TEOTWAWKIAIFF

I’ve been struggling a lot of late. I’ve lost my way in several aspects of my life. Ironically, just as I got other aspects heading in the right direction, other things have fallen apart.

Physically, I’m doing a lot better. A recent trip to the doctor’s for my annual physical left  me scratching my head. I’ve lost over 4″ from my waist, which means a LOT more than that from my belly, and I’ve only lost 15# in the last six months. I’m pretty freaking pissed about that. I am a lot thinner, you can see it in my face, and wrists. I now bulge when I flex my arms, the biceps are getting there, but my triceps are going really nuts. I have deep cuts in my legs, the hamstrings are bulking up nicely, and the quads are getting defined. My back is getting bumpy, and the moobs are shrinking. My blood pressure, heart rate, cholesterol, etc. is all normal, or below. This always freaks my doctor out because I am well over what most would consider a healthy weight.

My diet has improved, but is not perfect. I’m getting fewer urges for junk food, or snacks at night. I had been having healthy snacks at night, to replace the ice cream I used to have. I need to cut back on the red meat, but it is hard to get motivated when you have better bloodwork than your doctor or your health-nut friend.

My sleep is all balled up. I’m awake too late, and I’m having trouble getting going in the morning. I’ve begun winding down early, about 1/2 hour before bed. Low lights, no TV, no computer, no hard mental activity. Still having poor sleep. I’m starting to do some Tai Chi during this quiet time this week and see if there is an improvement. I got to do something. I am so burnt out it is affecting me negatively in many ways.

I have an idea what’s causing this, but there is no much I can do to change it. I’ve been wrestling with a lot lately. I’m on my own these days. I have way to much to do to prepare and not enough time or money to do it. I’ve been having money problems, nothing serious, but I refuse to dip into the credit card. I need to focus a lot of mental energy on my career, and these certifications.  I’m frantic with the amount of work I need to do, and the lack of time I have to do it.

Balancing preparing for what may happen versus what you need to do if nothing happens is a reoccurring theme that I think we need to spend a little more time on. Right now, I have a list of preps to do that is well over 200 items long, and these are nothing really crazy. I also have a list of 75 or so items I need to do for my work career to do. I have hundreds of things I need to do around the house to make it better and more liveable. Examples include: Replacing the broken screen door, fixing the plumbing to the bathroom, replacing the flooring the front hallway, and making a welcome sign with my house numbers on it. (I still have the “old lady” one that was on the house when I bought it…) Then there are my hobbies that eat time and in return give me some mental stability and sanity.

There is too much for me to do alone, but I really do not have the time to do the dating thing. I’m on a few of the dating sites, but I am finding that I do not have the patience to wade through seas of bullshit. I need a woman who is independent, not a smothering,  bon-bon eating, Jerry-Springer watching, mindless, souless, tween in a 35 year-old-body looking for the ideal co-dependent. I rather be alone then deal with that crap. It is amazing how well these “women” camouflage themselves via messaging. I hate to use the term, “woman” because I think it insults real women when I use it. At least I sniff them out in a few minutes when I meet them face to face. The ones that have passed muster usually want nothing to do with a man on equal footing, they want some mindless boy-toy. That, or they see $ when they find out I have a house, which sets off alarm bells in my head and cools things down pretty fast. I have to laugh at this afterwards because I am underwater in my mortgage by about $65k.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about freedom. Normally, this isn’t a big deal, but I’ve been obsessing it lately – like a fat kid over cake. The idea is there, in the front of my mind burning like hot brass down your shirt. It doesn’t help that anywhere I turn I see the shackles binding me to this slave’s existence. Every time I spend money I can feel the weight of the taxation’s irons clasp my wrists like a drowning man’s hand. It is tax season, but it feels different this year, it is close and pressing, almost desperate.

I wonder if I’ve seen enough to begin getting that faint notion of what real freedom is, and my mind is yearning for it.  I don’t think I will ever experience what real freedom is, I will not have it in this lifetime. I need to move past this, for my own mental health, but putting this genie back into the bottle is proving to be difficult.

Emotionally I am drained. I’ve had a few situations come up that have taxed me. My brother has added a lot of stress in two paths – directly on me, and to me because I am supporting Mum. I am the support network for a lot of people. I don’t mind doing it, I see it as a moral obligation to give sound advice and emotional support to my friends and family. These days I have been doing a lot of supporting, without my own solid foundation to carry the weight. I have friends with marital problems, others dealing with parents with cancer, and others with job losses all relying on me to give them the support they need. Elementally, I’m earth, and this is the natural way of the friendships I enjoy.

I have my own problems and the pillar of rock that is my emotional stability has been cracked. I’ve lost a group of people who I thought were my friends. I’ve been ungrounded, I feel my connection has been cut. I’m now the only one in my circle of friends that actively prepares, and the “zombie apocalypse” jokes are wearing thin. I see the world unraveling, but the confidence of how and when it will actually happen and what to do about it has been shattered. It’s like I’ve lost my internet connection and don’t know what’s going on in the world.

To try to get out of this funk, I have been trying a few things. First, I’m trying to relax before bed so I can get better rest, and have more energy. Better sleep and reduced stress should get me away from the hobbies more and into more productive endeavors. Next, I am in the process of listing everything I need to do and organize those lists by category and importance. I will then focus on working off those lists, a little each weekday, and a lot on each weekend. To reduce financial stress, I will be recovering capital from anything I can and working on alternative ways to reduce expenses. Because looking for a partner is a time and money sink, I’ll deactivate my profiles and go back into a bachelor hibernation for another few months. After a few months I will re-evaluate my time and money situation and see what I have for options for dating.

I’ve been doing a lot of my hobbies (gaming,woodworking, etc.) in order to try to re-ground myself. I’m going to have to let these people know that my emotional support battery is getting low, and I need to have them carry themselves more while I re-charge. For me to share this with these people is way out of character for me. I just hope they don’t freak and get all touchy-feely with my emotional needs. I can take care of mI need to find others of like mind. Conversation and discussion will help recover some balance between the “real” and “prepper” worlds.

Once I can get back on track I will be able to regain balance between prepping and living. Then I have a very large personal project to tackle. I need to do about 100hours of work to research the possibility of having my own successful business. Then I have to do a lot of soul searching to see if I want to do it or not. It will be a lot of work, that is for sure, but by having my own business I can re-align my life to starve the monkeys while reaping some benefits. I’ll have more time and money to prep, but I will be tied to this area. I have to push this out of my mind, I have too much going on right now to dream of being my own boss.

I know there are many out there in a similar situation. We preppers lead two lives, and one cannot be the master of the other. This blog is an outlet for me to give back to the community. I am working on how I can do more, but that is the subject of another post – after I regain my footing.

I’ve been a regular listener to the Shrugging Out Podcast, and this post is stolen right from Pete’s brain.

One of the thing he does every podcast is to go through the news of the week and differentiate what is signal, and what is noise. This is a throwback to the early radio days when the ratio of a signal’s power (what you want to hear) to the background noise (interference) was important. The older transmitters didn’t have a lot of power, and it was (and still is) common to move to different frequencies to get your message through.

The context that Pete uses the SNR, or Signal to Noise Ratio, is when discussing news items. We have access to terabytes of information at our fingertips, the trick is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Then you can focus on what’s important, and not inundated with useless trivia that drowns out the information you should be focusing on.

This is where we can get spun into a frenzy, where we waste our time and energy on meaningless noise.  In fact, I think that the news agencies, and governments,  want us to be in a frazzled state, where we cannot differentiate signal from noise. Blind to the Truth and tired from our jog in a mental hamster cage, we are easily manipulated into a pattern of behavior that is not of our own choosing.

So how do we know signal from noise? Generally, you can’t without at least spending some time looking at it. Some general guidelines are any human interest story, entertainment news, sports, or advertising is noise. I love sports. I listen to sports radio a lot, and read espn.com. But I see it for what it is: entertainment. There isn’t a lot of information that can be gained from sports news directly, but there are nuggets of Truth that can be gathered obliquely from the news. For example, the billionaire investor that bought the NJ Nets is all noise, but he is getting politicians to use imminent domain in Brooklyn to force property owners to sell him their land at a discount so he can move the team from Jersey to Brooklyn. That is pure signal. For politicians to openly abuse imminent domain for the profit of a wealthy campaign contributor is a clear-cut signal that government no longer cares if it has the support of its constituents.

I spend about an hour or so reading and filtering information a day. I first scan the headlines and open the articles that require further review into new tabs on my browser. Then I go through each tab, skimming the article for a few key pieces of information:

• Is it propaganda, and if so by who?
• Is it all opinion or are there facts? What are their sources?
• What are they trying to sell me?

With about five minutes invested I can then see if I want to read and digest the information. I have to say that 90+% of the news linked by preppers is noise. Many  are pure opinion from goldbugs trying to get us to “buy gold now” preferably from them. Quite a few are written to instill panic so we buy more supplies, usually from the sponsoring advertisers that are a click away. If an article has no sources, then I cannot verify the information is factual. If I cannot verify, then it’s only marginally better than noise, and easily discarded. Remember the messenger is part of the message, and influences the validity of the information.

Then there are the articles worth reading, reviewing and understanding, because you gain some information that is useful. There is not as many of these as there used to be.

So what are some of the signals I have found in the noise?

• China is building up their military — their navy in particular. This is not a good thing at all, as there is only one other super-power, the US, and the only reason to beef up their army and navy is to either attack the US or defend themselves from US aggression. Either way, we are screwed.
• The collapse of the Euro. The noise in this topic is off the charts, but if the Euro goes kaput, then the treasury will need the MOAT (mother of all TARPS) to keep the TBTF banks from failing.
• Germany and the EU. Germany is key to the entire European Union right now, as they are the only ones who have a stable and legitimately growing economy. If they leave the EU, then the EU is toast. If Germany stays in the EU because of some deal where they get special benefits is a key thing to look for as well.
• The Federal Reserve. The amount of money they print is inversely proportional to how long before the economy gives up the ghost. They more they print the quicker the common person will realize the ponzi scheme they are enslaved by
• American Economy. Tracking the real inflation and unemployment rates is a good yardstick to measure how fucked we are. I also am watching the commercial real estate market as well as the glut of bank owned properties. All of this contributes to waking up the sheep, and kicking off a panic of near-biblical proportions.
• The American Reich. The rise of the DHS, the militarization of our community police, and the TSA goon-squad are all inter-linked with the continued erosion of our rights. We willingly allow ourselves to be searched “for the common good”.  The question is whose good? Mine? Yours? Or is the “common good” a curtian behind which hides the men who would call themselves our masters? This is one of the barometers I’m using to see if the American people have had enough, and are ready to enact change. Using drones to track us like insurgents? Using TSA security checkpoints to find excess cash? These stories all signal the lack of concern the government has whether or not they have our consent to govern.

So read the news with one eye looking for the truth, and the other looking for who is telling the story and why. Filter for facts, and you will save your sanity for when the poop hits the fan, and things get real crazy.