Greetings from Belgium. Doing a four-day themepark trip so I’m living my best life. If all goes to plan I’ll have over 50 new rollercoasters under my belt this year alone, which is more than my entire life up to this year combined. My white whale is to one day go to Sandusky, Ohio to ride Top Thrill Dragster (now slightly altered to TT2) because there’s a ten year old kid inside of me who needs to fulfill his dream of one day riding what he saw on the Discovery Channel.

I’m also getting more into meditation. I now regularly do 45 minutes when I wake and at dusk and it feels right to do so, in a way that logic can’t quite explain. I’m not using a meditation app like I did when I meditated years ago, but I am learning about yogic and Buddhist traditions and trying them out with a nonzero amount of conviction. For example, meditating with incense is better and I can’t explain to you why. (It’s worse for the poorly ventilated attic I meditate in because the smell lingers in forever. So I’m not gonna do that on the reg.) The funny thing is that my mom has been into spiritual and New Age stuff for so long that I have grown a natural dislike for anything remotely related to chakras. But fuck, keeping up my practice and slowly increasing detachment is yielding me discipline, energy and a level of mental calmness and clarity that I wanna keep walking down this path, even if just to see where it leads to.

Earlier this week I went to a small get together for a newly formed TTRPG club/Discord in my city. It was great, almost everyone was 30 something (which leads me to hypothesize the D&D 5e wave is squarely a millennial thing) and it was fun meeting new people. I’ve never done so before but I signed up to help figure out how to to build this small and fragile start into a community of some sort. This piece has been helpful already: