So it’s been a while since I posted, mainly because my hearing has really went downhill lately and it’s not something I necessarily wanted to talk about and commit to posterity. I felt like the tinny metallic ringing had gotten worse and my high end and low end hearing basically went away. So I was stuck with this mid-range notch in my audible perception and it made hearing someone like Elsa very difficult. Even with my hearing aids in it was hard. The aids are good at boosting the high end frequencies but this was something else.

I was in a pretty deep funk about all of this. I stepped up my mindfulness game in order to get a handle on my feelings. Mindfulness meditation is great; it’s really made a change in my life and has brought me a lot of peace. Basically I can sit and meditate and let all my mind build new neuron paths for my emotions. The old neuron paths (the worn, deep grove paths) that my anxiety had followed through my life start to be used less and less. It’s really a magical, non-pharmaceutical method for bringing calmness and peace to my inner world. Basically I’m letting my subconscious do all the worrying for me, behind the scenes, while my conscious mind if free to think about whatever it is I want to think about.

So anyway I’ve being doing some meditation, to accept my fate with my hearing and be at peace with it. But then I thought to try Flonase again, in case it was something in my sinuses that was the issue with my ears. That didn’t help but I’ve been taking one Claritin every morning for the past three days, and that helps….maybe? I don’t know, but yesterday was the best my hearing has been in months. I feel like the earmuffs were taken off my ears and I could hear more frequencies again. I’ve even been three days without using my hearing aids, because I feel like I don’t need them.

So I don’t know if this is some miracle cure or if it’s just part of a cycle of my hearing issues. There’s been a few times since last August when I thought my problems were leveling off and everything was going to be okay only to have the beeping start up the next day and last for all day. Then the cycle starts over again. But I would be happy with what I have today. There’s still a high end ringing in my ears but it’s more like my “normal” tinnitus that I’ve had for over 10 years. I can ignore that pretty easily. It’s just when this “new” tinnitus and the whistling and beeping show up that I get very distracted and very immersed in it.

In other news….I started reading “How to Not Give a F*ck” book, which is the last of the books the wife got me for Christmas. I’ve also started on audibooks “Anti-Fragility” by Nicholas Talib and some book about how we don’t see objective reality. And I’ve stopped reading/listening to all of these books. Why? Because I don’t see the point in them. They all follow a them about how what we see and do now is wrong, and that we need to allow more creative destruction in our lives. But why allow this? In order to make our lives better. Ok, that’s a valid argument. But the point I don’t see is, why should we willingly allow destruction in our lives, to make it better? Wouldn’t we have to allow more and more destruction, with the goal of making our lives better and better? This is not a worldview I subscribe to. I am always striving for perfection even though I know that perfection is impossible. I’m already well aware of Buddhist principles that suffering is part of life, and that desire leads to suffering. Maybe I’m already in-tune with these books that to finish reading them would seem like an exercise in boredom. And the book about objective reality is kinda cool; it gives all these mathematical proofs that the world we experience through our five senses has been shaped by evolution. Our senses have been sharpened by experiences that help us to survive and reproduce. There is an objective reality but we don’t experience it fully because evolution has changed the way we experience it. This, to me, is all well and good. It’s a nice thought experiment. But what’s the point? Is there some benefit to us humans knowing that we don’t experience objective reality? There’s no way for us to escape our five senses to see what reality really is, so what’s the point in talking about it? There could be some hippies come along and tout the benefits of mind-altering drugs, in order to see reality for what it is. But is this really true, that one could take drugs and see behind the curtain? I doubt it, because everyone has their own separate experience on these drugs. (I myself have never taken any, I’m just going on what I read). But if different people routinely and consistently saw the same images and had the same phenomenon while on these drugs then I’d say, yeah, there’s something real and interesting going on.

Today is the happiest financial day of the year for me. It’s when I get my bonus and get to pay bills. I love paying bills. Seriously, I get endorphins flowing when I doing the books, balance our accounts, and pay all the outstanding bills. I think I like this because there was a stretch in my life when I was living paycheck to paycheck, and bills were hard to pay sometimes. But now I pay them off as soon as I get them. It’s a wonderful feeling. I’ve never forgotten how hard life used to be.

The 3D printing is going along nicely. It’s really fun now that people are coming up with requests for me to print different items. All of my other hobbies are pretty much self-serving, but this one is nice. I like to use my creativity to make things for others. I’m really trying to get more in depth with the Blender 3D modeling program, because that’s where the money is (if there were any money to be made in this hobby lol). Anyone can download a file and print it out, but few can actually create the objects in the first place. And also this is a hobby that seems right up my alley. I’ve learned the hard way up to now that I’m not really good with using my hands to build or modify. I don’t have the patience. But I can stare at a screen like nobodies business.

I’m finishing up printing a cinderwing dragon for Emma. I just made a nameplate for the Wife’s coworker. I’m printing a better 3D guitar so I can donate it for the school’s fundraiser. I’ve got a bunch of other stuff I’d like to print. But that’s one of the things I noticed about this hobby. Well, there’s actually two things I noticed:

1. It is very satisfying and calming to watch the printer print. It’s taking a raw material (plastic filament) and literally creating something new before your eyes. I know that under the hood it’s all machine code, telling the extruder where to go on the X, Y and Z axis. But it’s still magical to look at a blank plate and what the printer go to work, dutifully, like a bee building a hive.
2. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to delay gratification for anything. The dragon I’m printing now takes 24 hours to finish. That means in that time, I can’t print anything else. I can look online at other items I’d like to print. I can download the files, get them prepped, and load them on the printer. But I can’t actually print anything until the current object is done. So I get to build up anticipation and excitement for the next item to go. But we live in a world now of instant gratification – we can play any song on demand, watch any video, buy any object online, have someone shop and deliver food to us….It’s just been a long time since I’ve had to sit and wait for something I wanted. So this means that we are in the infancy of 3D printing, with all this waiting. Someday there will be printers and methods that are so fast and good, that I’ll be saying “I remember when it took a whole goddammed day to print a dragon like that!”

Elsa starts track practice next week. Emma has track practice now, plus she has Elite Choir musical practice, plus the Opera House musical practice. She is busy. Jack is sick, he has no voice. He was drawing his words out on the fridge last night, like some game of Pictionary. He is supposed to have Regionals for wrestling tomorrow in Pittsfield. We’ll see.