Tag: Emotions

STRESS IS OVERRATED

They say stress can kill you. So just don’t be stressed. Yeet that kind of mental energy right back to where it belongs. With the cats.

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DEAR TOSTITOS: THANKS FOR THE HINT

Chips are such a solid snack option. What other food is as versatile as a chip? They go with salsa. They go with queso. They go with guac. They go with meat and beans and vegetables. They go with the pool. They go with cookouts. They go with car rides. They go with lunch. They go with dinner. They can be found at home. They can be found at friends’ houses. They can be found at restaurants. They can be found in vending machines. Whenever, wherever, with whatever chips will never let you down. 

In and of themselves, chips have a fascinating variety. Textures, flavors, health content, you name it there is something for everyone. I have to admit that some of the flavors are definitely there solely for the bold, but if you’re feeling like putting your taste buds (and possibly your gag reflex) up to the test, nothing wrong with trying it out. Then there’s the option for those counting every calorie. Poppable options. Stackable options. Dippable options. Low carb options. Low fat options. Nothing but air and cardboard taste option. Whatever floats your boat.

While there are whole grocery store aisles dedicated to the wonderfulness that is the chip, my preference is the tortilla variety. Partially because it reminds me of the word turtle, which makes me think of those adorable animals. Turtles also have an interesting variety. From super tiny to the size of boulders. From young to literally dinosaurs. And also from shy to carnivore. They’re such a funny species. Can we take a moment, as well, to appreciate their shells. Mainly how they can curl up into their shells. The OG work from home life.

Where was I? Tortilla chips! Crunchy. Salty. Flavorful. Tasty. A perfect base for nachos. An awesome dipping accessory. Fantastic to eat as is. How could you possibly go wrong?! Especially with Tostitos upping their game as of late. I’m not sure who, I’m not 100% sure when, I for sure don’t know where, or why, or how. But I do know what happened. We got graced with tortilla chips flavored with just a hint of something else.

Normally, I’m not a big fan of hints. My guessing skills are subpar at best and I usually don’t like to spend 30 minutes trying to figure out something that you could just tell me in 30 seconds. Why send me down multiple rabbit holes to answer a riddle that will do nothing for me in life. So I know what’s black, white, and red all over. You don’t see me getting promoted for that. Or on scavenger hunts … do I remember where I lost my first tooth or where the city founder loved to go eat lunch? Not even in the slightest. What an unhelpful hint. I guess we’ll be stuck here on the first clue until time travel gets invented.

Despite my experience with hints that involve a mental action on my end, Tostitos has finally given me a hint that I can get behind. Some of the strange chip flavors dive right off the deep end and give you an all or nothing experiment taste wise. Our salsa sharing friends, though, decided that people should be able to get a more mild experience. A hint of lime. A hint of spicy queso. A hint of guacamole. My goodness where have these been my whole life? You get the flavor hint and put on the best tortilla chip on the grocery market. Quality on quality. Win win.

The best part of the hinted chips is that you can up your flavor profile on them. It’s a customizable experience. Unlike a barbecue chip which is a standalone item, you can mix and match your chips and dips for the ultimate feelings snack. Dip the hint of spicy queso in actual queso. Or switch it up and get the queso and salsa combo we’ve been creating since Luncahbles were invented. Put that hint of lime in some guacamole. Or some barbecue sauce to switch things up. Obviously a hint of guac gets upped big time in the mean green dipping machine, but mix some cheese or tomato based options in for a different game. 

And why stop there? Throw some more spices on there! It’s a hint so that you can customize to your liking. So what are you waiting for? Tostitos gave you the power to create. In a manner that involves no more effort than opening a bag and a can. Then kicking it however you want to enjoy in whatever fashion you choose.

Alright, jumping off my pedestal for now. If you know someone who would enjoy this post and want to share it with them, that would be awesome. Sharing is caring, after all. Don’t forget to subscribe to get these in your inbox twice weekly and follow TRP on Twitter for frequent musings. Thanks for reading!

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THE 5 STAGES OF EXPERIENCING BROKEN TECHNOLOGY

Nobody likes broken technology. I mean, I guess there are some people out there who get a weird sense of satisfaction from fixing broken technology, but are they really excited that it’s broken or that they were able to fix a problem? Are there actual human beings living in 2021 that pick up their phone and hope it doesn’t work? I have to believe the answer is no. Unless you were trying to get off the grid for a while. Broken broken feels like a strong wish, though, when you could just turn it off or leave it at home.

For the more sane among us, broken technology is never a fun time. Technology, for starters, is expensive. Like sell your first child expensive and every year those prices climb a little more. It’s the most exhausting hill climb I’ve ever done. Remember when you could get a phone for like, well I don’t actually remember anything pre several hundred dollars, but at some point it was affordable. Same with gas, and clothes, and houses, and cars, and toothbrushes, and watches, and all of the things. 

So you’ve spent your entire paycheck on something the size of your palm. It’s fun! It’s new! It’s the envy of your friends, co-workers, sidewalk strangers – everyone! Until it’s not. There’s always the one day where you go to power on a device and get the infinite loading screen of death. A stalled progress bar. A spinner stuck in time. A loading bar that never starts loading. A percentage that would fail every test, regardless of the curve. You know what I’m talking about.

Few things bring greater frustration than broken technology. Why is that? My guess: we need working technology to find a solution for our current problem. But if the solution magician is also asleep at the wheel, how are we ever supposed to move forward? Stuck in a black hole of questions and no answers. A lot like English exams. What answer are you looking for?! An opinion is not an accurate way to assess my knowledge of a book! Everyone is different and my current opinion is best left in my head.

Anyways … despite my raging passion against standardized English testing, technology is the same puzzle. And so we travel down the path and start walking through the 5 stages of grief with our currently most hated possession. Starting, of course, with grief. Grief for not being able to get it working. For never knowing if you’ll see the login screen ever again. A genuine sadness that it doesn’t work all the time. Like the price tag indicated.

We quickly move on into the angst portion of our journey thinking about all the potentially lost data if our technology does not magically come back online. When was the last time you ran a backup? Do you even know people’s phone numbers? How are you supposed to contact someone to send help? Will we ever see those unopened messages again? Once we’ve accepted our sadness, fears, and anxieties around our current situation we move to confusion.

Confusion around how to even begin fixing this. Who knows how to fix these things? Do you have to physically go to a store? Wait in line and hope you can explain the problem enough for someone to fix it. General confusion on how it works to begin with. Literally think about that for just a second. How do these things do all of the things they do? I have no idea. But that is a short rest area on our way to anger. Why? Simply why must things be like this?

You want answers. I want answers. Everybody wants answers, but the place with the answers is currently closed. So where does that leave us? About to throw something at a wall probably. And you can see how we easily get to tears. Throwing is never the ideal solution. Brute force, after all, usually makes it much worse. But at the end of the day, hole in the wall or not, we are frustrated to the point of literal, or metaphorical, tears. 

Alright, jumping off my pedestal for now. If you know someone who would enjoy this post and want to share it with them, that would be awesome. Sharing is caring, after all. Don’t forget to subscribe to get these in your inbox twice weekly and follow TRP on Twitter for frequent musings. Thanks for reading!

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MY PARENTS WATCH SQUIRRELS, WHAT DO YOURS DO?

Remember the incredible GEICO commercial where some secret agent is trying to escape via helicopter and his ride is late … then his phone rings and he answers it, expecting to talk to his companion, only to hear his mom on the other end talking about how ‘the squirrels are back in the attic. Your father says it’s personal this time’. Are you familiar with this 30 seconds of commercial genius? Arguably one of the best commercials GEICO has put out. It makes the gecko look a little dull if we’re honest.

If for some reason you are not able to recall the commercial I’m referencing, no worries. I’m clearly fantastic at illustrating the most minute of details and you should have a good understanding of what it’s like visually. It’s also not overly critical to my point here. Well, I guess a little bit, but not in a major way. The real star of this post is the squirrels. As it should be. Who doesn’t want, nay, need, more squirrels in their life? The answer is nobody except my parents.

Squirrels are a curious creature. Aesthetically, they are not the ugliest fur covered animals that exist. Believe it or not, ugly fur covered animals is a predefined Google search and there are some horrifying creatures that are living among us. I fully regret my decision to click on the link that specified ‘with pictures’, but here we are. Besides their physical appearance, because true beauty is found on the inside (duh), squirrels are a simple creature. In my experience observing them, there’s only two things they want – nuts and whatever the birds are eating. 

Sound familiar? Squirrels kind of remind me of the animal version of us. Always wanting what someone else has. And sometimes going to extremes to be like those people. Including, but not limited to, scaling greased poles, making daring leaps from fences towards the greased pole, waiting on the ground to catch crumbs that fall down, using a buddy system to scale the greased pole, etc. Ok, sure, those examples are highly specific to the squirrels, but use your imagination to apply it to the greener pastures we often chase.

Besides being cuddly looking and spending the majority of their time thinking about food, what else do squirrels really do? Become an invasive species on college campuses everywhere? Practice their hide and seek skills? Go on tree branch jumping adventures? Adorably tackle other squirrels as they try to climb trees? Pause. Let’s talk about how much I love seeing a squirrel come out of nowhere and absolutely wreck another squirrel’s journey up a tree. To what I’m assuming is a hidden nut stash. No sexual pun intended. Do you think they do it maliciously or are they playing with each other? Hard to say.

Now feels like a good time to point out that prior to about a year ago, I never really paid attention to squirrels. Or thought that much about them. They were just living their lives and I was living mine. Then, my parents decided to put a bird feeder in their backyard and the morning quarantine ritual became drinking coffee and discussing the ridiculous attempts by the squirrels to eat the food they bought for the birds. Discussing might be a generous way to put it. Imagine eating a peaceful breakfast with your father, only to have him space out in the middle of your conversation and, without any indication, leave the room to go out on the back porch and yell at the squirrels.

COVID gave a lot of us more time at home, and a chance to re-center. My parents chose to re-center and become the people who get annoyed with the ‘damn squirrels!’ I chose to re-center and thoroughly just enjoy those moments. And also accept that my parents have entered that phase of their lives. Sipping coffee and grumbling about squirrels. Spending countless hours thinking of ways to deter them from the bird feeder. But I love them anyway!

Alright, jumping off my pedestal for now. If you know someone who would enjoy this post and want to share it with them, that would be awesome. Sharing is caring, after all. Don’t forget to subscribe to get these in your inbox twice weekly and follow TRP on Twitter for frequent musings. Thanks for reading!

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DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME: THAT’S A NO FROM ME

Oh, look. Another daylight savings time has come and confused our biological clocks like the demon it is. Why are we still observing this not once, but twice a year? What purpose is it serving? Does it boost the economy? Is it a way to keep the calendar in sync? I would like answers from whoever controls this. Who does control it? Father time? Mother nature? Please tell me it’s not the government. Regardless, it needs to go.

If this happened once a year, it would still be annoying. On the scale of which version is better, spring or fall, that clearly goes to the fall option. I have yet to meet anyone who gets excited to lose an hour of their lives every spring. Time goes fast enough, I don’t need some arbitrary time rule eliminating an hour every year. Thus why the fall is preferable, since I gain that lost hour back. Although, if we’re being honest, that hour would be more useful to me during the summer vacation season instead of during winter.

Let’s break down why this is the worst, and then argue to send it back into the fiery pits of the south where I feel confident it originated. Spring forward. What? Why? It’s 1:59AM going on 3AM. How absolutely exhilarating. Especially since it happens overnight. You go to sleep. Life is normal. Time makes sense. You understand when to wake up and when to sleep. Life is good. Then, BAM! Time change! And all of a sudden you are late to all of your Sunday activities. Your phone says it’s one time, but all your other dumb household appliances say something different. It’s so stressful.

And what if you forget to change all of the possible places that display the time in any sort of fashion? Well, first of all, everything does not need a clock. I would like to throw that out into the innovation universe cloud. If you decide that what you’re building is going to display time, then you better make sure it knows how to sync with the actual time as well. I’m over trying to adjust my microwave clock like I live in the 20th century. I literally don’t have the time. I’ve lost an entire hour.

Circling back, what if a clock is off? Well, in my experience, the clock I usually forget about lives in my car. Which is truly just unfortunate. Am I late? Am I early? I left the house on time, or so I thought. The amount of times I second guess my decision about when to leave in the days following a time shift is astronomical. Usually for the first half of the ensuing week I’m late for every meeting on my calendar. How I still have a job, you and I both wonder. 

In other musings, why is it always a Sunday? A Friday night going into Saturday would allow for more adjustment time. I never know when to go to bed on the night of the incident. My phone says bedtime, but my body says binge time and that is an internal struggle I still haven’t figured out how to resolve. Meanwhile, who has a Saturday night bedtime? It’s more of a fall asleep when you fall asleep kind of vibe. Or if some external circumstances cause you to lose consciousness. No judgement. 

You might be thinking, yes springing forward is my least favorite form of exercise, but then we get to fall back in just a few months. Well I’m here to say that I enjoy falling back as much as I enjoy trust fall exercises. Which is not at all. Do I trust a stranger to catch me? Absolutely not! What if they feel their phone vibrate and are waiting for a text back from their crush? If that was me, I’d sneak a glance for sure. Anyways … falling back is more confusing. Your bedtime syncs up with your grandparents momentarily. And then you’re awake before sunrise and everything is dark and you aren’t sure if you’ve been abducted and sent to Alaska or not.

My last feeling about this, not final though, just going for a somewhat concise post, has to do with our poor animals. Whom we adore. Maybe not all animals, but definitely our dogs. They too don’t know what to do with daylight savings time. Think about it, their internal clocks are synced with the actual daylight – not just the concept of day versus night as presented to us in the form of four numbers separated by a colon. Or Google it, some very smart, scientific, people have researched this extensively while I have merely thought about it for a few moments. 

Mmkay, so overall emotion towards this ritual is not great. I would propose solutions, but there’s only one thing I would like to do with it. Make it disappear. Send it the depths of the ocean where those creatures have never seen daylight once. Fly it into outer space, I think time is relative out there anyways. I don’t care. Just take it away from me. Arizona and Hawaii are looking like excellent options for my next place of residence. 

Alright, jumping off my pedestal for now. If you know someone who would enjoy this post and want to share it with them, that would be awesome. Sharing is caring, after all. Don’t forget to subscribe to get these in your inbox twice weekly and follow TRP on Twitter for frequent musings. Thanks for reading!

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ALL OF MY EMOTIONS DURING A HALF MARATHON

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: running sucks. I do not enjoy running. I do not look forward to going on a run. I do not wake up excited for a workout involving a run. I do not like the monotony of it. I do not need the knee and shin pain that comes from a run. I do not want a constant reminder that my endurance levels are maybe not in an adequate range. Yet, I do it anyways. Because I know that it’s a great workout and because I’ve been doing it since high school, which was long enough ago for me to technically be a 10,000 hour expert at it. But it’s not a desire of mine to quickly move my legs, struggle to breathe, and give everyone I pass a mental image of me trying not to die.

It’s no secret that there have been times in my life where my decisions have been questionable. A bit of a head scratcher, if you will. Normally it’s other people who are confused by what I do. Recently, however, I shocked myself, which doesn’t happen as often as you would think. Despite some of my previous posts. In a weird twist, I agreed to run, not one, but two half marathons with some people that I care very much about. TWO?! What is wrong with me? That alone is cause for concern given how long a half marathon is, and my current struggle to complete a run that’s a mere third of that distance.

Here’s the kicker, this is not my first half marathon. No, sadly I agreed to run one a few years ago and I hated it. When I say I hated it, I was on the verge of tears near the end of it. Not because I’m an overly emotional person, but because it was a traumatizing experience. Now here we are, in the year of the vaccine and a hope for normalcy, and one of my first big decisions is to suffer through 13.1 miles of pain. Again. Twice. Why? We don’t know. Do I have regrets? More than you know, but I’m no flake so here we are. Can you get PTSD from a bad run? I certainly think so! I’m no medical expert, but let’s go through all of my emotions from half marathon numero uno to make my case:

Anxiety

13.1 miles is a long way in a car. On foot, you might as well be running to the moon. I was nervous about my ability to complete the race.

Excitement

Ok, yes, I was a tad bit excited about earning my 13.1 sticker so all the fake ones I’d bought could be validated.

Regret

Nothing makes you question your decisions like standing at the starting line knowing you have to run 13.1 miles in the woods on a 4 mile loop. Might as well get back in the car now.

Resentment

I’m not ashamed to admit that I felt some resentment for the person who convinced me to run the race at about the 5K mark.

Sadness

Also at the 5K mark, I felt a giant wave of sadness knowing that I had 10 miles to go. Which is still a long way in a motorized vehicle. On foot, might as well be walking through the whole Sahara.

Confusion

Somewhere on the second loop, I forgot how far I’d gone and thought I was almost done. Only to be told that I had 4 more miles. And I wasn’t 100% sure what my name was at that point.

Fear

You ever go for a run in the woods and wonder if there’s a serial killer just lurking about waiting to kidnap you? Thank you CRIMINAL MINDS for that! But also, I lost most of the other runners on loop 2 so it was just me and my confused thoughts hoping to make it out alive.

Regret, Again

Let’s be honest, this was the underlying feeling for the whole race. Specifically, though, near the 10 mile mark I hated myself. I hated running. I hated the race organizers. I hated the people who were so happily cheering like I wasn’t trying to simply survive. I was in a mood.

Anger

You know that feeling when you are trying to just finish something and when you do, after a giant struggle, you find that other people finished it easily, in a third of the time, with seemingly little effort? What a fun time.

Relief

I did feel a lot of relief when I finished. Mostly since I promised myself that I would never, ever, ever run a half marathon again. A promise that I broke. Now I’m internally conflicted. Who even am I anymore? We don’t know.

Alright, jumping off my pedestal for now. If you know someone who would enjoy this post and want to share it with them, that would be awesome. Sharing is caring, after all. Don’t forget to subscribe to get these in your inbox twice weekly and follow TRP on Twitter for frequent musings. Thanks for reading!

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