Happy Fun Cog

Today was one of those days where I feel like I'm the guest, not the owner, of my mind. We got a good chunk of snowfall in Boston, enough to justify working from home. I was very much looking forward to being at home, to staying in my PJ's all day and mixing in some reading and writing with my work.

However, as things often are when I'm alone with my thoughts for a prolonged period of time, my mind quickly became Buddha's monkey, climbing the walls, screeching, flinging poo, and so on. I found it impossible to concentrate on anything, quickly falling into a patter of manic distraction interrupted by minute-long bursts of beseeching myself to be focused, to be present, to do something with my time. I was pretty much unsuccessful and wasted the day, both in terms of work and in terms of my personal use of time; the only thing good to come out of it was an understanding that, while my motivations or lack thereof were unclear to me, I did know the best thing to do, which was to give myself forgiveness and patience.

Finally, almost 7 hours later, my head has cleared, and now I see the problem: when I'm away from work or my daily routine and have lots of good thinkin' time on my hands, I panic because at a very deep level, I'm trying to avoid thinking, trying to avoid a certain level of self-realization. Speaking of self-realization, I should also note that this is not a new epiphany for me, but rather something I come upon every once in a while like a drunk who staggers into a church, prays for and receives sobriety, then walks out the door towards his new life only to be drawn irresistibly into the first bar he sees until he staggers out again... and here we are.

And I think this is one of the reasons that I'm addicted to my job, as miserable as it makes me, and it's one of the reasons why my attempts to figure out grad school or some new way of living my life have always fizzled out; because if I put myself in situations where my ability to think, feel, and realize, are optimized, then I will inevitably confront that which I've spent so many years avoiding, that which makes it hard for me to breathe when those brief moments when I actually feel in touch with my emotions. And that confrontation, or rather the specific lack of that confrontation, has defined a great deal of my life, so naturally the thought of dealing with it scares the shit out of me on pretty much all levels of consciousness.

I'm filling out my yearly self-evaluation form for my job, and I just want to be honest and say, "I have a great deal of ambiguity about my job. I can't fully commit to it, but I don't know if that's from simmering resentment based on hard work and initiative not being rewarded as much as weaseling and dodging, or if it's because I do hard work, show initiative AND am a bit of a weasel and a dodger and I just don't know what the fuck I'm doing with my life. Just give me more fucking money, OK?"

At work, just an hour or so ago, I happened to glance at the phone at my desk and something about looking at the date/time display on the phone made me remember that my birthday is coming up next week. I've known that it was coming, of course, but hadn't really thought about it; I have a complicated perspective of birthdays, having gone through a phase in my life when I was determined to de-emphasize that particular personal occasion because it was a Western construction of no real meaning that perpetuated an inherently superficial perspective of time and space that our culture has turned into a concrete truth. And yes, I had a marvelous time at college, why do you ask?

Despite this history, though, my birthday suddenly means something to me. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that within the past week or so, I stumbled across a journal entry that I wrote around the time of my last birthday, and I could practically see the heat waves coming off the page, so powerful was the sense of simmering resentment and misery. But a lot has happened in the past year, a lot of good stuff, and I find myself wanting to embrace that, an oddly positive mood for someone who has so actively embraced negativity and pessimism. I still struggle with that negativity every day, still hurt every day, still feel loneliness so intense I have trouble breathing sometimes, still feel so tense that I clench my teeth so tightly while sleeping that my jaw pops repeatedly when I'm eating breakfast the next morning.

Yet here I sit, unable to avoid the simple truth that no matter how badly I feel about things, things have gotten better. Today, for the first time that I can remember (literally), I reached out to a friend to a) remind them that it was my birthday and b) ask them to celebrate it with me. There's more to say about this, but this is an issue saturated with deep emotions for me, and I'm at work, and I'm afraid that if I keep pushing it I'll find myself in a position where someone will come up to me with a technical question and I'll just burst into tears, crying, "My mother never loved me enough!" Which isn't true, of course. She loved me plenty. But she did beat me about the head with live trout. Well, that's a lie. It was sardines. And they were dead. Just like. My. Heart. Happy birthday to me.

On Sunday, I took a promotion test at my tae kwon do dojang; given that I'd be there until 1:30 and given that the Whole Foods at which I shop becomes, by noon, so swarmed with yuppies that a plague of locusts looks like the dance floor during a party for 7th graders, I decided that I would do my grocery shopping before the test.

It was snowing all morning and even though the snow plows had been out for several hours by the time I left for the grocery store, there hadn't been enough traffic to grind the snow and slush into the ineffectual thick, gray liquid that all urban snow eventually becomes, much like how even the finest meal becomes a log of shit that you squeeze out your anus.

I was well on my way to the store when I realized that this was traditionally the type of thing I avoided. Under normal circumstances, I would've stayed off the roads until the plows had done their business, maybe even to the next day just to be safe; as it were, I slid a few times and my brakes locked up once as I tried to slow at a stop light.

In short, I was able to go out and accomplish something, something small, granted, but something that I would've normally avoided because of one simple thing: I forgot to be anxious about it. I didn't debate it with myself, not even when I had my first skid. I decided that X would be the best thing for me to do so I went out and did it without falling falling prey to my normal anxieties.

I didn't intellectually work through the anxieties (though I'm sure that was part of it), I didn't get angry at myself and have a dialogue about confronting my fears about driving on the snow. I just went out and did it.

The funny thing is that I was mentally writing this post after I dropped off my groceries and was headed towards the tae kwon do school, ruminating about how this act of just going out and doing something was symbolic of some conquering of fears, some personal development, when I tried to stop at a red light. My brakes locked and I went skidding through the intersection, blaring my horn to let people know I was coming. Fortunately, there was no accident or even close call.

So, lessons from this: 1) not concentrating on things can be a good way to get them done and b) not concentrating on congratulating yourself for not concentrating is an excellent way to avoid a car crash.

OK, I'm just going to confess. I crave approval. I constantly feel pressure to get approval from my co-workers, from my manager, my manager's manager, my tae kwon do perspective, mere acquaintances who have no impact on my life, the bartender on any given night.

I can't, for the life of me, figure out how to control this ravenous desire for approval. I feel like it makes me emotionally vulnerable and contributes to my pessimistic attitude. Maybe I should just start doing heroin so I can develop a new kind of craving.

Part of me wants to be fired from my job so I, unable to find a job in this shitty economy, will have to pack up my car and move back to my hometown. Not move in with my parents, just move back and just give up this city bullshit and spend my time writing. I'm really, really hoping that I don't jinx myself by thinking this/writing this, but I can't help it. The way things are going with dating I feel like it won't really matter if I move back to a city with a much smaller dating pool since my social skills are so fucking weak. At this point, I'll have to rely on the luck of running literally headlong into someone I can fall in love with (hopefully, neither one of us will be in a car).

I've spent a lot of time during the past 5 years playing a military/resource management strategy game called Age of Empire; it's probably mentioned in the earlier archives of this blog. Before Thursday, I hadn't played it in almost a year.

But on Thursday, I found the discs for the game and spent a good chunk of Friday night, and almost all of Saturday, playing the game. At first, I couldn’t remember what it was that I found so appealing about the game. But I was soon re-addicted to it, to the point where I uninstalled it on Saturday afternoon because I felt like I couldn’t do anything productive as long as the game was an option; I reinstalled it with an hour and promptly spent another 2-3 hours playing it..

As Saturday came to a close,I felt a lot of frustration about the fact that I'd spent around 6-8 hours playing the game and had as a result missed a tae kwon do class that I wanted to take. It got me thinking about the balance I (and I'm assuming others) are constantly trying to strike between enjoying life (we've only got one!) and trying to be productive, not only in terms of necessary tasks like housework, but also in areas of self-improvement (like exercise) and hobbies (in my case, reading and writing)

That there is a balance to be sought is a given; if you’re relaxing all the time, you’re not doing anything with your spare time. But if you’re always working or otherwise doing ‘productive’ things, then there’s a very good chance that you’re not taking the time to appreciate your accomplishments.
Where it gets complicated for me is that I have an incredibly hard time being balanced about how I spent my time. I've never been able to strike a balance between the good and bad of everything. For example, pot. I’ve found that, in small doses, pot can be a real boost to my life. I’m a habitually anxious person, to the point where I have to wear a mouthguard at night because I grind my teeth so intensely when I sleep. Smoking a bowl or a joint can put me in a much better mindset and slow time down enough for me to remember to enjoy it. The problem is that I can't just smoke a bowl or a joint a couple of times a week. When I buy a bag of pot, I smoke constantly, putting aside all regular activities, until that pot is gone. As such, it has a negative effect on my life and I’ve more or less given it up.

On the flipside, I wasn’t balance out the energy and effort I put into my job in IT my first few years. Once I was assigned to the software which I’m still supporting today, I was quickly consumed by the work. Between the unstable code of the software and the mental instability of those managing the project, I quickly became burned out and resentful, something I’m still working on getting over years later. As a result, my job has been a steady source of anxiety and dissatisfaction.

So in closing... I have no fucking idea what to do except to keep moving forward and trying to find some balance in my life.