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So, I kinda dropped the ball on posting for a little bit.  A combinations of things (being busy, being stressed, lack of content, being stressed, trying to relax) made it a bit difficult to keep on top of this.  Hopefully I’ll be getting back into the rhythm of posting soon.  With any luck, this will be the first post in a long line of regular postings.  The impetus for this post was a set of conversations I had with my parents recently and the realizations that came from that.

Everyone knows growing up is hard.  Everyone has a different experience of it and learned thing from different places.  When they have kids, everyone also seems to either forget what growing up was like, or had a different enough experience than their children that teaching certain things gets lost.

From my experience, it seems children never get to see or hear about the troubles the adults they know also went through while growing up.  Sure, parents talk about stories from their childhood here and there, but how often do they talk about the one time they were really drunk in college and went home with some random person.  It doesn’t seem till after kids go through the same or similar experience that their parents bring it up.

Growing up, I always viewed the adults around me in positions of authority as relatively infallible.  It was just something I noticed and it seems became a bit ingrained in me as I aged.   As I grew up, my parents never really talked about their childhood mistakes or the hardships they went through growing up.  Who likes talking about all the times they screwed up, or made morally questionable decisions anyways?

I know that parents tell kids that it’s OK to make mistakes in life, but how often do parents give examples of themselves making mistakes before their kids make the same ones?  It wasn’t until recently that the infallibilty perception began to wear off for me.  My lack of posting recently has been caused by some trying times in my life, but as part of that, I’ve found my parents are more human than the perception left from my childhood let on.   It wasn’t until one night at dinner when my dad came out and said he’s made the same mistakes before that I felt on the same level as them.

Perhaps this is an experience unique to me, or maybe I’m just a late bloomer (wouldn’t be the first time), but  I have a feeling that this is something everyone goes through.  Knowing what mistakes one’s parents made makes it that much easier to understand that mistakes aren’t something to be feared, but are something to learn from.  Though, it’s not like I can blame parents for keeping their mistakes to themselves until their children make the same ones, they are human too afterall.

Just two months ago, I had a plan.  I was getting out of the house on a reguar basis, working on my writing skills, reading philosophy, coding in my freetime, doing the things I wanted to do.  In the course of a week, that changed drastically.  Randomly, it seemed, one night my ‘me’ time flew out the window.  Mental breakdowns are not fun things.

Not my own mental breakdown, but that of a close friend of mine.  At first I had to be there for her at the end of the day, when we both were done with out obligations.  After a bit she began skipping more and more of those obligations because of this, and thus began siphoning more and more of my time.  As time went on, there she was, online more and more wanting to talk about things and getting upset if I had other things to do.  In a short period of time, I came to realize that I was the only person she really talked to anymore.  She’d stopped going to class and hanging out with friends.

Often I know I come off as a bit emotionally empty, but when asked for help or presented with someone in need, I can’t say no.  Thus, I’ve been carving out more and more of my time to try to help out my friend, though nothing I’ve done has helped her (aside from getting her to start therapy).  Recently, she’s been upset nearly 24/7 and because of it feels she needs me to be talking to her constantly, even though I have a full-time job and need to maintain a regular sleep schedule.  More often than not though, she ends up resenting me for not being there for her for the entire time she’s upset, which would be a bit impossible to do without sacrificing my job and own health.

At what point is  too much being asked of me?  At what point am I able to exercise my right to live my own life when someone is this unstable?  I’d feel terrible just abandoning her, but I also don’t want to be a parent at this point in my life.

Just really busy.  Haven’t had time to sit down and write anything of substance.  So for now, the blog is hibernating.

“Invictus” by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

So recently I got switched over to do mac development at work.  Being that I’ve only ever written anything worthwhile in C++/C#, it’s a pretty big step to switch over to writing production code in a language that I only first saw code of a few weeks ago.    The syntax of Objective-C is pretty counter-intuitive to a C++ developer even though objc is a C derivative.  For the non-programmers out there, its kinda like going from eating with a fork to eating with chopsticks.

I’ve been procrastinating learning obj-c for about a year now.  I’ve been planning to learn objective C to write a media organizer for my mac media center but have never actually gotten off my ass to start.  Now that I have an artificially imposed outside deadline, however, I’m sitting at a coffee shop after work trying to figure this shit out.  If only I could find some sort of similar outside motivators for other stuff I’m trying to do since I’m pretty terrible at self-motivation.

After an hour or so (including learning curve), here’s what I came up with: http://screencast.com/t/w8kRupWcuAm.   That’s after a day of programming exercises at work.  Hopefully learning the rest of this stuff starts speeding up as I keep going.  So far the biggest hurdle has been getting used to the new syntax.

Tomorrow I get to head out to Purdue for to participate in a career fair for my company.  My job there will be to actively engage the students there and sell the company to them in an effort to recruit kids to the amazing Lansing area (or at least the mediocre area which is made up for by an amazing job).

What better way to chip away at my social inhibitions than with a monetary motivator?  Get out there and talk to people or suck at your job.  Personally, I’ve always taken pride in all the jobs I’ve had when interacting with people and this should be no different.  Practice makes perfect afterall.  And hell, I’m getting paid for it too.

Looking back, I was always incredibly outgoing when working at the movie theater in high school.  When I was in that uniform I became a different person.  That simple change of appearance gave me extraordinary amounts of self-esteem and I could say anything to anyone there without flinching.  (Probably part of the reason why I got so many more girls there than from just meeting people as myself in college).

Either way, it’s nice to have more motivation than just myself to dive into more and more social situations. And if all else fails, there’s at least a really good brewery on the way in which i can down my sorrows.

A couple days ago I went in to Best Buy to try to find a eyecup for my camera (mine seems to have been broken somehow).  On the way in, I get the same old greeting as always at best buy.  After I’m about 10 feet into the store, the greeter says “Hi.”  So I do my usual and turn my head back and give a nod.  They didn’t have what I was looking for, so I left after about 3 min in the store.  On the way out, I get a “Have a nice day.” from behind after I’m 10 feet out the door.  At that point, I just keep walking; screw responding.  Then I realized what gets on my nerves about the greeters at best buy:  they always talk to you from behind, never giving you a chance to respond without awkwardly turning around.

Most of the time I’m out and about, I try to be at least somewhat friendly with strangers.  If I make eye-contact, I generally smile or say hello.  At best buy however, I’ve noticed that even when I walk in and purposefully make eyecontact with the greeters, they dont do or say anything until I’m at least 10 feet into the store.  At that point I feel the obligation to respond but am unable to without turning around to say something.  Anyone else get this there?

Since I started this blog, I’ve tried to aim to only make posts of some substance.  This requirement seems to bring me down to one past every two weeks when I actually get busy with things (moving, etc.)   So, the question is: more shorter posts, or few long posts?   I cant decide, maybe you guys can help.

It seems things in my life like to clump together.  Last weekend I went to the wedding of an old friend from High School.  This weekend I’m going to Madison for a cousin’s wedding.  Next week, I’m going up to the Alpena area for the post-wedding family vacation type thing.  Then that weekend is Lollapalooza.  So, unfortunately I doubt I’ll be able to get anything written through all that.

All that wedding talk definitely makes me wonder if I’m starting to hit “that time.”  That time when all of one’s friends start getting married, etc.  To look at the numbers, I now have three friends my age from high school who have gotten married in the last 3-4 years.  Other friends I know now are measuring their relationships on the years scale rather than months.  At what point do I become the odd one out that doesn’t have a significant other?

It’s not exactly like I’m looking forward to being tied down.  That would limit the possibilities for more spontaneous trips to other countries.  Either way, I still enjoy the open bar at these things, even if I go without a date.

So, I’ve been doing a very bad job of being a blogger.  Three weeks with no update.  A combination of things came up and resulted in my slacking off.  First I was just lazy and put off posting for a week.  Then July 4th came up and I went out and did things.  Then this week I haven’t been feeling well.  Throughout all of this though, I haven’t exactly felt particularly insightful. I like to try and keep away from fluff posts, so this lack of insight has only compounded with the other things that came up and made this a very lonely blog. I will try to remedy that now though.

Part of the purpose for this blog is to both encourage and log my efforts of self-improvement.  Ever since my return from London, I seem to have lost much of the motivation I had beforehand.  Despite it being an amazing and eye-opening experience, it seems to have been more mentally taxing than expected.  I’m already one that gets rather anxious around strangers, and dealing with that for two weeks was a bit draining and I guess I haven’t fully recovered yet.

I have a history of giving up on things like half-way through, right when they start to get difficult.
It’s a character fault I am painfully aware of and have yet to find a good way of addressing aside from sheer willpower.  Willpower is not my strong-suit though.  Being that I believe in pursuing those things that one enjoy, it’s hard to get out of comfortable ruts in pursuit of a greater long term benefit.

I guess it’s time to suck it up and do my best though.  Moving to a new house in roughly a month, so hopefully I can use that as a marker of yet another renewed start.