2014 - Change is in the air

Not for the first time, I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that it is, yet again, a new year. Arbitrarily counted days, which aren't quite accurate representations of the Earth's rotation and tick marks that only somewhat scientifically represent the revolution of the Earth around the sun, marked by a new four digit number that has, now, for quite some time, indicated we are in the mythical land of the twenty-first century. A time which once was talked about with awe and hope and fear in the science fiction pulp novels I devoured as a kid. (Lots of fiber in books.)

So I haven't blogged much since this time in 2012. January 1 2012 was kinda the last serious blog post I put out. Which, I'm sure no one but me missed. I'm also fairly sure no one is actually going to read this one, any more than they did the one in January 2012.

So yeah. I skipped January 2013. Mostly, because right near the end of 2012, we lost my mother. She had catastrophic heart failure and fell down dead on the floor of her closet while looking for yarn for a craft project. It would be a lie to say it wasn't something we knew could happen, but I certainly wasn't ready for it to happen. My mother and I had a very complicated and frustrating relationship, but I never doubted she loved me, and I know she knew I loved her. It hit me hard, and it's taken a lot of emotional slogging to get myself to the point where I can write about it - and I really wasn't sure I could write honestly about my life without writing about her death.

(Note to self: have violent conversation with the universal sense of irony that caused a song called Mother to start playing as soon as I wrote that. Yeah. This time? Violence is a very good answer. I'm going to kick reality right in the proverbial balls.)

One of the oddest things about skipping a year on my traditional New Year's blog post is that I have two years to reflect on, not just one. I've come to some very odd realizations the past couple of years - which have been very busy, all things considered. I've quit smoking, starting vaping, quit two jobs and started one, been dumped and taken back, lost my mother, gained and lost friends, started playing an MMORPG, gained weight, lost weight and gained it back again.

I've shaved my head, started to get a handle on some anger issues I was ignoring I had, and written almost nothing of worth or value. I've read too much fan fiction (or not enough) and discovered that change is a lot harder and easier than we like to think it is.

Change happens, especially when we're not looking at it when it happens. Sometimes, we tell ourselves that it happens gradually, but I think there is almost always a moment where something shifts over and what was once one thing, or was once working a certain way, then starts being a new thing or working in a new way. Looking back, I can point out the moment I stopped being a guy who held the MMORPG community in towering contempt and refused to touch it with a ten foot pole tipped with a flamethrower and became a guy subscribed to an MMO he looks forward to playing with friends and family. I can point you to the moment when I put my pipe down for good and became a vaper. I can point you to the moment I realized why it is I 'don't get it' and why it is that I need to learn how to 'get it'.

But I couldn't have told you what those moments were when they happened. They passed quickly, without comment. Without thought. They whizzed by me and became immortalized only after I realized something had changed, and I looked back nodded at myself: "Oh. So that's what it was." Not really conscious decisions to create a change - just a ex post facto realization those moments had marked that a change had occurred.

However, those things we actively want to change? Those are harder. Sometimes, we view it as a process. Sometimes, we view it as a decision. We talk about backsliding or taking steps backward when we screw up and revert to what we did before the change. Often times, we berate ourselves and beat ourselves up about it. We blame circumstances. We blame ourselves. We blame others. We blame the universe, God, fate, random chance and the distortion of probability. And sometimes, each and every one of those things might be the cause.

I'm sure that there's some hippy feel-good theory floating around out there that says something like: "If we aren't ready to change, we won't. We'll change when we're ready for it. It will just happen." Annoyingly, there is some truth in that bleeding heart rhetoric. If I hadn't been scared witless by a serious bout of pneumonia in 2012, I might never have picked up my first vape, let alone given it a fair chance. I was ready for that change, because I didn't want to die - or worse, not have nicotine. (Blather on and scold me about my addiction in a different post, please.)

You could say I haven't lost as much weight as I want to because I haven't planned and prepared correctly. I haven't planned meals, set aside time to (ugh) exercise or done my research on what is actually a healthy diet versus the appalling (but tasty!) food I punish my body with on a daily basis. You could pat me on the head and smile at me and tell me that I'm just not ready to give up the emotional crutch that is tasty, unhealthy food and that once I reach some new stage of psycho-social development, I'll willingly walk away from the bacon laden cheeseburgers and into the welcoming arms of nutritious fruits and vegetables. You could also argue that I'm deluding myself into thinking I actually give two monkey fucks about losing weight or exercising, that I pay lip service to it because I'm a fat man who is constantly berated, commented on, advised at, and lectured at length about the fact that I am one rotund, cellulite ridden and overly fed first-world stereotype. That if I really cared about losing weight, I would bend my not-inconsiderable stubborn streak in the general direction of my excessive diet and sedentary ways and start doing something about it other than whining like a first-grader stuck sitting through a TV docudrama about the life cycle of the common houseplant.

The truth about deliberate change is that you have first have to acknowledge what you are actually changing. Not just that 'I want to lose weight' - but you have to say: "I am fat." And what you're changing? It has to have impact on you. It has to be something that when you realize it, you have to either care about it so much that you're willing to be ready to change and willing to put that work in, or you have to not care enough that you can let go of it without a fight. If it's not important, if it's not something you care about - you can let go of it easily. Mid way through 2013, I realized a word I used as a matter of course was offensive. Until the moment someone told me it was offensive, I had no fucking clue I was being an ass. While I have no objection to being an asshole when I know I'm in the right and I need to stand my ground and hold a moral or philosophical line or you've done harm to someone important to me. Or just been a bully. Or, really, lots of other reasons.

But accidentally offending a bunch of people, for no other reason than I use a word that offends them? Thta was an easy change. I haven't used that word since, and I don't plan on ever using it again. I know better now, and that word is now relegated into my arsenal of verbal grenades - words I don't use unless I'm being offensive to make a point. It's a word that gets used in a time of extreme necessity. (I have a lot of these words. I haven't ever had to use any of them.)

This was an easy change to make. It was a small alteration of my vocabulary that prevents me from being a dick. It took me no effort to stop using one word and use another in its place. It was a word I had no attachment to, no desire to use beyond it being what I felt was an adequate and accurate descriptor. Upon learning it was neither adequate nor descriptive, I put it aside and now use a word that is more accurate, more descriptive and not offensive.

The other kind of deliberate change s harder, because you actually do have fucks to give about it. There is something of you tied up in it, something that makes it important, meaningful or special. You might even hate it about yourself, but it's comfortable and known and you don't really want to give it up. It might be a security blanket, a passive bit of self-harm, or something that you've made part of your identity. I've been a fat guy so long - do I really not want to be fat? How will that change me, how I think of me, how other people think of me?

It's a bit scary when we realize we define ourselves and cling to those parts of ourselves that might seem negative - that even those negative things are important to us, part of how we think of ourselves. We don't often want to let go of those things, even when they hurt us. I have friend who prides himself on his ability to argue and debate anything. He loves to get into verbal sparring. But, he often alienates, hurts and pisses the fuck off most of the people he meets, because he's got no sense of proportion. He's a passionate asshole, with a vast store of knowledge, the ability to pick apart logical fallacies and use logic to turn anything you say into a point in his favor. He prides himself on his ability to argue, his love of debate - but he doesn't argue. He picks fights. He hurts people. Hurts his relationships with people, and is often profoundly lonely. He also realizes a lot of it is his own fault. But giving up that behavior he has defined himself by - right now, that hurts him more and scares him more than the consequences of holding into that behavior. Until the consequences outweigh the positive value he feels he gets from the behavior, he has no real impetus to change.

I've made a lot of changes over the past two years. I've also changed a lot in the past two years. Some of the changes have been deliberate and some have just happened, but I am not the same person who wrote his 2012 New Year's post. Yet - even with all these changes, even with not being the same person - the core of who I am hasn't changed much. I still don't understand (despite participating in and even looking forward to) the metaphoric reset we endure and embrace (approximately) every 365 rotations of our beleaguered planet.

A lot of changes have also happened around me that have affected me in profound ways - ways that I'm still starting to understand and may not understand for a long time yet.

One of the changes I hope to make permanent, a change that will last well beyond the 365 days of 2014, is that I want to write more. Not just because I hope people are reading the words I spew forth from my crumb-dusted keyboard.

Here's hoping that the impact of my realization that I am not writing - that the frustration of that outweighs the apathy that is slowly creeping through me as the years go by, and that this is the first post of many that so many of you probably won't read.

Welcome to 2014. For what it's worth, I hope the next 365 (approximate) rotations of planet Earth are productive, memorable and bring about the right kind of changes for you.

Happy New Year - or something like that

I never know what I'm going to write when I start one of these New Year's posts, but I always seem to find something to say - though, the quality of that something probably tends to vary. I mean, how often can a guy talk about all the things he fucked up the year before and all the ways he wants to fix it in the next year?

Especially since New Year's is such an arbitrary thing, and self-improvement and self-examination should be a constant and consistent process. It shouldn't be something we (I) do just as calendar rolls over to the next year. I mean - really? How many people actually keep their resolutions? How many people make serious and significant changes that stick, just based off a tradition that doesn't make a lot of sense when you look at it empirically?

It's sorta like deciding that you're going to fix everything about your life, one item at a time, one year at a time. If you're actually successful, you might actually have made some progress about the time you're stuck in the old folks' home, mainlining prune juice and praying you can remember the names of all the relatives who never come to visit you.

Hell, even if you make and stick to multiple resolutions a year, it still doesn't end up making sense. Why do people only seem to really want to change their lives as the new year starts? Okay. I get the whole idea of 'starting over with a clean slate' - but you really don't. All we really do is take a deep breath and hope that the next year is better than the year before it, despite that fact that all the problems we had in 2011 are still going to be there in 2012 - along with all the problems we haven't seen yet.

Yeah, yeah - I know. Old man Jayiin doesn't get it. What else is new? I rarely get it.

So, onto the part of this you've been dreading since my last New Year's post. Mostly, because I don't have many New Year's traditions (seeing as how I'm crap at holidays), so I might as well stick to the one I have and enjoy the fact I'm able to write something coherent in this blog once a year.

2011 was a year. I turned 31 and enjoyed the fact no one's taken a hit out on me yet.

2011

This post brought to you a week late by computer failure, utter exhaustion and insane amounts of work.

I am thirty years old.

It's odd how much that surprises me. It's almost like I didn't expect I would make it this far - that somehow, reality would somehow stop and I wouldn't turn thirty. I can't even claim I didn't see it coming because eighteen months ago, I was pretty worried about turning thirty.

Why (w)angst over it? Because I'm supposed to! Didn't you know? Thirty is the beginning of 'middle age' and soon that slow, inevitable decline into decrepitude will begin. The fun, good part of life is ending!

Or, so I'm told.

Yeah. I call bullshit.

I once wrote about the new year being an arbitrary starting over point; most age milestones are the same thing. I often call it 'magic number theory' - the idea, propagated by popular culture and social conventions, that having lived a specific amount of time automatically confers necessary knowledge, wisdom and skills.

It's especially apparently supposed to be a bit like leveling up in a video/computer/role-playing game. There will be a cool sound effect, some lights, maybe some sparkles and - boom! - you just suddenly know and understand. When you hit the magic number, you suddenly grok life.

(Of course, when you hit this arbitrary benchmark and you don't suddenly get new knowledge, wisdom and skill, you can't very well admit to everyone else you didn't get your level up, now can you? After all, they obviously did. It is most imperative and important that you pretend, because no one should know you don't have it all figured out yet. But only for a little while, because surely next year will be the magic number!)

Just for the record - thirty is not my magic number.