01456: Geeky Stress Management

The work week hasn't exactly been kind to me thus far and there have been moments over the past 2 days when I feel like I'm just barely treading water. But thankfully work eventually ends and I find myself back in the comfort of the Sietch, which truly is a place of safety with respect to the madness of the outside world. And that is what home should always feel like - a place that you can retreat to in order to feel safe and to be able to shut out the noise of every day even just for a while.

Times like these, we all have our own unique ways of handling stress. Some people keep a punching bag for moments like this. Others find solace in smoking and other sources of nicotine. Whatever floats your boat, we all deal with stress in our own way. Of course my ways are a wee bit geekier.

One of my primary ways of dealing with stress in recent years involves unboxing Transformers. It may not seem like much - at least not until you actually watch me go through my entire process. This includes complete photo documentation of the box and related box art, examining each figure fresh from the box, going through the Transformation process with the manual in hand and perhaps a few transformations back and forth to help me commit the process to memory. All throughout I take more photos and position the figures here and there and ultimately just enjoy the figure freshly released from its plastic and cardboard prison.

I used to unbox entire sets of Transformers all in one go but then I found myself without unboxing options on really crappy days. And it's not like I only let them out on stressful days. There are times that I just want to have fun and get the figure out in the open to be able to play with it for the first time.

So yeah, I'm really not one of those never-remove-from-box types of people.

Other fun activities that I get into in order to unwind include the "normal" stuff like reading a book (physical or electronic), spending some time on the PS3 or watching a movie here at home. The quirkier stuff that I do to relax include washing dishes, ironing clothes and covering my books in plastic. All are pretty mundane activities on their own but the very fact that they are rather mundane make them even more fun. And for some reason the process of restoring order to the universe in these small ways just feels so, well, uplifting or something. Plus my brain likes going through the steps that I have worked out over the years for each of these activities. I iron shirts in exactly the way way. I wash dishes with a certain sequence in mind. And while my I cover books in a manner that would make some friends cringe, it's still the method that I'm comfortable with and thus I don't see the problem in continuing to process my books in that manner.

So yesterday was a day that merited not just unboxing Transformers but also buying new ones. I'm still a bit stressed today but I don't foresee immediately wanting to release another figure. Of course there's still plenty of time before I sleep to do precisely that so we'll see how things go.

And it's only Wednesday. Bugger.