Last Entry's solution, Reaching the Equinox

Down the page is the solution to last entry's logic problem, but if you are still doing it, don't give up yet. I included the following hints to  help you sort through the challenge before you scroll to the answer table.

Hints

From Clue 1., as well as there being no such leprechaun as Smiley O'Riley, one should reason that there are also no such leprechauns as Bleary O'Leary, Greeny McSweeny, Tally McNally, Whirly O'Hearly, or Greeny Mc'Nally. Greeny then wasn't the one with the pocket watch who hid his gold in a tree (Clue 2). McSweeny didn't use the well nor clay pipe nor the hayloft in Limerick, therefore no gold watch nor well in Limerick (Clues 3 and 4). From Clue 3., there is no leprechaun named Tally O'Riley, neither Tally or O'Riley then used the clay pipe. The well was either in Cork or Galway. There is no such leprechaun is Bleary O'Hearly (clue 4). From clues 1 and 5, we see that O'Riley didn't possess the pewter flask; there is also no Whirley McNally, so from the previous clues McNally's first name is either Smiley or Bleary. In clue 6, it can be deduced that the fifth leprechaun not included in the list is the one from Limerick, thus Smiley wasn't in Limerick. If the flask belongs to the bog leprechaun, the pipe belongs to the well leprechaun, and the walking stick belongs the manure pile leprechaun from Meath (not Limerick, Galway, Cork or Kildare) (clue 7), and the watch with the hollow tree leprauchaun, the tin whistle thus belongs to the hayloft trickster in Limerick. Thus O'Riley, not Smiley (from clues 1 and 6) owned the tin whistle, and from clue 5, we determine that his first name was Whirly. Using Clues 6 and 1, we eliminate McNally as the walking stick owner/manure pile leprechaun from Meath county. I could go on, but the rest of the puzzle should logically solved from here on in.

First Name	Last Name	County	Lucky Charm	Hiding Spot
Smiley	McSweeny	Cork	Pocket Watch	Hollow Tree
Bleary	McNally	Galway	Clay Pipe	Brackish Well
Greeny	O’Leary	Kildare	Pewter Flask	Peat Bog
Whirly	O’Riley	Limerick	Tin Whistle	Hayloft
Tally	O’Hearly	Meath	Walking Stick	Manure Pile

I wish I were able to add something else cheerful and positive to this entry, but today greeted me with some grief: my own challenge is to tear it apart with some focus, common sense, and logic. I'm faced with using my day to do my best to muddle through it. I'll just say that I'm at least glad that we've reached the point where the days are getting longer than the hours of darkness.

Blockages and Drainages, Logic and Leprechauns

I'm glad to say that the spring thaw has been coming aggressively throughout the past week here. It's still not quite warm enough to allow me to roost out on the deck to enjoy morning coffee/tea and my post-breakfast reading in the fresh air though. I'm hoping that will be possible within the next couple of weeks if the melting continues at this rate. I hope to be cycling then too as the streets get drier. For now, it still gets cold enough overnight to freeze things hard and thick enough to restrict all the run off from flowing away and draining properly. This part of the season seems to be a direct reflection of the way my own mind is working now*.
   
There has been a lapse between now and my last entry. It's because since I began la vie sans TV, I've been taking advantage of the extra silence and liberation from one less distraction, and I have been shifting my attention and focus to another writing project. I think the overall concepts of it are sound, but I'm still having problems with transposing the things from my notes, tables and spreadsheets into a workably progressive, and manageable flow of content. There doesn't seem to be enough time in the world to allow me to fix this stuff up right; especially not while working full-time hours, plus doing my unit chair position duties. The lightning bolts of originality and creativity just don't seem to be striking me as frequently anymore. The week off I had at the beginning of the month, although I welcomed it, didn't do as much to help me sort out things as I had hoped.

I took a break before I began this paragraph; a spell of creativity did manage to seize me. I directed it to fashioning something through writing that I enjoy doing: a logic problem. I do them once in a while. They are made for more esoteric and quirky personalities and are the less popular of the pen and paper puzzles, much less so than puzzles like Sudoku or crosswords, and sadly they seem to be a dying art form. They are to the puzzle magazine world like what polka is in the music world. I know the magazines dedicated to them are becoming harder to find. It's a shame too, because logical thinking is something that the world needs more of. I guess I like to retreat to them, and create them, because working with this kind of hard pure logic is compensation for feeling too often deprived of just being able to just verbally bash some common sense into some people I'm forced to interact with when I've exhausted all my tact and patience. Given that St. Patrick's Day is winding up quickly, I used an hour and a half of time to burn away some insomnia to compose this puzzle. The inspiration came to me from reading one of my cousin's posts on Facebook. I tested it, and the solution works. I'm still trying to figure out where to get these things published for a little extra cash. I risk showing everyone the weird way my mind works. I should have stashed it away in my portfolio of other such problems I made, but I thought I would share and sacrifice this one to the public, for anyone else who is up for the challenge. I crafted and pasted a logic grid for your convenience, to be found on the bottom of this entry. I'll post the solution in my next entry. St. Patrick's Day may have passed by the time you read this, but I hope you get a kick out of doing it anyway. All names used in this puzzle are completely fictitious.

The Leprechauns

The leprechauns of Ireland come out of seclusion once in a while to roam the land and collect treasure; and at the end of the day, the miserly little fellows make it a habit of returning to, and adding to, their hidden pots of hoarded gold; which in truth are found in far less enchanted places than at the ends of rainbows. If you’re lucky enough to find one and stealthily follow him, he may lead you to his preferred treasure hiding place. Leprechauns pretty much all look and dress alike; they usually can only be told apart from each other by whatever single prized possession they carry on their person. This ordinary looking possession they carry is actually their characteristic magical “lucky charm”. There are five such leprechauns in this problem, each one of them lives in a different Irish county. From the seven clues below, can you correctly sort out: the first and last name of each leprechaun, which county each one lives in (and keeps his treasure), which distinguishing lucky charm each one carries with himself (like a pocket watch that can detect where gold can be found), and which strange location each one stashes his pot o’ gold?

1. Smiley O’Riley has lovely lyrical ring to it; but this is not the full name of any of the leprechauns. In fact, none of the leprechauns’ proper first and last names rhyme together at all. However, the bearer of the magical tin whistle has either the first name Smiley, or the last name of O’Riley (who never goes near any peat bogs). When the tin whistle was played, it stunned the senses of whoever heard it, so that the leprechaun could have ample time to make a hasty escape from greedy people who found him or his gold. Greeny never possessed this enchanted object, neither did McNally (whose pot of gold isn’t in Meath county).
2. A pocket watch that magically signaled an alert to its keeper for the presence of gold was a mighty useful thing to have for indicating which unsuspecting strangers to pick-pocket. McSweeny, a very absent-minded leprechaun, also often used it to locate the right hollow tree when he lost his way in the thickly wooded forest (not in Kildare county) where he kept his hoarded stash. 
3. While walking home one evening, Mrs. O’Hara was scared half to death when she spotted an impish little figure crawling out from a derelict roadside well.  The locals never used it anymore because the water in it had long ago turned brackish and undrinkable, and some claimed that it was haunted by spirits. The clever little leprechaun she encountered took advantage of the well’s reputation and neglect, and had used his long stemmed clay pipe as a snorkel while he secretly dived in there to stash his gold coins in the submerged pot. This well wasn’t in either Meath or in county Kildare; nor did Tally or O’Riley use this place to hide their treasure.
4. It was near dusk when Mr. O’Toole, a farmer in Limerick, thought he heard a strange sound coming from the hayloft of his barn. When he went to inspect the place, he could have swore that he caught a glimpse of a shadow of an odd-looking little fellow, but he felt a bit dazed and thought it was just his weary eyes playing tricks on him. Neither Bleary nor O’Hearly was responsible for this commotion. Greeny didn’t do it either.
5. The constantly tipsy leprechaun with the pewter flask was also the one that always stank like the vile peat bog where he frequently visited to cache his gold. Very few curious people wanted to follow him. His first name wasn’t Whirly, his last name wasn’t McNally, and he never lived or roamed around Cork County. Whirly and McNally actually weren’t from that county either; one of these two did have a tin whistle, while the other one kept his gold in Galway County.
6. Four of the five leprechauns were: the one who drank from a pewter flask that turned bog water into whisky, Tally (who wasn’t in Limerick), the mischievous trickster from the county of Galway, and Smiley (who hid his gold in either a hollow tree or the brackish well).
7. A sneaky young vagrant, named Rowan McManus, secretly followed a tiny stranger who headed towards a great mound of rotting horse manure by a potato field. The little fellow poked his walking stick in the pile three times, and all of a sudden a pot of shimmering gold coins magically rose out of the dung heap. The leprechaun then tossed a few more coins into the pot, which then sank back into the compost pile and was once again concealed from view. The leprechaun suddenly caught sight of the astonished McManus, who witnessed it all while hiding behind a hedgerow. With an elfish grin and a wink, the leprechaun then said, “Well ya didn’t seriously think I was going to dig through all that mess, did ya?” Rowan left there and quickly returned after finding a shovel, and then he dug around and rummaged madly all day through that manure pile like the greedy fool he was, but he never did find any of the gold, and he never saw this rascally leprechaun (who wasn’t O’Riley) ever again. This incident never happened in the counties of Cork, Kildare or Galway.

*- I'm also pissed off about recently discovering that my dishwasher (something I deem as an essential time-saver) has also all of a sudden failed to drain properly. I stayed up until 2:00 AM last night trying to fix the damn thing to no avail. It represents yet another inconvenient blockage coming along my way, both reminding and frustrating me about how stuck I'm feeling about so many other things.

In Like a Pride of Lions/ Re-Evaluating Education

As happy as I am to see the wretched month of February pass, I can't say that I'm any more relieved that March has finally arrived. "In like a lion . . ." just isn't a sufficient enough of a simile to describe the coming of this month in this province. Yesterday was the coldest March 1st on record for many places in Saskatchewan, including here*. The extreme cold has been twisting a real crappy beginning into my string of days off in the weirdest and unexpected of ways. It is yet another proven case of the fates conspiring against me whenever I yup myself into doing any part of a night shift, or to try make some extra coin. I was already short of a lot of sleep as I worked overtime prior to the last night of my last evening shift. Hoping to just collapse into bed and go into some sort of coma, I instead was pestered all night by false alarms from the fire detection system. I don't take blaring fire alarms lightly, especially since after the building just across the street went up in flames last fall. For the first time, the residents evacuated and were forced outside to stand in the wicked -42 below temperature. It's suspected that the sensors downstairs were being buggered up and triggered by the super-condensed, car exhaust-laden cold air drafts coming in from the lower parkade entrance. Whatever the case, the alarm bells were set off several times over night, and for the day after; with cumulative loss of a night and a half of sleep, I was completely dead to the world throughout most of yesterday. I just got to be thankful that there was no actual fire emergency to contend with.

The exhaustion and the miserable frigidity outside didn't make me feel compelled to do much of anything; but I did make the effort to escape the place in late morning to avoid the noise from the service repair and system testing that they were following up with after that night's incident. I used that time to volunteer some help for my friend get some electrical supplies for a home improvement project. I thought the trip might give me some inspiration for doing similar stuff around my own home, but I was too brain dead to be ignited with any ideas for such things. My back and legs were stiffening up too much to do the running that I should have been doing as part of my training program. I could only handle absolute stillness and silence. It ended up being a wasted day for me.

Today, I've been trying to compensate for yesterday's lethargy. I occupied myself all morning with laundry, housecleaning, filing and taming of paperwork, and noting all my stock shortages to shop for later. Now that the slate has been cleared of that stuff, I'm now exploring options for the remaining week or so I have to be absent from work. It began with taking my head offline** to allow my brain to reboot itself. The insomnia left me stricken with a massive headache anyway, and my eyes were too sore for reading or viewing screens after I came back home.

Now that I'm re-invigorated, I'm going to share what I'll be doing this during frozen time off. If I can't physically go anywhere, I have to do different things with my brain to take it to different states and places. I've been thinking more about I feel I need more formal education to do any meaningful shifting of career, moreover, I've been wondering where in the hell am I going to find the time and money for it. I become very sickened and bitter when I start thinking about the current paradigm of post-secondary and polytechnic education for so many reasons: too many to list here. I predict a disaster coming ahead socially and economically if the universities and tech school administrations in this province don't pull their heads out of their asses soon enough, and start designing curricula and programmes that reflect the times coming ahead, i.e. considering the rate in which technology is changing things.***

For now on my personal time with no TV to distract me, I'm sticking to the fundamentals of staying sharp mentally for what ever is to come.

• memory (re)training/logic puzzles
• programming/language learning
• increasing my own general teachability index
• learning more life hacks/template creation for efficiency
• using Creative Commons and other free open source online university programmes 
• finding other projects and useful and demonstrable applications for them, and to make a recognizable portfolio in lieu of a certificate

How ironic it is that the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs: the richest and greatest technical innovators of our time, were college drop outs. Warren Buffet, one of the richest men on Earth, says "The best education you can get is investing in yourself. But this doesn’t always mean college or university".

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-trashes-higher-education-says-its-not-for-everyone-2012-5#ixzz2uxmqKzWu
He sent none of his three children to college. Even though he has formal university degrees, the only certificate he has on display is one for the Dale Carnegie Public Speaking Course, which only cost him $100.

*- With the wind chill accounted for, it was -52° Celsius here in this town.
** - I was strictly audio. No computer, no books, and no TV; I turned my cable service off for spring and summer.
***- Have you ever just looked at the apps on your smart phone and wondered how many human jobs these things have eliminated?

Sochi Games Winding Down/Rosling's Stats

Throughout the past week, I began some more intensive training with my running and skiing*, and I resumed walking to work, more to get my breathing and heart rate adjusted than anything else. Watching the Winter Olympics has been somewhat inspirational in making me continue with this stuff; it's also the only thing going on now that's making this bitter stretch of this wretched season tolerable. But now, I'm relegated to sit still and rest my back and bones from all the activity. I'm dividing my attention between the highlights at Sochi, and writing here. I'm being captivated in watching the finals** in both curling and hockey.

I'm happy to report that the final round in men's hockey for the gold medal will be between Canada and Sweden. It's unfortunate that we couldn't play the Russians for all the marbles in hockey for these Olympics, but this is the next best thing. If we are destined to win the gold medal . . . super. However, if we end up with silver, our loss would at least be to opponents from a nation of decent and honourable sportsmen, and there would be no shame in that. The upcoming game brings me to thinking about the work I've been following of another Swede, who is quickly becoming one of my favourite intellectual heroes. He is a statistician of all things. I'll get to talking about him in a minute.

On Monday of this week it was Family Day in this and other provinces. It's still a new enough holiday such that there really is no common socially established traditions for it yet. A holiday with the title of Family Day is just yet one more date for labeling, separating and isolating those who are alone without families, or with limited social networks; which follows close behind the other day of singles alienation called Valentine's Day, in the middle of the month where people are already at their wits end with dealing with winter here. With the subject of families in mind, and given that I'm in more of a global thinking state of mind as I watch the Olympics, I've been giving thought to the common factor of what all families globally are doing on this Earth: contributing to a human population growth in which this planet is becoming less and less capable of sustaining given the current rate and degree of our consumption and waste*** of energy, food, water, and the environmental destruction from it all. I could have found it easy to get even more depressed and pessimistic about the future when dwelling on all of this, but then I found out about the research of Professor Rosling.

I recently discovered Hans Rosling through the TED talks. He is a guy who has made statistics look like fun, if that's at all possible. He has also gives a bit of optimism in the presentations he makes in regards to what may come ahead as "peak child" as a result of improving global healthcare, and the ending of extreme poverty. The consequence of less poverty and more investment into health and education in developing countries is that we will be reaching a limit of where more humans are being put on this Earth.

What is even more impressive is his founding of the website Gapminder (www.gapminder.org)
and the interactivity of the informatics graphs that are there. The documentaries are interesting too. I could waste an entire week making cross-comparisons and correlations with these tools he provided. I think you'll like the TED video provided below. If this world had more teachers influencing governments like this magnificent Swedish professor I think the world would be a much better place.

*- I don`t think any of the classic cross-country skiers in Sochi have anything to worry about from me breaking any of their records
**- I just watched the Finns crush the Americans 5 to 0, playing for the bronze medal. For this round, I was cheering for Team Finland. Suomi! Suomi! Suomi! I'm doing so not so much to be spiteful to the USA, but more for the fact that I want to see something happen that will make some Finnish people actually get emotional and smile.
***- The exorbitant cost of 52 billion dollars used to create the lodgings, venues and to host these Winter Olympics triggered the thoughts of corrupt use of energy and resources, mismanaged funding, and wasteful inefficiency.

V-Day Melodies

A weird glimpse into my eclectic music collection, and a sloppy mix it is too: ranging from the sappy and romantic, to the depressing, to stuff that's just soothing and slow, to stuff that is more lyrically erotic. . .

My Playlist for this Valentine's Day

• Love Song - The Cure
• Don't Panic - Coldplay
• 9 Crimes - Damien Rice
• The Weight of the World - The Editors
• Sun Up Running for Home - Matthew Good
• Slow Burn - David Bowie
• Here Comes the Flood - Peter Gabriel
• In Your Eyes - Peter Gabriel
• The Scientist - Coldplay
• Inflatable - Bush
• We Do What We Want To - O+S
• Fall at Your Feet - Jesse Cooke
• There Is a Light That Never Goes Out - The Smiths
• Never Had No One Ever - The Smiths
• Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me - The Smiths
• Unlovable - The Smiths
• The Drugs Don't Work - Ben Harper
• The Ground Beneath Her Feet - U2
• Perfect Circle - R.E.M.
• If You Wear That Velvet Dress - U2
• Sweet Jane - The Cowboy Junkies
• The First Cut Is the Deepest - Sheryl Crow
• Possession - Sarah McLaughlan
• Woman in Chains - Tears for Fears
• In Your Room - Depeche Mode*
• Stripped - Depeche Mode
• Higher Love - Depeche Mode*
• More - J. Englishman
• Chekannya - The Ukrainians**
• Vivir Sin Aire - Maná
• Como Dueles en los Labios - Maná
• La Puerta Azúl - Maná
• Con Te Partiro - Andea Bocelli
• Don't Dream It's Over - Crowded House
• Can't Do A Thing (to Stop Me) - Chris Isaak
• Wicked Game - Chris Isaak
• I'm Not In Love - Crystal Castles (featuring Robert Smith)
• These Foolish Things - Roxy Music
• Avalon - Roxy Music
• Only The Lonely - Roy Orbison
• This Aching Deal - Shocking Pinks
• Sight of You - Pale Saints
• In Too Deep - Genesis
• Black Hair in the Wind - Ottmar Liebert
• Blue Moon - The Mavericks***
• Dante's Prayer - Loreena McKennitt
• You and Me - Lifehouse
• Iris -The Goo Goo Dolls
• Name - The Goo Goo Dolls
• Sleepwalk - Amos Garrett
• The Book of Love - The Magnetic Fields
• Flaming Bed - Blue Rodeo
• What Is This Love (with Sarah McLaughlan) - Blue Rodeo
• My Funny Valentine - Frank Sinatra
• Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin' - Journey

* - From the Songs of Faith and Devotion live concert recordings.
** - A cover of the Velvet Underground hit Venus in Furs, sung in Ukrainian and played with traditional instruments. Quite romantic really. Thanks again to the late Lou Reed.
*** - Holy cripes! This kind of sounds like country music. . . how did this get in here?!

To Build a Bridge to a Dream in 10 days

I started writing this on the last hours of the eve of Groundhog Day. I don't anticipate a positive report for tomorrow, but today begins a new month, and since January was such a depressing write-off, it's time to be firm and take steps to put some serious action and effort for more growth oriented projects. I put some time into establishing some metrics for the goals I set out to achieve, by reading back through some past entries, notes, and journals to winnow out what wasn't working out for me, and thinking about how to secure and engrain whatever is left that does.

While accounting for my time ahead, I'm discovering that it's one of those rare times when I have an approach-approach dilemma. As it approaches the end of the fiscal year, like every other year since I've worked where I am, I again have a sizeable chunk of unused vacation time remaining. I'm sitting here wondering if I'm just going to take it as a pay out, as with all the other years, or take the actual time off. Considering all the extra stress I'm going to be facing ahead with negotiations reopening, it might be a more prudent measure to take the time off. If I do book it all off in the right cycle, I'll have about 10 days off. There is nothing to make any stretch of time between mid-February/March look appealing around this territory; as we're only through 65-75 % of the way through winter. Travel was suggested by a friend at work; I wish I had her enthusiasm about the idea, but what I really have been missing most is a substantial sense of accomplishment from starting and completing a personal project that flows along a middle range timeline. Traveling somewhere won't give me that satisfaction*. With the time constraints that I have, I've only been stuck doing either very short term (within a day) projects, or tiny and slow progressive stages of very long ones. I've been trying to think about things that I could do that are radically life changing that could be done within the span of 7 - 10 days. The stuff that comes to mind of things that I've done in the past that fit such criteria are:

• Cramming the essential elements of another language (as in the case of me learning enough Spanish on an intermediate level that allowed me to travel abroad for six months). I know one person who I should try and find moments to Skype with to work on my German. I should also find someone to talk for improving my French, which I learned years ago but never found use for.
• Re/learning HTML and other programming tricks.
• Practicing some guitar, learning some new songs
• Assembling something to make some sort of functional gizmo.
• Building some furniture**
• Redecorating/painting my condo (too expensive to do now).
• Writing essays which I can get academic credits/certification for (which means I'd need a meaningful course to apply to, which is probably too late to register for now).
• Dating. Well . . . I lie, this is not truly a thing where I have found either success or satisfaction in doing, and it's doubtful that it will be a course I take ahead. The only radical thing in life that it has done for me was show me how few single women there are out there around my age who would take a liking to someone like me, and to show me just how petty, self-centred, immature, and/or just plain friggin' crazy people can be. It has come to where I am disillusioned to some point beyond just simply feeling flawed, jaded, and hopeless. I really just hate the indignity of it all. It's worse than trying to muddle through any job market. I'm coming to really wish that I lived in a place like Sweden, where one of my correspondents who lives there tells me that, in comparison to here, there really isn't any sort of ritualized form of dating, or at least there is less burdening of themselves and each other with gender roles, or pressure/expectations***, and men and women generally demonstrate more sexual equality, openness, and respect for each other.

It will be interesting to see what else I'll turn up when I peruse Instructables, or when I attack Google's search field with the words "10 day DIY projects", and if I do decide to book that time off.

*- Having the same stuck mind and taking it on a tour around a different place isn't really positive change.
**- I would need to borrow my father's workshop if I choose to do something like this, but it would take me two to three days alone just to de-clutter it and organize that place enough just to make it operational for my standards.
***- When I meet people around here, why is there some expectation for me be either some sort of business tycoon, or a professor, a dumbass redneck cowboy, or some sort of worthless macho/gangsta badass shithead with an inked-up hide?

Post Funeral Reckonings

I just returned home from a funeral. I don't believe in publishing the name of any deceased person within my circle of acquaintanceship, nor the details of their passing away, without formal permission from their family to do so first, so I've withheld those details. But what I will remember and say of this person is that it was someone who believed in living honestly, dutifully and working toward virtues, and seeing that this person was so welcoming and respectful to me and my family, and always treated me kindly when I visited her, it made me feel assured that she perhaps saw some of the same qualities in me as well. I am also grateful that it was someone who was a supportive and dear friend to my own Mom; who sadly was a witness to the critical incident that eventually claimed this person's life. Looking aside from the death itself, I am comforted a bit in knowing that she was spared from suffering for very long, and mostly good things seem to be going on in the lives of her surviving children and grandchildren, and that they seem to be prospering well enough. I wish better for all of them in the times ahead.

My mind has been thrown on a bit of an emotional roller coaster as I sit here and reflect about not only the passing of this person, and with all who I spoke to and saw during course of the day, the most salient things being:

• memories that were tagged to some of the guests there who were indirectly a link to the past bad memories from my old home town I grew up in. The case today was that I met the sibling*  of someone else who put a lot of effort into attacking my self-esteem and psychologically bullying me through any opportunity they had throughout my school years. Through our discussion, I gained a clearer picture today as to why that person had used so much energy in directing this abuse at me: it stemmed from their own selfishness and insecurity; nothing really to do with any flaw I had (something I wished I had the sense to learn and accept a few decades ago). I should feel more secure in myself after knowing this, but I only feel despair and regret. After all these years, I'm still angry to depth of my core about how I allowed the antics of a pathologically hyper-competitive, sanctimonious, spiteful, asshole who thrived on schadenfreude, to scar my self-confidence/esteem so deeply, which has affected more than one aspect of my life for so long. I'm ashamed to admit this, but it is true.
• in the scope of things, I'm realizing just how I've been limiting myself and treating myself badly. Worse than even being enslaved by some sort of addiction, is failing to reach one's real potential, and failing to see that one deserves better and to live with dignity, and to not waste any more time suffering fools.
• it's overwhelming and incredibly hard to meet people after not seeing them for five years or more, and being pressed to try to share a summary of my own life details, or to get a concise precis of theirs. Part of my failure for this is not being available socially anymore, and seeing how much time has past in between is a hard way to be struck back into reality.
• the general overall reminder about how life is too short, and how it can vanish away in a blink of an eye; and I'm forced to think of the ways that I'm squandering away my own talents, resources, and energies . . . maybe now more than ever I must stop and wonder, and ask myself at this stage of it, the question: "Is it really meaningful for me anymore?

When arriving home and checked messages, it was almost as if it was a sign from above, given the course of this day, that I found this link sent to my Facebook feed. I am sharing it here as well: On The Shortness of Life: An Introduction to Seneca. Thanks again, Tim!

*- He's an honestly decent and good person, with whom I never had any qualms with. I regard the same of the parents of them, which makes me wonder what the hell went wrong with this other person.