Dealing with Annoyances

The daily struggle continues...

It should come as no surprised I am easily annoyed by things. That isn’t the ADHD talking, rather my inability to filter the signal-to-noise ratio. Social media, and all the posts, streams, and threads haven’t helped. Even shuttering a few channels and unfollowing many people hasn’t helped.

I have a friend who continues to send me messages with news of the war in Ukraine. This friend and I used to have great debates about things in life, politics, education, religion, and the like. Being annoyed with the one track messages, I stopped getting alerts everytime he messages me. I’ve done this with others too. I have Facebook friends but unfollowed about half of them. I unfollowed pages and groups that I used to. On Twitter I not only cut down what I follow, but used an app to ditch a lot of my tweets from the past. Being on Twitter since the early days, I had 20,000+ tweets, now culled to about the last six months worth or so. The way I figure it, if I can’t remember what I said to a person six months ago in-person, and no one else can, those conversations don’t need to be in writing somewhere online too.

Whatever I try however, my annoyance level has not gone away – it seems to have more piled on. Actions by others, decisions by some, just annoys me. And when I think about taking a break, doing something I enjoy, I get annoyed with that too. Last night for example, I went to the basement to work on a model. Instead I spent an hour working on project for one of my kids because I wanted to get that off my plate to enjoy working on my own project.

I think I need some photo therapy. No, not that light-box thing where you shine an overpriced flashlight to trick your brain into thinking its sunny outside. Rather just go out and take some photos to see what I can find. Finding inspiration in the rainy gloom of pre-Christmas December is a challenge. Will see how it works out.

Meanwhile, here’s a photo I took in early 2020 at Upper Canada Village’s “Alight at Night” event. I am going later this week to take photos for a photo feature story. I like these types of photography assignments because they are technically challenging and I get to use all my toys tools in my camera bag.

I look forward to seeing what they have this year on display.