over again.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

If you drink caffeine regularly, that's actually another thing that might be messing you up. I used to be sort of afraid of caffeine, but the exhaustion was so bad, I tried adding caffeine to my schedule for a while and I noticed that it definitely affected my brain. It was like a segment of my brain had been shut off while I was on caffeine. The longer I stayed on caffeine the worse and worse I felt, I could tell that even though I was sleeping the same amount, the quality of my sleep was worse, and eventually, I had to quit. (I actually even quit the job that had a schedule that made me try caffeine, although there were other factors in that decision)

So even though you may not feel tired (because you're on caffeine) caffeine also causes tiredness. It won't feel good to quit, but once you're over caffeine withdrawal, you might start feeling more energetic. If you want something to replace it, try ginseng. I take a 600mg tablet every other day. You can get ginseng tea too if you'd rather have something to drink, or actual ginseng root if you like to mix these things yourself, but I figure it's better to have a controlled dosage.

Another thing about sleep is the idea of sleep cycles. Basically, your body passes through different stages of sleep, REM sleep, which causes dreams, and deep sleep, which causes complete stillness, and you cycle through these stages every 1.5 hours. Supposedly, if you wake up during deep sleep, you will feel tired, but if you wake up during REM sleep, you will feel fine. REM sleep takes less time, but is more important for feeling rested, so a short 15-25 minute nap can be beneficial if you can manage it. If you have an alarm set to 6am or something, chances are you are waking up during your deep sleep stage and you will feel groggy. I don't think that effect should be bad enough to last all day, but sometimes if you have a bad morning, you can never catch. The ideal thing is to go to sleep early enough that you can wake up on your own before whatever time you need to start your day. There are also devices you can buy that monitor your sleep cycles and wake you up only during REM stages.

Also, drinking sprite and eating cereal for dinner sounds like a recipe for not feeling good. If you've got a physical day job, you should try eating a "post workout meal", generally, protein and carbohydrates other than sugar. Chicken and rice is famous, but basically hardy food, like a can of beans, tin of fish, bag of nuts, block of cheese, etc. I mean, I'm hopefully not the first person to tell you that eating sugar is bad, but yeah, if you are feeling bad all that time, decreasing your daily sugar intake is something to look into. Basically, sugar is among the simplest biological compounds, when your body digests food, it breaks down more complicated fats and carbs into simpler sugars. When you eat sugar, your body gets an instant hit. Too much of that instant sugar rush can overwhelm your body's ability to absorb all that energy, causing the classic sugar coma, and over a long term, insulin desensitivity which becomes diabetes.



Anyways, you can tell by now that I've spent a lot of time thinking about exhaustion and researching it. It's apparently a pretty common thing for people, and there are plenty of resources online you can check.

[Trninja2]

Man I've never really thought about all that but the caffeine thing totally makes sense as a buddy of mine
is a big soda junkie and he's been having to take sleep meds to knock himself out. I myself have done that
in the past but i figured that i didn't wanna rely on pills to get to sleep or eventually become ineffective, so i cut
that out real quick. Same with watching tv or listening to music, if i grew used to hearing noise while sleeping
I wouldn't wake up easily to an alarm clock or some emergency situation.

I've always known sugar to be bad but i have a big sweet tooth to restrain, lol. Normally i don't make a habbit of eating candy
or other treats regularly but every once in a while i may eat a bit more than normal. Not a fan of coffee but will have an iced one
in the morning about once a week and i have actually cut myself from soda numerous times but it tends to be the cheap and with my
family, it's kinda hard to stay away from.

It would seem that my actions the night before impact how the next day will go, i mean how else could i have gone 2 days in a row so pumped and positive from start to finish. If i have an early shilft, i use an alarm just to make sure I'm not late, otherwise I'll wake naturally.
But if it's early, i ride my bike in, grab an iced coffee and sausage mcmuffin from McDonalds before i start and spend about
90% of the day outside in the hot sun, consuming mostly water and a bottle or 2 of poweraide and for lunch is usually a toss up between pizza, chinese and mcdonalds.

Anyway, thanks for the advice. This trend has gone on long enough and it's time to make some changes if i ever want to get better.