Adam Oster's Blog, page 11

New Year, who dis?

Holy crap, it’s 2022 already!

Like, for serious, I’m still feeling as though I’m way back in 2019, back before the time of the end times, when we were just moving into our new house and feeling all the joy of what the world could bring. When I was just starting school again and feeling all the stress of finally working toward a degree again. When I was performing in my first show on stage in years and thinking about all the people I could meet again.

When the world felt new and fresh and full of opportunities.

And it feels like the world has kinda stopped ever since then. Like, for the past two years, I’ve been spinning my wheels to get all these things done and things have certainly moved forward in all those ways that I was expecting back when we made the big change to move off the farm and back into the city.

If I’m being completely honest, this whole pandemic thing has probably has the weird effect on my life in that it’s just put me even more in focus on the school thing than I had expected to be, in a way I hadn’t realized I would need to be. Although those first terms felt easy, the past few terms have felt like I’ve been crossing the finish line right at the last second every time. And while I’m getting closer (six months left!), I’m still feeling in this weird purgatory of life because of it. Like life is somehow on pause until I finish it, with school taking this unfortunate priority in my life. While life is already still somewhat on hold as we wait for this crazy pandemic to finally become something less.

And so, as I look forward to the new year, I’m actually more thinking of the same possibilities I was thinking of two years ago, under far different circumstances. And getting a little eager to finally be able to consider myself on to the next phase of life again.

Also, I’ve got a book coming out. So, that’s pretty sweet, right?

Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads, but Maybe Anxiety Meds?

As we are now in the first week of 2022, it’s easy for most of us to start looking toward the future. For those of us who have a big year in store, like for me, finishing school, releasing a new book, production of a new play I wrote, and a few things I can’t actually reveal on here yet, there’s a lot to look forward to.

I’ve certainly been spending the past few weeks thinking about the year to come, as well as the amount of work I have in store to not only finish the things I have planned, but to prepare for what comes after. All of this has the tendency to feel more than a little overwhelming.

Which is why I’ve been posting on here a bit of late about taking care of your mental health. I’ve been personally avoiding my own mental health for the past month or so as I power through the needed activities for success, and during these couple weeks of in between times, I’ve been realizing how much stress I’ve been putting on myself for the past long period and wondering how much longer I’ve got before this amount of stress is too much.

Luckily, for me, some of the big things for this year are actually completions of things. Like school. Once I finish the next six months, I no longer have to take at least two hours of every day trying to fit in completing my homework. Yeah, I might have a big job hunt to commence after I get that degree, in order to best capitalize on the work I’ve put in these last couple of years, but that’s nothing compared to the amount of effort I’ve been putting into getting this piece of paper that the occupational world loves so dearly. And it’s definitely no where near the amount of effort required to complete a 100-level course for the online classes in the University of Wisconsin’s Flex Program.

What this all means is that here, at the start of the new year, I’m looking toward the end of a really long tunnel I’ve been stuck in for the past couple years. And instead of focusing on the length of tunnel I have left, I’m really trying to put my focus on the light at the end.

While also trying to figure out if I can somehow cram in a few additional projects for myself.

And I’m really eager to just be done with school, in case I haven’t mentioned that yet.

New Year’s Resolutions

Since I talked earlier this week about how New Year’s resolutions can be triggering at the start of a new year when you realize how far you are from the goal you set for yourself 365 days prior, I thought I’d talk a little bit more about resolutions in general.

I don’t typically do them.

It’s not that I have anything against them, in fact, I think it’s a wonderful tradition to start the year off thinking about how this is going to be the year you finally do X and how you are going to make those changes or whatever you do when you make resolutions. It’s pretty great.

It’s also…well, if feels a little empty.

I remember as a young kid in school, we would talk about resolutions and go around the room asking everyone what their resolution would be. And, as someone who never had one, I would always just say something similar to what everyone around me was saying. You know, “Play outside more”, “Do better in school”, or some other nonsense that didn’t actually mean that much to me because I was already doing well in school and as someone who lived in the South in the 80’s, playing outside was already over half of what I would do.

So, maybe I don’t do resolutions because I’m just not good at them.

And…I also do have some versions of resolutions, I just don’t like talking about them out loud.

Things like, “I want to sell more books”, or “I will write more books”, or anything else similar to getting away from my normal day job and just sitting around putting words to a page.

And the truth is, I entirely plan on doing that this year. I’ve got approximately six months left of school, and when I finally get done with that, I’m going to have this huge gaping hole in my requirements of any given day that I’m incredibly eager to fill with words.

But one of the cool things about New Year’s resolutions is that you have this crazy energy at the start of the new year to just go ahead and do it.

And I don’t think I have the time for the copious amounts of writing I hope to be doing at this point. A new term at school already starts on January 4th, and coming out of the term I just finished, which was incredibly rough considering it involved completing my capstone and an entirely unnecessarily hard Psychology course. That means for the next few days, I’m really not planning on getting much of anything of worth done. And then I get right back to all of it. Work, school, and pretending I have time to write.

So, I guess what my real New Year’s resolution is for this year, although I have so much more I want to do with any given day, is to allow myself to chill more.

Because, if I’m being completely honest here, it has been a long time since I’ve been chill.

And I miss that.

Happy New Years everyone. I hope you ring in the change of the number of the year with some awesome chill.

Murder Mystery Update

Hey folks!

You may or may not be aware that over the past couple of years, I’ve added writing plays into my repertoire. And while I’ve love to tell you that I’ve been writing the next big thing that will some day grace the stages of Broadway, the truth is that I’ve actually just been writing these goofy little dinner theatre style murder mysteries. You may be familiar with the style of show. Tony and Tina’s Wedding was a big example of this type of performance a number of years ago that theatre groups all over the country were raving about, although it’s a script that has very little substance and a ton of goofy improv.

That’s what I’ve been writing.

And right now, as of about a month ago, we cast and began rehearsals for the second (well, there was also a first script that I co-wrote with a number of people that I can count as at least half-mine) Adam Oster murder mystery.

And…I somehow allowed them to cast me in it. Luckily for me, I dragged my wife along for the ride, so for the first time in over a decade, my wife and I are sharing the stage together, while reciting words I wrote in between trying to get all my school stuff done and editing my far more serious book that I’m hoping to release to the world soon.

Needless to say, with all the distractions I’ve had in my life, this script I wrote over the period of about six months, with very limited inspiration, is a little rough. Of course, comedy scripts aren’t all that uncommon to be severely cleaned up during the initial rehearsals of the show. We like to call it workshopping. In this case, it’s primarily been a lot of spotting of plot holes and trying to come up with improvements to the gags already written into the script.

I don’t write much for broad comedy, and the way these things have been developed over the years, the expectation for them is incredibly broad (and often rather bawdy).

But, I’m happy to report that although we’ve been struggling through some of the logistics of the script as written…it’s actually pretty damned funny.

Even more importantly, the cast we’ve gotten for this thing is proving that they are more than capable of taking some cheesy writing and performing it like it was written by Shakespeare…you know…if Shakespeare were writing a comedy about neighbors murdering their HomeOwners Association president.

But here’s the thing, folks, there aren’t a ton of opportunities to see this show. It only runs for four nights. That means that if you want to see what my writing looks like if I do it on an incredibly tight turnaround and replace all of the serious attempts at characterization and storytelling with innuendo, you’ve got to move quick.

Also, you get to have dinner while you watch it.

Come on out and see what we’ve been working on. It’s sure to be a ton of fun. And if you’re not having fun while you’re watching it, just have a few more drinks and it’s bound to get better :).

Go to ecct.org to get your tickets. You (probably) won’t be disappointed!

Have you Checked on your Mental Health Lately?

As we’re in the thick of the holiday season right now, I figured I should take a moment to discuss all those terrible things too many of us go through during this period of the year. Because, look, mental health is a serious thing we all need to be concerned about, and it’s simply not something we talk about nearly enough. In fact, until very recently, it was incredibly taboo to even think about, much less have open and honest conversations regarding.

I’ve been pretty open about it on here for years, but I struggle with my mental health on the regular. It’s been something I’ve gone through numerous different therapeutic techniques to help with, and I certainly manage it a lot better than I used to, but I still struggle.

And I think part of that struggle is that it’s so dang hard to actually get a grip on what is actually troubling you, when it comes to mental health. When I was first diagnosed with depression, it was during a period in my life where I had a lot going on, and things weren’t exactly moving in the direction I wanted them to move, and, well, I just felt lost. Sad, definitely, but I think even more than that, I just felt lost.

And so, one day, when I was feeling more exceptionally lost than usual, I up and left work with a quick message to my boss about feeling under the weather, and I went for a long drive. About halfway through my drive, I sent a message to my wife telling her I thought I was finally ready to do something about my mental health issues and she immediately called and set up an appointment for me. This was when I knew I had found the right person to marry. There weren’t any additional questions about what I needed from there, she just called and got an appointment set up for me.

And I showed up at the doctor’s office, told him that I think I suffer from depression, and after filling out a quick little questionnaire that would determine just how much depression I have, I was diagnosed and given my first prescription for anti-depression medication.

It was incredibly easy to get that first step completed.

But as I’ve gotten older and have learned some of the techniques for managing my mental wellbeing, I’ve started to realize how little there seems to be with regards to diagnosis outside of that questionnaire and just saying you feel sad a lot. While I know that the questionnaire has been developed as a proven method for determining whether people are depressed vs. just being sad, it still felt a little weak of a diagnostic tool for me. I remember answering questions about whether I feel more sad than happy, whether I have trouble getting up in the morning, and whether I had ever considered self-harm. And while I know that these are not things that all humans struggle with, they still felt a little too much like questions any person could score a few points on easily.

But maybe that’s the point? Because mental health isn’t exactly stable, just like your physical health isn’t. While there are those of us who suffer from a chronic chemical imbalance in our brains, that’s not to say that someone can’t get an acute case of the sads.

And the holidays seem to be the time in which this happens more often than any other time. Which makes sense. Not only are there so many requirements of us to try and make sure that others have a happy holiday season. Not only do most of our jobs become that much more taxing as we prepare for the end of the year (or, if you’re in retail, deal with the hordes of people who are trying to rush through their holiday shopping). Not only is this a time where we most remember our lost loved ones. And not only is this when we see the least amount of sun for the entire year, meaning we’re just not getting as much Vitamin D as we usually get. But also, the end of a year is yet another reminder of all those things we didn’t get done that we had wanted to get done.

The concept of New Year’s resolutions means that as the new year comes along and we start thinking about what our new resolutions might be, we also realize that we didn’t actually do that great of a job on last year’s resolution. Another year passed, but it feels like we didn’t actually do the things over the year that we wanted to do.

So, to add on to all the sadness and the stress of the holidays, now we get to throw in a little bit of guilt and disappointment as well.

Because this season of joy is really a season of closure for the year. And so many of us have so many high expectations for ourselves at the start of a new year, it can be really rough to see how few of those expectations we’ve met when the year winds down.

So, this is my message to you to take it easy on yourself. This year has been a rough one. We’ve all fallen short of where we want to be. We’re all still wishing there was more we could have done. And we’ve all just come out of the rush of the Christmas season feeling just plain exhausted.

As such, if you can find the time this week (or in the coming weeks), find some way to take some time for yourself. A mental health day (or hour) to just sit back and realize that although you might not have done all the things you wanted to get done, you’ve managed to get through another year. Another year of a global pandemic. Another year of political and global strife. And really, just another trip around the sun trying to survive. You survived. Be proud of that.

Mental health is nothing to take lightly. In fact, all of us could do a far better job of just sitting back and giving ourselves a mental sick day. Even if it means that tomorrow’s going to be that much more work because of the day we took off.

Of course, I’m saying this while also knowing that I’ve got a few more days with my kids around the house and trying to find some way to make their winter vacation fun…so, maybe next week.

It’s my New Year’s resolution to find a day to take for my mental health. I’m really hoping I can actually manage to succeed on that one.

Christmas: The Aftermath

I’ll start off by noting that since I write these out early, I’m actually sitting here just a few days before Christmas, picturing what my coming week is going to look like.

And what it looks like is exhaustion.

Because, as noted before, we’ve got a lot going on this week. We’re throwing both a Christmas Eve and Christmas Day party here at the Havok Outpost. Put on top of that the whole, you know, making sure we have Christmas all together for our three offspring, and you’ll find an Adam who is already anxious for all the effort in the coming days, but also, there’s the whole cleanup afterwards that comes with it, which means that the aftermath of Christmas means, to me, slowly cleaning over the period of the following week, generally just a location at a time as I find need to use that location for other things.

And often, LEGOs, all over my floor…everywhere.

But luckily for me, and not as luckily for my kids, the dog loves picking up the LEGOs and hiding them under things. I’m guessing he does that because he wants to keep my feet safe.

There’s one more piece of the Christmas Aftermath puzzle that is my actual favorite. It’s that my kids have enough things to keep them amused, and I generally have a few extra days off from work, which means I get to spend some time laying back and reading books/playing video games. While there are a ton of things that have to get done immediately before and after Christmas, there’s also this spectacular period where I find myself, somehow, relaxing.

And I’m really looking forward to that right now.

And maybe a nap.

I could always use a nap.

Putting the X Back in Christmas

Since I’ve somehow found myself spending most of last week talking about the Christmas season, it feels like I should probably spend a second or two talking about the whole “reason for the season” aspect of it all, even if we’re already outside of the actual Christmas week thing.

While walking in a Christmas parade a couple weeks ago with my two boys as a part of the Cub Scouts float, my youngest noticed a sign talking about X-mas and asked me what that was all about. My response was a big smile and, “Well, actually, there’s a very long and boring explanation I have for you about all that.” I doubt I made it as far as the usage of Greek letters working as a substitute for Christ before he was long out of the conversation, but it got me to thinking, in general, about this whole holiday we consider religious.

In the 90’s, at least here in America, there was a push to make our holiday celebrations more inclusive by saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. And look, I love inclusivity. But…I’m of the opinion that the only reason that we really had this push appear is because of how exclusive Christians try to make Christmas. Which is, of course, an interesting perspective, considering the history of the holiday itself. Because what we now consider as Christmas was once the winter solstice festival, a very secular holiday celebrating, well, the winter solstice. One could say, then, that Christians have actually been working on shoving Christ into Christmas ever since Christmas was a thing.

Christmas itself is such an odd mess of religious traditions mixed with the secular. Saint Nicholas, an actual, you know, Christian saint and real existing (albeit long-dead) person, has been transformed into this magical elf who gives out presents. The story of Jesus’ birth has been interspersed with this message of presents and family and honestly, it’s pretty easy to question how everything we consider an important part of Christmas is really part of a religious holiday. I’ve certainly spent a not-insignificant amount of time trying to figure it all out. Like Easter, we have a celebration of the life of Jesus that even the most religious of us wind up being unable to keep separate from the secular pieces.

How can you possibly celebrate Jesus’ resurrection without an egg hunt? Or Jesus’ birthday without putting a dead tree in your living room?

These traditions, which may have some connection to religiosity if you look hard enough, really do nothing but distract from the religious messaging that’s supposed to be center, according to the “Keep Christ in Christmas” folks. But, then again, that message itself forgets the entire history of X-mas being a way of shoving Christ into Christmas in the first place.

While Christians have been using Christmas as a way of excluding others from the traditions of this holiday for years, it seems to me like it could be a time of great inclusion, where we recognize that the message of Jesus is already there and doesn’t need to be crammed down throats any further than to just remind people that they’re celebrating a day the Christians have decided is also a day for celebrating the birth of their Messiah.

Or maybe other groups should just get a little more aggressive in their marketing for their faith. “Put the Menorah back in Hannukah?” or “Put the Harvest back in Kwanzaa?” I’ll be honest, that one might be offensive…I’m not sure. I mean, actually, I like that Kwanzaa uses a bunch of harvest festival traditions in the middle of winter. It’s like celebrating the birth of a kid who was actually believed to have been born during the harvest season. It’s almost like the whole Bogarting of holidays has come full circle.

So, maybe we really should say Happy Holidays, because these days, who knows what holiday we’re actually celebrating ourselves? Just put some presents under the tree and hope your friends and family come to dinner with limited political discussions and no COVID and call it a day.

Christmas Eve…

Christmas Eve…

What to write about Christmas Eve…

So, yeah, it’s the day before Christmas. And, well, that means that while you’re reading this, I’m frantically trying to find a way to stop having to clean and help prep for the party we’re throwing at our house tonight in order to hide outside for the majority of a party with my in-laws that involves a lot of yelling because there’s far too many children and at least one deaf person in the house.

It gets loud.

And so, I sit outside, by a fire that is rarely warm enough, talking about the latest superhero movie with my brother-in-law, knowing that at any second I’ll be called to duty to take care of something inside. Probably a full-on brawl between some of the children.

And this has been my Christmas Eve for the past ten-plus years.

Which is a far cry different from the Christmas Eves of my youth, which were more about getting to the Christmas Eve Program, standing, speaking, sitting, standing, singing, sitting, stop moving so much Adam, standing, singing, walking out the door to grab a paper bag filled with ribbon candy, peanuts, and an orange, before trying to rush my parents to stop their talking so we can get home and open all our presents.

Honestly, I guess there’s still a lot of similarity.

But now I get to drink beer…so that’s something. And something I’m probably already in the midst of doing as you’re reading this…

Happy Christmas Eve, everybody. And Merry Christmas.

I hope you get some good books under the tree this year.

Get to the Doll, Jamie!

As we get closer and closer to the big day where the tree is finally so flammable due to forgetting to keep it watered that we have to finally take all the presents out from under it and remove the paper from the house so we can sleep a little easier when we put the hot lights back on, I know we’re all thinking about one thing. The brilliance of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s second greatest film, Jingle all the Way.

And I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Adam, if you’re using hyperbole to make a joke, why wouldn’t you just call it his greatest film?” And the answer is simple. Nothing beats Terminator 2. Not even in a joke.

But for serious (yet still in a joking fashion), Jingle all the Way might be my favorite Christmas movie. Not only is it this weird goofy little thing that barely has any recognition, not only was it filmed primarily next door in the Twin Cities, and not only does it have the brilliant Phil Hartmann, and Darth Vader playing the son of The Terminator, but it encapsulates so well the true mania that is the Christmas season. Here we see Arnold working hard to try and provide for his family, while struggling to get out of the office in time to see his kid’s karate competition. Yeah, pretty standard guilt-trip-on-dad stuff that makes me worry that my children will all be taken away by Captain Hook and I’ll go to save them only to have a bunch of middle schoolers call me fat.

But it goes on from there to follow that dad as he works to try to follow the rules of Christmas to give his kid the greatest holiday he can, not realizing that what his kid really wants is him to be there. It’s this dad who has no clue what he’s doing, trying to do his best, and ultimately failing into success. And the more I write this, the more I realize that this is just a Christmas version of Hook, which really just means that since Hook came out first, what we’re seeing here is just some really lazy writing.

But screw it. I love Hook, and I love Jingle all the Way, so it makes a lot of sense that these two share a lot of the same heart. But Jingle all the Way, in my opinion fits together as an overall theme a whole lot better. Because by the end, we finally get to see that not only was family the really important thing all along, but also that the real issue in this whole story is the wife, who, once the credits have started rolling, asks Arnold what he got her. The kid gave the present that Arnold had been working so hard for away, he didn’t care about the gift, but that damned wife of his, she only cares about the stuff.

So, the real story here is, don’t worry about getting your kids anything. They’ll play in the dang box of whatever amazing thing you get your wife. Because she’s really the only one to focus on.

Because, she is your number one customer after all (that’s a quote from the movie for those of you who are not as familiar with this gem of a film as I am, which I’m guessing is most of you).

And boy am I starved for Christmas content to put out here, huh?

The End of Magic

While I’ve never been one to personally push the Santa myth or any of the similar myths like Tooth Fairies or Easter Bunnies, I’ve also never been one to shoot them down. In general, I’m not one to want to shoot down people talking about magic for most things, unless it’s, you know, actually dangerous for them to think that way, like, for instance, with magical horse de-wormer.

And so, as it is, my kids have grown up believing in all of those cool little magical creatures which inhabit the dreams of little ones. And although I might not push the myths, I have to admit I’m usually the one who puts the money under the pillow, writes the letters from Santa, and develops the escape plans for the leprechauns, so although I don’t directly promote the idea of these things existing, I’m still a little complicit in the whole duping of my children thing.

All the same, when it really comes down to it, my kids stopped asking me about the reality of it all, as I would just say I didn’t know anything. And after they stopped asking, there would inevitably come a time where they would tell me about their plans to disprove the myths. There’s an awful lot of conversation around myth-involving holidays about which of these mythical creatures are real. Just the other day I heard a debate about how leprechauns are real, but tooth fairies couldn’t possibly be.

Which brings me to the meat of my story. Over the past year, two out of the three of my kids suddenly decided to stop caring about the Tooth Fairy. Instead of happily putting their teeth under their pillows and awaiting the morning’s cash haul, they actually threw away their now-useless masticators. Ignoring the question we should all be having about why they would want to stop doing the thing that gets them more money, both of these kids got to a point where they were done playing the game, and just determined that the whole thing was some sort of scam that they were innocently playing into, even if they tended to be the ones coming out ahead of it all.

The magic died for them, and it died so hard that they didn’t even care about the reward that was there for kids who believed in it.

And now that we’re in the midst of the Christmas season, I fear we’re at a point again where these two kids who have had the veil of magic lifted to see their parents as devious little tricksters who want nothing more than for their kids to believe there’s special things that happen in this world will again determine that the magic isn’t worth it.

So far they’ve been playing along. They wake up in the mornings and seek out the new hiding spot for the elf. They talk about the fact that you can’t touch him or he’ll lose his magic. But I think they do it more for the youngest Oster, trying to keep the magic alive for him, knowing that the truth they’ve determined is not worth the loss in the myth.

Which is sweet, don’t get me wrong, but a part of me misses that part of their lives where anything could be true. Where they were willing to go to hunt out Nessie or the Bigfoot. Now, I’m not so sure they’d be willing to go on a cryptid hunt with me.

So, maybe the real issue here is that in their losing the magic, the magic goes away for me as well.

And that makes me more than a little sad.