2025 IndyCar Year in Review
After completing my NASCAR year in review last week, I provide to you my IndyCar year in review this week. This one also took a long time because I tend to write more about NASCAR and IndyCar drivers than any others, not because I think they are more intrinsincally important than drivers in other series but simply because those are the series I am most informed about. I don’t have time to watch or listen to every series and I admit most of the time I just listen to the radio broadcasts for NASCAR and IndyCar races and that’s it when trying to balance my book work, my three jobs, and visiting my mom. The amount I write about a driver has nothing to do with their impotance or where I am ranking them, but I’ll probably just have less to say about the drivers in other series since I’m only looking at data I’ve calculated and perhaps relevant video clips while not actually watching or listening live, so those should probably go faster.
I finally got an estimate for the roof repair. It’s $25,400 and I can’t imagine any chance I’ll be possibly able to come up with that. I’m going to try for an emergency loan for that, but I can’t imagine myself actually getting it because I’m in default to either two or three credit cards after my last steady job in 2022 got automated. I have a payment arrangement with one of my other creditors, but I’m sure my score is far too low to get that much money from my bank. Helping my case, I did take over my mom’s mortgage payments after she was admitted to the nursing home. The payments were automatically being deducted from her bank account and now that Medicaid is taking all but $50 out of her bank account, I had to pick that up but since I haven’t missed a mortgage payment yet, that might increase my chances that the bank will loan me more money for the roof repair. At this point, I’m just wondering if I should sell the house as is even though Medicaid will instantly drain all of that money. Should I even try to raise that much money to repair the house if I’m just going to lose it after Mom dies due to the Medicaid Estate Recovery Program anyway?
Mom has been very frustrated about how rude her new roommate has been. Her roommate doesn’t even like me visiting her or reading to her. One day she told me, “You are dismissed” because she wanted me to shut up. Last Friday, when I couldn’t find Mom and was looking for her in her room, she told me to leave but I didn’t. And there were several times she said I was reading to her too loudly. She also got angry when I sat on Mom’s bed to touch her, and like I said even the housekeeper called my mom’s roommate “evil”. I also find it frustrating that the television is on the other side of the room so my mom has no control over it being on or off and the other roommate always controls it when I think what she really wants is peace and quiet. So I thought I’d ask the nurse if either Mom or her roommate could be moved. Honestly, what I would’ve preferred was just for the roommate to be moved tbh. The head nurse told me she had no available rooms for women and she’d already moved another patient to another room for a physical altercation, and she commented that my mom was ruder to her roommate than vice versa, which honestly wouldn’t surprise me. The head nurse also told me apparently that a lot of people are trying to force her to be sent to the dementia ward and the head nurse is fighting this because she wants her to be able to come home so that might be the only hope. I decided to back down at that point.
Looking for other potential sources of income, I decided to start uploading YouTube videos again to see if I can at least get my watch hours back over 4,000 a year to get back in the YouTube Partner Program and maybe see if I can get some subscriptions or something. I mentioned this blog in my last two YouTube livestreams last Sunday and Friday. I had already uploaded my appearance at the 1999 Syracuse Regional Spelling Bee several years ago, but I’ve got like six or seven more old home videos from the ‘90s and early 2000s so I thought I’d share them all. Last Sunday, my livestream started with a video that was recorded at Blockbuster Video to help find lost children. On Friday, I uploaded a video from 2002 when I appeared on the morning show of ABC’s Syracuse affiliate to discuss a website I invented to find lost pets in the Syracuse area. I also talked about my life, my work, this blog, politics, culture, and myriad other things. I didn’t get much of a response on Sunday but the chat on Friday was much livelier and a lot of typing fans convinced me to come back and do a bunch of typing races. I also did the 8values political affiliation live on stream for some reason, and I guess I’m getting back into it. Everybody wants me to type again and I really don’t because it’s a distraction both from the things I both need to do and want to do but if I either got sufficient money or enough attention to get my watch hours back up after doing several live streams, I might. Should I make any YouTube content about racing? I’ve talked about it some, but I’ve never made dedicated racing videos and there could be an audience for that. I just don’t think most of my audience that seems to care exclusively about competitive typing games would go for that, but maybe there might be some interest from you guys.
One of the other things that got me back into this I suppose is I just listened to a YouTube video (I didn’t really watch because I was simultaneously continuing to enter data on my master driver list) about the downfall of BreadTube and how a lot of those popular left-wing content creators had either stopped making videos, begged people for money, or were pathetic in various other ways and I saw too much of myself in that. Even though I had the right education for a solid professional job, I somehow ended up becoming mostly a starving artist instead and it still really baffles me how that happened, but I don’t know; listening to that guy marginally motivated me to stop wallowing in my self-pity and create content. I need to spend my free time making more content and consuming less. I need to just stop reading random crap that won’t make my life better and spend whatever free time I have either making things or socializing people rather than reading Reddit comments of people will I never meet, which is probably one of my biggest vices. (Although certainly that’s nothing compared to Vaush’s vices for instance…)
With trying to get this done as well as all my jobs as well as the roof repair and trying to bring my mom home, it’s probably insane for me to think of real world socialization outside the nursing home besides that, but after I went to mass yesterday afternoon, I stopped at a tabletop gaming store that is also walking distance from my house in North Syracuse and looked around. I never played any of those games like Dungeons & Dragons or Magic: the Gathering or anything like that (in my adulthood, I very rarely plaed anything other than Scrabble, typing games, or sports fantasy games) but I’m thinking maybe I should start. I know it is far better to socialize in the real world than online in general, but I seem insufficiently neurotypical to hang out in any of the cool hangouts. I want some kind of real life autism support group for adults when that doesn’t seem to exist, so learning some kind of tabletop gaming could at least give me some nerdz to hang with when it seems like I’m far too autistic to hang with anyone who goes to anything else. Or I could go to bar trivia again, but that wasn’t really social. Or I could go to Scrabble touranments again, but I alienated the guy who ran all the Scrabble tournaments around here a decade ago with a nasty Facebook post I made back then and he only ever ran those local Syracuse tournaments for his son who now lives in Boston, so that would probably be too expensive for me to get involved with again. (And honestly, I think after my mom dies, I want to move to either Indianapolis or Charlotte to see if I can get a racing job or make some connections, which is not to say I wouldn’t take a normie job in another field, but at least if I was in an area surrounding one of my “autistic special interests”, I might find it easier to make connections or friends or even a book deal to formally publish this.) But I’ve got to replace stuff like Reddit doomscrolling with something more pro-social and I know it. (Hopefully, I’ll talk some sense into myself and replace it mostly with paid work.) As much as my mom and I yelled at each other about politics and other things over the past couple years, I vastly underestimated how lonely I’d be without her.
