Bryan’s Ramblings

The past year or so has afforded me quite a few opportunities to contemplate and think about an assortment of deeply psychological topics about my life or life in general. These moments are often catalyzed by discussion with friends, good books and movies, or other thought provoking events. My favorite times are when I can look back on each day of the week and find one of these moments in each of the previous days. This has been one of those weeks.

Early in the week I was able to reflect on relationships, religion and politics. As if that weren’t enough, I went on to ponder ambition, communication and wellness. To top it all off I ended the week by analyzing the importance of family, race, happiness and love. That is one heck of a week. The only thing lacking was the consideration of sleep.

I suppose it all started on the weekend of my birthday and continued on from there. Birthdays inherently force one to think about the past, the present, and the future. Mine was no different this year. I took advantage of the fact that I got to be surrounded by so many of the people that I most care about.

The funny thing about birthdays is that, in a sense, in only a single day, age gets incremented by one whole year. Of course, the reality is that a person uses the entire year for growth and the label is only applied on that one day. I guess it’s that old battle of age vs. experience.

What I’m trying to say is that I owe who I am today to all the people who have influenced me and helped me grow over the past year. This includes everybody who has had some impact on my life since November 6, 2004. I got to spend November 6, 2005 and the rest of this past week with all of the important ones who are still in my life and who continue to help me learn and grow every day. This is my ultimate thank you note to those people, who are really the only people who would probably bother to read this anyway.

In general, I think most people would consider me a fairly cynical person. I don’t think I’d necessarily disagree with this assessment, but it does affect me, and I am actually often offended by it. I don’t strive to be cynical; cynicism just finds me. Even so, every time it is pointed out to me, I think, “I need to be a more positive person.” For the most part, I surround myself with positive people, and most of the time I am about has happy-go-lucky as they come. Unfortunately “easy-going” does not equal “positive”. In fact, I’ve found that being care-free is often what leads to this jaded negativity that I must exude. When you don’t really mind things very much, you tend to let bad things happen without really noticing them. When these things build up over time, they eventually result in some sort of minor explosion that tends to look something like pessimism. Invariably, for me anyway, it isn’t really anything negative as much as it is a form of venting designed to help calm down a series of strong emotions. Still, I’m such a stubborn soul that I’ll take my own ranting to heart and go on believing whatever brash opinions I’ve formed in my state of conjecture. Then they stick around for as long as possible until someone pokes holes in their thin existence and I start questioning myself (after first nobly defending my original position of course).

The flip side of this, however, is the potential of being so overly positive about everything that you end up seeing everything through rose-colored glasses. This is not a place I want to be. I’ve known a lot of people who have lived like this and it never turns out well. This sense of bliss is usually just ignorance in disguise. So I guess the trick is finding the balance between positive and negative attitudes such that the combination equals happiness. I always talk about balance and how it’s what I strive to achieve in all aspects of my life. It’s easily the hardest thing to solve, though, because there are so many variables in the equation that it becomes almost impossible to balance both sides.

Since this positive-negative balance is nearly impossible to achieve, I often end up using compensation as the answer. By this I mean that when things are negative, I try to shove a lot of positive stuff on top of it to compensate. (Rarely do I throw negative stuff on positive things though…what’s the point of that?) The major problem with this method is that the negative aspects do not go away, they just get temporarily hidden, only to be exposed later when the fabricated positive items expire and disappear. I need to start trying to take care of those negatives to balance that side of the equation instead. To keep with the math analogy, I need to work on simplifying.

I started school when I was about three years old. It was “pre”-school, but it was school. From the early age of 3 to the ripe old age of (almost) 22 I was in school and school was my life; it was all that I knew. My life went from grade to grade, semester to semester, quarter to quarter, summer to summer for 86% of my natural born life, which basically translates to 100% of the life that I can remember. When I finally reached the end of the line I was in 16th grade, my senior year of college, and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. I finally graduated and entered the working world, started to encorporate into Corporate America, and began my new school-less life. I was out of school for just under two years before…

I went back. I decided I would go for my Master’s Degree because my company would pay for it, so why not? Besides, I missed school. It was always a piece of cake for me anyway. Why wouldn’t it be? I’d been doing it for my entire life. Plus, when compared to the daily grind of a full-time job, going back to school sounded almost refreshing, and for the most part, it has been. It is completely true that school is a joke when compared to my job. However, that’s exactly the problem: school is a joke.

When school is your whole life, it is so easy to see its importance. School’s purpose is preparation. First grade prepares you for second grade; sixth grade prepares you for junior high; high school prepares you for college. What does college prepare you for? Yep, you guessed it: nothing! It’s supposed to prepare you for “life”, but it so drastically misses the mark on that one that parents have to continually cop out behind the “but it expands your mind” excuse in order to justify why kids should go to college. Don’t get me wrong, though. Everybody should go to college. The experience alone is a priceless one. However, school in general and college in particular is pretty much a complete waste of time. Essentially it is a forced social life with some semblance of an “education” mixed in that is designed to help bide your time while you wait to become an adult. By the way, I’m totally fine with this. It’s a societal necessity and I think it makes good sense.

What I’m questioning now is: what can an adult who has already gone through this academic assimilation and absurdity possibly expect to gain by going back? Other than a “graduate” degree (and hopefully a raise at work), I don’t know that I’ve figured that out yet. It’s tough for me too. I mean, I didn’t really go back just to get the degree. I really wanted to learn new stuff and try to apply it at my job. The problem is, there isn’t much new stuff, and the few things that are new, I’m totally unmotivated about learning because I’m too busy worrying about work and all the other stuff that real life brings; that’s all the stuff that being in school was able to shelter me from. On top of that, because school was always easy for me and because I haven’t been out of it for that long, I’m so accustomed to the ease and the format of a school environment that I don’t feel that I need to try that hard to do well. Then, when I don’t do well, I get upset. That in and of itself upsets me too. I shouldn’t care about an A or a B. That stuff is trivial when compared to deadlines and expectations at work. So ultimately it sends me into a downward spiral for no good reason.

Being in graduate classes where students often know more than professors and a working world where employees almost always know more than their managers, what do you really expect? It’s an upside-down design, but that’s how it is. I’m sure I will eventually understand better the importance of “higher education”, but for the time being I think I’m just going to have to keep going through the motions, hoping to gain something out of the trivial tasks that come with it…for now.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur always bring about extremely reflective and emotional thoughts inside my busy little head. It of course makes me want to become a better person and improve myself in whatever way(s) that I can. This usually includes promising myself that I will start going to the gym, start eating right, stop staying up late, stop procrastinating, and all that perpetual “New Year’s resolution” bullshit. Every year I hope that at some point I am able to meet those very meaningful and self-fulfilling goals. Of course, every year I fail miserably to do so…hence the reason for setting them every year.

Still, I’ve set them again for myself this year, and hopefully with something more of a plan than usual. I have a larger goal in mind this time; it’s a much broader target. I will reduce stress over the next year. I’m putting myself on a stress-reducing plan that includes all of the usual methods: more relaxation time, more vacation, and of course less work. As anyone can usually tell you but not actually do, the way to accomplish this is with more efficient time management. It’s the age old problem, and usually the root cause of all my headaches and problems in my life.

I never have trouble coming up with excuses to not work on something or to not do something or to not go somewhere or whatever. What I have a harder time coming up with is what the heck I’m doing that’s so damn important while I’m avoiding these other things (excluding, of course, the writing of this blog). I’m talking about laundry, bills, exercise, job work, school work, house work, and all that stuff. Sure, these things seem mundane and oftentimes they are, but if enough mundane things pile up, eventually you’ll have no clothes, have bad credit, be out of shape and have more work to do than time to do it. My life is rapidly approaching this state, and it’s a scary place to be.

Thankfully, the High Holy Days are here, and it’s time for me to carpe diem and do something to avoid having to live in an unnecessarily stressful existence. So during these Days of Atonement, I am working on devising a detailed plan to get me stress free and 100% happy once again. It’s a sort of phased approach (thank you corporate America…) that slowly works in all the aspects of a stress free life.

Time management just means scheduling and planning and getting into a [good] routine…all things that I have always been so poor at doing. Usually I fail to achieve these goals because I try to change them all at once, but I can take baby steps over the next few months to make progress. Unfortunately, I need to dig myself out of the hole I’ve dug thus far…which means being on overdrive for the next couple of weeks and plowing through it full force with little to no free time.

My new favorite phrase is “I made my bed, so I have to lie in it.” It’s so easy to blame others for the problems you create. This stops now for me. I will face the music each time it plays loudly in my ear. I have no one to blame but my lazy, procrastinating self. It worked so well in school, but it just doesn’t work in real life. A wise puppet once said “I wish I could go back to college.”

So I know what you’re thinking. “This guy is all talk.” Yes, that’s definitely been true for me in the past. All I can say is that I hope it’s not the case this time. I feel like I have more of a handle on things now with the High Holy Days here right in the middle of crunch time for me. I’ve always claimed that I’m not a pessimist, just a pragmatist. As I’m getting older, though, I’m feeling more and more negative, which just isn’t me. So I think I’m going to have to try to switch to being a perpetual optimist just to offset the many negative things that pragmatism (i.e. real life) exposes.

I’ll say this much for my life right now: it’s never boring. I have so much going on that if I don’t implement this High Holy Days induced stress-reducing project as soon as possible, I very well may hit a brick wall and never be able to recover. I can’t let that happen.

These fires seem to have come at a weird time. It’s strange how certain events can trigger random thoughts and emotions that have virtually nothing to do with what triggered them. I like lists, and for me, things very often come in threes. I have three things on my mind right now:

1. Time. I have a problem with time. I don’t like it. There’s never enough of it. It doesn’t move fast enough but it never fucking stops. It drags when you want it to go by, and it flies when you want it to last. It’s different depending on where you are. It requires tons of management and planning. It’s an incredibly huge burden.Time is a resource. It’s limited. Like any other resource, we have to be careful with our time and try not to waste it. We conserve water, energy, gas – why not time? We waste time. We waste a ton of time. Don’t we? Of course, you can’t always consider “using” time to be “wasting” time. That’s true of any resource though. We never “waste” water – we just “use” it when we need to. We do the same with time. We use it at night to sleep, and we use it during the day to work. But also like any resource, we’re always trying to find ways to use it more efficiently. We invent more efficient cars, more efficient toilets, more efficient appliances, and we are always trying to find more efficient uses of our time. Our teachers and parents always tell us to anyway. Time is all over the place. Count the number of times you look at a clock in a single day. You’ll be surprised how concerned with time you are. You always hear expressions like “We have all the time in the world” or “I’m just taking my sweet time” or “Time flies when you’re having fun” or “What time should I meet you there?” or “It’s time to go home.” Time itself takes up quite a bit of our time. What is time anyway? It’s just the Earth moving around the Sun. Right? Yes…but it’s so much more than that. It’s the enemy of every single human being on the planet. It’s our biggest nemesis as we all race against the clock to beat it. The problem is, though, that time always wins. It always fucking wins. It’s impossible to beat because it’s so consistent. Sure, we try to mess with it sometimes. We flip the clock back an hour or forward an hour every so often. It doesn’t matter though. Time is still time and it will still go on and on like the Energizer bunny until the Universe implodes and there is nothing left. There’s nothing we can do but keep plugging away and fighting this forever losing battle until our inevitable demise. It’s sad really. Still, maybe one day we will find a way to beat time. It doesn’t seem likely, but it’s that small hope that keeps us all going I guess. I will continue to try to manage my time, use it more efficiently, and consantly try to beat it until I either die or invent the Flux Capacitor.
2. Comfort. I’m not sure I always know what makes me comfortable. I mean, I know specific things that make me comfortable: my parent’s house, my room, my bed, my car. I know certain people who always make me comfortable: my mom, my dad, my sister, my best friend, my girlfriend. My problem is, in the absence of those things, I am unsure of what else I can use to fulfill my need for comfort. I’m not talking about those uncomfortable situations like an airplane or a public bathroom where there is nothing you can do but grit your teeth and bear it until it’s over. I’m talking about those middle-ground, in-between places like a workplace, a party, or someone else’s space. In fact I’m talking specifically about those three situations. I mean I’m not really UNcomfortable in those places, I’m just not really comfortable either…particularly for long periods of time. I’d always rather be in one of those aforementioned places like my mom’s house or my bed. The place is what’s most important I think. Even if I’m with a friend or family member somewhere “outside my comfort zone”, it only serves to ease my discomfort, not really cure it.Comfort is more a feeling or a sense than something concrete. That’s the root of the problem. It’s impossible to definitively define and thus extremely difficult to explain. For me, it’s not the discomfort that is disconcerting, but rather the fact that I’m never sure how to fix it. Do I really not know my own needs well enough to know how to comfort myself? That’s a scary thought.
3. Insignificance. There’s something like six and a half billion people in the world. So each one of us makes up about 0.0000000154% of the world. Do you think anybody really fucking cares about what you ate for lunch or whether or not you’re having a bad hair day. Let me tell you, the majority of the world doesn’t. I mean they don’t even know you. Think about it. How many people do you know? In your wildest dreams you could never even know 1% of the people in the world, let alone the U.S. or the state of California, or even the city of Los Angeles. Even if you loosely define “know” to mean “indirectly interact with” you couldn’t meet this percentage. So think about that the next time you get mad at someone, or feel hungry, or miss a deadline, or fail at something. It’s really not that big of deal after all. Right?

So my therapy for tonight has come to a close. I think the only thing left to help cure my mawkish state is to get some sleep.