Veni, Veni
I have a stupid Christmas tradition that I started a year ago and hold dearly. Can you call something a tradition if you only started it a year ago? And really, it’s more of an “end of the year” tradition, I guess. Doesn’t matter. It’s a Christmas tradition now and I’m standing by that.
See, I take off of work from the week of Christmas until the new year rolls around. I might drive somewhere out of town or do something special during that time. For the most part, though, all I do is watch the movie Four Brothers as often as possible. I take it with me whenever I go somewhere, especially friends’ houses, and I ask them frequently if they would like to watch it with me. I bring it up quite a bit. My friends are rarely amused by this.
It’s funny to me. And it’s stupid and quite honestly I’m sure it annoys everyone I talk to but at the end of the day it is something I do and something I think it is funny. And if there is one thing that is true about me, it’s that I will go fully in on something I find to be funny, regardless of whether or anyone feels the same.
Perhaps that’s why it’s become a tradition: it allows me to end the year entirely on my own terms. Not terms dictated by the pressures at work, and not terms dictated by the social pressures surrounding me at all times. It’s my own stupid way of embracing what is, for me at least, the most insecure time of the year. Read More…
Spring Cleaning In September
When what you hold dear
Starts to disappear
You can tell what you trust
By the things that you fearYou can look for me baby,
But baby I’ll be long gone
- Fiction Family, “Look For Me Baby”
Maybe things should be simpler. Does it always have to be so difficult to be an adult? Bills keep coming in and demanding the resources that you’ve traded in so much of your time, your very existence, in order to acquire. Surely life could be different than this, and if not, at least it could be simpler. Read More…
Leave A Trace (Or, I Have ADHD And Apparently I Love The Feeling Of Being Overwhelmed)
The timer on an eBay auction can be my worst enemy. It sits there, saying “You’re almost out of time!” as if whatever item is available will never be seen anywhere ever again. This is the key to the promised land, and if you miss it now, you will regret it. And it’s really funny how frequently I buy into that idea and feel that regret. It’s a trap for me; one that I slip into all the time.
It’s because I don’t know what to do with regret. If I’m going to be honest here, and if I’m going to continue writing this post with wherever it might end up, I have to admit my biggest fear in the world. And no, my biggest fear is not having to call a stranger on the phone or a surprise cockroach charging me, even though those things cause me the greatest amounts of anxiety.
I am terrified of looking back years from now and realizing I misused my time. Terrified that when I’m gone, I’ll leave no trace of who I was. Read More…
John
I met John years ago in what feels now like a totally different life. He was an experienced disk jockey at the classic rock radio station, and I was a part-time employee and college student. He had dedicated a great deal of his life to making it in this business, and I was wondering whether I even cared enough to try.
If I learned anything from my brief time working in radio, it was that you had to be married to the job in every sort of way in order to make it anywhere. My time certainly was brief. Just barely over a year as a paid intern and part-time weekend shift kid before they told me via email that they were having to do away with all us little people. Downsized via email. Odd experience.
The job took dedication that I didn’t have. A lot of the people who worked for years in the business to have a stable career didn’t have what most could consider a stable life outside of it. At least, the ones I interacted with were like that. Granted, they were often the ones at the classic rock part of the studio, so it could very well be that the ones working in oldies and news had more going for them. I didn’t know them as well. Read More…
PODCAST: EPL Preview Show!
I haven’t linked to a podcast here in a while, but then again, I don’t write here often at all it seems.
I am VERY excited, though, to link to this podcast, because it’s a preview of one of my favorite things in the world: the English Premier League. My friends Zach Osborn and Alex Lebl join me to talk about some of the top teams from last season, trying to see if they’ve made the right moves to stay on top going into the new year.
Click here for a direct link to the episode, click here to find my sports podcast Running Out The Clock on iTunes, or click here for a really weird looking page that the show pops up on. Whatever works.
But wait, there’s more! Read More…
Jurassic World (Or, That Time I Felt Like I Was Five Again)
[SPOILERS SPOILERS OH SO MANY SPOILERS PLEASE DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT THIS UNTIL YOU’VE SEEN THE MOVIE] Read More…
Doing The Work Well Is Worth It (Or, I Started This Blog Four Years Ago Today And I’m Fine With Not Having Anything To Show For It)
These days it seems as though a lot of my writing ideas come from conversations with others that cause me to think about things I might not have thought about before. Or maybe to view it in a different way than I have in the past. Not an amazing concept, I realize, since people seeing things from a different perspective is sort of how life works.
A particular conversation I had in the past week was with a guitar playing friend of mine. He had always been a guitarist, and we met when he was in school and was studying guitar. In recent years, he had relocated to a part of the country that bred more songwriters and he was expanding into the full art of songwriting. Basically, uncharted territory for himself.
Why do that? Why branch out from what you have done for your whole life? Well, simple: because doing the work well is worth it. The finished product is a nice result, but perhaps too much focus is placed on it. Michelangelo had a fine résumé built for himself before he was commissioned for the Sistine Chapel. The grand masterpiece doesn’t happen overnight, and without his early work, he doesn’t get the recognition, and therefore Sistine goes elsewhere. Read More…
