Tag: dailyprompt

Sacrifice

Daily writing prompt
What sacrifices have you made in life?
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I feel like I answered this question recently, but could it have been a different question? Is it just a coincidence? I don’t know, and I’m too lazy to do any research on the topic at 7:07am on a Friday.

Sacrifice is a really heavy word. A sacrifice is what a soldier does when they give their life for their country. It is what you do when you give your child’s life to the fire god at the local temple. You know, serious stuff. What have I done that measures up to things like that?

I sacrificed eating sugar to the gods of weight loss. How’s that for making bariatric surgery more dramatic? Did it work? No? Oh well. It is the first thing that pops into my tiny little brain when I think of the word sacrifice. It’s not what I’d call noble or anything.

I don’t really mean to be a smart ass here. I am looking forward to reading through other people’s responses to this because many of you really are noble and deserve respect for what you’ve lived through. Don’t hold my being a doofus against me, please and thank you.

Everything is New-ish

Daily writing prompt
What’s the oldest things you’re wearing today?
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I lost a whole truck load of weight back in 2022. I lost more weight than I currently weigh. I’m a little less than half the man I used to be… literally.

What does that mean in regard to today’s question?

It means I don’t own any clothes that aren’t relatively new. The socks I’m wearing at this moment might be a year old. Maybe a little more than that. They are the oldest thing I’m wearing, by far.

Now that is assuming we’re taking about clothes. What if we broaden the search a little? My Apple Watch is a little more than a year old, but probably not quite as old as my socks. My glasses are a whopping three weeks old, give or take a day or two. What else is there?

There is one thing, and it’s the winner. Two weeks from now is my 15th wedding anniversary. That’s right, my wedding ring is the oldest thing I’m wearing today and everyday. 15 years and counting, with many more to come.

I love you, Jen. I love you more and more each day.

Yes

Daily writing prompt
Are you a leader or a follower?
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I have thought long and hard about how to answer this question (we’re talking at least five minutes of internal debate here) and I think the best way for me to answer it is:

Yes.

Am I a leader or a follower? Yes, yes I am.

I am a supervisor at work with a small staff reporting to me. I have to be a leader for them or else I’m not going to be terribly good at my job. Outside of work I feel much more comfortable letting other people take the lead so I can just follow along. I would like to think that in my relationship with my wife we are both leading some of the time and following at other times, but I suspect that I do a lot more following than leading. I suppose I could be a leader in the cover band, but I prefer to let other people take the reigns and just go along for the ride. I feel like I am playing that leadership role more today than I used to before our singer left, but I suspect as time rolls on I will step back again. We’ll see.

So there you have it. Am I a leader? Yeah, sometimes. Am I a follower? Yeah, sometimes.

Yes, yes I am.

Deep Discussion

Daily writing prompt
List your top 5 favorite fruits.
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Well, today’s prompt is going to lead to some deep, heavy discussions. I’m a little hesitant to contribute as I don’t want to upset anyone today (yeah, right).

Also… do I have five favorite fruits? I haven’t had a lot of fruit since the gastric bypass surgery. Something about the few things I’ve tried have made them difficult to handle so I’ve backed off. A lot of this will be pre-surgery opinions, but it’s not like I was a big fruit eater when I was eating party sized bags of chips in one sitting almost every day. You don’t get over 400 pounds by eating things that are good for you all the time. Once in a while, sure, but doubtful it could be a regular (ya know, healthy) kinda thing.

Here is my super detailed list. Enjoy!

  • Grapes. Specifically green grapes. Post-surgery, the thin layer of skin is tough for me to chew up to a small enough state to not get stuck trying to get into my newly redesigned stomach. I’ve been mostly okay eating grapes, but every now and then they bring on a nasty case of The Foamies.
  • Apples. When I was a kid apples were my favorite by a mile. As I got older I sort of lost the taste for them. Not completely. Every once in a while an apple would be great. Post-surgery I haven’t had one. My hesitation is the same as the grapes issue. I’m worried about not being able to break down the skin enough. I could peel them, of course, but I just haven’t tried it. Also, there’s a lot of sugar in apples. Would that lead to dumping syndrome? On a related note, just after surgery while I was in the pureed food stage I tried some apple sauce. It went down fine, but the gas it produced. WOW.
  • Oranges. I love a seedless orange. I haven’t tried one post-surgery. One of these days.
  • Pineapple. I’ve tried a couple of bites of pineapple since the gastric bypass and it went fine. Pineapples are delicious, but do they go with pizza? I’ve never tried it so I recuse myself from the debate.
  • Okay… one more… now we are firmly into, “is that a fruit or a vegetable” territory. Also… I’m having a hard time thinking of something else I like. Is celery a fruit or a vegetable? It’s a vegetable. Also, the stringy nature… there’s no way I could eat celery without getting savagely nauseous. What about olives? Google says it’s both, though technically a fruit. We have a winner! I always loved seedless black olives. I haven’t had one in ages though. Maybe I should revisit them. There was a time in my younger days when I really liked them.

And there you have it, friends, neighbors, and gentle readers. Five fruits that I like or liked, some of which I might still be able to eat without vomiting! Enjoy!

Stop Procrastinating

Daily writing prompt
What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?
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There is irony here. Big time. I just got to work. Thanks to insane traffic I was a couple of minutes late. I’m caught up now though. I have a lot of stuff I want to plow through this morning, but here I am writing a blog post. Foreshadowing? Oh yeah. Big time.

One small improvement. Hmmm. Just one? I can think of a few. How about doing something to tweak the ol’ work ethic? How about we try to cut down on the procrastination. Work now, flake later, rather than the normal vice versa. I feel like that would go a long way toward making me feel like a better human, in the purely professional sense. I haven’t been missing any deadlines lately or anything that demands changes, but I also feel like there have been times when the nose should have been squarely on the grindstone and it hasn’t. Case in point… I am writing this now while I should be doing some paperwork. Ugh.

I should be more attentive to my wife’s needs. I should be quicker to help out with anything my kids need. I should be more attentive to my father and really just be there for him more than I am. That’s a big source of guilt for me. Anything related to my father is a source of guilt. Ugh, again. I’m trying. I am failing often, but I am trying. I should initiate talk with the kids more than I do too. Just send them each a text saying little things like you rule and I hope you’re kicking ass today. You know, little things.

Okay, stop procrastinating. Get back to work, Mr. Red Head. Get some stuff done.

We Did This Already

Daily writing prompt
Share a story about someone who had a positive impact on your life.
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Come on, guys. You’ve given us this question already. I answered with the “I gotta take a walk” story from when I was a young, impressional guitar playing high school student. I think I might have mentioned my third grade teacher too.

Man, I don’t want to write the same thing again. I know it’s difficult to come up with original questions, but can’t you do better than this? Ugh. These daily prompts are supposed to help me get my brain ramped up to speed in the morning and instead today it’s just making the grumpy old man feel grumpier. Ugh, again.

Okay. We were either still in high school or it was shortly after high school and I was in the Music School at the University of Lowell, shortly before it became UMass Lowell. Mike the Bass Player, who was my band’s bass player in high school and is still my band’s bass player today, had a house party and we played. One of his friends, that I didn’t really know, had had too much to drink and came up to me and, in a very slurry voice, said, “you’re the best guitar player in the world.” That might not be the exact quote. It was 100 years ago and he was a little hard to understand. There may have been an F-Bomb or two that I left off the quote. Also, it was objectively, demonstrably, untrue. I suck. I am not the worst guitar player ever (back then or today) but I am so far removed from good. If he had said, “you’re the most adequate guitar player in the world” I wouldn’t have laughed at him the way I did. I would have thanked him. As it were, it was just a silly ego boost that stuck with me for a while. I had forgotten about it over the decades until just now. It’s a stupid story that is meaningless, but I’m grumpy so that’s what you’re getting.

QED, or some shit.

Freedom

Daily writing prompt
What does freedom mean to you?
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“There is more than one kind of freedom,” said Aunt Lydia. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

A little clarification on the quote. In the context of the story, what Aunt Lydia called “the days of anarchy” was our current society, at least at the time of writing which I believe was the 1980’s. The “now” of which she speaks is arguably the most brutally oppressive religious dictatorship western fiction has ever dreamed up.

You know what would be nice? It would be nice if women had control over their own healthcare. My wife and my daughter, my sister, my niece, my friends, my neighbors, all women. It would be nice if freedom meant they made their own decisions about their own bodies.

You know what would be nice? It would be nice if freedom was not dependent on something as idiotically arbitrary as the color of your skin. If people with one color skin had the right to a fair trial when they are accused of breaking the law, while people with another color skin are shot in the street like animals by those who claim to be upholding the law for even the most minor legal infractions. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

You know what would be nice? It would be nice if our rights were not dictated by where our ancestors lived or how they choose to practice religion (or not). It would be nice if people in our society had the same rights whether they were descended from people in western Europe, or people in the middle east, or people in the far east, or people in Africa. That would sure be nice, I think.

Okay. I am stopping now. Today’s daily writing prompt has seriously pissed me off and I am going to start writing the word fuck a lot if I don’t stop writing now.

Define: Loaded Question

Daily writing prompt
What public figure do you disagree with the most?
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I asked the jetpack AI assistant this question:

Define the phrase “loaded question”

A “loaded question” is a type of question that contains an assumption that, if answered, implies agreement with that assumption. It is designed to provoke a particular response, often by creating an unfair or false association. This type of question can be seen as manipulative or deceitful because it aims to push a particular agenda.

Yeah… that’s pretty much what I thought you’d say, Mr. AI.

What public figure do I disagree with the most… yeah… You don’t have to scroll too far back on this stupid little blog page to find the answer. I don’t often say his name directly anymore because it makes me sick to use those five letters in that particular order. I don’t enjoy putting name to evil, but I’ll do it. Instead I refer to his cult followers by the name he sort of gave them. The maga cult. Lowercase letters because fuck them all, they don’t deserve capital letters. Scum.

I am talking about that neo-nazi who is running for president as the republican nominee, because there is no republican party anymore (still with the lower case letters because capital letters imply respect). I am talking about the orange pile of fascist goo who calls himself trump.

Do I disagree with the nazi? You bet your ass I do. Everything he stands for. Everything he thinks. Everything he does. Everyone who follows him. Fuck them all. He is the physical manifestation of evil in our universe and the so-called christian right follows him as though he were the second fucking coming.

I don’t believe in hell, but if I did I would believe that he comes from there. No question.

Fuck him and fuck everything he represents.

Not The Target Audience

Daily writing prompt
What is your career plan?
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Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas.

Paula Poundstone

My career plans are pretty much set. Work in lower management until I die. Simple. I mean, I could possibly move up to middle management or something like that, but really there aren’t many different options at this point. I’m too old to be making plans to hop around. On July 12th I am going to hit the 20 year mark at my company. Right now, that’s the only career plan I’m thinking about.

I get the feeling that this question of the day was geared toward the younger folks. I’m looking forward to reading through other posts because, as Miss Poundstone* suggested, I’m always looking for new ideas.

*Wasn’t Paula Poundstone black balled or something? Didn’t she do something awful, or was accused or suspected of doing something awful? Oh yes, the google clued me in. Three counts of lewd acts upon a girl younger than 14. I used the quote because there was a point when the Comedy Central network used it in a commercial that ran about 20 times per hour and it seemed to fit my point for today. Apologies for quoting a potential child molester. I suck.

I Probably Mentioned This Already

Daily writing prompt
What was the last live performance you saw?
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In my younger days I went to clubs to hear live music all the time. Almost once or twice a week. It was basically my social life. As I got older the frequency was vastly reduced. After the pandemic hit the frequency dropped to a hair above zero.

I went to the Letters to Cleo annual Thanksgiving homecoming show back in November and it was pretty much perfect. That was the last live performance… until four days ago. Scroll back a little, you’ll see it. My daughter, Bellana, performed with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra four days ago and you bet your sweet music loving ass I was in the crowd having my mind blown by the Mozart and being so overcome with pride for her that I was close to spontaneously combusting. Literally. Boom. It was amazing.

My step daughter… that little kid I first met when she was six years old and in first grade… one of the two people who have allowed me to be a part of their life as they grew from little person to adult… the woman who used to be the girl who I’ve been blessed to be able to hear sing for most of her life… sang in the choir with a freaking symphony orchestra performing a Mozart masterpiece.

That was my most recent live performance, all of four days ago, and damn it if that is going to be tough to top.