I wanted to post something meaningful here… I wrote the words that were in my heart three times…
Each time, they vanished when I tried to publish them. Maybe that is a sign.
Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow. Maybe I won’t. Hard to say at this point. Maybe it just means that my words have no meaining. Wouldn’t surprise me. Nothing else does.
Good night Internet.
That’s right. Today is my birthday.
I’ve been telling myself that I really need to get back into the blogging habit and this seemed a good of an excuse any.
Another year older and another year wiser, as the saying goes. And this year I really feel that I am.
People who know me well, know that I get weird about my birthday. To be frank about it, for the last several years I’ve been a big baby about it. My birthday isn’t special enough. No one wants to make a big deal about it. I’d tried telling people how I felt about it… to ensure that it was special enough or whatever it was I thought I wanted. But all I managed to do was to scare those people into be super cautious about how they treated me on my birthday. Which isn’t what I wanted at all.
And to be honest, I started to fall into that same trap this year as the day approached.
But enough already. It’s just a day. Really no different than any other. And yet I’ve got phone calls and facebook messages all day long. I have a reservation for dinner with one of very favorite people for tonight. That’s nothing to complain about.
(Yes Shannon, that means you can do whatever it was you wanted to do. I really am done being a big baby.)
This also seems like a good time for some reflection.
Life is good. There is no other way to look at it. I’m in control of my situation and where I want to be. Is it perfect? Hell no, I don’t think perfect happens, but it’s good. And almost more importantly, it’s moving in the right direction. What more could I ask for?
So my birthday promises to myself are as follows:
Stop being such a crybaby about your birthday. You have it pretty damn good, enjoy the day as it is.
Life is good. And I know it. I need to keep knowing it and keep appreciating it.
Keep blogging. Blogging as I knew it when I first started this thing is gone. Replaced by social networking and other web 2.0 phenomenon. But my reasons for blogging were always personal. That hasn’t changed.
Keep improving. I’ve done a great job of improving myself over the course of the last year. I need to keep that momentum going and keep getting better.
That’s enough introspection for me… I have a day to enjoy!
I tend to say that change is good. Did I say that here, recently? Perhaps.
I say this to balance out the part I leave unsaid. Change is always hard.
I’ve had more change in the last 12 months than I could have imagined. All of it good. All of it hard.
That trend continues this week.
I’ve taken a new job and given notice at my current one. This change will be good, I’m sure of it. And it is sure as hell hard.
I’m trading in the security and comfort of the place I’ve worked for over 5 years. I’m surrendering my status as an expert for that as the new guy.
And for the next few weeks, I’m a lame duck. A short timer.
Unlike the last time I changed jobs, I don’t hate my job. But it is time for me to move on. The response I’ve gotten so far, was less than I expected. I’d hoped that people would be happy for me. Instead they act like I’ve betrayed them or something. That’s a shame, but at the end of the day. irrelevant.
And no doubt, the changes will keep coming.
Usually, when pressed, I tell people that I’m lousy with money.
This isn’t exactly true. I understand a budget and prioritizing expenses and all of that stuff. I just don’t do it.
Like many people in my generation, I have a real hard time with the concept that I should have to wait to get some thing or go with out. Hell, that’s what this whole recession is about, isn’t it? The whole lot of us bought what we wanted, whether or not we had the resources. But sooner or later that fails.
After I moved out, I continued to pay mortgage. It was still my house, my investment and my kids lived there. I knew I couldn’t afford that. Not with even my very affordable rent. We agreed to sell the house. Maybe she drug her feet a little getting it ready to go on the market, but then again I didn’t help. I was working 60 plus hours a week. Months passed. Credit cards hit their limits.
It finally went on the market. But no one came to look at it. A month passed. 6 weeks. We dropped the price. I started selectively paying certain bills late. To help spread the money a little more evenly. We dropped the asking price. No one came to look.
My four day concert festival turned out to be too much. Hotel rooms, dinners and other expenses racked up. My Oil Change ended up including replacing few filters and changing the rear differential fluid. The bill started getting ahead of me. And still no looked at the house. The realtor says it could take over a year to sell it.
She calls, the ex, and says if we can re-fi she can take over the payments and stay there for a while. I say okay.
The mortgage company want all of my outstanding over 30 days debts paid before we settle. I don’t have the money. I look at my account. I look at the unpaid bills. I look at the calendar. I’m out of tricks. I don’t have the money.
I borrow. This re-fi must happen. If it doesn’t… I will not have the money to pay the mortgage again. Not this month. Not next month. Not ever.
This really shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does. I’ve never been able to afford paying the mortgage and my rent, utilities and everything else. I robbed Peter to pay Paul. Then I robbed Matthew and John to pay Peter. For a while, I believed I could keep all of those balls in the air, but in the end those guys ran off. Except for Paul. And he wants his damn money.
This re-fi needs to go through.
That won’t solve my problems. I’m late across the board. And I have too much debt. But take that mortgage off the table. I’ll still have to pay child support (paying the mortgage was kind of like child support plus,) but it will reduce my expenses by hundreds of dollars. And maybe, if I do that budgeting thing. And try not to be so impulsive. I can get this thing back under control.
But this re-fi really needs to go through. I should hear something tomorrow.
I hope it’s good news, cause I’m all out of tricks.
Sometimes I get this feeling that I should blog daily. I suppose this would be easier if my posts didn’t tend to run to 1000 word manifestos.
Also, I fear that I probably just say the same things again and again. Just using different words each time. I really shouldn’t give it that much thought. Blogging, especially this style of talk about my day to day life blogging, is dead. It’s been replaced by easier to manage social networking. Which provides me the freedom to write what ever I want and know that in long run very few people will ever read it.
As I mentioned, I’ve started doing yoga again. I’d tried yoga a few years ago. I had a few DVDs I followed along with. I enjoyed it, but had a hard time finding a quiet time to do them and eventually it slipped away.
My girlfriend is big into yoga, so this inspired me to re-visit it. Better yet, she is in training to be a certified yoga instructor (as if her day job wasn’t enough.) As a result, I’ve been lucky enough to get one on one instruction. This has been great and has provided far more than any DVD ever would. And since finding quiet time is not longer a challenge, I have no excuse for not doing it more.
I’ve been trying to practice 30 minutes to hour each day. In reality, it’s more like three to four times a week, but still that’s not too shabby.
I do feel like I’m beginning to hit a limit, there is only so much I can do on my own in home practice and it’s not fair to ask her to be my full time yoga tutor. I’m going to try to enroll in a weekly class to help me expand to scope of what I’ve been doing. Assuming, of course, that I can figure out this money thing.
The first time I started with yoga, I was very focused on the fitness aspects of it. This time around, my interest was much more motivated by the idea of being centered and those kinds of benefits. And it has helped with that, although as unentered as I am, I should probably practice yoga three times a day. The fitness benefits have been there too. I’ve lost some weight and feel much healthier in general.
As seems to be case with this kind of thing, I find it easier to eat better as I feel better. Which is helping too.
I also hope that if I stick with this, it will help with some of the uncertainty and confusion that I’ve been writing about the past few days.
I’ve had a lot on my mind lately. Enough so that those around me have commented on how distracted I am. They probably believe I am being rude or ignoring them… but that’s not the case. I just have these thoughts swirling in my head and they distract me.
If you’ve read this space for any amount of time, you’ll know I spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of things and how I fit into them. You’ll also know that all this thinking doesn’t seem to do me any good, but it’s just what I do.
In the last year, I’ve developed an overly simplified image of myself. I dove into the Grateful Dead music and lost myself. I obsessed over downloading recordings of their shows. I have almost 200 of them. With the average length of a show being around 3 hours, that’s enough music to listen to nonstop for almost a month. And that doesn’t include the Ratdog, Furthur and other Jam Rock concerts.
I made my own tie dyes. To the point where all I wore when I wasn’t at work, were tie dyed shirts. Every day.
These aren’t bad things. But somewhere along the way I sort of reduced myself to not much more than that.
It was no longer an interest of mine. It just was me.
I’ve found myself reduced to a caricature.
What brought this to sharp focus for me was the All Good Music Festival and Campout. Billed as 4 days of Peace, Love and Music. Just the place for a guy who obsessed on Jam Rock and lives in tie dye. Except it wasn’t.
I showed up there with my girlfriend. We set up our tent in between two rows of cars, just like everyone else. This wasn’t camping, it was a 4 days of tailgating. So I settled in and waited for the music to start. I was sure once that happened, everything would be alright. And it was better. I do love the music. But as the night went on, the crowd closed in. I guess it’s my cautious nature, but being surrounded by literally thousands of people who appeared to be either intoxicated (and I don’t mean a little bit) or just idiots… and in many cases both, made me very uncomfortable. It was exhausting just to be there. The heat didn’t help. And being possibly the single sober person on that entire mountain made me feel even more out of place.
After we had our fill of the music, we headed back to the tent. In my mind, I believed that we go to our little square of personal space and be able to relax, get some sleep and be ready to face the next day. What I found instead was one of my camp chairs my missing. Stolen. This in and of itself is hardly the worst thing I’ve ever had happen to me. But it shattered that notion of even having a small square of personal space. If some drunk, stoned idiot was willing to just snag that chair… what else would they do?
I couldn’t relax. I couldn’t conceive of sleeping. I felt completely and totally vulnerable. I packed up and left. Pissing off my girlfriend in the process. We ended up making the most of the weekend and having a pretty good time else where.
Yet I lost more than just the price of the tickets. And a camp chair.
This image of myself that I had been building and projecting, the carefree deadhead hippie that I fancied myself to be, was shattered. If that was who I am… then why couldn’t I enjoy the festival? The answer is very simple. That’s not who I am.
The bigger question is: who am I?
The same person I’ve always been, of course. But I have work to do. I’ve spent over a year try to force myself into this over-simplified version of myself. And now that the illusion has been shattered, I don’t want to play that part anymore.
For fairly obvious reasons, money has been tight. I don’t own much besides the tie dyes, yet I’ve made it a point to wear different tee shirts when I’m going out. I really need to invest a little money into fleshing out my wardrobe, so that the tie dyes are an element of it, not the definition of it. But that, unfortunately, will have to wait.
I am having an identity crisis of sorts. And its about more than just tie dyes and festivals.
Once that illusion was shattered, it called into question a number of other decisions, I’ve made in my life. Some of this questioning is healthy. I’m taking a hard look at my career and making some decisions that that will be beneficial. But others scare me.
One in particular. But I’m not ready to talk about that one yet. Not here. Not with anyone. (And no, I’m not questioning this divorce thing. It’s one of the few things I’m very certain of.)
I need to think. And re-define. And think some more.
I’m not sure where this takes me… but there is no doubt, I’m going whether I’m ready or not.
April? It’s really been since April? Wow. I’m not very disciplined with this whole blogging thing, but that comes as no shock to the few of you who have stuck with this on and off again blog.
It’s not that I don’t have anything to write about.
And I’d be kidding myself if I said I hadn’t had time.
It intimidates me. The writing. Committing my thoughts to this virtual paper. I don’t really care who sees it. Or what they think. The process of taking a fluid thought and forcing it into a set of rigid written words is difficult. The words become different than the thoughts that inspired them. Or maybe it’s all in my head.
So much has happened since April.
My project that had been consuming me is winding down. I’ve met some one. And I care for her deeply. I’ve begun doing yoga again and really enjoy the benefits to my mind and body. This divorce process has me as strapped for cash as I have been in years. I’m happy, yet after all of that, I still feel like I am at a crossroads.
I don’t know where I’m going or where I want to be.
In the time leading up to and immediately after the separation, I made decisions about who I thought I was. I would be a rugged loner who didn’t need anybody. A free spirit that lived for music. I pictured myself going to Jam Rock Festivals and being one with the masses; enjoying the peace, love and music. I believed I would immerse myself in work. A serious career minded dude during the day. A free spirit at night.
This is not me. This was never me. An idealized version of me at best. More likely, a pipe dream.
I went to the festivals. Peace and Love? I think not. Drugs and Booze. Kids more interested in getting fucked up, than listening to some of the most amazing music around. Free spirits they might be… but that only proves that I am not. Where I had pictured thousands of hippies, kids and other free spirits coming together to enjoy music, I found a bunch of kids, deadbeats and hippies coming to what amounted to freakin’ huge field parties. The only redeeming or interesting thing about them was that the bands were top notch… but it seemed like that was the secondary attraction. I did not feel at home or as if I belonged at all.
And work? I threw myself into work. And all I found was more work. I still take my job seriously and pride myself in the work I do. But I’m more than just a workaholic.
And a loner? For some reason, I’ve always pictured myself as a loner. But it’s not me. I enjoy a little solitude, but truly, I hate to be alone. This apartment of mine is one of the loneliest places I’ve ever been. It’s one thing to be somewhere and have no one else around. But here, no one is going to stop by. No one is going visit. No one else is ever going to come home to here. Excepting the weekends that my poor kids get dragged here, when I’m here I am alone and will be.
I try to invite people over, but let’s face it. It’s small, it’s not that nice and it’s basically out of the way. People don’t want to come here. If they want to see me… they want me to go some where else.
I’ve never lived alone before. Even in my twenties, when I was on my own, I had a roommate or was staying with someone. This is lonely. Most of the time it’s okay… but sometimes it weighs on me.
To complicate this, I think I’ve put pressure on my girlfriend that she doesn’t deserve. I would so much rather just be at her place. Even if nothing is going on. I have her company. And two dogs. And two cats. And her daughter is there. Her place is never lonely. I don’t give her enough space (although I’m working on it.) But I dread being here.
It’s not just the apartment. I lack a lot of the social interaction that I think I need. Maybe I fancy myself a loner, because I believe that is the simpler answer to this dilemma. I see other people, they have community. Whether it is the gym they go to, church, a bunch of guys that play poker. I have my family, I have my girlfriend and not much else. Something is missing. And I don’t know and never have known how to address that.
Even when I’ve gone the gym or been invited to play cards, I feel like the outsider. I don’t feel included. I know that it is self-imposed and not from without, but I still don’t know how to get past it.
Don’t think, not even for a minute, that I am wallowing in self pity. This is the only way I know how to deal with an issue. To break it down, examine it, dissect it further and then try to address the little pieces. At the end of the day, I find it easier to a a handful of smaller problems than one overwhelming issue.
And I’m working on it. I put a lot of effort into projecting positive. I find that by putting on a happy face, people believe it and react to you in a certain way. Often, after a while, I believe it too. The yoga has been very helpful. Not only has it helped to be in much better shape then I was last time I wrote here, but it really does help me center.
Still, I need to understand who I am and where I’m going. Until I do… I’m going to continue to have these feeling of loneliness.
There is so much going on and so much to tell… I’ll try to stick to it this time and keep it up to date for more than a month or two.
Did I tell you what happened to me when I moved into this place? I can’t remember… I guess I could look back and see… or I could just tell you now.
When I came to sign the lease, I parked right on the main street here. There was a fair amount of traffic behind me, so I pulled to the curb faster than I should have. Sure enough, the tire hit the curb just right and punctured the sidewall. I could here the air rushing out of it.
I went up, signed the lease and then came back to the truck to deal with the flat. I pulled out the spare and the jack and got to work. I’ll level with you, I haven’t changed a tire in 20 years. And I don’t understand these funny little jacks that come with cars these days. I’m sure I was doing something wrong, although I’m not sure what. Just about the time I had the tire almost off the ground, the mini crow bar thing broke off in the jack.
So there I was, in front of my new home, with a flat and my truck lifted up on this jack and I can’t do a thing.
I’ll admit that I panicked. I mean what the hell am I supposed to do now. And I’m not superstitions, but really… talk about omens.
I was grabbing my phone, trying to figure out who I could call and what I would ask them to do… if I got a hold of anyone, when I looked across the street. SoAndSo’s Tire and Battery. It was a little late, but there were people inside, so I walked across the street. They told me they were closed and I told them what happened. He sent one of his guys across the street with a floor jack. He changed my tire for the spare. No charge. I had him order me a tire and I was back in business the next day.
Fast forward to today.
I was at a meeting. When I left and got back into my truck and turned the ignition, I heard that horrible clicking noise that told me that m battery was dead. I checked everything I could see, and it didn’t seem like I left anything on. I found some one to help me jump start it and I was on my way.
Since I was close to home, I went home for lunch. After I pulled in and turned off the engine, became worried that the same thing would happen to me again. I tried to start it back up. Click Click Click.
I got out of my truck and walked across the street to the Tire and Battery place. He sent one of his guys across the street with a jump start kit. He jumped the truck, we tested the battery. It was dead, wouldn’t hold a charge. He replaced it while I ate my lunch and I was good to go again.
I guess you could look at these things any number of ways. I choose to consider myself lucky.
It would be easy to attribute it to one thing or another, but I suspect the reality is more complex than that.
January and February are hard on me every year. The long nights. The overcast days. It fills me with despair. A cloud that hangs over me till spring. I’ve often wondered how early man had the will to struggle through those cold dark months. How did they know that the sun would come back, that the plants would return to life?
This year was worse than most on many counts. Three massive blizzards made this one of the most severe winters in my part of the world in decades. Add to that, that I was recently moved into this apartment, unsure of myself, unsure of the future and so alone. Being snowbound, alone, in this little place really did feel like the end of the world. Just to pile on, I started a project that was so big and so ambitious that the sheer scope of it put incredible stress on me. The long hours and stress that comes with this kind of work and interacting with so many people was utterly exhausting.
But, as it does every year, winter ends and gives way to spring. The days get longer, the nights get warmer, the birds return and the plants spring back to life. And the despair fades away to hope.
With that, I emerged from this apartment confident and hopeful.
Maybe that’s all it takes. Confidence. Hope. The belief that I am in control of my self and my future.
Things started improving. My project was progressing successfully. More than I had dared to hope. I even started getting ‘atta boy’s’ at the office and those are elusive as a gray fox. The hours have eased up. The stress is dissipating.
For all of my fears that I can’t deal with people or make friends… I’ve done pretty well. I suddenly have a crazy busy spring with much of my free time spoken for. I’ve grown acquaintances in to friends. I’m not sure how it happened, how I became so a closed up person, but when I opened up people responded. (I’m sure that this is obvious to all of you, but to me this has been an epiphany!) I’ve made new friends. And one of them is so special to me, I don’t even know where to begin.
The funny thing is life didn’t get better. Life is life. My project has been extended, preventing me from taking any real vacation time this summer. I have this house that needs to get sold before I bankrupt myself. I still have many of the same problems I had in February. And I still have no idea what the future will bring, I may be less certain now then I was then.
But I’m better. Like the rest of the world, spring has come and I’ve come back to life. And it feels good.
I guess if you didn’t know me… or at least didn’t know me well… these last several posts would make me look like a whiny little bitch.
But, I hope, those who know me well will understand what’s going on here.
I’ve found over the years, that sometimes committing a thought to paper helps to cement it. Committing that same thought to the blog takes it a step further. It puts that thought out there for all of you. And knowing that the thought will be reviewed, forces me to flesh the the idea out, to defend it and explain it. It makes me work to express the idea in such a way that a stranger might understand.
In doing so, I find that I gain understanding in the process.
The past months have been confusing. Filled with highs and lows, like life often is. Filled with uncertainty. I’ve written about some that. To help me understand what it is that I think and feel. And it’s been helpful.
Having said that, I’ll write about some of the rest of it, beyond the self doubt and angst.
A funny thing happened to me last week. I met a girl. She was pretty, smart and funny. She also seemed to have a bit of a mean streak. Obviously, I was interested.
I’m not sure what the time frame on me being interested in dating is supposed to be, but then again, I don’t really care. The thing is, I have no idea what I’m doing. I was useless at this nature of thing a decade ago when I last tried. And all that has happened since then is that I’ve become more closed, more cautious and less social. This is a problem.
But this girl, she seemed special. So found a reason to talk to her. That wasn’t hard, I had reason to talk to her, outside of this interest of mine. And that went well. It seemed like we hit it off. And everything good I felt from that first impression was reinforced. The problem was that my reason to talk her was passing, and I wouldn’t likely have another excuse.
So I gave her my number. Told her if she had any questions about what we’d been working on, she could call me… or she could just invite me out for coffee or something.
Not bad… huh?
I can tell you that I have never before done anything as cool or as slick as that. (And maybe this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to you… but this is huge for me.)
And she did text me. We chatted. I suggested something a lot like a date. She said yes, tentatively. (Don’t sweat it, there are legit reasons why it is tentative.)
I think this is a good thing.
But in some ways it doesn’t really matter what comes next. (Although I have some distinct hopes.) A week ago, I didn’t even know I had this in me. Now I’m walking around with this foolish grin on my face. That is a very good thing.
Things aren’t perfect. They never will be. And I still have a mountain of shit to deal with. But right now, I feel better about myself than I have in a very long time.
