Journal #10: A plate of failure
I started typing this next to a plate of failure.
A black bean burger had been sacrificed on an altar of dry, dense bread that refused to rise in the oven. I garnished the corpse with disgusting DIY mayonnaise and cheap vegan cheese in a futile attempt to glamour the grotesque.
My stomach turned at the sight of it. My bladder1 then spasmed, slashing my hopes that I could keep it at bay by using rice vinegar (allegedly the mildest form of vinegar) to make low-acid mayo.
I shamefully walked to the trashcan and scraped off the rejected bread and mayonnaise. I was left with the paltry entrails of the bean burger, which I doused in my last ration of Hidden Valley vegan ranch.2
This allowed me to finish my hard-won "dinner" after three hours of cooking,3 cleaning, and washing dishes, but not without guilt. The ranch costs nearly $4 per bottle. I've only got $90 to last me until my next paycheck in two weeks, unless I want to wrack more credit card debt.
Things haven't been going well for me. In fact, things haven't been going well for awhile.
I guess the slump started last fall. Anticipating the advent of my annual Seasonal Effective Disorder, I had requested to increase the dose of my antidepressant4 from 60mg to 90mg. All I got for my psychiatric circumspection was a week of terrible ocular migraines and nausea.
After that, I raw-dogged it for a month or two until I finally ordered some vitamin D3 supplements. I'm still taking them now. They help, I guess. Or at least they don't not help.
It's now gone on 11:00 PM. This is the third Friday in a row where I've found myself aimlessly schlubbing it up late into the evening, bemoaning wasted time and dissatisfied by how I cashed in my spent time.
My days off are Thursday and Friday. Yesterday I was busy fighting off a bug that swept through work and had finally locked on to me. I hardly did anything all day outside of playing on my 3DS and taking a shower.
I struggle with being unproductive. I feel like I always have to be doing something. Whether it's cleaning the house, doing the laundry, filling out the budget book I bought for 2025 and haven't used all month, writing up a resume for the first time in over four years so I can try to find a less shitty job, or start reviewing for the networking class I'm retaking later this semester after I failed it the first time on account of falling behind in the coursework.
Keen readers will be able to track how my to-do lists tend to aggregate into a snowball of increasing importance. I'll start thinking of basic stuff to do—say, take out the trash. Then I'll think about how I should probably clean the litter box before taking out the trash.
But if I clean the litter box I'll need to sweep after. If I need to sweep, I might as well make food first so I won't have to sweep twice. But making food takes time. If I make food I have to do dishes after, which will push everything else back even further.
I work second shift. If I do too much during the day, I won't have time to relax before work. If I don't relax before work I'll be in a bad mood. If I'm in a bad mood at work I'll be anxious and tense all night, which requires more time to decompress after work, which means I'll be up later than usual. If I'm up late I'll sleep in late, and that leaves less time to do stuff tomorrow, which will then affect the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day...
Sometimes it feels like even the simplest of choices will determine the next 72 hours of my life.
Living by this sort of system also means that I'll be stuck like I am right now, thinking back through every single decision I've made over the past few weeks to try and find the one that set me on this path of bullshit.
I guess the point is that there's nothing I'll ever be able to isolate as the One Thing that made everything Go Wrong. The time and effort I spend searching for it could be better spent trying to making everything Go Right.
Yet as much as I find myself capable of making everything Go Wrong, I seem unable to believe I can make anything Go Right.
I'm responsible for every wrong choice; all right choices are just strokes of luck chalked up to happenstance or serendipity.
The implication here is that I'm more likely to make an error of judgement than I am to go against my self-perceived shitty odds and do something right. As it turns out, sometimes the safest choice to make is to not make a choice at all.
Maybe that's why I get stuck in these loops of inaction followed by compulsive productivity. If the culprit of my current predicament isn't something I did, then it's something that I failed to do. There's no escaping the self blame.
I'm not sure what I'll do with this information. I figured it was worthwhile to at least lend words to my thoughts than sit and stew in them. We'll see if I ended up regretting that choice or not.
I'm gonna go listen to Matchbox Twenty and daydream about smoking cigarettes.
✘ Posted on — 01/31/25
✘ Last modified — 6 months, 3 weeks ago
✘ Link — https://blog.xavierhm.com/journal-10-a-plate-of-failure
Footnotes
In 2023 I was diagnosed with Interstitial Cystitis. It is a chronic pain/illness condition that affects the bladder. I've had to reconstruct my whole life around my diagnosis, including my diet.↩
Miraculously, it never flares my I.C. It's the only condiment I can safely use at the moment, even though it has vinegar in it. Thoroughly demoralized by this rancid mayo, I'm not sure where to go next.↩
I also made bean burgers and biscuits, which turned out a lot better than the bread and mayo.↩
I take Duloxetine, the generic version of Cymbalta.↩