Becoming an adult

This one goes out to Josh, because he asks me this from time to time.

So, occasionally a friend of mine asks me what made me realize that I was an adult. My first answer, back when he asked, was socks. I bought my own socks, and that's when I realized, 'Wow, I'm an adult'. Because I was burning my disposable income on a quality of life item like socks instead of something strictly entertainment purposes. I'll admit It was a goofy answer and only half-serious, but it remained my answer almost six months later when he asked me again so I suppose it stuck.

But I had a thought on the way home today while I was mulling over a few songs I'd been listening to. There's one song in particular - "Car Radio" by Twenty One Pilots - that really caught my attention. In the song the singer has had his car radio stolen and he's stuck driving with only himself for company, no music to distract him from his own life. His thoughts run away with him, and he wants to replace it just so he can stop being forced to think about his life on every car ride.

I'm going to be brutally honest right now - no matter how put together everyone appears to be on the outside, we're all just a genuine invitation away from a complete stranger away from bursting out with every fear and misgiving we're dealing with in our lives. Some people do it in journals, some people do it in drunken conversations, some people do it on blogs using thinly veiled allusions, but we all want to get it out.

That brings me back to our protagonist, the radioless man. He's locked away inside the car he's driving, nothing to distract him from the dissatisfaction of his lot, and he's wrecked by it. He talks about his pride being on his sleeve, the dreams (his own) he's killed and says 'I could just pull the steering wheel.'

The french have an idiom for this - "L'appel du vide" or the call of the void. 'I could just pull this steering wheel'. Terrifying, horrifying even.

Back to being an adult.

We're all scared, we don't really know what to do. This is our lot, of course. For the last few years I've always thought I knew how everything worked. I was under the impression I had it all figured out, if I was just a bit better at translating the runaway train of thought and transferring it to paper I could quantify the words that would make it okay for everyone.

I know that I was wrong. I couldn't write it then and I can't write it now. It's certainly not socks. Truly, I may only have just become an adult on this 'car ride' myself.

Because the moment I realized I was an adult was the moment I accepted that I would never know what it meant to be an adult, that I'd always be scared of something. That finally having everything together was always just out of reach. That no matter how much we think we know, there's still something more to be learned.

But hell, what do I know?

Amber Alert: 100 Day Meditation Challenge Disappears at 35 days old

So I was burning up to write something - anything - about the meditation challenge since I'd let it slip off. There's always a mix of shame and relief when it comes to failing at something. You no longer have to give it your all, you no longer have to answer to yourself when you fail. No one enjoys that gentle slipping away and that feeling of 'not quite right' that settles in when you know you've given up on this day or that day. Giving up can sometimes feel too easy, with a seductive quality.

Years ago I was horribly overweight. Not just a little bit with a beer belly or anything, but unequivocally morbidly obese. I still have flashbacks of embarrassment from that time in my life, the way I treated friends and family. I was 280 pounds, and I'd stake myself depressed for a majority of it. It was no one's fault but my own, and even now I sometimes struggle with admitting that and try to blame others for it.

I reveal that because it goes hand-in-hand with the breakdown of my attempted challenge. I am no longer morbidly obese and maintain a fairly healthy weight of around 180 pounds. There was a period of my life, about a year and a half during which I worked tirelessly at fixing myself. So much so that I became fixated on those things, I endangered my health and well-being chasing self-image.

I actually spent a period of about two months in a state of constant malnutrition. I survived (barely) on egg white omelets on the morning - 75 calories, a protein shake at lunch - 400 calories, and an egg white and broccoli omelet at dinner - 175 calories.  650 calories is not enough to support a thin guy, much less a fat guy losing 5 pounds a week. All this while doing a near daily gym regiment of a 3.25 mile run and an hour of weightlifting a night.

Did I end up better for it? That's a good question. I certainly look better. Who knows what sort of havoc I subjected my body to during that period. During that time I learned a lot about myself and the way I deal with certain things. I have an obsessive nature which I can channel: In the times I wasn't starving myself and working out constantly, I also started learning to play the guitar, was regularly writing again, went out for rock climbing every week, started reading again, and had completely blocked out video games and television from my routine.


But I persevered in that mode for months, rarely eating out of step and generally being a simpleton with my nutrition. People think I have incredible willpower, I was just obsessed and berating myself for every misstep. I took my self-hatred and channeled it into a self-destructive whirlwind behind a mask of self-improvement. I was ashamed of my progress every step of the way because I knew it had become an extension of the worst part of my personality.



The meditation challenge was, and still is, something I wished I could have kept up with. But I can't let that guy who obsessively follows his whims be the driver; I was generating a lot of self-doubt and frustration from my failures and that's a quick jump to 'looks good from the outside but is a mess within' territory. It's also counter to the purposes of meditation and Buddhism. I'll return to it and continue my personal research into the eightfold path, writing about it when I find something that I can be proud to share with the people around me. Until that time comes again, I'll try to be more active on this blog about the things I'm passionate about. Thanks for reading.

Hello again!

Okay, wow, so it's been a while huh?

I always considered myself to be really careful with things, finances, my words, my actions, all that other stuff. I like to temper my optimism with realism and sometimes that can come up and bite me in the ass. I try to take on like ten things at once and keep up with it for the briefest flash in the saucepan and next thing I know I got nothing again.

A few years ago after a breakup my cousin invited me to the gym and I got really into it. I had just spent a lot of time losing weight and I was excited to be working out, which was awesome. I spent many days of my week out with that group of people and lifting, we went to some shows in the city and off in some further away places and it was grand. At some point I picked up the guitar again and started taking lessons, and a bit further down the line started rock climbing and joined a book club. Everything was in balance, and I was improving myself in a wide arc. I could have mastered all those things over the course of a few years if I had the single-mindedness to continue with everything at once.

I met a very special lady, we hit it off and have been together ever since. We go on all sorts of adventures (some of which I wrote about in this blog - Ireland is a biggie!)

I picked up my writing more frequently. I'd never tried to give it structure before, instead working only when I fancied to on an impulse. So I picked two days a week and started writing on those days, which further locked down my weeks.

I overextended. six out of seven days a week I was spoken for and people were asking me to make time on the remaining day. The stress of all that was too much.

I finally hit the tipping point though, something had to give. I stayed with rock climbing but was running out of time to work out, so I toned it down to just running. I kept up with the guitar but I wasn't watching my finances. When I realized it I started cutting back - the lessons went but I tried to keep it up. I injured myself running and never really got it back together. I occasionally break out and go for one and realize I'm pushing it too far too fast and get frustrated. I promise myself I'll give more and never get around to it.

Life is hard. It's not supposed to be easy, not by a longshot. We all do the best we can, but at the end of the day we all have a limit. I push mine in leaps and bounds and sometimes need to take a break. It seems like I hit that point with this blog as well, and let it languish.

I'm going to try to resurrect it soon - I've got plenty of other projects I'd like to explore and work on. I'm especially interested in Buddhism at the moment, in addition to financial stuff I was going to explore in another blog but I realized I didn't have the experience to really work on that and give advice. I might need to consolidate and just give my personal experience in the areas of finance, spirituality and entertainment from a central spot. That doesn't jive with my original plan - that this be a blog for my writing - but I don't produce at the rate that a blog like this needs to be relevant.

So I'll be back, and will be posting things differently.

Reflect on Change

Today has been a day of reflection. Partially in the Buddhist sense, partially in the western reality check sense. If two years ago you told me I'd lose 100 pounds, get a tattoo, put 1,000 miles on a motorcycle, start writing a novella, attend a writing conference, and end a 6 year relationship, I would have scoffed. I definitely wouldn't believe you if you told me I was going to Ireland either, but here I stand on a precipice with two tickets and an appetite for the unknown.

Life is a chore, it can be a drag, and you can do two things with it: let it bring you down or rise despite it. I learned to be unsatisfied with what I was, what I had, and what I wanted. I wanted all that was easy, nothing that took effort, and had been afraid of change. Change is scary, change is hard, and most of all it upsets a status quo of ease we accept.

But fight it. When you reach the other side, reflect on change, and be satisfied.

This will be one place I don't pull an Irish goodbye. I'll be looking to update on Ireland if the places I'm staying have wifi, otherwise I will schedule a few posts when I get back. It'll be a full itinerary tagged separately using the blogger system so that if anyone is looking for ideas they can easily stroll through it. Ciao kids!

A Proper Introduction

Let's start this like any initial meeting should start: Hi, my name is Chris and I have a writing problem.

I've been at it, on and off, for most of my young adult life. My love of reading and writing began with Roger Zelazny's "Chronicles of Amber", which I must have read and re-read over ten times. In case you're unfamiliar (likely), it was a fantasy story about a family of titanic, crafty immortals vying for lordship over 'the one true reality' of Amber. It was one of the many worlds style books and rife with heroism, sarcasm, a bit of intrigue, some classic deus ex, and plenty of religious symbolism (the latter aspect was one of Zelazny's hallmarks).

Sadly, Zelazny died long before I realized I had to meet the man and I learned of his death something like a year and a half after it happened in '95. This crushed me; I worshiped this series and to know I'd never meet the man who wrote it was upsetting. To this day I refuse to read novels alleging to pick up where he left off that were written by other authors. Proving that I was kind of a moron, I didn't actually read any of his other stuff until much later on in my life.

I was captured more by the characters in his stories and their dynamics than anything else. I wrote my first stories about things that I had in my life, one was a many worlds story that was basically ripped straight from the Amber mythos that I craftily titled "Ruby" because I'm an ingrate. It wasn't anything worth mentioning besides the fact that I filled a 3 subject notebook with my inane scribbles and lost it sometime in the many years since. If I ever find it I might even transcribe a bit as a jab at my younger, stupider self.

After that I wrote something a little less derivative (only a little) about a game I was playing at the time called Infantry (and I think most 90's gamer nerds will have had some experience with that one) which involved energy guns, combat suits and flying surfboards. I would write that in a notebook too, ripping off the classes and the game dynamics while generating my own story about how it all came to be.

A friend of mine at the time would read it once or twice a week and comment on it until I took it off the rails and had the characters sucked in to a medieval setting through some sort of reality rift. This, I think, is where I first started to show a dueling ethos in my head: the more I consumed things the more my writing became this weird mash up of things I liked, gradually being copies of things less and less.

I wrote a story about mutants after that, which I thought was pretty clever but was mostly just me reading old X-Men comics after I inherited them due to a family member's passing. There was some pretty cool technologies in it, and I specifically remember the ISS making a big appearance as a massive intergalactic defense station (Master of Orion 2 was loaded up on my computer). This story made it in to the hands of my English teacher at the time, something which still embarrasses me to this day. I don't remember him commenting on it, possibly because he didn't actually read it. If so I'm quite certain I dodged a bullet; it was awful.

Now we're homing in a bit closer to the end of high school when I spent a lot of time writing a novel I called Azure (Zelazny would have sued my face off at this point). That one was all about magic and reality bending stuff, trying to tie magic in to the setting and the people in a believable way. My girlfriend at the time absolutely loved the story and when we broke up many years later I handed her the 3 subject notebook that contained the original work. The story still exists on my hard drive coming in at 146,309 words of utter garbage. I edited the work laboriously for many months before determining it would never be picked up, at least not in that form. But I'm a firm believer in the 'first novel is trash, and toss it' bit of wisdom, and will happily never seek print for it.

I took a long vacation from writing after the last piece. Looking back, it was the best thing for me: I grew up a lot and shed the last of my rampant plot robbery in the intervening years. I gained a real respect for reading and found many more genres once I let myself get away from it. That takes us up to now, where I'm working on a piece called RAM, which I'll talk about in later updates.

So that's my history, and I'm sticking to it.