Struggling against the almighty tides of eventuality

So, tonight was a good night.  I like to think, at least, that it went better than last year’s company Christmas Party (I don’t think we’ve regressed to the point of caring to call it a “Holiday Party”).  At this one, I didn’t make a point to yell out my sexual orientation loud enough for people in adjacent counties to be made aware.  That always counts as a success in my book.

I did try to have a serious conversation with my friend Eric about what we do at work and where we’re all going in the future.  I fear I may have been a bit meandering, but at least I made the effort.  I know I have trouble with that.  I always am concerned I’ll make a fool of myself, but alcohol has the wonderful effect of making me not give a shit.  I intentionally planned to have a discussion about these sorts of things at the party cause I knew I could talk after a drink or two.  I was at about my 5th when I started the conversation, and I think the content suffered as a result.  I hope the point came across, though.

I’m not really sure what I mean to say here, except that, after having a rough day (my furnace is broken and I may be getting gypped into a $2,500 repair for it, and my partner found a colony of spiders [like 30, literally] living on my computer equipment), I still count today as a success.  I tried to let a friend know I cared and supported his decisions but just wanted to help him make the best ones for himself.  I tried to let my partner know just how much and why I cared so much for him and about him.  Tomorrow, as I’m reading this more sober than I am now, I’ll probably groan and realize what an ass I’ve been, but for tonight I’ll let myself bask in the idea that maybe I did a couple things right on a crummy day.

I fell off the blogging wagon.  That didn’t really take long; in fact I think it took about two weeks.  My “boring life update,” like this one, was rather forced.  These days it just doesn’t seem like I have much to post about.

Actually, I do, but none of it seems particularly valid.  Of course, in high school it was perfectly acceptable to blog about how lonely we all were, how no one understood us and it was just all so damn hopeless.  These days, I feel like I’m supposed to “know better.”  If I don’t have friends, it’s cause I don’t go out and make them.  If I don’t have a working furnace, it’s cause I was stupid enough to buy a house.  I’ve still got the annoying situations, but I’m supposed to have the maturity to just adapt instead of running to the internet and complaining.  At the very least I’m supposed to understand that people have worse situations than mine and complaining about mine is paltry.

I guess that’s perfectly valid.  In high shcool there were hormones at the steering wheel more than common sense.  Instead of thinking about the valid reasons why my parents were trying to control my behavior (to protect me, usually), it was just so much easier to assume they were emissaries of Satan, sent to rob my life of any semblance of happiness until I killed everyone and automatically got sent to burn in Hell for eternity as a result.

Of course, they weren’t perfect, and I’ve always felt somewhat socially crippled as a result of their efforts.  I feel unable to form meaningful long-term attachments because I hate people so damn much and assume that everyone hates me and, if interacting with me at all, is only doing so to try making a fool of me (cause I make it pretty damn easy).  It’s not their fault, though, and again, at my level of emotional development I’m supposed to be able to fix a problem if I see it, instead of whining incessantly.

Sometimes it’s hard to do much else though.  I’ve been verbally blogging to my mother and my partner for a while today, so I figured I’d commit at least a bit of it to the written form.  Of course there’s the aforementioned furnace: it’s broken, but thankfully it’s because it didn’t want to kill us with carbon monoxide, for which I’m grateful.  I consider myself to have few friends, as always, and I never know what to do with the one(s) I have; this is actually where almost all of my daily stress comes from (and what I’ll probably talk about most at length).

I want to offer advice for the bad situations in which people find themselves; from the outside looking in, it always seems so obvious.  But by the same token, I don’t want to damage what already seems so frail with words that may not be so well-received.  Life’s not easy for everyone, but for some it’s harder than others, and I do definitely recognize that.  While the advice that isn’t so welcome may be useful, it’s still about hard decisions that I don’t know how I’d really make in the same situation.  But maybe that’s why the advice is so useful: I couldn’t make the decision myself so easily, why should anyone else have to do so?  But then we are brought, again, to my being socially crippled: even if my advice is good, it might as well be as thrusting thumb tacks outwards from my eyeballs for the ease I have in giving it to anyone.  I’m just not charismatic enough to be a good friend, cause it takes balls to say the unfortunate truths that sometimes need to be said.

And so, I come to my blog, wherein my verbal vomit serves as an embarkation point for all the ideas floating in my head that are too difficult to say aloud.  At least here I can acknowledge that my thought exists.  At least here I can pretend like I know what to say or what to do to make everything better for everybody.  I really do think I have an idea, but I remain mute.  For fear of reprisal.  For fear of recrimination.  I remain mute.

I’d like to end with an epiphany, an apocalypse of understanding in which I emerge from the cave and know what to do and then do it.  But I won’t.  I’ll just end, cause all I can do here is return to my childhood where at least I could complain about my inactivity, rather than suffer in silence because of it.

Well it’s a sad picture, the final blow hits you
Somebody else gets what you wanted again
You know it’s all the same, another time and place
Repeating history, and you’re getting sick of it
But I believe in whatever you do
And I’ll do anything to see it through

Because these things will change, can you feel it now?
These walls that they put up to hold us back will fall down
It’s a revolution, the time will come for us to finally win
We’ll sing hallelujah, we’ll sing hallelujah

So we’ve been outnumbered, raided and now cornered
It’s hard to fight when the fight ain’t fair
We’re getting stronger now, from things they never found
They might be bigger but we’re faster and never scared
You can walk away, say we don’t need this
But there’s something in your eyes says we can beat this

‘Cause these things will change, can you feel it now?
These walls that they put up to hold us back will fall down
It’s a revolution, the time will come for us to finally win
We’ll sing hallelujah, we’ll sing hallelujah

Tonight we standed on our knees
To fight for what we worked for all these years
And the battle was long, it’s the fight of our lives
But we’ll stand up champions tonight

It was the night things changed, can you see it now?
These walls that they put up to hold us back fell down
It’s a revolution, throw your hands up ’cause we never gave in
We’ll sing hallelujah, we’ll sing hallelujah

There seems to be a movement afoot to promote animal research; I saw this the other day, and now get to see a copy of that billboard every day on my way to work.  The thing I don’t understand is: are these people high?

I don’t particularly like animal research.  It’s not that I don’t understand that it advances medical technologies that help human beings.  It’s not that I want more people to die horribly from cancer.  But you’re still breeding animals specifically for the purpose of injecting them with or otherwise inducing horrible afflictions (or doing various other experiments to make their lives awful).  Does this mean we should stop doing it?  Well, I don’t know what alternatives there are that people will be satisfied with, and thus there’s no response I could give that is even remotely close to “yes” which won’t get me labeled as a monster; and that’s weird, cause I’d be advocating not torturing animals for our personal gain.

So, we’ll accept animal testing as a given, if only for the impossibility of stopping it.  However, I do think we can agree that it’s not something we should all be happy about.  If we suffered some horrible nuclear winter down the road, you’d probably eat your dog.  It’s unlikely you’d be overjoyed at the prospect.  As such, I don’t think it’s a good idea to make a whole god damn ad campaign extolling the virtues of dog meat.  Guess what?  You’re still eating Rex, you jackasses, and he was a part of the family.

My point is this: you shouldn’t spend time advocating a “necessary evil.”  It really makes you look like you enjoy the suffering. Ultimately, that just makes me wish you would wander in front of the nearest mass-transit bus.  Meanwhile, I’ll still think animal testing is something we put up with as a society because we don’t have better choices.  If only someone with an interest in saving more human lives had some spare money to throw at such an issue…

Been feeling down lately. Wait, what am I talking about? I’ve been down for a long time. Every now and then I’ll get into a little episode of depression, just like most of us humans. It’s normally inexplicable, and equally harmless. Most times homoeostasis is returned within mere days, but I’m starting to think I may actually have a depression problem.

At first, I thought it was just a bout of homesickness. I don’t particularly care for my life at the moment. So far I’ve managed to convince myself it’s merely a transition–I must simply “hang in there” as it were, while my beloved girlfriend completes nursing school, which will allow us to move anywhere we please–or so the theory goes. The problem with this is I can only convince myself for so long. The cold hard truth is that there is a big difference between plans and reality, and reality has never seemed to have much of a predisposition for conforming to my plans–in fact, it seems to almost have its own plan for my life. I would prefer it left it to me. I find that reality is almost always wrong.

My friends from back home ask me what I’m doing in Baltimore, and when I tell them I work for an engineering company that has me write computer software for the government they’re pretty impressed–if only I were also. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’m no longer particularly interested in it. In fact, when I coded as a hobby I vowed I would never rely on it for a paycheck, simply because I cannot maintain an interest in some arbitrary project. I have the “open source itch,” as it’s come to be known. That is, I have an urge to code particular things I’m interested in, and not something that a project manager tells me to code. Fortunately I’m not in that situation–I get to code however I want, with whatever method, style, or language I prefer–but I still don’t get to pick what I code. When I first started this job I ran at full speed; I completed two major projects in the first three months, one of which had been in limbo for nearly three years. I am good at what I do, I just don’t like what I do.

So what do I want to do? Due to various encounters–positive and negative–with the healthcare profession, I would very much like to attend medical school and work as a pain management physician. I don’t know if I’m smart enough, and I don’t think I’m young enough. If I wait until my girlfriend has finished nursing school I will be–at the minimum–three years shy of thirty before I can even start pre-med. I just can’t convince myself this is a realistic thing to do, especially seeing as how we have plans to start a family around that time.

I dreadfully find that I have fallen into the exact same predicament most members of our society do–one that I promised myself I would never be trapped into: not achieving my dreams. Most of us have something happen in their early twenties, and you think “oh, I’ll just wait a year until I can figure this out,” or “I’ll just take a few years to get this right,” and then you turn around and it’s been five, seven, ten years. I’ve spent a mere twenty-three years on this planet–four of them taken away by intractable pain that isn’t stopping anytime soon–and already I feel the pressure of time slowly pushing me farther and farther from my dreams.

I see my friends saving money, buying houses, having families; I see me stuck, as if running in a dream: never quite able to catch what you’re chasing. No matter how hard and fast you run, it only gets farther anyway. I’m very afraid that I’ll become like so many blue-collar families–like my own parents: spending their entire lives attempting to ensure a better one for their children. That’s simply not what my life was made for. It was made for greater things than these.

I don’t know about you, but there are times when words just get stuck in my mind.  It’s pretty much the same idea as getting a song stuck in there, a phrase or two endlessly repeating, only it’s just one word: the sound of someone saying it, the way it’s written.  For me, the word usually just pops into my head, I guess something could trigger it though the source never seems clear, and it typically sticks there because, in spite of seeming/being very common, I can’t quite remember the meaning.  It stays in there, thumping against my skull until I happen to remember what it means or I can look it up.  The clearest occurrence I can remember was related to “misogynist.”  It bugged me all day.

Sometimes, though, it’s a completely different story.  Sometimes, a word gets caught up inside a deeper web woven throughout my brain.  A long time ago, someone taught me what “catharsis” meant.  I didn’t really get it at the time, but now it feels like it’s related to damn well near everything.  It is the peak of a story, the point at which all the building emotional tension reaches its climax, or essentially an emotional orgasm.  Technically, it could also be a medical term related to purging…other things.  I’m not talking about that one.

These days, I never seem to get much by way of catharsis.  Of course, to have a really strong emotional release, you have to have a build-up of emotions.  Working a boring job programming, what release could I possibly need?  Strangely enough, I still have plenty of tension in my life.  It seems the response to any time I get slightly worked up, though, is to try shutting me down before I go critical.  But damn it, sometimes I need to go critical so I can live the rest of my life normally.

If we never experience any emotional release, we have only a steady buildup of tension that grants us no reprieve in our waking hours, and then slowly encroaches even on the brief respite our sleep gives us.  Eventually, it all bubbles over in a violent outburst at some minor infraction.  This is not healthy.

I feel like this lack of catharsis is part of the puzzle of why I’ve been so creatively stunted for the past few years.  Artists live off of the emotional release their works grants.  Of course, they have to pour a bit of their own soul into their creations, or their work is at best an academic exercise.  A key ingredient, that bit of soul I’d have to pour out onto the page or into the music I play, is what I’ve been attempting at others’ behest to cut out of my life.  In addition to the perilous outcome for anyone I mentioned previously, I also have the removal of one of my more unique qualities.

I like being able to keep calm in stressful situations; it’s a useful skill.  But, every so often, I’m just going to have to be able to blow off steam.  I need these moments of catharsis, or I’ll just be killing myself slowly, one little piece of my soul at a time.

So, I took today and cleaned a bit around my apartment.  I figure this is a necessary first step to packing for the new house.  Plus, as I mentioned previously, my place was kind of a wreck.  Well, it’s still a wreck, but it’s less of one.  I have yet to do my dishes or scrub the bathroom clean, but after that my place’ll be clean enough that I wouldn’t mind having guests (hint, hint).

In the meantime, I’m just trying to force myself to blog a bit more.  Real creativity can’t be forced, but the pipes through which my creative juices flow have been somewhat clogged, and I think they need to be blown out.  It’ll be an arduous process, but hopefully a worthwhile one.

The Baltimore Marathon was today.  I stood outside and watched people running (and eventually walking) by; apparently my neighborhood was at mile 23 of 26.  I watched this for 3 hours.  I was informed there were over 20,000 people signed up to punish themselves.  At first I had to imagine it was for some noble cause, but apparently the cause was “running until your shirt chafes your nipples off and you bleed down your torso.”  Seriously, that shit is gross.

In addition, these people would not stop for an ambulance that was headed to the hospital up the street.  They kept flowing around it, adding to the clusterfuck of the lone police officer attempting to shepherd it through, clearing out the cars (who’d been waiting for upwards of an hour and a half at the light).  All in all, it was pretty retarded.  Later runners, who were presumably later because they were less willing to run all that distance, actually let the next two ambulances through without much fuss.  I have to wonder if the upswing in ambulances was due to people passing the hell out after running so far.

All in all, it was a fairly interesting day, dull though it sounds when typed out.  I talked to a couple complete strangers, made some single-serving friends.  I used to do that every so often, but it’s been years.  It’s best to think of this as baby steps, small movements towards waking myself up from the self-induced intellectual coma in which I’ve found myself.

Well, it’s been a long few weeks.  Fortunately the Joint Commission has come and gone.  Our office still stands, a magnificant vortex into which all hope and joy may be sucked.  I don’t think it’d be nearly so bad, if we had windows, or maybe didn’t have pipes that made rather graphic attempts to mate with the wall every so often.  Seriously, these things get an air bubble in them and all of a sudden we hear cheesy synthesizer music.

Such is the joy of working in a mechanical room.

I had fully intended to make a big celebration of the whole ordeal, since the NIH managed to cruise through nearly unscathed with a 99% approval rating from the JC, but sadly, it was not to be.  My suggestions of good times and good drinks were met with scorn and derision.  Oh well, screw you guys, I can party all by myself.

Except that didn’t really work either.

As it turns out, me and everyone else on the home front were a little too tired to party, and by tired I’m also inferring a bit cranky.  So, no drinks and merriment were to be had last night.  Well, drinks were had, less merriment.  Ah, well.  There’s always the next survey, in 3 years.

I’m trying to figure out, in the meantime, what is so offputting about my invitations to hang out.  Half the time it seems like people think I’m joking, and the other half people think I am the joke.  It’s not quite clear to me what, exactly, so diminishes my going-out worthiness.  I do realize I get a bit rowdy after a few drinks, but isn’t that the point of said few drinks?

Maybe I’m just over-analytical of the situation.  Perhaps I just associate with lame people.  Unfortunately, “birds of a feather” and all that shit seems to suggest I’m likewise lame.  Well, fuck, could someone just come out and explain to me, in clear and simple terms, what I do, or don’t do, that makes me so lame?  It’s pretty damn obvious my name was off the distribution list for the social interaction manual.

I realize, of course, this sounds overly wangsty of me.  People shouldn’t measure themselves by others, I shouldn’t care what other people think, you should be your own man, blah blah blah.  I don’t really care at this point, I just think it would be awesome if I had some people I could easily hang out with.  Every so often I scroll through my contacts looking for someone that would take the offer to hang out.  I tend to get to the last entry, my landlord, without ever landing on a single name, and I don’t think said 80-year-old landlord is up for going to the discoteca.

At this point, I typically read through the whole entry, select it all and delete it, cause it’s so much whining.  Honestly, I don’t care anymore.  If you’ve read this far, congratulations, you’ve wasted some time you’ll never get back.  However, I should also point out that I have beer, and I have Nintendo.  Good times could be had here, random Internet person.  My place is a wreck and my partner will have a conniption if I randomly had random people over at random, but hey, it’s all good (randomly? no, that doesn’t work).  But then, nobody even reads this damn thing anyway.

Well, shit.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, but I’ve become dull.  There’s no real good way around that fact, since it’s the pure and unadulterated truth.  At some point I stopped being interesting in any way.  It’s not that I don’t think interesting things, or want to do interesting things, it’s more that these things never quite make it out of my head.

At one point, I was daring (take with a grain of salt, this was on the Internet): I wrote what I thought, and screw what anyone else thought.  I was going to school, and learning more every day in spite of myself.  I hated just about everyone, and it apparently showed quite clearly.

Over time, however, I grew more and more cautious.  What would happen if my boss were to read what nasty things I wrote?  What if I complained about my partner (as in life) and he read it?  What if, worst of all, my mother read it (she’s very sensitive)?  All these things weighed down until only the most bland of ideas and thoughts actually made it from my brain to the screen in front of your face.

I can’t really promise myself that I’ll fix that.  It certainly won’t happen overnight.  This blog is ultimately my attempt, though, an attempt to overcome the stage fright of the world wide web, where all our words are catalogued forever on some hardware in a warehouse in California.  Someone might someday come down the line and say “oh my goodness you were so [angsty/retarded/mean/gay],” but I guess I’ll just have to deal with that.  The fact that no one will now can’t be counted as an accomplishment: no one would simply because no one cares.

Of course, no one will care about this post, either, but I’m trying not to give too much of a shit.  It’s not really working out well, so far, but I’m giving it a go.

Fuck. That. Shit.

I’m laying here, tugging at my brain, trying to pull it out of the sludge that doesn’t seem to stop coating it in ever more thick layers these days.  Something breaks free.  It’s just another piece of flaking paint covering the walls of my so-called life.

Back in the day, I was filled with promise, or so they would say.  I guess they say that about everyone.  Of course, I believed them.  I was one of the smartest people I knew, and I was barely even giving it a good-faith effort.  I’ve lost all my faith now.

Sometimes I feel a slight glimmer of hope, underneath all this crushing tide of sameness forever washing over me.  Sometimes, I think of what might be, if I can break free of the mire.  I’ve wanted to fly for years.  The runway’s always over the next hill.  I can see it, before the next wave rushes over my head again.

Some day, some day, and it’s always some day, I’ll do it.  I’ll take off, and fly away and never come back to this dreadful place…this dreadful place here inside myself.  My soul is atrophied, but maybe all it needs is a little fresh air, up in the sky.  It’s always some day.  But not tomorrow; tomorrow will be the same day.