Tag: life

2025: a retrospective

Posted on by xxjgputnamxx

Wow, what happened this year? I have no idea. It went by pretty damn fast if you ask me. That seems to happen more and more as I get older though. Go figure. Definitely wasn’t anything to write home about honestly. A lot of nonsense, a lot of BS, not a lot of memorable moments really. I took a bunch of international trips and those were sort of fun but again, not great. Don’t feel like I accomplished much, made many new friendships, or contributed in a very meaningful way to any cause I care deeply about.

However, just before Christmas, I did attend a meditation retreat where I felt genuinely good about myself and what I was doing. Honestly, that may have been the highlight of this year for me. Nothing went seriously wrong and no one flipped their sh-t at me and I didn’t feel the urge to strangle anyone. It was only a few days long but I gotta say, I really liked it. It was almost like being back at college for a few days.

And actually, another thing I did which I was quite proud of, now that I think of it, I wrote an annual message directed to my college graduating class for my alumni association of which I am now a participating member. Becoming involved with my alumni association feels like a bit of a crapshoot for me at the moment, like “What do I really aim to accomplish by reconnecting with them?” but I’m doing it so we’ll see. I liked the tone I struck in the message quite a bit and it just felt good to write something in a semi-professional context and have it be sent to hundreds of people. I felt official and competent. I love that. One of my favorite feelings in the whole universe: feeling competent. And writing this letter definitely made me feel that way.

So I guess, now that I’m thinking about it, there have been a few good things that happened this year. Also, I’m getting ready to build a house on a lot I now own in another part of the city I live in but that has been kinda crazy: getting permits, working with builders, negotiating the design with the architect (who is also my father), sh-tting my pants thinking about how much money it is costing, etc etc. So that MIGHT be cool at some point but right now it is too abstract and scary and full of hassles to be cool. Don’t get me wrong, it SEEMS like it WILL be cool at some point but so far it’s been a bit crazy.

I stand upon the brink of an entirely new year as I have done many times in the past. Thinking about it logically, nothing is likely to be all that different but I want it to be. I want this year to be the one when I really drive home my points, when I do the things I’ve been avoiding, when I don’t mentally cower in front of the contemplation of everything that could go wrong for me, when I don’t wallow in self-pity, when I have the courage to follow through on what I think is right no matter what other people are suggesting… When I stop searching for that elusive “problem” or “problems” that I KNOW I have but can never discover exactly what it is… When I stop thinking of myself as deficient, not good enough, unsuccessful, inept, fundamentally flawed. I want this year to be the year I say to myself, “I CAN DO IT” and really believe it!

Maybe I’m getting my hopes up a bit high. But I just want to shrug off all the nonsense that may or may not be happening around me and get my side of things straight. Thanks for reading my post. Happy holidays and happy new years to everyone! Let’s get it.

Why?

Posted on by xxjgputnamxx

Someone has just booted me out of their little world: an online friend who I never actually met in person. It seems this is becoming a pattern in my life: getting kicked out of people’s lives, organizations, establishments, so on and so forth. It’s a lot like being fired though when it happens with just another person, there’s no danger to personal finance. It has happened to me more than I’d like to admit: suddenly and more or less without explanation, being unceremoniously dropped from the universe of another. Honestly, looking back, it really does seem to happen to me a lot. Whenever it does, it leaves me reeling, staggering almost, attempting to understand what went wrong and what role (if any) I played in the separation. The 6 million dollar question: What did I do? What did I do to bring this about? Was it my fault? Could it have been prevented if I had just been smarter, more tactful, more respectful, more subservient, more aggressive, etc etc. Or was it going to happen no matter what I did or did not do? Was my connection to this person/place/organization bound to be severed by he/she/it/them eventually no matter how nice I was to them, how respectfully I behaved, how cleverly I stoked the fires of our connection?

When money is involved, it’s usually worse but it’s always at least a little bit painful and very stultifying whether money is involved or not. It’s actually more scary than anything: to be dropped like an object of some kind and almost feel yourself hit the floor so to speak.

Conflict immediately arises in my mind: should I attempt to understand what went wrong and go over the details to ensure this doesn’t happen again? Or should I dismiss it, write it off as just another one of those things that seems to happen to me (all the time)? On the one hand, I don’t to dwell on negative events that are in the past. They happened, there’s nothing I can do about it. But on the other, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” Is that what has been happening I wonder? Am I just not learning from my mistakes? Or is it just that every time these things happen to me, it’s just an unavoidable part of life, something I’m fated to continue experiencing until the day I die? And thus, if that’s true, then there’s utterly no point to paying any attention to them after they’re over because they will continue to happen whether I learn from them or not.

They are always disconcerting and stultifying as I mentioned earlier.

Part of me deeply believes that these things happen to me only because God has chosen for me a heavy burden involving the ostracism from and ridicule of many people outside of myself. This has always been my experience regardless of where or when I find myself. Hence, it would seem that it’s not really within my power to control or even affect.

Meditation has taught me that the events of one’s life are less important than how we “react” to those events and part of me also knows that this is at least partially true if not entirely true. But controlling one’s reactions is most certainly easier said than done. Science in fact teaches us that, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Hence, if someone or something “acts” upon me or my life, a reaction is a foregone conclusion. Which is correct? Meditation or science? Who knows.

Part of me also believes that every difficult experience I endure is an honorable one in some way. And everytime someone or something rejects me, drops me from their universe, they are in fact showing how unworthy of my time and attention they have always been. They are demonstrating how shallow and weak they are by refusing to give me the benefit of the doubt, another chance, or the time it takes to understand where I’m coming from.

But of course, the fact that it seems to happen to me a lot makes me wonder: is it really my fault? Is it something I need to change about myself that people keep shutting me down? The answer to that probably depends on who you ask I suppose. But if it doesn’t and the answer is yes across the board, that is more depressing than I care to contemplate.

I always come away from these sorts of things wanting answers and getting none. Like I said before: what did I do that was so wrong? It’s hard to make changes when you don’t know what you need to change…

New Job

Posted on by xxjgputnamxx

So I’ve started a new job. It’s at a manufacturing company about a 30 minute drive from where I live right now. I think that’s a pretty reasonable commuting distance. I’ve been there for about a week and a half so far. I’ve had two other different jobs in the past 9 months or so and they haven’t worked out for various reasons. This one seems like it could work. So allow me to be stupidly adult and modern for a moment and say “I think my work could work for me.” I’ve always subtly detested that phrase: “It (doesn’t) work(s) for you.” I don’t know why.

Many exciting things seem to be happening in my life at the moment: new job, making my car sportier and flashier via various modifications, taking a trip to the Southwestern United States with my dad in the next week or so but… I feel quite sad for some reason. Like a lot of the things I wanted when I was younger haven’t come to pass and like despite being marginally successful by some measures, I am woefully inadequate by others. It just seems like the harder I try the more things seem to go astray somehow. Gaging what is and is not acceptable action seems more difficult than ever for me.

Life is hard, it always has been, it always will be. But I always feel like there ought to be more tools at my disposal for turning life’s many difficulties to my advantage in one way or another. And, yes I admit, I always feel like things are just plain worse for me than for others. Experience and conventional wisdom tell me that that is simply not true, that everyone’s burden is unique, that it’s all relative and I occupy a certain space on the spectrum of things with some people having an easier time of it than me and others having a more difficult time than I am. But goddamnit, it just FEELS so true, the thought that life is just plain harder for me than anyone else.

I don’t know much about history, anyone’s or anything’s besides my own and I don’t pretend to. I think of myself a bit like Sherlock Holmes in that he once commented to Watson, after Watson told him that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around (I think that was the factoid), that he found that piece of trivia moderately interesting but that he would now put all his energies into forgetting it completely and entirely. This flabbergasted Watson to say the least but Holmes explained that he had all the knowledge in his mind more or less neatly arranged and a factoid like the one he just heard would only serve to clutter things up and get in the way of other things he was more concerned with remembering. I have no real interest in history and I imagine that little pieces of historical fact would only serve to clutter up my mind and get in the way of other things I’d rather keep there.

What am I trying to say…. I don’t know. I’m 41 years old and I feel quite beaten down by life to tell you the truth. Like the harder I try to just go out there in the world and live, the more the universe tries to make things difficult for me. I wonder if I will ever look out upon the world from some as-yet-unknown vantage point surveying my surroundings and say to myself, “Life is good, I’m happy where I am, I’ve done things I’m proud of, and I am at peace with the way things are.” And mean it. I just don’t know.

I hope this job proves to be interesting, lucrative, and doable. Bye for now.

Dreams

Posted on by xxjgputnamxx

I was thinking today as I ate my breakfast, or maybe it was lunch, at any rate it was my first meal of the day, that people always talk about dreams as something desirable beyond all else. It goes without saying that if you have “realized a dream” in some way, you’ve accomplished or achieved something truly remarkable, at least according to your own standards. It’s like “What’s better than a dream?”… I’m just saying in the world of today, of America, of the 21st Century, I don’t know what, it’s just… universally accepted that if you have “made a dream come true,” there really is nothing left to seek after, am I right? A dream is the embodiment of the highest accomplishment a human being can hope for is it not? Maybe… Maybe not. At least, in the America I grew up in, it was pretty f—ing important.

But… at breakfast, or lunch, or whatever it was today, I realized something. I realized that, at their core, dreams… don’t make any sense. That’s a fundamentally defining characteristic of all dreams is it not? And so what can one conclude from that? Well, I would say that, basically, most people’s highest aspirations consist of seeking to realize or achieve something (a dream) that doesn’t make any sense.

People talk about “following your dreams” do they not? And if we can all agree that, almost across the board, dreams are inherently nonsensical things, then everyone advocating the idea of “following your dreams” is, by extension, advocating “following something that doesn’t make any sense.”

I’ve heard that lucid dreams can sometimes be less bizarre and nonsensical than regular dreams but that’s neither here nor there really since most people don’t know anything about lucid dreams.

I guess something deep down in me really takes issue with the idea of devoting so much time and energy to something that fundamentally has no order and no reason. It’s almost as if we revere dreams as something with a logic and sensibility all their own that we could never hope to understand, making the pursuit of them inherently worthwhile. Maybe its a zero-sum thing: like, well if you’re not going after your dreams, you’re going to wind up in your nightmares so it doesn’t really matter if they make sense or not because they’re better than nightmares.

On the other hand, isn’t regular life also more or less nonsensical? Maybe we just ascribe meaning and order to things that essentially don’t have any and thereby convince ourselves that dreams are mostly nonsense while life more or less makes sense. I can say from personal experience that I’ve always considered life to be kind of nuts, like not much different from a strange dream.

That’s more or less all I’ve got to say about it. I just wanted to share this revelation… that many people spend most of their lives pursuing things that… are totally bizarre and absurd.

Life after 40

Posted on by xxjgputnamxx

When I was a kid, I never thought much about what my life would be like when I got older. I was just too busy being miserable, being happy, playing sports, doing schoolwork, crushing on this or that girl, jumping on the trampoline in our backyard beneath the old oak tree, mowing the lawn, playing tennis, getting my license, etc etc. I don’t know exactly what I did with my time when I was younger but I didn’t waste it worrying about the future, I’m pretty sure about that.

So what really happens after you turn 40 years old? Well, obviously anybody past the age of 40 knows the answer to that question but everybody’s different am I right? I guess what I mean by that is: life after 40 for you won’t be the same as life after 40 for me. Maybe that’s obvious too but I think it deserves to be pointed out.

In some ways, the media would have you believe that, for all intents and purposes, you’re pretty much dead after you turn 40. There are so few representations of anybody outside of their teens, 20’s, and 30’s in mainstream media. It’s almost like the whole world forgets you exist once you no longer fall into one of those age brackets. You’re dead exactly, just nobody really pays much attention to you anymore. Maybe they never did in the first place even when you were younger but it’s like passing 40, they’re less concerned with you than ever. Does this sound depressing? I don’t mean it to. I’m just trying to draw attention to the idea that, past a certain age, well, it’s kind of up to you to decide what’s true and what isn’t. And by that, I just mean, there are fewer signposts and role models and images telling you who you ought to be, what you ought to look like, how you ought to behave, so on and so forth. The makers of those things tend to focus on a younger crowd.

So… is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is it liberating? Confusing? Sad? Do you have to unlearn all the crap they crammed down your throat when you were younger about what’s important in life?

Many people say that as middle age wears on, happiness increases. At least, a great deal of research supports that assertion as far as I know. And I think it’s very much because the media doesn’t make such a fuss about people past 40.

I turned 40 a little over a year ago and I feel like I’m still waiting for that whole “happiness” thing to happen. Maybe I’m just being impatient and I need to give it another year or so.

There’s a quote from a movie called “Waking Life” (one of my absolute favorites) in which a character utters the cryptic soundbyte: “…the systematic questioning of the idea of happiness.” Basically, he’s talking about feeling disillusioned with the world and how he and his compatriots ought to slough off the ideas and ambitions foisted upon them by their elders in an effort to… i dunno, be more authentic. A defining characteristic of this character and the group he finds himself in, however, is his (their) age. They’re clearly headstrong, idealistic young men. Kinda doesn’t sound like something an older man might say but who knows? After losing a bunch of worldly things like a house, a job, a wife, maybe someone older might redefine (or at least try to) what happiness is all about.

I’ll certainly say the pace has slowed significantly. It’s not quite as go, go, go anymore. Maybe it will be again one day but right now, it’s definitely not like that. I often feel listless and unsure about the choices I’ve made that have led me to where I am now. Like, what would life be like if I had done X instead of Y? But it’s sort of pointless to think about those things. Wasted mental energy or something.

Anyway, I’ve got some things coming up this year I’m really looking forward to and it’s never over till it’s over as they say. Who knows what life as an old geezer has in store for me… 😉

The end o’ summer

Posted on by xxjgputnamxx

I’ve had a pretty ridiculous summer. Not in a wet and wild, I got blackout drunk in Cancun and scored with a million chicks kinda ridiculous though. More like I’ve had to deal with massive amounts of bullshit but I’m still here and I keep climbing up that tiny little end of my rope kinda ridiculous. That might sound “negative” I realize but it has been a difficult summer and I’m glad that fall is here.

A lot is changing in my life and most of it seems like its for the best. You never really know what you’re getting in this new century though the way I see it, and I think of this new millenium kinda like this game called Samorost 3. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it but basically, there’s a lot of little things you can do and click on in the game and you never quite know what you’re accomplishing no matter what you do.

I mean, we like to think of life as this linear progression of events with a beginning a middle and an end but when you’re really living it, it’s never quite so cut and dried. You might think of that as opening up a lot of excuses, which it does, like “I had no idea my relationship with that stripper would turn out so badly, that’s life,” or “Buying a used car from a guy on craigslist with an eyepatch and not getting it checked out beforehand seemed like such a good idea at the time” and so forth. But truthfully, we do the best we can with the information we have available to us at the moment (for the most part). I know I do.

I met with a career advisor today. I’ve met with him in the past but today was a day for “catching up.” I mentioned something about fitness which seemed to resonate deeply with him and he practically implored me to write something about it.

To give you some background, I was very into exercise, going to the gym, and staying in shape for the last 3 to 4 years. I mean I still am but the way I think fundamentally about fitness has changed a lot since I started this fitness journey of mine. Initially, I really wanted to change my appearance. I wanted to be physically imposing more than anything. I wanted to exude that “don’t mess with me or you’ll be sorry” vibe as I walked down the street. But it seemed like the harder I worked at being and looking tough, the more opposition I got from the outside world. I felt more threatened rather than less. The world can be a very antagonistic place when you are intentional about getting the better of it. It seems to me, if you keep your intentions to yourself, people tend to leave you alone. But then how do you go about pursuing your intentions??? Whatever.

My point was, when talking about this with my career advisor earlier, that doing something for the wrong reasons, more often than not, will benefit you in the short term but hurt you in the long run. I’m pretty sure I was into fitness for the wrong reasons. And I realized this and I halted the pursuit of my goals until I could figure out what the right reasons were.

Who knows though? I mean, maybe I would have been fine just continuing along the way things were, working out and getting jacked just because I wanted to intimidate people. Like I said, you never know what you’re getting in this new century.

Ultimately, I think I will be better off when I really get my feet under me and figure out what’s so great about working out, why I love it, and what part of the fitness world I want to be a part of. It’s a big place. And being physically fit isn’t the same thing as being well. I think at least some degree of wellness must be present if true physical fitness is to be obtained.