step42.com

So, the wedding went off pretty well without a hitch.   The time up north on the beach was quite relaxing as well.   Lollapalooza was amazing though really tiring.  Both Flogging Molly and NIN were just as awesome as I was expecting, and NIN even seemed to exceed my expectations a bit.

Unfortunately I’m still slightly MIA; It’s moving time.  Over the next week I’ll be moving from my current apartment in Okemos to a house in East Lansing on the corner of Lake Lansing and Abbot.    To hold you over till I have time again, here are my pictures from Lollapalooza:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/waltflanagan/sets/72157606560819962/

Videos will be up soon also.

Be back once we have internet at the new house.

I’ve neglected my blog the past week.  I’ve fallen into this funk of just wanting to sit around and play video games and not do anything productive.  Laundry is piling up.  Thoughts are going unblogged. Kitchen is running out of food.    Over the next couple of days I will try to get out of this rut and hopefully will start posting with more frequency.   This post is just to get the ball rolling again.  It seems like I let settling back in after my trip to Europe go a bit too far.

So, last night I ended up at a house party in EL. I expected to see the group of friends that had invited me, but not many other people I knew. About 10 minutes after arriving, I ran into an absurd amount of unexpected faces. Somehow I ended up knowing about half the people at the party.

One unexpected person was this one girl who was in an Intro to Feminist Philosophy course that I took the first semester of my senior year. I recognized her, but only to the extent that I knew that i’d seen her before. On MSU’s campus, even though there are 40,000+ students, recognizing people is incredibly too common. It’s odd how often I run into the same people around campus, outside of class, even though there are so many people on and around campus. I would think that the probability of running into a random person from a class at some party outside of school would be incredibly small, yet this small world syndrome seems to crop up all the time and show just how, even on a campus of 40,000, everyone knows everyone.

Anyways, back to the story. Her name was Erin. She was the one that remembered that we took a class together over a year ago. Every philosophy class tends to have at least one person who plays devil’s advocate, and in this class I was that person. Sure, it rubbed many of the women in the class the wrong way. How could this guy come in here and question this stuff? As a philosopher though, it was my duty. One sided philosophy is nothing more than useless ego stroking. I must have made an impression on her though, because even after a year and a half, she remembered my name in an instant. The entertaining part was that she didn’t remember my friend Tony’s name, and he was her partner for an in-class project.

Seeing that I left such an impression put me in a great mood the rest of the night. Sure it was a semester’s worth of hearing me talk that did it, but the end result is the same. Someone remembered me. That may seem like nothing, but having that impact without formally meeting someone gives quite the ego boost.

The events of last night made me realize that I want to have that ability, to leave a vivid enough impression on people that they remember me years later. The challenge is reducing the amount of time that is necessary to create such an impression from five months in the same class, to something within the first few hours of meeting someone. I need to think about this more to figure out what steps I can actually take to actually accomplish this task.

It’s odd how a feminist philosophy course taken on a whim my senior year of college could still be coming back into my life and teaching me things.

Or at least 42 is usually the answer, so why not here too? Either way, the end goal is freedom.

Freedom to live life how I want to. Freedom to live where I may land. Freedom to enjoy every minute I can take.

The impetus for starting this blog came about from the bout of 20-something angst that I’ve been dealing with since I started working. There is was, pondering the cliche saying: “Here I am, my whole future in front of me…” not having any real direction aside from my job. Everyone is familiar with the Office Space-esque 9-5 job that makes people want to kill themselves, and I didn’t want to end up there. Granted, I had a leg up being that it is an interesting job that I enjoy doing, but everything grows old after 10-20-30-50 years of repetition.

Seeing this, I decided to make it my goal to avoid such a scenario. Sure, it sounds good, but I had(have) no idea how to actually fully accomplish it. How do you break free from the standard life track that 90% of everyone else in this country follows?

The answer (aside from 42): I don’t know, but this is my attempt to find out.

Come, join the ride.

Here it is. step42.com. Here is my attempt to record my journey through life and experiments hacking it. In the weeks months and years to come I plan to write both reports on my success and failures hacking my life, as well as analysis and insights about things i hear. Step42 is here to help all of us live life awesome.