Nobody blogs anymore on this lonely little corner of the internet. I still check regularly to see if anyone has posted anything. They haven't. Though I myself haven't posted anything in recent history, blogging is always at the back of my mind, because there's typically something gnawing away at me that I want to say. And, since so few people ever venture out into this sector, I can post pretty freely in a comfortable style. So here we are.
July the fourth has come and gone again. I had to work this year, but I got Friday off in exchange, and since we weren't doing anything particularly exciting to celebrate Independence Day in the first place, I gladly took the three day weekend, and the mini holiday kicked off pretty well. We went 5-0 in League of Legends on Friday night before I left for the last Dragon's Maze draft, in which I was able to split 1st and 2nd place in the final match and get my promo and prize packs without having to play it out. Saturday saw a trip to the mall with Anthony whereupon I purchased a headset with which to play League, and play League with it I did. Oh and we also wandered over to Price Chopper with Jess and Danielle rather spontaneously, and Chris wore his horse head mask throughout. Of course, we can't forget about the post-League explosion that led to a mini wrestling match between Chris and myself over a misplay in lane. I was pretty mad, but not blinded with rage like I was after that EDH game back at Farm Street where Chris threw the ladle at me out of the spaghetti sauce pot. We were both more or less trying to ensure nothing got broken last night, and it broke up pretty quickly once Missy came out.
Which brings me to the current state of affairs. Sort of. The whole reason I sat down to write this blog was indirectly because of the dreams I had last night. My dreams are often hauntingly realistic, so when I have a particularly disconcerting one, especially one that goes uninterrupted for a long enough time for me to remember the sequence of events in detail when I wake up, it can very well throw off my groove for the entire following day. Today was one such day. I just couldn't shake the funk for most of the day, and the fact that it was rainy and dreary and we had nothing on the agenda but our typical lazy Sunday fare (i.e. League of Legends) didn't help matters. A brief interlude to McDonald's (Wolf Road, because Central was out of iced coffee) did significantly improve things, and my headache dissipated (sidenote: I think I have a caffeine addiction), but there was still that lingering sense of gloom shrouding things for most of the night.
There is a point to this. I'm getting there.
Having basically done nothing but eat and play League for most of the day, we wrapped up just after 1 AM, which is pretty early for us, so I decided that a blog might be cathartic. Except there was one small thing bothering me: I couldn't find my Relient K CD. The only reason I really thought about it was because they came out with a new album this past Tuesday, at least digitally; the physical CD won't be available until July 23rd, which I wish I'd known before hunting for it Friday with Missy and Saturday with Anthony at Crossgates and Colonie Center respectively. The saddest thing is the album I was missing, Forget and Not Slow Down, isn't even very good. I'd actually go so far as to say it's the weakest of all their albums, being quite a downer and having really only two, maybe three decent songs.
Anyway, I didn't know what the heck I had done with the CD, and I had searched for it briefly earlier today but it hadn't turned up. I continued my search, checking my Magic table downstairs, which is where I thought it might have been, but it wasn't there. I looked through the rest of my former downstairs dungeon room, but it wasn't there. I checked my laptop backpack, which was the other place I thought it might be; not there either. I basically tore apart my bedroom looking for it, searched the kitchen, even looked in Chris's corner of the living room to see if it might have wandered over there somehow. No luck. Finally, I gave up in frustration, hoping it would just turn up sooner or later if I stopped worrying about it. Besides, I had ripped the CD to my laptop, and like I said, I don't even like it that much, so no big loss. I headed back to my room to sit down and start my assuredly melancholy blog.
But NO. I could NOT. It drives me CRAZY when something is missing. I went downstairs one more time to make a more thorough search of my Magic table. I picked up a newspaper I had bought last Spring, and lo and behold, there it was. Suddenly, I was at peace. And the weirdest thing was that I wasn't just relieved to find the CD, I was relieved entirely, as though everything that had been bothering me all day didn't matter anymore.
It made me think: maybe the challenges and difficulties we face aren't just here to give us a hard time. Maybe we face them so that when they're over, we can feel that sense of relief or even triumph. My mood went from bad to good, not because something overtly good happened, but because there was closure on something irritating. I've always known that tough times have their expiration date, and that brighter days are around the corner as long as you can wait it out, but it's also hard to keep that perpetually in mind, especially when things seem like they're going so wrong. But when a trial reaches its conclusion, even when it's something as stupid as a missing CD, it's a pretty good feeling, and that's something to consider. This post has gone on quite longer than I originally anticipated, but there it is, the moral of the story. I may be forcing optimism here, but hey, I forced Naya every Dragon's Maze draft and it worked almost every time, so I'm gonna run with it.
