Labor Dabor...

I'm taking my cues from the 'blogs I follow and taking the day off.  I have to work at the depot, though, so it's not like I'm just hanging around doing nothing.

See you tomorrow...

I Have An Ingrown Hair In My Nose

I know it's gross and kind of an old-person thing to say, but it's true and it hurts like a <insert appropriate swear word/phrase here>.  It feels like I have a pulsating land mine shoved up my nostril and it makes me want to claw my nose off of my face and go back to bed.  At the very least, it makes me not want to 'blog.

Normally I wouldn't talk about this kind of thing, but it hurts a lot and I don't have the wherewithal to ignore it.  If the trend for my 'blog is to write about what's going on in my life, that's about all I'm able to focus on right now, so we'll go with that, I suppose.  Besides, I have kind of an embarrassing body, anyway, and I don't think that ingrown nasal hair does much to lower the property value for everything else.  It would be similar to complaining about the poorly manicured flowerbeds on a condemned building.

When did I get so old?  Everybody I know who's at least five years older than me will look at that statement and laugh, but I'm serious... I don't remember having to deal with this kinda crap when I was 17.  It seems like every day, something else happens to remind me that I have a birthday coming up in a few weeks and the numbers aren't going backward.  I woke up a week or so ago and thought my shoulder had been torn out of its socket in my sleep.  I mean, I know I was laying on it kinda funny, but there's a difference between being a little stiff for an hour or so when you first wake up and being in pain three days later from a high-speed boating accident that never happened.

It's weird, man... this whole business of "aging."  I remember being a kid and feeling like 8 meant something, like everybody else should be happy that I'm 8, because 8 years-and-one-day ago, I didn't exist.  I guess maybe that's why little kids like birthdays so much: it's a celebration of a recent phenomenon; of moving from non-being into being.  But then it stops being such a remarkable thing.  "Getting" your life becomes less of a miracle than what you happen to be doing with it.  You go through a graduation ceremony or two and suddenly, nobody really cares what you learned over the last year and everybody wants to know what you did.

And I guess I'd be okay with that if I didn't feel like my body was fighting back so hard.  I mean, I've had some big accomplishments in the last year that I'm really proud of.  Quitting drinking and finishing my degree are huge.  If I did nothing else with 27 (and I'm honestly struggling to figure out whether or not I did) those would still set the bar really high for 28.  But to have to do all this and start figuring out whether Aleve or Ibuprofen is better for all my aches and pains kinda feels like I'm being rewarded for my troubles with a swift kick in the teeth.  Or shoulder, as it were.

I'm gonna stop before I start complaining about kids these days and their hippity-hoppity raps.  I'm really not mad about getting older or anything, I think I'm just starting to understand my dad better and see why he's never that excited about his birthday.  Then again, he also has to deal with the Birchristhmasday Eve contingency, where one gift is obviously inferior to the other, assuming he gets two presents for it at all.  Personally, I would have been more demanding from the outset if I were him and made my parents put up a Mikemas Tree, too, but whatever.  I was lucky enough to be born in a month with nothing more than a bank holiday in it, so my celebration tends to be a bit more pure and give everyone a chance to focus on what's important.

I'll probably be posting a list soon.  If you don't know what to do with it when you see it, then I don't know if I can help you.

Also, if you haven't subscribed to my 'blog yet, please do.  It doesn't take long and if you already have a Gmail account, then that takes care of like, 90% of the registration process.  Plus, it's nice to know who I'm talking to.

See you Monday.

We Who Are Your Closest Friends

I ran across a poem yesterday that I'd forgotten about that I thought I'd share with you.  It's by a guy named Phillip Lopate and I found it in a book called Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.  I've read the book a number of times, and I started reading it again because I think it'll help me have a more constructive attitude toward what I spend my time on here doing.  

I love Anne Lamott's stuff because it reminds me that faith and life and writing are all one big, messy enterprise that don't have really clear divisions between them.  You tend to write about what you live and what you live is rooted in what you believe, and so on.  I was reminded of a similar idea yesterday in a conversation with a friend: that what I believe and what I do are essentially the same thing; that choosing to act as though something is true is, by definition, faith itself.  It's a difficult idea for me to grasp because I keep orienting my faith around an emotional experience, that is, I believe something to be true only if I feel it to be true.  

And this is a lie.

Stepping out in faith is, in a certain sense, anything but an emotional experience.  It often requires acting against one's own feelings and trusting something beyond the individual level.  I struggle very deeply with this and I worry that my life may suffer many unforeseen and undesirable consequences as a result of it.  I struggle with this because I don't trust people.  I don't trust anything.  I don't even trust myself.  I assume from the outset that things are always going to fall apart so that I'm never disappointed and I don't end up feeling hurt or betrayed.  I don't act on promises made or rely on other people to hold up their end of the bargain.  I basically just ask myself if I'm willing to accept the risk of them not following through and if I'm able to still move forward and be okay if they don't.

But there are two problems and, I suppose, a third that come out of this.  The first is that the decision to start thinking this way is rooted in painful experiences with specific people in my past, and those experiences don't go away or correct themselves by writing-off everybody else in my life and lowering my expectations for them.  The second is that, if I'm honest, I really don't want to write everybody off.  I want to be able to trust people in my life and have healthy relationships and positive experiences with them.  Which is kinda where the third part comes in: if my goal from the outset was to stop the pain and spare myself any future injury, then I've done nothing but change the source of it.  Instead of being stabbed in the heart, I'm now diseased and suffocating.  

I don't have "real" relationships because I don't want to be hurt.  I don't want to know that I've lost esteem in your eyes and I don't want you to get weirded out or be disgusted with me and walk away.  I can't think of a single person in my life right now from whom I haven't withheld some level of the truth. And yet, I still want people to love me and validate me and convince me that I'm a good person who's worth something.  It would be bad enough if the true crime were that I expected to get all this without giving anything up or taking on any risk, but the reality is that I'm expecting other people to do something that they were never designed to do.  You are not here to prop me up any more than I am for you.  We were not meant to be that for each other.  Our individual worths are, indeed, derivative, but not from each other.

Which is where the poem comes in.  When you read it, I think you'll understand why.  Regardless, here it is.  

Enjoy.

We who are

your closest friends

feel the time

has come to tell you

that every Thursday

we have been meeting,

as a group,

to devise way

to keep you

in perpetual uncertainty

frustration

discontent and

torture

by neither loving you

as much as you want

nor cutting you adrift.

Your analyst is

in on it,

plus your boyfriend

and your ex-husband;

and we have pledged

to disappoint you

as long as you need us.

In announcing our

association

we realize we have

placed in your hands

a possible antidote

against uncertainty

indeed against ourselves.

But since our Thursday nights

have brought us

to a community

of purpose

rare in itself

with you as

the natural center,

we feel hopeful you

will continue to make

unreasonable

demands for affection

if not as a consequence

of your disastrous personality

then for the good of the collective.

Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan

Having a 'blog is a lot of work.  Well, technically, that's not true.  Having a 'blog is no big deal.  Having a meaningful 'blog is a lot of work. 

Today marks 20 'blogs, which amounts to almost three weeks' worth of work, and I'm still scratching my head and wondering why I'm doing this, who's reading it, where do I go from here, why can't I just get a welding job or something and be happy... y'know, the usual.  Mostly, I just feel obnoxious and stupid.  Why would anybody want to set aside time from their day to read an uninteresting, unfunny, hours-long ramble from some nobody who works at Home Depot?  Who cares what I think about what Lance Armstrong had for breakfast or whatever it is I'm constantly blathering about?  It's such an audacious, yet desperate feeling: if what I were writing about were really important, you'd already be thinking about it and wouldn't need me to tell you it was important.  But I do think it's important and I want you to see it, too.  Water, water, everywhere...

I've started reading books about writing again, and it's helped.  Writing is a compulsory behavior for the people who do it.  It's like when people who are in really good shape talk about the need they feel to work out; something about feeding a desire to engage a process they're already obviously good at.  I believe writing to be this way; that it shapes a mind and perfects something within it to desire further shaping and perfection.  Reading other people's thoughts and ideas about that process is a soothing and encouraging affair, like Anne Lamott and Ray Bradbury are sitting beside me at my desk and rubbing my back, telling me that it's okay to be a tornado of shitty, boring words, flinging terrible all over the place, because the important thing is to just keep going and be alert for when something good and usable does come out.

I've also taken some time to look at a few other 'blogs and webcomics that I keep up with.  I've been thinking less in terms of a consumer of ideas and more like a creator of them and noticing what it is about these different things that work and what it is about them that doesn't.  In looking through their archives, I can see where they started and how they've progressed and, frankly, most of them were terrible when they first got going.  I mean, they had some reasonable successes here and there, but compared to where they are today, most of their early work was lightyears-lost to "sucks."

I don't really know what all this means in terms of what I should be doing right now.  On one hand, all these guys got their start as part-time, non-monetary recreationalists who were just doing something they enjoyed in their free time.  As such, they did whatever they could whenever they could do it and they didn't over-exert themselves in trying to do something everyday.  They did it because they loved it and it was an outlet for ideas that they had.  Yet, they also seem to invest a lot more energy into their ideas than I do because their ideas are more complex than mine and it requires more of them than just an hour or two here and there.  There's no real "art" involved in what I do, it's just kind of an outlet for thoughts and feelings.  I know I've talked about giving my 'blog direction, but it's still just kind of stream-of-consciousness with no real sense of purpose.  I'm not entirely sure how to change that.

One thing I'm going to try, though, is editing some of my earlier posts.  There are twenty of them now, so it seems like I have enough to start whittling down and, after reading through them all a few nights ago, they could definitely use the work.  I'm going to keep updating daily and stay diligent, but I'm going to try to give myself some limits as far as keeping my time-spent to only an hour and probably just skipping some posts altogether to share some stuff from other writers and poets that I'm reading and learning from.  I may go to a schedule where I 'blog/ride my bike every other day.  I dunno.  I'll try to keep it to a minimum for now, though.  I'd hate to lose readership.  As part of the editing cycle, I'm going to mess around with font sizes and arrangement of stuff, so feedback would be appreciated as to whether or not you like the changes made. 

Also, I know I keep making jokes about only having two or three people that read this with any kind of regularity, but there's a "Stats" button that tells me how many page views I get each day, so I know there are at least five or six of you.  As pathetic as it feels to ask, I'd really appreciate it if, as someone who regularly reads this, you'd consider registering with Google/Blogger and following my 'blog as a subscriber.  For one thing, it keeps me from being discouraged by the thought that only seven people subscribe out of pity (because thirty or a hundred people's pity is more acceptable) and, for another, it helps me know who's reading and what kind of audience I'm dealing with.  It's hard to feel like you're developing a voice when nobody's really listening.

Gotta get going.  Got other things to do.  See you guys tomorrow...

Too Tired to 'Blog...

Yeah... I'm still posting something because I know I should, but I'm too tired and have too much stuff to do to spend the next hour or two messing with this.  I'll have something up tomorrow.

- P -

I Gotta Quit WoW... Again

I have a lot of things: a dirty apartment, a great head of hair, low self-esteem, an almost-empty can of mineral spirits that I have no idea how to properly dispose of... but of all the things I have, one I've had the longest is an addictive personality.  I've mentioned my issues with alcohol in a few other places, but it's not just that.  I suck at taking anything in moderation.  As a child, my parents would have to pry my white-knuckled-fingers from the television set to get me out of the house and taking my Nintendo away was pretty much the go-to form of punishment throughout my adolescence.  By the time I hit my early twenties, I went from zero to pothead once I got over all my religious posturing and stopped being such a judgmental freak.  I mean, really... it's like magic potpourri that makes your brain shut off.  Who wouldn't want that?

Regardless, my point is this: I don't do anything small.  Go big or go home, man: if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right and if I can't either go crazy and freak out/impress somebody or experience some radical change in my mood and/or outlook on life, it's not worth doing.  Given these criteria, the number of things on the "worth doing" list is rather small and one can easily see why drugs and alcohol are a perfect fit.  Or maybe you can't, I don't know.  What I do know is that my brain didn't have an accurate and definitive model for words like "happiness" or "freedom" until the first time I got drunk, and it practically bounded out of the silly closet the first time I got high.  These experiences were intense and liberating in ways I didn't even know existed and on levels I didn't think it was possible to achieve.

But what does it mean to be "drunk?"  How do you define "getting high?"  Does it require a certain substance?  Are there safe ways to do these things?  I understand that there are chemical reactions that take place when alcohol gets into your bloodstream and that there are legal definitions of "driving under the influence," but what does that mean to the individual?  I can tell you from experience that, for an alcoholic, calling a .08% BAC "drunk" is like giving a hungry man a stick of gum and calling it "dinner."

One time after masturbating, I realized that I felt high.  I laid on my bed and felt the room spin as my pulse beat in my eardrums, which is almost exactly the same thing I used to do when I smoked weed all the time.  I mean, there usually would have been some Frank Zappa song going in the background and I didn't have to Febreze my whole apartment to get the smell out, but other than that, it was just like being high.  But who's to say I wasn't?  My heart rate was up, my vision was blurry, my body relaxed... 

I think that to define "drunk" as equivalent to passing out naked in somebody's lawn is to embrace a faulty description, and "being high" isn't necessarily related to just marijuana.  It's not some on/off switch with only two positions where you can say "Okay, I wasn't drunk before, but now I am" or "Well, I was high for a little bit, but now I'm not."  It's a continuum.  It took me a long time to understand this because the spectrum used to talk clinically about drunkenness typically follows a pattern of heart-rates and pupil dilation; things I don't really concern myself with until we get to the parts about "unconsciousness" and "death."  I think if someone had shown me a sliding scale that went from "Making eyes at that one girl you went to high school with who isn't very attractive" to "Puking off the balcony at some stranger's apartment you met in a bar," I probably would have related to it better.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to make light of addiction or say that it's just in your head and I'm certainly not trying to say that all substances are equal.  I know that there's a physiological component to all addictions: I completely understand that crystal meth is not a substance to be trifled with and there's no such thing as a recreational heroin-user.  But I think it says a lot about the nature of addiction that some people can have two beers and stop with no problem and I can't, even if I were to have two beers and stop.  If I even had one beer, it would open up a whole universe of addictive thoughts and behaviors that I've been, so far, granted victory over.  I can remember a time in my life when I learned that clinical alcoholism is defined as anything over and above two drinks a day, so I spent months orienting my entire life around my two drinks a day.  What would I drink?  Where would I go to drink them?  Would I want to be with friends or alone?  Should I drink them both together or space them out?  Would I drink them fast to make the buzz consistent or space them out so I could savor the taste?  Should I have two of my favorite drinks or two different ones for variety?  And I lived by that, man...  Two drinks.  Every day.  For months on end.  So that I could keep up the lie and keep saying that I didn't have a problem.  And I don't just think it's me.  I think a lot of people are bumbling their way through life with no self-awareness because they have a really skewed definition of what it means to be addicted to something.

In a recent post, I mentioned this idea of "Whatever I spend the next five minutes doing is going to be what I end up doing for the rest of the day," and I think it's true.  But I think the truth of what it looks like is different than what you think I'm saying, because you think I'm saying that if I spend the next five minutes looking at porn, I'm going to do nothing but look at porn for the next eight-to-ten hours straight.  Believe me, it's not to say that I haven't done it before or that I think I'm incapable of doing it ever again, but reality, as it often does, lies deeper than that.  The truth is that if I spend the next five minutes looking at porn, I'm choosing not to engage my life on a meaningful level because I'm afraid of the pain and hardship that comes from confronting areas of brokenness and dealing with sin.  The truth is that I'm embarrassed to say that I started playing computer games at 8 o'clock this morning instead of looking for a job. 

You're probably going to think I'm crazy, but sometimes I think there's a gigantic Ferris wheel in my brain.  I go around and around in circles on this Ferris wheel, and whenever I get to the bottom, the question of "What am I going to do for the next five minutes?" opens the door and asks me if I want off.  Most of the time, the fear of what will happen if I step off and the shame of admitting that I ever bought a ticket for this stupid ride in the first place will take over, and I'll say "No, thank you."  I'll take my chances and go back around again to see if I get any further this time.  But every so often, I get dizzy enough and I stumble off the ride.  I get sick of all the sweet-sounding voices telling me how much fun it's going to be, only to turn into the nagging screams that constantly remind me that I'm only going in circles.  Just when I'm at the tallest point and farthest from the exit, a voice whispers over the heights and the howls that tells me I'm not made for this... this is stupid... I don't have to keep doing this... but then I get to the bottom again and I see everybody on the outside and I worry what they're going to say to me whenever I step out.  I cling to my fears like a nasty old blanket and I go for another spin. 

To date, I have spent at least a combined total of four weeks, six days, one hour, sixteen minutes and fourteen seconds playing World of Warcraft.  I know that most of you aren't going to understand half of this, but I say "at least" because I've created and deleted numerous characters over the years that I have no way of knowing how much time I invested in.  If we assume that I've deleted as many characters as I've kept and that I played them at least as much as I've played the others, that means I've probably spent more like nine weeks, five days, two hours, thirty-two minutes and twenty-eight seconds online.  If you sat down to play a computer game for that long, you would have to start now and not eat, sleep, or get up from your computer until November, 7th at 5:45 in the evening.  And God only knows how much money I've spent on it over the years.  If I had a running tabulation of the time lost to pornography and masturbation in my life, I'd probably cry.

There are a couple of things in the Bible that address these ideas directly, yet I always seem to get distracted and forget them.  God seems to be neither surprised by my failures nor impressed with my excuses.  But the "Go big or go home" thing kinda works in my favor here, because it takes something drastic to get rid of stuff like this.  I understand the idea of unmerited favor, and I know that you don't earn your salvation, but God has some very specific thoughts regarding what's expected of us when we find ourselves trapped by sin.

I'm probably outing myself with a lot of this as sicker/dorkier/way more broken than you realized, but whatever... it's the truth and if you look down on me for it, so be it.  You'll probably have noticed an "Adult Content" warning when you opened this post up.  Don't worry, I'm not going to start dropping f-bombs or posting pictures of naked ladies or anything like that.  I am, however, (in case you haven't already noticed) going to talk about things you probably shouldn't read at work or around little kids; things that will give you a different impression of me than the one you might already have. 

I've also enabled comments again because I think feedback is a good thing, even if I don't like it.  I deleted everything from before for reasons I've already mentioned, but I still feel the same way: if you want to respond to ideas in my 'blog, that's great and I'd love to hear your thoughts, but if you're just going to tell me to cheer up or quit bitching or whatever, you can save it.  I did what I should've done from the outset, anyway, and set-up an approval system for all the comments, so  if I don't think your comment really takes anything I've said into consideration, I won't post it.

But I will get it.  So feel free to send it.  It means a lot to me that all you guys care enough about what I think to keep up with this... all both of you.

See you tomorrow...

You Get What You Pay For...

I don't really feel like 'blogging today.  I don't really have much to 'blog about.  But I said I was gonna, so I guess I need to.

I've been reading a Chuck Klosterman book lately.  I avoided him for a long time because I saw a joke on The Onion in relation to trendy-hipsterism (hippy-trendsterism?) that referenced his writing and I didn't want to invite the comparison.  If there's one thing I want to avoid, it's any sort of fashion statement that gives off an intrinsic "stuck-up a-hole" vibe.  I can take care of that on my own, thank you very much.

In hindsight, though, I'm kinda disappointed I didn't pick his stuff up earlier.  He's a great writer, though I can see where the hipsterism comes through.  He makes really specific references to very detailed aspects of pop culture in order to make seemingly non-existent comparisons between different ideas, and he never stops to fill you in if you aren't up-to-speed with him.  If you're unfamiliar with (or just don't care about) whatever it is he's making reference to, it can seem like he's just showing off how much trivia he knows--a very hipster thing to do.  I had to skip an entire chapter because he was talking about some basketball player I had never heard of and making reference to various basketball strategies.  By the time I was pulling up Wikipedia on my iPhone, I realized that I was working too hard to follow something I don't care about.  Like, at all.

For a writer (or, at least, for someone trying to be a writer), finding a new book/author that you like is similar to making a new friend: it's fun and exciting, but you feel like you're cheating on all your old friends and you're constantly making comparisons the new one.  At first, it's pretty tame.  You start saying things like "Dude, Brennan is going to FREAK when he finds out I've been hanging out with Chuck," or "Man, Don would never say something like that."  But then it gets all weird.  You start wondering what they would think about certain things and trying to mold yourself to fit in with whatever you think they would approve of: "Chuck would never go for that," or "I'm not sure Chuck would be enthusiastic about these shoes."  Everything starts to find itself under the microscope to be examined; to find out whether or not it would be good enough for <fill in the blank with whoever it is this week>.  Eventually, I have to put the book away on a high shelf and promise not to dig it out again, lest I shame myself into burning everything I've ever written and swear never to touch a pen to paper again as long as I live.  I'm not sure why it happens.  In fact, I'm not even sure if it happens to anyone but me.

I think there's an insecurity inherent to every writer that sort of crumbles a little bit in the face of talent.  We all want to be validated as something more than what we feel we are, so we tend to get a little star-struck whenever we run into someone we think has got "it" more than we do.  Bear in mind, I'm certainly not trying to even the playing-field between me and Chuck Klosterman: if authors were comedy films, Chuck Klosterman would be like The Big Lebowski or The Royal Tennenbaums; I'm somewhere between Slam Dunk Ernest and Ernest Goes to Africa.  But I do think there's a part in all of us that's terrified of finding out that our ideas really are as stupid as the voices in our heads said they were.  I doubt that Chuck Klosterman is reading my 'blog and biting his fingernails over whether or not I like his book, but I'm sure that there's someone out there that makes him want to hang up his hat whenever he reads their stuff.

But there's a part of me, too, that thinks Chuck Klosterman does what he does because he feels like he has to; like he'll never get a good night's sleep unless he puts his thoughts down on paper.  I think that maybe it's this way for all writers; I think maybe we're all a little bit crazy.  No, that's too cliché.  I'm not saying that I think Chuck Klosterman is crazy.  But I do think he'd still be writing even if his stuff never got published.  I think there's something inside him that compels him to write because, honestly, what the heck else would he do with it?

I'm really tired and I feel like I'm not making sense.  Maybe I am, but there's no sense of purpose to it.  I don't really have a point with it, and there's no Bible verse for me to wedge in there and tie it all together.  I guess the bottom line is that Chuck Klosterman is a really good writer and if you've never picked up his stuff, you should.  He's what we all wish this was.

Goodnight, everybody.  Hopefully some rest will make tomorrow's better.

Day Off With Grandma

Saturday 'blogs are tough.  For one thing, I really don't want to do them.  I mean, it's Saturday, for crying out loud... who really wants to do anything on a Saturday?  For another, I work 'til midnight most Fridays, so by the time I get home and unwind enough to go to sleep it's usually 1 or 2 in the morning, which makes it tough to get up and get an early start on my day.  For the last couple of weeks, I've 'blogged right up until I had to leave for work, so hopefully I can get this in with plenty of time to still do a couple of other things around the apartment.

I've been thinking a lot about Grandma lately.  I've mentioned her before, but without much explanation, so I thought I'd spend some time writing about/sharing her with you guys.  I had the rare privilege of a great-grandmother up until last November.  She was 92 years old and retained her sanity and relatively good health right up to the very end.  She started having some health problems in January and by the end of the summer, her body was worn out.  As the fall went on, she was in and out of the hospital on a monthly/weekly basis and right before Thanksgiving, she just couldn't go on anymore.

My great-grandmother was born in August of 1917, the same year as Desi Arnaz, Thelonious Monk, and Zsa Zsa Gabor.  She died in November of 2009, the same year as Walter Cronkite, Bea Arthur, and Michael Jackson.  It's weird to think of someone you love in terms of birth and death, especially a parent or grandparent.  You grow up with this person having had no memorable beginning and having no perceivable end, and you get the impression that they'll never go away or change.  You are introduced to this environment as the product of a birth, just like they were a thousand years before.  They become as familiar to you as the settings they occupy, like the position of a piece of furniture or the color of the carpet.  Then, when it changes, you get this disoriented feeling and think in terms of how things ought to be instead of being able to just accept the way they are.  Birth almost never seems to do this.  Death always does this. 

My great-grandmother lived through a lot of births and a lot of death.  She was there for the birth of every member of my family.  She survived the loss of her own parents, her husband, one of her grandchildren and many, many others.  She was born into one world war and built her own family during the second.  She bore witness to the Great Depression, the moon landing, and the Oklahoma City bombing.  She lived through radio, television, computers and cell phones.

There were times, especially toward the end, when it was hard to think this way about Grandma.  She got so frail and weak, it was hard to remember times when she was independent.  But she was.  I remember as a child when she would call my grandparents from Houston to inform them that she had driven down to see my great-uncle Jerry and would be staying there for a few days.  I remember how all the "little old ladies" in town (some were significantly younger than she was) would always ask her to drive them into Dallas-proper because she was the only one among them who knew her way around and wasn't afraid of downtown traffic.  She had been through a lot in her life, and ended up with a lot of strength and wisdom because of it.  She used to wonder out-loud, in the last decade or so of her life, why God had restricted her mobility and why she couldn't get around as much.  I'm curious if it wasn't to force her to slow down and share it with the rest of us.

All said, I don't really miss my grandmother because I miss sharing things with her, or getting my picture taken with her, or getting presents from her, or anything that I really got from being with her.  I just miss her.  I miss stories the I never heard about family I never knew and the stories I've heard a million times before.  I miss the way that time seems to be put in its proper perspective when it's around something old.  I miss the calm assurances that come from 92 years of survival and the tested wisdom that carries someone that well for that long.  I miss her laugh and the lines that creased her smile and carried more stories in them than she could ever tell.  I miss the way we all seemed so small relative to the largeness that occupied her diminished and world-worn frame.  I miss the hope she had of seeing her husband again and getting the Yahtzee and egg salad sandwiches ready for the rest of us when we joined her.

I miss my Grandma.  But only for now...

Get Your Priorities Crooked

Sometimes I amaze myself with how quickly I get distr

Sorry, I just remembered that I needed to change out my Brita filter.  Anyway...

Sometimes I amaze myself with how quickly I get distracted.  It seems like every time I settle on some idea as being important and necessary, ten other things I haven't done this week/month/year pop in to my head and demand my immediate time and attention.  It's kinda like how I'm bad at grocery shopping: I walk in with this overwhelming sense of determination to get milk and eggs and get the heck out of there as fast as I can, but then half an hour later I'm wandering through the aisles with $90 worth of cinnamon rolls, Pop Tarts, Dr. Pepper and ice cream sandwiches, trying to remember why I came here in the first place and where all this other stuff came from.

I think maybe it's because I'm such a sucker for flashy advertising.  I crave to be told what's important.  And I love the idea that all I need to do is acquire something to start being happy or quit having a problem, even if it's a problem I only found I had because some commercial told me I did.  I think maybe that process has screwed up my ability to prioritize things correctly or hold on to one thought for longer than thirty seconds.

In my last post, I talked about coming up with an instruction manual for how to get out of wherever it is I find myself to be, and I think this is where I'm going to have to start.  I think you end up wherever you end up in life because of the desires you choose to follow.  And I think there's a super-practical application for that, too.

I was talking to a friend of mine about how Sunday was kind of a rough day for me in terms of feeling anxious and stressed out and wanting to drink, and I told him that there was this point somewhere in the late afternoon where I realized that whatever I spent the next five minutes doing was going to be what I ended up doing for the rest of the night.  I ended up leaving for Cliff's house an hour and a half before I needed to, because if I sat around and moped because I was mad and wanted to drink, I wasn't going to do anything else all night long.  We talked for a minute about how weird that is, but how true; about all those mornings that we woke up and started drinking or smoking pot before 10 AM, and how the rest of the day was pretty much determined from that point on.  We talked about how weird it is to look back on those times and remember how we lied to ourselves, saying we were just relaxing a little bit before the day started, or how we'd get right on that other thing as soon as we were done.  And then we'd spend the rest of the day drinking or smoking and be totally wasted by noon.  It's stupid, I know... but that's what I used to do.

Change started happening when I ran out of excuses.  You go on like that long enough and eventually you realize you've been telling yourself the same things over and over for days and weeks and months on end without anything actually happening.  I just kinda came to the place where I couldn't help but admit that smoking weed and drinking were choices that I made, and that every time I made those choices, I was essentially choosing to put my life on pause for one more day.  It seems like such a simple thing to talk about now, but I was really messed up back then.  My main goal in life was to not have stress or face hardship and the only way you can ever really do that is to just kinda check out on life.  But even then it doesn't work, because you get new stresses like "What do I do now that I'm out of weed, but I don't get paid 'til Friday?" and "If I go out drinking tonight, I won't be able to pay rent next week."

And I guess that's where it all comes to a head.  Like I said before, you end up wherever you end up in life because of the desires you choose to follow.  You basically decide what's the most important thing for you to do or to have and you just set your priorities around that.  When it's time to change, though, you have to turn those priorities on their head and develop altogether new ones.  And that can be a really difficult thing to do, especially if you've spent the last however long making a mess of everything and killing brain cells.  It makes it difficult to know where to start or how to proceed.

But proceed we must.  Sometimes I end up caught in a vortex of thoughts and feelings that immobilize me and make me want to stop and sort everything out before I take any action.  But I know that doesn't work.  You just have to focus on one thing at a time, something immediate and manageable, and just work on that until it's finished.  It can feel kind of childish because of how simple it is, but it's really the only thing I know that works.  You have to ask yourself "If I could only get one thing done today, what would be the most important thing to do?" and then go do it.  If you start to get distracted, put down whatever it is you chased after and go back to what you were doing.  Make up your mind early about what "done" looks like so that you know to stop once you get there.  Then you can move on to something else and repeat the process.

I think one mistake I've made lately is trying to lean on routine and structure to pull me out of the mess.  Don't get me wrong, I think routine and structure are great, but they're great if you've got a good system going.  If you're trying to fix or get rid of a bad one, putting new routines in place of the old ones can take away from your ability to clean up the mess.  I love riding my bicycle and writing my 'blog and having a smoothie for breakfast, etc. etc. etc. but those things take time and I have other concerns to worry with right now.

I'm going to hold off on riding again until I feel like I can add it back into the mix without taking away from other responsibilities.  I know it's good for me and I really want to keep doing it, but I have a hard time limiting myself to a few laps around the block.  I want to explore and push myself to go farther than I really have the time for right now.  

Don't worry, I'm not giving up the ghost completely... I'm going to continue 'blogging and eating better.  But for now, I've got laundry to do and a bathroom to clean.  I'll figure out what's next when those are done.

Stay gold, Ponyboy...

Step One: Figure Out What Step One Is

One of the reasons I'm such a bad adult, and there are many, is that I don't do housework very well.  I mean, I can mop and sweep and do dishes and stuff, it just feels like there's never enough time to take care of everything all at once and, after I've checked everything off the list, something else is dirty and needs to be cleaned. again  It's like trying to mow a thousand acres with a pair of scissors.

Add to this that I'm the type of person who thinks he deserves a parade and a sandwich just for getting off work for the day.  When I actually do finish all my laundry, I want to celebrate like it's a bank holiday or something.  I don't wanna have to move on to "Item #2" on the list.

But it doesn't really work like that.  I don't ever really "finish" my laundry, I just get a couple loads done here and there.  See, whenever I do laundry, I feel like I need to clean my bathroom, and in order to do that, I need to take the trash out and, since I'm already doing that, I might as well clean my desk off and, if I"m cleaning my desk, I should probably do the dishes and, before I can do the dishes, I should really take a shower, but if I'm gonna take a shower, I should wait until the stuff in the laundry finishes so that I have clean clothes to put on when I get out (and I can wash the dirty ones), so I'll just grab a snack and set up camp here in front of the computer while I wait for my laundry to finish.

That was yesterday.  My clothes are still in the washer.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, because I've been thinking about how to get out of this funk I've been in.  Most of my thinking has drifted back to other times in my life that have been like this: there were a number of break-ups that left me pretty wounded and angry for a long time; some incidents with friends that were kind of a kick in the head; my parents separating was a pretty big one and then when the divorce was finalized, it kinda sucked the wind out of my sails for a few weeks; when my first grandmother died, and then when my great-grandmother died...  In fact, I don't know that I've ever really had a point in my adult life where there wasn't some recent, depressing and/or traumatic event to look back on and be affected by.

I don't think this is a unique experience or that I'm somehow unable to handle it, it's just not something I normally think about, either.  Truth be told, it's not really anything want to think about.  I want things to just happen on their own and not have to make time for them.  I don't want to keep looking back at the clock and deciding whether or not I have enough time to do everything I need to do today.  I hate thinking about what's coming up and what I'm going to have to cut out to make room for other things that I need to do first.  I wish there were an instruction manual for it.

...so I think I'm going to write one.  I heard Anne Lamott say that you should write the kind of thing that you'd like to happen upon in a bookstore because then the thing you're looking for would exist, (approx. 5:30) and I think that's great advice, so I think that's what my 'blog is going to be for a while: just me going through and figuring out how I got from A to B and how to get to whatever's next.  In a certain sense, I've kinda been hoping that's what it would do all along, but I don't think I've really put together the idea as concretely before now.

Still blocking comments.  Still don't really need them.  Still glad you're here, though.  Still gonna keep writing.

See you guys tomorrow.