I just turned 27 and I'm feeling pensive. This is probably going to be very disjointed.
Out of all the people I grew up with and went to school/university with, I only know of a very small number (maybe 5 or 6?) who have gotten married. This is probably because most people I knew went to university, and I also think that nowadays people are moving away from the mentality of marriage being something you have to do by your mid-twenties or you're not a real man/woman.
There seems to be a switch that flips in some people's heads, the idea that once you get to age X, whatever that should be, you should forget about fun and frivolity and focus only on the Big Serious Things. Naturally this idea has never held much sway with me. See, many fun things don't magically stop being fun just because you reach age X. You've chosen some arbitrary number of years beyond which you declare something off-limits? Congratulations, you've just voluntarily made yourself more boring.
One of the things that really stuck with me from Randy Pausch's Last Lecture (by the way, it is well worth your time to both read the book and watch the free lecture) was the idea that you should "never lose the childlike wonder". The best people I have ever known have not only taken this mentality to heart but incorporated it in what they do and used it to produce some great things (by putting forward this idea I am not advocating that you spend all day playing video games and smoking weed, letting responsibilities fall by the wayside! Balance is key). These people are rarer than they should be. I'm wondering, what does it take to make a Rachael or a Stu, a Bob or a Carrie? Is it a matter of background? Can we bottle it? Could we spray it from a cropduster, make the world a better place?
"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am 50, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things - including the fear of childishness and the desire to be grown-up." -- C. S. Lewis
Thursday 23 February 2012
Tuesday 14 February 2012
Valentine's Day
Despite the fact that I am still single, this isn't going to be an emo post. Not in the slightest.
I'm going to use today as a kind of Thanksgiving.
Someone on my LJ friends list put it this way: Love is special. Why shouldn't it have its own holiday? Celebrate it any way you like and don't worry about commercialism or any of that crap. It's a hell of a lot healthier than being cynical. Of course, if you act completely different on this one day towards your significant other than you do the rest of the year, then you should have a good long chat with yourself. But you don't get to throw a party every evening of the year, so why not go hog wild? (If it helps, maybe you can think of it as a modern-day version of the pagan sex holidays)
I have had relationships of varying degrees of seriousness with five different women. Thank you, each one of you, for what you brought into my life and how you helped me grow. I still think fondly of you all.
I'm going to use today as a kind of Thanksgiving.
Someone on my LJ friends list put it this way: Love is special. Why shouldn't it have its own holiday? Celebrate it any way you like and don't worry about commercialism or any of that crap. It's a hell of a lot healthier than being cynical. Of course, if you act completely different on this one day towards your significant other than you do the rest of the year, then you should have a good long chat with yourself. But you don't get to throw a party every evening of the year, so why not go hog wild? (If it helps, maybe you can think of it as a modern-day version of the pagan sex holidays)
I have had relationships of varying degrees of seriousness with five different women. Thank you, each one of you, for what you brought into my life and how you helped me grow. I still think fondly of you all.
Friday 10 February 2012
Secret Origins
Whether you're coming in fresh or you've been reading me for years, welcome! For those who came in late: I used to blog (more and more infrequently as time went on) over at Livejournal, and now that once-mighty service has died a death I thought I'd venture out into the wider internet and so I've placed myself here. Two people in the last week have told me that I need to write, so I took that as extra impetus to get cracking. (Katie and Pete, if you're reading this, thank you for the support!). This blog will probably be fairly similar to my writings of old: a mixture of life chronicling, project info, martial arts, random thoughts, sprinkled with the odd dose of pop culture.
Socrates said that the unexamined life was not worth living, and while I think that view might be a little extreme, I can see the sentiment. So for a first post, why not look at why I'm doing this?
-There are very few things that I have a natural aptitude for. If writing is one of them, as some people have suggested, I think I owe it to myself to explore it further. That's going to take practice - Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success (which I have not read and should probably add to the list) posits the idea that it takes around 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in a particular field. If this is true, then I've got some way to go. At an hour a day that works out to 27 years!
One of my favourite quotes on the subject of writing:
"A writer is one for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people" -Thomas Mann
The nice thing about doing stuff is that the more you do a particular thing, the easier it tends to get. If you're a writer and a reader, you no doubt know the feeling of discovering a piece of prose that makes you think "I'm never going to be half the wordsmith this person is". I'm hoping eventually that with time and practice and as I grow in life I can silence that inner chatter telling me "You've got nothing to say."
-Many of us are, I think, trying to figure out who we are. But I believe that this passive search is only a part of it. The other part is actually deciding who we will be. Strong characters often emerge from terribly disadvantaged backgrounds - from poverty or abuse or otherwise broken homes. They find the will to fight back, to ensure that their life will never have to take that turn again. The results can be amazing. Now, I may have issues with my parents (don't we all?) but there is no way that you could ever describe my childhood as being tough. I am lucky. I have been able to afford to be laid back. If I am to turn myself into something special, I must provide my own stimuli. This requires planning and thought. Here's a good place to work some of that stuff out.
I find that the more I write, and think about writing, the more I actually take time to think about experiences and events and thoughts and what they actually mean, rather than just going through the motions. This must be a good thing.
-One of the greatest uses of the internet, if you discount Youtube comments and AOL, is discussion. No-one should be an island, so let's talk! Tell me if I'm full of shit or if my writing and ideas suck. I'll probably still love you. Probably.
You know what one of the best things about dating humanities majors was, for me? (3 for 3 so far. Hmm...) Having discussions with and bouncing ideas off people who are smart in ways that I may never be.
-I can be really lazy if I let myself be, so putting my ideas and goals out there for all to see provides me with a little bit of accountability. Perhaps not the best way to get motivation, but I'll take anything that works!
-Blogs act as a kind of life archival. I'm sure that there are a ton of things I should have written down at the time when they happened. What can I say, I'm a memory packrat (as well as a digital one).
Hm. Perhaps that was not too bad a first post for someone who's got nothing to say.
Socrates said that the unexamined life was not worth living, and while I think that view might be a little extreme, I can see the sentiment. So for a first post, why not look at why I'm doing this?
-There are very few things that I have a natural aptitude for. If writing is one of them, as some people have suggested, I think I owe it to myself to explore it further. That's going to take practice - Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success (which I have not read and should probably add to the list) posits the idea that it takes around 10,000 hours to achieve mastery in a particular field. If this is true, then I've got some way to go. At an hour a day that works out to 27 years!
One of my favourite quotes on the subject of writing:
"A writer is one for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people" -Thomas Mann
The nice thing about doing stuff is that the more you do a particular thing, the easier it tends to get. If you're a writer and a reader, you no doubt know the feeling of discovering a piece of prose that makes you think "I'm never going to be half the wordsmith this person is". I'm hoping eventually that with time and practice and as I grow in life I can silence that inner chatter telling me "You've got nothing to say."
-Many of us are, I think, trying to figure out who we are. But I believe that this passive search is only a part of it. The other part is actually deciding who we will be. Strong characters often emerge from terribly disadvantaged backgrounds - from poverty or abuse or otherwise broken homes. They find the will to fight back, to ensure that their life will never have to take that turn again. The results can be amazing. Now, I may have issues with my parents (don't we all?) but there is no way that you could ever describe my childhood as being tough. I am lucky. I have been able to afford to be laid back. If I am to turn myself into something special, I must provide my own stimuli. This requires planning and thought. Here's a good place to work some of that stuff out.
I find that the more I write, and think about writing, the more I actually take time to think about experiences and events and thoughts and what they actually mean, rather than just going through the motions. This must be a good thing.
-One of the greatest uses of the internet, if you discount Youtube comments and AOL, is discussion. No-one should be an island, so let's talk! Tell me if I'm full of shit or if my writing and ideas suck. I'll probably still love you. Probably.
You know what one of the best things about dating humanities majors was, for me? (3 for 3 so far. Hmm...) Having discussions with and bouncing ideas off people who are smart in ways that I may never be.
-I can be really lazy if I let myself be, so putting my ideas and goals out there for all to see provides me with a little bit of accountability. Perhaps not the best way to get motivation, but I'll take anything that works!
-Blogs act as a kind of life archival. I'm sure that there are a ton of things I should have written down at the time when they happened. What can I say, I'm a memory packrat (as well as a digital one).
Hm. Perhaps that was not too bad a first post for someone who's got nothing to say.
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