Hallelujah

Day 16 of writing every day.

I made the title hallelujah today to express my exhilaration that today is my last day of work for the year. Maybe I’d be happier if it was my last day at this job. Anyways I’m just looking forward to not being forced to live on an 11 – 8 shift for a week.

In exciting news I finally went through and scheduled a consultation with a programming school. It’s with one of the options I’m considering and depending on how things go, I might end up feeling a lot more hopeful about the future. Or not much might change.

I’ll have to set myself up so I make good use of the time I took of tomorrow to get more done than just the online consultation and Aikido practice at night. Aikido practice is also coming to an end for the year and there will be a one week break as well, so I’ll have time to ponder things.

A sudden urge to watch reality TV

The other night I had a sudden urge to watch reality TV. Maybe it was a need to be exposed to what other people feel and think unfiltered (it’s all checked and cleared by producers of course though). The show called Alone stood out to me and I began streaming and ended up binging a few episodes.

The winner of the show is whoever lasts the longest on his own in the forsaken wilderness of Vancouver Island, but the grand prize is a meager $500,000. It might be a lot for working people, but for a TV show that seems like a drop in the bucket if it could get the funding. The dangers the participants are exposed to just don’t seem to match the reward offered in my opinion.

I don’t claim to be a tough guy and I don’t think the participants on the show do either. They might say they’re prepared and in it to win, but they know how powerful nature can be especially if they’re alone with no one else around to rely on and surrounded by dangerous bears, wolves, and cougars.

To make things even harder, they’re allowed to bring only ten tools and had to haul camera equipment that totaled around 45 pounds because they were responsible for filming their activities. The only protection allowed to them against the wildlife predators were pepper spray and flares. If they wanted to call it quits either due to their inability to continue, or because they feared for their safety being stalked by carnivores, they had a satellite phone to call for an emergency rescue.

It’s not easy is all I can say and there was one participant with a military background who was frank about how the toughest people can break easily if certain conditions just aren’t what they are able. He broke down himself because it just wasn’t an environment for one person to be able to survive, especially when he had no reliable fresh source of water on the section of the island he got dropped off on.

The competition to outlast is not merely something decided on the skills of the participants and preparation they made. It is part luck depending on their specific location on the island, their mental durability in the face of constant wet and cold conditions where one mistake can compound into something fatal if they don’t pull out of the competition.

Anyways it’s a refreshing change of pace for me in my free time and the tidbits of survival tips seem to be informative as well. I hope you can find something to take your mind away from your troubles as well.

I’ll be appreciating the free time I have for about a week during the end of year and new year break in Japan. But I’ll still be writing as well.

Thanks for reading!