Picture Perfect

We were talking about shopping, right?

So summer of 2015 I got a digital HD camera... you know, the really expensive kind that your friend uses to take really beautiful/irritating photos of gongs in the middle of misty forests in Japan?

I even watched a series of videos from National Geographic about digital photography and I was getting really excited about it. I'd say last summer I took about ten photos I was really excited about and maybe twenty more over the fall and winter at parties and stuff that I went to. It was a pretty good start.

But then school started and I fell off the wagon. It's been about seven months since I've really done anything with it and I had kind of wanted to be ready to take really amazing, next-level photos in the snow this winter.

So far I have taken zero snow photos.

I'm considering a goal to shoot as many photos as it takes each day until I have one truly great picture per day.

But when you set goals like that it's really just a way of saying that you're kidding yourself. So I probably won't do it.

I have however completely charged the battery.

Deep Breath

Would you blame me if I liked aromatherapy?

I was once skeptical about it (like any normal person) but a long time ago I worked at the Body Shop for a few weeks and discovered that I like it.

I started out using only products of theirs, mostly this spray that you spray onto your pillow and it makes you fall asleep and dream really, really heavy, weird dreams. But then you wake up feeling the way it felt to wake up when you were five years old and you were ready to start climbing the walls all day.

Anyway they don't sell that stuff anymore but I started using essential oils from the grocery store in my old Body Shop oil burner and I had a lot of success with it.

Before we go any further... no, I do not receive anything from any company selling aromatherapy stuff. I am just some gay dude that shops a lot and likes to talk about shopping.

Anyway I have a big issue these days with staying up until 3AM and then sleeping in until around noon. I long ago accepted that this is my body's natural cycle and it wouldn't be healthy to break it. I always feel really amazing whenever I just surrender to that cycle and go with the flow.

But it's extremely inconvenient for school and also for work and it's just true that I'm not a kid anymore and there's not that much useful for me to do from 1 AM to 3 AM... I usually just end up watching Netflix until I fall asleep.

So I thought I could try to reset my schedule using some aromatherapy. But I needed new stuff since my trusty Body Shop sleeping mist doesn't exist anymore.

I decided to try Saje, that natural products store that's in all the malls now. It's funny because I returned to my original position of being a skeptic. I thought that if it was a store in the mall they would just be selling the idea of new-ageyness (see: my feelings about Lulu Lemon) and it would just be perfumes in little bottles designed to make you think that you were feeling more relaxed, like a placebo.

Big mistake.

I got this roll-on sleep remedy and the first night it didn't get me very far but the second night I slept like you couldn't believe.

It's a weird thing. It's this little roll on and you roll it onto your neck. The girl at the store actually recommended rolling it onto your wrists, which I also do. The instructions say to roll it onto your feet, which I personally think sounds ridiculous but honestly all of it sounds ridiculous so I decided to just go for it and I've been doing it.

In the morning I burn an oil from them that's supposed to help you wake up. It's not as impressive as the sleeping one but I do like it. It also comes as a roll on and I'm so impressed with the sleep roll on I might try the energy roll on next.

I've moved up to one of those electric diffusers. I love it so much.

Surprise

I make tea every day.

This morning I put two teabags in the tea pot, poured in the water and stirred it around as usual. But I thought while I was stirring that something inside the pot felt kind of funny. 

I prodded all around the inside of the pot with a spoon, trying to figure out what wasn't right about it.

I decided that the bottom of the pot must be dome shaped and that I had simply just always assumed that it was flat. So I just continued steeping and then enjoyed my tea as usual. 

Three cups of tea later I rinsed the tea pot to put it away and that's when I found a rancid tea bag stuck to the bottom of the pot that had obviously been rotting there since yesterday morning.

I drank three cups of tea out of that mouldy pot. 

And I'll tell you what else: it was more delicious than usual.


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Photo: "Tea" by Laurel F. CC BY-SA 2.0.

And We're Back...

Once upon a time I turned thirty.

I gave up my job and my apartment downtown and moved back home to the suburbs to make a change without knowing what that change would be.

I got a job that didn't pay enough for me to move back out again and suddenly became one of those thirty-something males that lives in their parents' basement.

I was working in retail. Despite what non-retail people think retail is actually a mentally and physically exhausting job and also a very difficult schedule. It gets harder the older you get as well and by this point I was in my thirties. Over time retail jobs suck up your energy and your time until you start to lose touch with the people in your real life and you suddenly find yourself in a very small life with no relationships, hobbies or willingness to do anything outside of work.

I had a little blog ("Adam M is 30") and that was my only outlet, something small that I could do at home by myself in the middle of the night, my only "me time".

And then people at work started reading it. Then they started making dramas about it. So I eventually I lost enthusiasm for it and stopped posting, the job having taken even my blog away from me.

Fast forward four years and it turned out that all that time working, living in the basement and not having a life added up to saving enough money to go back to school, something that I should have realized as my obvious next step from the beginning.

I can't go back to ironically using the blog name Adam M is 30 because I'm not 30: I'm very non-ironically grown-ass man.

No, I'm not 40.

I am an adult person that spends all day on a university campus with kids who were born in the same year that I first started my degree. Sometimes the professors are younger than me, so that's a treat.

I don't know if this blog will take the same shape as the old one or be totally different, maybe just a little different, or who knows?

But it is time to blow the dust off these old pages and see what comes next.