Such Clarity

There comes a point in which we come to realize that the friends you grew up with are no longer the same individuals you have come to know. What’s sad is that when we arrive at this point, we can see with such clarity that the connections from years past are but a distant afterthought and that is probably what hurts the most. When friendships die a slow death all parties involved are desperately clinging to a bygone era of our adolescence in which we at the time shared our lives, hopes and dreams with. Up until last night, I too was one who was desperately clinging to that period in my life. But life is what shapes us into who we are today. With our formative years spent in search of a life we all had in our minds, we failed to understand each others journey up until this point.

It is quite awkward to be thrust into hanging with old friends when there is no more new shared experiences in which to build new memories upon. It is not for a lack of trying, people change, priorities change, I fucking change! So goes it and here I am trying to capture some raw emotion from my realization last night.

Conversation topics fluctuate from small talk, how’s the weather bullshit to superfluous mind numbing boring shit like what bars make the strongest drink. But I too am guilty of bring up topics that are of no interest to the group, like blogging and twitter. But at the root of this, is not that the topics are of no interest, it’s because we as a group have no traction in which to relate to the stories.

So to fully process this new feeling I have for the people I used to know, and in trying to capture some initial feelings, it is with great regret that I must admit to myself that we are no longer the friends we were.

I am not saying there is no chance for reconnection but at this time it is unhealthy for me to be stuck in this juxtaposition of my adolescent self and the man I want to become.

A great indicator for me is that our collective life experiences have no traction to relate to each individual’s day-to-day struggles, so much so that even I cannot accurately convey what the fuck I do for a living. Life experiences dictate what constitutes as intelligent conversation, as such, everyone had nothing to talk about.

I had to write this post to fully grasp what I was feeling last night because I am quite sure everyone in the resturant was just waiting to get the hell out of dodge, and we all could see it. What kills me the most is that I too care not in their new day-to-day lives, which to me clearly indicates the demise of a once close group, I guess it starts here first.

Thrift Store Junkies

Fuel costs are a joke and their is no end in sight, and to be honest, I’m slightly OK with this.  Why? I’ll tell you straight up, for those who needlessly congest our freeways with land yachts, they can eat shit now, that’s why.

As fuel prices climb, food prices correlate the trend, which leaves all of us with little to no room to breathe.  Because of this trend I have been on an exercise of frugality as of late.  Up until January of this year, I was foolishly eating out for breakfast, lunch and dinner like it was no one’s business and to be honest, that was only way I knew.  Not that mom and dad didn’t teach me the economics of preparing meals and shit but hey just like my peers, it’s a way of life, no big deal.

Well, this mode of living has lead our country straight into horse shit and I’m not riding the train anymore.  I am not qualified to make socioeconomic commentary so I will spare you the lecture.  What I do know is that, I’m not an idiot and understanding that if I continue on this trajectory that my chances at bankruptcy by years end would grow logarithmically.  I said to myself, self, do you really need to eat fried chicken, and subs every other night and sushi on the weekends?

Basically, I will need to retrain myself on how to feed myself because if college had to taught me anything, it’s that I really don’t know shit about living life on my own.  8 years later and I’m still working on my food budget, FAIL.

In accepting the fact that I’m still a retard in all things life, I turned to one of the only things I can control to reduce my costs of living.

Doing a bit of clean up on my closet, I notice a substantial amount of foolish purchasing decisions.  First off, I have tons of clothes, I mean tons, like a chick.  I’m not so sure I even wear half the shit in the rat’s nest I call my wardrobe closet.  As a few bags turned to boxes, I realize I was ridding myself of thousands of dollars worth of junk.  My first inclination was to go all ebay and have a fire sale, but that would have cost way more in the long run with all the labor hours involved with organizing and uploading images and descriptions.  In the end, I just didn’t want to do it.

Boxed and ready to donate to the local Goodwill, my roomate and I headed to the east side Salvation Army to donate my treasure chest of excess.

Upon arrival, I was blown away at the amount of usesless shit of others! I mean, a freaking leather couch in fairly good condition at $150, a set of Taylor Made golf clubs for $22, eh yo, eh fahgettaboudit!!!!

As if pouring through a bunch of used crap wasn’t fun enough, I discoverd the fruits of thrift store clothing.  It’s like treasure hunting, says my roomate, as he was scanning the local offerings of the day.  And he’s absolutly right!  Located a bin of custom tailored shirts that was to my exact specifications, and I’m not talking about the run of the mill used shit, I found custom tailored haute couture.  All of which costs a cool $10 for the bin!!!  LMAO, like, OMG, FTW!

Giddy like a school girl and prancing around the store harassing the locals on all the great shit that people would throw out, I was approached by a store employee asking to see the box I had in hand, and to my suprise it was a green tag.  Green tag meaning half off bitches!!! Holy mother of shit, I have hit the mother load! Four tailored shirts for $5!!!

A bit of caution though, sometimes you see something and go, “I can’t believe someone gave this up,” then you wear it once or twice and you’re like, “Oh, I know now. It’s so ill-fitting it feels like it’s on sideways.” Then you put it in a big bag of second-hand clothes to donate to the thrift stores and, like credit card debt, the cycle continues.

But for my money, locating thrift store deals has become my new hobby and I have just ventured into the world of hipster fashion.  Call me crazy but it is not a bad of a place to be.

Lurking

I have always wanted to write, but I had no encouragement or inspiration so it became something to loathe. High school being the barrier to entry for all things, was not particularly kind to a kid who’s only interest at the time was smoking dope. In hindsight I was searching for an outlet, a place I could control and gain sure footing in a world that offered none, a place where I could effectively process and understand the shit going around me.

Working in an office became so monotonous that after 6 months of my first job, I began to surf the internet for weeks at a time with reckless abandon. For one, I just didn’t like what I was doing and began to regret my career of choice. Up until that point I was still trying (and still am) to find my niche in this world and as I saw my peers expand themselves geographically and mentally, I came to realization that this was what I was seeking all along, mental expansion for emotional intelligence. The job I hated was at least banking me a fairly decent salary, so I was allowed certain things to slide, like an entry level engineering job that sucked the soul out of you.

Mental expansion was the goal, but execution was easier said than done. Lurking on the Internet can be a learning experience that offers many lessons. This was how I discovered blogs and blogging. Before paying any mind to the writings of others through a blog, I was regretfully entrenched in updating MySpace, where misrepresentation happens. MySpace is a vehicle for presenting a version of oneself, this version, a facade at the discretion of the user, that only presents what the user allows to project of themselves, is something I never fully embraced. Reading the writings of others for me, the thoughts and perspective offered more value than staring at vomit that is a MySpace page layout.

This realization came 2 years ago and I can honestly say unequivocally that I have been lurking all this time. Not the type of lurking that would make Larry the L2 perp proud of, but rather lurking in admiration for all the wonderful stories and fresh perspectives that I have come to admire and respect but too lame to try out myself. So, in a sense, I felt I was not worthy of starting a blog myself. Going back to the original thought, I was unsure of how I would approach creative writing or even capturing my daily exposure to all things life.

Ten months into my entry level gig, I traded in the civil engineering post for the wonderfully chaotic world of clinical research, and this is where I was thrown into a cubicle farm so devoid of character that after 8 weeks of eye gouging and in flagrant contempt for the job, I fell back to my old ways, surfing the internet for weeks at a time. Only this time, I happened to come across a few blogs that just inspired me. inspired me to express my thoughts through writing, forget grammar and prose, just write whatever feels natural.

As it turned out, following a few bloggers snowballed into joining discussions and adding comments. This became an outlet for which made my work days shorter and seemed to motivate my creative self. As I thought over what concentration I should focus for a new blog, I digressed back into my lurking ways, for I didn’t believe I was an expert on much of anything to have a blog focusing on a discussion topic.

It finally occured to me that the only way to process the world around me was to capture in writing, things that inspire me, current events, random shit and everything in between, the good, the bad and the ugly. Fast track to early 2008 and anything is better than the process of constantly posting additions to a facade in which we all know are never rooted in foundaton.

Life Sucks(?)

I have been posturing about this statement for the better part of this year. I see old friends and these are the first words uttered, the people I come across can only see the world as such. To me, this is a call to attention from individuals who have not the experience nor opportunity to go out and make the world their own. To which whey respond, ‘Life sucks’, but further examination reveals that life in fact is neither pleasant nor foul. It is of what we make it. Again, i myself did not believe this.

To further examine this point I turn to my own life for the moment. Externally, one would assess that my life is rich. I’m living on my own, I got a place I call home, good friends, and good times abound. On the contrary, life is hard, so hard in fact that I am more scared and doubtful of my current state of affairs than when I was a stoned and broke undergrad. Instead of saying to others that life sucks, I internalized such thoughts painstakingly and unnecessarily wallowed in self-doubt.

Self-doubt is such a high-level subjective term that I must pinpoint an exact event in which this notion manifests itself. A few months back, I was working for an organization I need not mention by name. Work life got so bad that it affected my self worth and above all my mental state. You see, work was going fine, I had a job in which I looked forward to reporting to, until something that I have never experienced happened. MASSIVE layoffs! Acquisition and merger! Frightened and at a loss to process what the fuck had just happened. I sought out support from my friends, to which they replied, ‘Dude, at least you have a job, and besides you didn’t get laid off, you should be so lucky’ Ok, not particularly the response I was looking for, I turned to my parents for advice. Again, self-doubt was even further fortified with the curt response from mother, ‘Are you sure you can just leave and find something else?’

I was like, ‘WF?!’, rather than offer words of encouragement, I was slapped in the face with a moment of clarity, I was now grown (i am not using the term grown man , because a.) I can barely take care of myself and b.) I am not ready to be for the responsibility of being a man, but i digress). My parents being the stoic figures of old world thinking, thought I was being a being ‘a fucking whiny bitch’, my father in so few words. So this was the turning point in which I saw the light, my folks were actually relating to me as if we were on the same level, equals if you will, and this was when it dawned on me that my reaction to the curt response was in fact my inner child seeking assurance from my guardians. Self-doubt was the only objective term that I could tag on myself.

A few weeks later, work turned from alright to down right bullshit. We merged with a German company, my director at the time left for greener pastures, morale was low and I had no plan as how I would move forward. As the merger progressed, the Germans, began ‘integration’ efforts, by that I mean, ‘hey, give me the passwords and create thorough documentation, and no you will not have access to the system and application that you designed!’ Well the writing was on the wall and the resume was being polished as the days turned to weeks.

How does this correlate the original thought, well, this lead to the fabled ‘job search’, and we all know how encouraging that can be, it’s worse than dating! For one, I am sick of dealing with recruiters who have not my interest at heart, but of their own. Here’s what I think of recruiters, why would I allow C students to place in me in under-paying jobs so they can score their commission, why would I take someone seriously when they expect 7-9 years experience administering Windows2003 server, (hey homeboy did you know that the OS has only been on the market for less than 5?, but I digress.) what the fuck does a windows administrator do anyways? Calling out their bullshit I played along and went to meet some ‘recruiters’, and you should have seen the shit show I encountered, that arrogant prick on the phone stringing together buzz words and shit they read on PC magazine looked like someone I would smoke fucking blunts with not someone who could help advanced my career. So i asked myself, if my resume only garnered the attention of these fucking wastoids then I must not have the requisite skill set for advancement. Again self-doubt reared it’s ugly head into my life.

Then a funny thing happened, beat up by the whole process of job search, I decided to ride out January and cease contact with said recruiters. Unknown that my info was out there I was approached by an actual HR employee of an organization. Scheduled phone interview with hiring directory, my mental state was that I was not currently looking for a job and that the current opportunity was something a few notches above my skill level. Reflecting back on this experience I now see how self-doubt could have prevented me from going for the win, so to speak.

As I aced the phone interview armed with little other than my personality and wits, I was invited to an actual face to face meeting. Brimming with confidence I approached the interview process with less calculation and more bravado, to which I attribute to my mental state of not expecting much of an outcome. My valuation of the situation was that if I had any self-doubt going in I was going to at least attempt to counter that with my inherent talent and skill to which I can tactfully bullshit and talk sauce with the best of them but with some humility.

A few days later, I received a great job offer, I had earned it completely on my own and of my on volition. And the only person doubting me is myself so fuck the haters. To come to this realization was the defining moment of my life up until this point, LIFE is Good.

Playoffs?!?! I’m just trying to win a GAME!

I wanted to take this time to reflect on my softball season so far.

Sure we have not won an official game and at some point something has got to give. As weeks turns to months which inevitably turn to end-of-season and not a 1 in the W column, this would certainly make any competitor lose sight of purpose, but to fully appreciate purpose one must be aware of the ebb and flow, fluctuations if you will, of the season itself.

The season is far from over so why I am writing this monologue about the state of the season? To be frank, I myself was not too concerned with the introspection of all the games thus far but as I drove home last night it occurred to me that in spite of all the losing, I was indeed having fun this season. (Now don’t get me wrong, there have been moments of transgression in which I have not displayed my vested interest by applying full effort in playing, but I digress.)

So to complete the thought, I was going through the series of events of last night. I was not having fun because of my fielding errors, such as dropping a bunny fly ball out in center and dwelling on such; to be so infuriated by my own error I lost sight of the objective of showing up to the games, to have fun. By focusing in on things such as fielding errors and meatballs being thrown, my general mood began to sour and it had a negative effect on my approach to the game, but to be even remotely bothered by such is rather superfluous. As a group I do not believe we are dwelling on all the losing and this in turn has lit a fire under my a$s, because mediocrity is unacceptable, but this approach is grossly unnecessary in the realm of company softball.

As a competitor this kills me, but realizing that I do indeed plan my weekdays for softball, I am in fact, showing up not to WIN softball games but in actuality I am showing up to PLAY softball games and this invokes a quote a saw in a movie (can’t remember the title but I remember the line), “You know, happiness is in the doing, right, not in the… getting what you want…” Winning is always the primary objective in terms of what you want out of playing the games but to allow negative feelings to manifest themselves in the execution as a result of the losing is clearly in no ones best interest.

(Clearly you all see I have way too much time on my hands at work but rest assured I am writing this while something compiles in the background…… yep yep!)

P.S.

Good to see Maceo out there taking some swings, where have you been?!!