Veteran's Day — Blog

What you really want

A day off during the middle of a work week is a great opportunity to reveal to yourself just exactly how you spend your time. No work responsibilities, no weekend errands: you’ve got eight solid hours dedicated completely to you. How you choose to spend those hours is a good indication of what you really want to do.

This Veterans Day holiday, I spent the majority of the day reading. (The Red Rising trilogy is a fantastically good read.) In between two meals and a workout session, the rest was proper couch time with a book and a few cups of coffee. Eat, workout, and books; what more does a person need?

This list of things I chose not to do shatters the illusion that those things were something I actually wanted to do. Videos games? I’ve yet to play a single hour of games on the PlayStation in 2025. I pretend to be an avid gamer, but really it’s the idea of it that’s interesting to me. In hindsight, I should have never bought the PS5 at all.

Go outside and take photos? It turns out I’m not that type of hobbyist photographer. I want to be, but again it’s the ideal of it that I fancy, not the actual process. I enjoy taking pictures during my travels, that remains. Going around locally, hunting down moments and scenes? I am and was never that kind of photographer. It’s time I stopped pretending to be.

Take the car out of a spin on the mountains - for the fun of it? I’ve not done that since the beginning of the pandemic, and I never resumed. The magic of an open windy road is not as alluring as it used to be. I’m okay with admitting that I’m the sort of car enthusiast that enjoy cars as a static museum object. This might be sacrilege for some that consider mileage as a badge of enthusiasm.

Sometimes I watch YouTube car repair videos, and think to myself that’s something I would like to do. If only I have a garage. I should get a garage! Then I can be the DIY car person with chests full of tools and hours to spend tinkering. I could spend a ton of money pursuing that ideal, but I have to remind myself that I’m not even inclined to wash the car these days. What makes me think I’m want to spend a free afternoon wrenching, instead, of say, reading?

To quote the great DJ Khaled: “Never play yourself.”

Laundry day off

As a public employee, I got the day off yesterday due to it being Veteran’s Day. It’s rather nice to have this mid workweek break on a Wednesday, and today feels more like a second Monday than a regular Thursday. Nevertheless, because there’s a still a pandemic raging on - with drastic upticks in cases in many parts of the country - having a day off just doesn’t seem as awesome as it used to. Even though you can go out to places, you really shouldn’t if it isn’t something essential like getting groceries.

What about hanging out with friends? Well, you probably shouldn’t do that either, though the fact most of my friends don’t have Veteran’s Day off sort of solved that conundrum for me.

So what I did yesterday was just hung out in the new-to-me studio apartment, enjoying a quiet day of solitude. It was also a good time to do my first load of laundry at the new (again, to me) premises. The place has got the latest fancy and eco-friendly front-loading washers and dryers, very smart and super quiet in operation. It’s such a stark contrast coming from my parents’ apartment, with its nearly two decades old top-loading units that make a horrendous racket - everybody in the house knows when laundry is being done.

Advancement in technology is lovely indeed.

Another point of difference from my parents’ is that I no longer have to hang-dry my clothes. Even though there is a dryer at the old house, for the sake of saving a few dollars of energy cost, my family have hung-dry our clothes since forever; the dryer is there only for sucking up the lint afterwards. So to go from that to immediately transferring freshly laundry into the dryer and using that machine as intended is rather awkward at first, though the end-result of slightly warm and fresh-smelling clothes is such a luxurious feeling.

Surely some of my stuff that’s never seen a proper mechanical drying session will shrink from the heat; I guess I’ll find out which ones eventually.