I sometimes feel the need to punish people that do things that I consider wrong. Since I’m usually so non-confrontational, the way I ‘punish’ someone is through subtle and non-aggressive ways. I tend to want to hurt people emotionally, because I feel emotionally hurt by them. In the end, I’m usually the one getting hurt more than they are.
So I decided to try to understand why I do this. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been getting over another cold thing for the past couple of days. It doesn’t seem as bad as the one I had a few weeks ago, so hopefully I’ll be over it in the next few days.
Today it occurred to me that I’m an adult. Not that I’d forgotten that fact; I guess I just haven’t consciously thought about it in a while. I was lying in bed, and I just happened to think about it.
I’m 26 years old. I’ve been supporting myself for three and a half years now. I can do whatever the hell I want to do (within reason). I could quit my job if I felt like it. I could go back to school. I could move away and start a new life somewhere. Not that I think doing any of those things is a good idea right now. But I could.
It’s sort of amazing what the comfort of a routine can do. Doing the expected. I went to college, graduated, and found a job. I like my job, so I keep doing it. It (almost) never occurs to me that something drastic will happen, and so I keep living my life. One day rolls into the next day, and time flies by. Things change incrementally most of the time.
But then again, I’m just saying that because most things are okay in my universe right now. In fact, they’ve only become that way very recently. My life has been filled with turmoil since I graduated. I’m merely experiencing a lull in the action. But how much turmoil could I really have gone through if I can just casually dismiss it now that things are okay for the moment? I don’t really have any well-formed conclusion to this train of thought; just thinking aloud.
Maybe with age comes the realization that life is hard, and that’s just the way it is. I feel like it’s impossible to live a certain amount of time and not come to that conclusion. If one accepts that truth, then the bumps in the road are expected, and it’s not that big of a deal anymore. The powers of fate and destiny aren’t somehow geared against one person specifically. Everyone is screwed.
We all have to go through the same crap. “The human condition.” Maybe that’s a cynical way to look at things. I also think it takes an extraordinary feat to not be cynical after a certain amount of time. But hey, we all do what we can with what we were given. It’s a cliché. The older I get, the more meaning I find in the stupid sayings I heard all the time as a kid.
In the last post I mentioned that I don’t feel the love from my group of friends all the time. That’s not really true at all, I decided. Everyone has their own way of showing love.
For a couple of weeks now, I’ve made some changes in my life. I’ve been consistently getting up early everyday, doing exercises, and making it to work on time. Technically, there isn’t really an “on time” at my work; I just have to be there for 8 hours. But still, I’ve been getting to work consistently earlier than usual.
Over the weekend I bought new running shoes and went running for the first time in a year and a half or something. Consequently, I’m pretty sore today. My current goal is to run every other day for a while, and maybe start training in January for the half marathon that happens in April.
Also, I’ve been coding more in my off time on side projects just for fun.
I think that what started me on all of this is a talk at RubyConf about fear. It was about how fear can prevent you from doing the things you want to do. That’s mainly true for me when it comes to completing things (like side-projects). When I get to the point where continuing something is a little harder than it used to be, I get discouraged or frustrated, and I quit. Something about that talk made me realize what I had been doing.
I try to be consistent in my life. I think the most evident part of that is my friendships, but now I’m trying to apply it to other areas of my life. I don’t like leaving things unfinished. I have a somewhat high threshold for pain when it comes to seeing things to completion. The problem is that sometimes I don’t consider certain things worth finishing. The choice to finish something is difficult, because it means pushing through the hard times to get it done. I think I’ve become a little bit more resolute about making the tough choice.
I like running because it pushes me physically and mentally to just keep going. One foot in front of the other.
I think my life is going in the right direction now, maybe for the first time in a while. I feel like I’m getting things together. Hopefully I can keep it going.
This weekend was the rumble. It was 48 hours of coding madness, and it was a blast. We had so much fun. You can find our app here. You’ll need an OpenID account to access it. I recommend ClaimID. Apparently the Flickr and AOL OpenID interfaces don’t work with our app. 
(fixed!)
Considering that we only had 48 hours, a team member who had to bail halfway through due to other plans, a team member or two who might’ve been a bit rusty on Rails and/or git development, and no designer (except for my gimpy designing skills), I think we did a pretty kick-ass job. We were running on as little sleep as we could get away with. A couple of us brought sleeping bags and slept in the office. It was pretty awesome.
I think that our app is probably a little bit above average as far as all the apps people came up with, but there are some AMAZING apps out there, so I’ll be pretty surprised if we place. But man, it was so much fun. At the very least, we have a great start to an application that has a lot of potential to be really cool. If you’re feeling generous, go register to vote at the Rails Rumble website, and vote for us! =)
Everyone on our team took today off work. I caught up on sleep a little bit last night, but I’m still behind. I’m probably going to crash pretty soon, as I’m still exhausted. Read the rest of this entry »
One thing I’ve learned about mental health over the years is that it’s important to be proactive. Figure out what your subconscious needs and act on it. It’s way better than not doing anything. Basically the reason I try to be proactive is because the alternative really, really sucks. Anxiety, shortness of breath, muscle cramps, bad news all around.
Lately it has started to get bad. My anxiety isn’t really bad yet, but it’s getting there. On the way to work today I decided that I needed to do something about it, and that decision alone made me feel a little better.
The story for what’s going on with me right now goes back a few years, maybe even longer than that. Over the past few years since I graduated from college, one by one my closest friends have “let me down”. Maybe they were a little insensitive to my feelings, or maybe there wasn’t quite enough communication. It’s been a cycle. I rely too heavily on one of my friends, and then they pull away from me a little bit to pursue a girlfriend or a job, and my equilibrium gets fucked up.
I blamed lots of things. I blamed them for abandoning me. I blamed their girlfriends for taking my friends away from me. I blamed myself for relying on them too much. But in the end, blaming people doesn’t solve anything. The real reasons why I felt hurt or betrayed or abandoned or whatever is because I counted on them for things that humans just can’t possible provide me enough of: security and self-esteem.
People fail. That’s just how we are. We fail. Friends fail. Parents fail. Children fail. Everyone fails sometimes. So if everyone fails, who can I rely on? The only logical answer left to me, is God. I’ve maybe been to a church service once or twice in the last 6 or 7 years, and I’ve been generally happier as a result of not going. But I think it’s time to give it a shot again, because I don’t really know what else to do.
A month ago Mitch was talking about just this topic, and it stirred a little something in my spirit. I don’t really know what’s going to happen, but I’m tired of being anxious. I still don’t like a lot of things about church, like the legalism and the political and emotional bullshit, but I’m going to try to go to a few different churches and see what happens. The first step I made to get help when I was depressed after high school was really hard, too, but eventually it changed my life for the better.
I’ve felt this coming on for a long time, and I knew it would happen eventually. I knew I would go back to God eventually when all of my pain from high school maybe started to scar over. When I had maybe unlearned some of the poison that was put into me by legalism. And maybe this is the time for it to happen. I’m a little bit wary, but I’m also a little bit excited to be free from this.
~
In other news, I discovered the band Justice the other day when I was listening to Marketplace on NPR. I dig them. Kudos to NPR for playing kick-ass music. Funnily enough, Justice is from France, and so is Daft Punk, and so is AIR. Why are so many bands I like coming from France?!
