If I really mean to practise concreteness, one supporting practice could be to write in this blog daily for a while, recording actual things that I did, saw, bought, and so on. A first-order, direct experience journal. (There are no actual things or so it would seem. Hmmm, maybe there are some. )So here are some quick notes on such actual things:
I have actually been quite social. We've just had a four-day weekend for Sallah, so everyone at home more.
I have really been quite social, come on!
I visited these people Monday, took a road trip to a meeting out-of-town on Tuesday, got a little sick with a cold by Thursday, also had a meeting and took public transport and walked back home and visited mum at work and met more people and she bought me plenty food and I found super-mild medicine at home to use for my cold. First I tried once again to buy Panadol Cold and Catarrh, cata is such a hard word to spell, but I find they don't stock it anymore or who knows maybe they don't make it anymore, maybe it's too simple lol, too inexpensive, too common-sense.
The medicine is called Lemisip - it has paracetamol like the equivalent of 1 tablet of Panadol and a dot of the actual cold medicine phenylephrine hydrochloride. It's black-currant flavoured and you make it in a tea with hot water. I've used it before but this time it was better because 1. I lowered the dose even more, used half of the sachet at a time - first half in the evening and the other half the next morning, and 2. I didn't drink a straight Lemisip tea, but a sweet and sexy full packet of ginger-lemon or was it ginger-honey tea with the half-sachet blackcurrant Lemisip in it. Yummm. It worked and without the pain-and-suffering aka side-effects. I suspect it's not very good for your stomach.
I just put all that in small print because the main point of this post is to enumerate actions and concrete things, not ramble with details of cold medicine? I guess. I'll soon end this concreteness experiment lol.
On Sunday and again yesterday, I visited people and visited people, there was fun and laughter and food. And different ages of people o, there were always older than my parents people and older than me people and sometimes younger than me people and everyone having a laughing-good-time. And I guess, great advice for me, something like that.
Also yesterday, dad helped me change the light in my room. I'm the electrical engineer. But. Funny.
I am trying to get a job so I need to email and do things like that. Specifically, somebody gave me some people to email to connect me with a job abroad. Somebody told me recently that I had a "fantastic" CV and that has given me such a nice feeling. I did the fantastic CV because an old friend asked me to use a résumé-building website so I did.
I spoke with a former colleague on the phone and he's connecting me for a job in Naija and he also told me how to do things to put "affiliate marketing" on my books or blogs but I checked out the sites and got confused.
I'm highlighting the impact of people because this is my concreteness post, isn't it?
I noticed my phone getting a mind of its own so this morning I looked at things about hacking and found out that I haven't changed my google password like since the beginning of time. I will have to change it. Maybe in a changing ceremony with tears of an era passing.
Then I found that something called clearing the cache of your phone operating system could help bounce off the hacker(s) so I pushed myself to do that rather than just sit back and say whatever it's not like I have money for them to steal looool.
Then I started becoming more hyper, started doing more: changed my phone device security from the minimum default pin code to (I'm not telling youuuu) and then tested it and then found out about SIM card PINs and debated whether to lock my sim and then I pushed myself to not be all-contemplation and no action then I decided to change the
So now I had to find the PUK, an eight-digit number. It took many minutes because it wasn't in the old cellphone box where I keep old phone stuff or in the tiny purse where I once kept sim card fragments. Hmm, I was thinking I'd have to use customer service (phone or much better go to the office) then I remembered I kept it somewhere REALLY VERY EASY to find, yay, then I found it then I entered it and now could lock, unlock I mean, and then I ended up deciding not to use the lock sim in the end, because - long story, but basically more password-using and it's not adding very much new safety anyway. I may change my mind and activate the sim card pin and all that.
While I was sorting these phone things out, maybe 1-2 hours this morning of reading help pages and forums, I had a notepage (Sticky Notes) on my laptop where I wrote out what I was doing and deciding to do, what I was trying and deciding to not try -- to keep track and not get muddled.
For example:
what i did: cleared cache 609MB, change device pin - it prompts twice, test startup pins, also wanna: change google password since April 2006. not doing: add sim card pin because too much pin-pin and sim card stolen in other ways. update - tried to and now locked out until i can add 8digit puk.
And at the end I wrote:
OK. I feel like i was 'busy' this morning. Not necessarily productive, but definitely morally hardworking aka up-and-doing. Whether or not I improved security in my digital life, I learned a few things about my devices. Now to stop before I make things worse.
Actual things that I did, saw, bought, and so on...
Well, now you know that I hung out a bit, had a bit of a concrete existence/experience of life.
What did I see? Usually my room. Also the roads and places and stuff.
What I "bought" was supposed to be a joke but hey, as it turns out, I'm on the market for a Benzoyl Peroxide thing to drop on pimples when they appear.
And I should stop stressing about things: no stress, no pimples.
Also, no fast-food, no pimples.
But it's when you stress that you get attracted to junk food lol. And it's when I stress that I don't sleep enough and drink enough water and then I eat groundnuts or whatever hahahaha.
I'll do laundry today or tomorrow and check out the beauty-related shops for the ointment thing. Laundry is another concrete thing - I like the laundry place.
Oooh, money is another concrete thing - I am nearing zero with money now but someone's going to lend me some, payable when able, that's the good life y'all. I'll pay back when I get back to doing a job whether bigly paid or acada-paid, like, in a few months.
I did things that I usually do, of course: watch Colbert and lots of late-night comedy on youtube. Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah, Jimmy Kimmel, that whole crew lol. But this week I also watched a lot of Jim Jefferies' and watched a few more Bill Burr comedy bits. And probably I read a lot of internet news and stuff and tried to read a book or two (cue the song: The Best Book To Read is the Biiiible). Ah yes I went to church and I liked it. Very much. 2 Chronicles 20 - the basis of Sunday's sermon - is good stuff.
Now I'm yawning. It's time to add some pictures and stop boring myself, stop boring you.
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4 comments:
Interesting that the lady at the phone shop moved on from that job already. She'll do amazing - let's hope we still get to meet up.
Also interesting, I've had pimples show up a few more times in the past few months, and what I bought is rather useless. Oxy-10. Wow, compared with what I had many years ago - Mary Kay, etc - it really sucks. There's active ingredient there, 10% it says - but maybe it's suspended in the wrong lotion so the absorption is faulty - it stays on the skin instead of going into the trouble spot. The texture is not right, it's at first too greasy, eventually too drying/dessicating. Then the packaging is problematic too - an overlarge overthick plastic squeeze tube that is mostly just full of air, then with this blobby not-so-perfectly-mixed cream inside, and it tends to throw out too much at once or too liquid, until you learn to control it and get out the tiny dot which is all you need.
When you find good cosmetics, treasure them, I guess, because the world is full of expensive nonsense. Oh well, it's better than nothing. I mean it actually sort of works better than nothing in that you can focus on the pimple spot and rub it in vigorously in the hope that the medicine penetrates, and get relief in several days instead of the few hours that it would take with the right product. Ok, it is rubbish.
When I was trying to buy this, store-keepers told me the new popular ingredient for acne was salicylic-acid and no longer benzoyl peroxide. I wonder why. I wonder if the s-a is better, or more likely, really really rubbish.
It just occurred to me that a bad acne treatment may be worse than none at all. Hmmm.
If this oxy-10 is as bad as I feel it is, I may actually throw it out to keep myself from using it at all. (So strange to be throwing something away)
I did chuck the cream in the nylon bag of nonsense that eventually goes in the bin. Then one day I bought one of those face scrubs, face wash, apricot something. Yes, my face is clear now. The scrub has salicylic acid in the ingredients.
I fished the cream out of the pre-bin at some point. Like I said it has active ingredient; I even tried it when there was a pimple that was more swollen and I had pinched it and it was more surface of the skin - so in that strange case the cream gets in and dries up the pimple but not effectively and then it also ruins the skin around the pimple as well...just writing this is making me think about it and thinking about it is making me want to throw it away once again.
I think the big causes of pimples for me these days, and like I said on good years I go years without, even as my face sits in its sweat, even with weather changes, period hormones, minor illness, I may or may not get a pimple. But some types of stress. Some types of food. Yes, pimple. And in recent months it seems some types of soap too - the big one was a regular dettol bar soap but I think it had a lightening ingredient or something, the package was brown, no wonder people with lots of 'products' have lots of problems...I found that soap not fit even for washing my hands as I got bumps on my hands too, so I threw it away fast. That was months ago. Somebody really should ban most cosmetics. They are stupid nonsense. More recently, another dettol bar soap that should have been standard nothing special, something to wash hands or face sometimes, the packaging is green, maybe mint, anyway it's rubbish because it has additives that pile on my face and then I end up with pimples. I haven't had to throw it away, I just use it for washing my underwear. I used to love Aveeno for showering in the US but this year (in Lagos) I find it also doesn't wash off (and this is hot and humid climate for which it is maybe toooo protective/moisturizing) and I recently had that body wash. I now have another one that is much drier, it's rather like a massage scrub, with a lot of "medicines" - xyz salicylate, benzoyl xyz, ... things like that, in it but too be honest it feels too dry. Maybe I'm just too sensitive :-)
* Idea** at some point start skipping soap altogether. I forgot that was an option. I mean, if they're going to spoil soap then we can dump it. LOL **
So it's just important that I insist on clean little soaps and bath washes that wash clean without leaving ridiculous layers of junk and perfumes on me that let pimple growth start.
And now that I found the secret to combat problems if/when they start, to use the face wash a lot if I get a pimple.
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