Rapid Fire Stuffs

Got a girlfriend
Got an apartment
Got more bills
Got more games
Got better internet
Got better at Starcraft for a while but then
Got Civilization V and it's all for nothing now

Spent more time at her place than mine
Spent more money on bills than ever
Spent more time on Netflix than Xbox
Spent more on curry than anyone could have guessed

Working on my story, still
Working on an actual comic soon
Working on getting back into writing classes
Working on getting a foothold into writing on my own site, my God, too many things

Tired
Bored
Alone (until Tuesday)
Excited (for writing)


I think that's everything. My excuse for not going over all of this in much finer details is that I was too busy living it. Documenting things can be hard when you don't hold yourself to a consistent routine. I guess I can sat least talk about where my mind has been at since moving:

Moving out was not exciting, scary, or anything other than overdue. My mom kept telling me that it would hit me, either sooner or later. It didn't. I was never afraid. I was never excited. To be honest, the most it ever was was embarrassing. It felt overdue. It felt like a delayed step into adulthood. It felt like every moment before was an excuse to not grow up, go outside, and live a life. And it permeates a lot of my old writing. I was talking to Felicia (my girlfriend for those who don't know already) about my Kendall post. It seems like it's from another era, but in reality it was only a month or two before I met Felicia. Here's how long it feels like it has been: I had to go back to the aforementioned post to remember her name, just now. Anyhow, just reading that perspective, it leaks a lot of insecurity. It reads like it is: a worried, self-assuring post from a kid who hasn't moved out yet. Moving out in a way feels like it's enabled me to take on more adult emotional capabilities. Not more complex, just more grounded. If I could do it over again in my present circumstances, I'd do a lot better in just about every way. But I wouldn't, because fucking up there ultimately led to who I'm with now.

It seems to me that for a smart person, it's easy to let fear utilize your intelligence to justify avoiding living your life. It's easy to make excuses for why you can't go out, can't spend time with your friends, can't do anything. There will always be work. There will always be obligations. And different will always be scary. But how long can you use those things to avoid seeing the world? For all we know, you've only got one shot at it. It just feels like there's no justification for not challenging everything, including your perception of your own contentedness. All I ever wanted to do as a kid is be an adult, to be the guy that knows his shit, and have the requisite confidence that comes with it. Well, now I've hit the edge of the beginning. Now I'm old enough to technically fill a small margin of those expectations. And now it's different. Now that I have a taste for being a man, what I really want is to absorb. As a kid, I wanted to meet what I felt was a societal expectation, to have a certain station superior to most. In short, to be better than most people. And this may just be my bias talking but I feel like a lot of people probably feel that way. But over time, I'm starting to find myself caring less and less about those sort of things. They just don't seem fulfilling at all. What I feel like I want now is to be free of that sort of thinking. Or not to be free, but to contextualize it in a place I feel it deserves, as a part of a child's mentality. My obsession has become understanding what leads people to become trapped within their own perspective. I see people who are content to be exactly what they are and nothing more. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, I think it's important to embrace your own identity. But I also wonder why they don't want to be something more, too. I have and continue to take pleasure in dismantling my own reasoning and thought processes. Why do I feel this? Why do I think that the sum of knowledge I have on x is sufficient? How does my favoring bias towards myself affect my view on this? These are all things that I think are really important to understand. I think it's dangerous to assume anything about yourself, or to feel that you're going to remain the same person over time, across experiences. What's true about me now may not be tomorrow. And that goes counter to the idea of concrete personality traits, it seems. So what constitutes a personality-defining trait and what constitutes a trait that may only be temporary? What evolves and what only changes? I feel like my life is in this way a series of interesting social experiments, while still being just a normal human experience. I don't mean that first part of the sentence to sound as anti-septic as it's coming across, because while one of the goals is to attempt to understand myself, the primary goal is to be able to look back on my times and be contented with the decisions I made.

I think most people spent each era of their lives wishing they could go back and redo the previous ones now that they know more about themselves and the world. I was thinking today as Make Me Bad by Korn came on my music player, "my god, if I had realized how much of an influence I was on my stepbrothers, who knows how my relationship with them and their relationship with music would be different now!" You see, back around the time when Issues came out, my older brother Roman was not into music like Korn at all. I used to listen sort of ashamedly on my own little CD player and headphones, because I didn't want to foist my tastes upon people that didn't share them. Not because it would inconvenience them, but because it would embarrass me. That's an important distinction in terms of motivation. Anyhow, the song Somebody, Someone came on one of these times, and I thought, "we used to watch horror movies when we were younger, even though he doesn't like this band, he might like this first part of the song." I was hoping to get ten seconds of validation from someone I considered my superior.



It turns out he did like it, and it planted a seed. Soon, he turned around completely on the band, and when the music video for this very song came out on MTV, we would totally get into it.



Still, I had a lot of trepidation about sharing music. But as time went on and that era of my life came closer to ending, I had a burgeoning realization that Roman in a very real and yet still older brother way looked up to my taste in music. My tastes helped bring more definition to his, and the unwitting encouragement of enjoyment spurred mine in directions it may never have gone. I got Satellite by POD because of (seriously) one song, and partially because the music video was cool:



I remember bringing this album over with the intent of listening to it with them. I ended up going on a walk to the store. I liked exploring the world in this way at the time. I was limited in just how far I could go, and there was something freeing about not being beholden to a more protective parent who'd at the very least ask questions or tell me to be careful, both things that at the time believe it or not could be enough of a nerve-inspiring hassle to make me not bother. Anyhow, I came back from the store and Roman was playing Hydro Thunder on N64 and telling me, "This CD is SO GOOD." That felt like a victory for me. It was peer acceptance in the purest sense. It was someone else telling me "what you feel is totally correct." But the honest truth is that this realization and validation came much sooner, although I was too young to appreciate it. We were just little kids when Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morisette came out. Much, much too young to grasp the actual meaning of the lyrics, or possibly detect dad's fear that us putting this album on repeat surely meant at least one of us had to be gay.


Hearing this song 40,000 times coming through the bedroom door had to be disconcerting, and possibly the only moment that alleviated this is when he called us down because this music video happened to be on and we ALL said, "SHE IS SO PRETTY." This album was either lent to me by my mom, or taken from her (probably the latter) and is my first real moment of musical bonding with my other family. This also happened when one of us got hold of the Bare Naked Ladies' album with One Week on it.



Me, Travis, Roman, and Roman's friend Matt all stood around the stereo, holding the liner notes that had the lyrics to this song, and tried to sing and keep up with it. Far more than one time. Seriously. And at that time, taste was so strongly communally oriented that I can't even say for sure who first liked the song. Not to say this worked every time, because back when the Spice Girls were popular, Roman brought home the CD and tried to get us into it. It didn't take, but at least from my perspective, my desire for acceptance kept me from outright making fun of him, because I didn't want to damage this thing that I for some reason perceived we all had.

And in at least one occasion, my dad also unwittingly had a hand in this, when a coworker lent him a CD with a song that made him laugh.



My dad didn't think all to much of this band beyond this song, Dune Buggy and We're Not Gonna Make It, and honestly, before I bought this CD, I didn't even realize there were more than 5 or 6 songs on it. But we LOVED this song, and we listened to it again, and again, and again. I remember this all very clearly, and this ended up becoming the first album that I ever bought with my own money.

My overarching point is, knowing all these things, if given the chance, I could easily redo this entire era of my childhood better. I would have a lot more confidence in my own place in the dynamic. I could easily have brought in a lot more music, and maybe even redefined the (for lack of a better term) balance of power amongst my brothers. But these memories are a product of that unknown fumbling, that lack of confidence in myself. That experience of being embarrassed, and hopeful, slightly ashamed and yet eager, they all form into one rich narrative that defines a large part of who I am now, and who I'll always be. The value of screwing up is so often understated in the world. It always has a negative connotation. But some of my fondest memories are a direct result of mistakes, and in retrospect, many of them are so endearing because they're embarrassing. It's impossible to calculate the exact synthesis of anyone's personality, but you can very easily say that a lot of my eccentricities today owe themselves to the fact that for 8 months after Tenchu came out, I was the kind of kid who thought I sounded EXACTLY like the soldier that says, "WHAT?" when you make too much noise, and the basis of that belief turned into a game we played in the backyard pool for literally years. I was the kid who read a two sentence synopsis of Resident Evil, and then not only completely fabricated a plot for three games on the spot to impress Roman's friends, but then decided we should film a parody/homage to each of them. And we did. Putting this to paper makes me realize two things: that embarrassment also gets a bad rap, and that our desires as children towards acceptance can lead us to hilariously awesome and ridiculous circumstances and ideas, and the formulation and execution of those ideas define who we are.

I went pretty far into the memory pool here and kind of lost my page, so I guess what I'm trying to say is that just because we're adults, doesn't mean we should be any different. Instead of regretting the mistakes we made as younger people, we should embrace them for what the realization of them has brought to us in our current places. We live in a culture that seems to have a fetish for shaming others, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that shame is exactly the wrong emotion to have over a lot of our fuckups. Right now, I really feel like there is never a more perfect time than the moment you inhabit now to commit to bold foolishness. And the only way to do that is to step outside of the tiny worlds we've made comfortable for ourselves.