I’m kind of moving with the current. I always want to begin these posts with nice little quips, simplistic rules that feel right, observations that ought to reek as poignant. And while I kind of have those, the truth is I’m swimming with the current

(Lots of internal and external forces try to keep a reasonable level of buoyant. Fish do that as a full time job, even the ones in little bowls and aquariums, and as safe as that is I think I’d rather be a dolphin.

See, now I want to point out that dolphin are eaten in Japan, that a good number of people prefer them in seaworld, and that you, dear reader, are someone who is guilty of stereotyping dolphins.

Ok. Guess I’m in one of those kind of moods)

I’ve hit 35 more than a work week ago. The 9 days since that happened somehow feels like less time than a regular week ago. Big takeaways from that are that if you double my lifespan it’s inarguably closer to 70 than it is to 40, because math. Men on my dad’s side of the family — which I’d like to believe I’m pretty damned different from, die around mid-70’s.
It’s just….knowing it’s appropriate to start applying phrases like “mid-life”, you know what I’m so ready to start raging against stupid thilly new mentalities and talk about how sharp AND basic we had to be in the 90’s — and how we liked it.

I’m time-poor AF, but healthy and doing ok, in fact newp much better than ok by any metric. I wasn’t always sure I’d be able to say that in nyc rent, nevermind during a pandemic, but I can coitenly say it.

One thing I think is a top priority forever and ever is going to be the ability to adapt and roll with it. (Oh gosh, I want to say being agile. No. God no.) But seriously, I was raised on print is media (and not media can be print.) Cursive is educated (and not being able to communicate across multiple mediums well is king.) Penmanship is marksmanship (rather than real marksmanship on the keyboard matters most). Weird work things too like showing up breeds company loyalty (whereas work smart, period). Or company loyalty defines a career (and not career steps define a career). I don’t know, I still sort of wonder how much of the majority of folks are actually faking it and still trying to figure it out, and I just hope I’m adapting and catching on.

Maybe a lot of my original lessons and values I kind of rethink ….maybe we could have rewritten those to be better as examples, but still, things would have and did change anyway. One thing I know that I don’t know is, I have no fucking clue how many ideals I have today will one day be ideal to change.

That is both a relieving and a frightening thing to know. But it makes it so much easier to smile when you’re falling back on both core tenants of 1) don’t be dumb and 2) try your best

As for 2020…..

I guess I’m in the minority because I still think we’re in a sort of amazing age — I think digital beats gold in many ways — but there is also a fucking plague, global issues and lots of lunacy afoot. My contribution to that thought bubble has become, humans are weird in ways that’s showing how fantastically amazing we all are. Of course we’re going to come up with a vaccine in record time! Let’s also distract ourselves with neurolinked VR and photograph it with drones — man we plagued it this year like we never did before in human history. A bunch of us teleworked. A bunch of us somehow got way fatter because ordering food by typing on your phone is easy. A bunch of us made Florida look cool by drowning a bunch of boats in some weird boat-for-a-cause. A bunch of us learned new skills and hobbies in forging the amazon empire — this has been WAY better than the Spanish flu. And let’s also try too, but there’s only so much you can sanely do on an individual scale (which is still more than ever before.)

I’m still starting to back up my own ego against the idea of rearing good hellspawn and saying “OK you take a shot and just try and don’t foul!”

Hey a couple of weeks ago, I was on wikipedia reading about the word slacker. I don’t know why, it just felt right at the time, but I came away with a lot that made me go “Yeah.”

You know, there’s a view of “slacker” that’s NOT someone who’s lazy….but someone who wants to do something interesting, or nothing at all? Now sure, we can throw all sorts of slurs like lazy, or entitled at that, but I can comfortably say that fits me at least in high school, and I certainly think calling me lazy is misguided, as is entitled. That’s like saying someone who is alone is lonely, and wants privacy.

A slacker is that pain in the ass who doesn’t get a high grade because they don’t try. Teachers get frustrated because they can’t attribute that lack of motivation to incompetence — lots of slackers pass tests without doing the work, because the test is fucking boring. They slack and still pass to show that.

The funny thing about what I’d call the slacker is, they tend to be motivated. Slackers geek out, and can smell their own. And one thing that motivates the slacker, I’d say, is fear.

Well, as someone who was a slacker in grade and high school, I can say that one of my fears was leading a life I found to be boring, numbing, and tedious every day, and having nothing but uninteresting things to do, and being surrounded by people who didn’t really want to say anything interesting. I can say that while every goal wasn’t met, I’m kind of more than ok with how things are turning out.