The blah collective

If you’ve met me, you probably know – I’m super-introverted.
I’m not a hermit or anything, but I’m certainly boring. As previously mentioned I re-read books, I don’t leave the house, I am aimless and lazy. So I’m not the best person to analyze these phenomena.

But, oddly, I’m also a manager, which means that I have to be, at least peripherally, a people person. It’s an integral part of my job to schmooze and gladhand and learn facts and details about strangers’ lives that I would cringe from in normal day-to-day. It’s not that I’m anti-social, I just don’t really welcome that kind of conversation about my personal life, so I don’t force it on others. Except I do, now.

One of the things I’ve seen when working with persistant groups o f people is the constancy of rumor and intrigue. Even in my current position, which, to be fair, avoids the heights of scheming more prevalent in retail or the like, there are cliques and whispered conversations and a genuine interest in spreading gossip.

These things tend to be uniformly negative – call in people to discuss a new project and they’ll assume they’re being fired. In fact, rumors seem to really only take off when their import causes panic and dismay.

 

Do we create these environments to stimulate ourselves? Is, perhaps, the entire success of a business model in a corporate environment based on the self-motivation of fear? It seems utterly foreign to me to fabricate terror and uncertainty where none exists – to shape half-heard rumbling into ironclad fact.

Especially when there’s work to do. Why can’t people just do the job?

Backward, not forward; inward, not out

Heather is always in an agony of anticipation. Whether worry or excitement, she’s always planning and re-planning, ad infinitum, her next day, week, vacation, whatever. I’ve never found this an issue for me – I don’t worry about what will happen tomorrow as I don’t eagerly await what will happen next month. Case-in-point – I’m leaving for Jamaica in two days on an all-inclusive vacation, and I’ve barely even thought about it. For the extent that I look forward, I live solely in the moment, and mostly in the past.

I will re-read books over and over – I’ve mentioned this previously. I’ll re-live movies, order the same dishes, visit the same places incessantly in an effort to recapture the past. The most absurd thing about this is that only through exposing myself to new experiences do I find new things that I want to repeat, and yet, I’ll rarely seek out anything new at the cost of revisiting old ground. Another example – having experienced a mostly surprise! vacation a few months ago to Mexico, I’m looking for times when we can go again. To the same place, and stay in the same rental house, though that area has many available.

When something is especially good – some new game, or vacation or restaurant perhaps – my attention leaps to the present to savor it. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to recapture – that sublime feeling of full concentration as my entire mind is paying attention. I tend to remember things so fondly in this manner that it seems to make sense – at the first sense of new enjoyment, my brain engages all my senses at high concentration – what was good is great, and so I struggle to find that feeling again.

Did I just describe getting high on life? I am the lamest person I know.

More like Impossible is Nothing, amirite? *facepalm*

That old emphemeral feeling

To be honest, it doesn’t happen as often as it used to. But I still look around every once in a while and wonder if everyone is pretending, like me. Take this morning, for example. I’m about to present to a panel of senior management during a four hour meeting on the intricacies of a new product line, with a presentation that I didn’t create. And while I’m sure I’ll do well enough I can’t help but think, “How do I know how to do this? Why are the things that I make up and pass off as plausible almost always the right answer?”

I imagine that all of us sometimes look around at our life and marvel at how things have seemingly grown around us – so locked into our day-to-day routine, we don’t realize we’re also accruing; whether it’s knowledge, a spouse, a home, friends, career advancement, our rut is causing us to accumulate without us knowing. I have responsibilities and a wife, a home, a team of people who report to me. My opinion is taken seriously. When did that happen?

Just as my wife would often marvel, “It’s so weird we’re married!” for months after our wedding, I sometimes wonder if everyone realizes I’m just acting grown up. At work, I answer questions and concerns with what seems to be either common sense or the most expeditious explanation, and it’s almost always right. So am I subconsciously answering correctly or just lucky in my responses?

Are you pretending too? Have you grown up without realizing you did it? We must all be doing so – after all, where would mid-life crises come from if we were constantly aware of our aging? Clearly, there’s a niche of time where we surface and look around and say, and I paraphrase, “You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house. You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife. You may ask yourself, how did I get here?”

The architect of ruins

One of the integral differences between my lovely wife and I is our ambition. For as long as she can remember, Heather has been motivated by a dream career – in her case, a dream that seemed almost destined to eventually fail, though we all expected it to last longer than it did (newspaper journalism heading toward seemingly inevitable extinction). Still, she was motivated and determined, and achieved her dream, and held it as long as it could be held.

On the other hand, I had no particular goals. One of our main friction points, when we met, was this aimlessness; I chose a lofty goal after one of these arguments and have worked towards it since then, but it’s not some aching desire within me – just a stopping point. What makes me wonder is why we turned out so differently, and I think there are some contributing factors.

First, and I hate to say it, but it does seem that gender is a big determination. I have accrued a number of male friends over my lifetime, surprisingly, and almost all of them seem as drifting and aimless as I. And while I can’t say that all women are the opposite, I’ve met many more bound and determined women than I have men. This may be more of a reflection on the friends I tend to make than the genders as they actually exist, but I’m bound by my materials.

Ok, so there’s nature. But nurture is a little confusing to me – again, using the example available to me, Heather’s parents were not terribly supportive. They unapologetically have a craft-fairy piece of art hanging in their kitchen that says “Having children is like being pecked to death by a chicken.” This is a value statement they endorse. My parents, by contrast, were infinitely supportive, and took every opportunity to impress upon me that I can achieve anything – if the mood took me, I could reach out my hand and have my every dream.

 

 

In the end, this was ultimately effective – I could have anything I wanted simply by wanting it and applying minimal effort. Therefore I wanted or tried for nothing. Whereas Heather, conditioned by a lifetime of doing things for herself and finding her own satisfaction outside of parental approval, set a lofty goal and methodically sought it out. Is it then actually destructive to our children to be nurturing and supportive? I still believe that anyone can achieve anything they decide to, and am setting about to prove that, now – but I would never have done so without the impetus of Heather, who does not believe anyone can achieve what they desire.

 

This may be why we don’t have children – you can do everything absolutely right, as my parents mostly did, and nearly end up with a wrecked child, and vice versa.

Relentless self-promotion

I’m from North Dakota. Which, socially, is like Minnesota’s handicapped cousin, when Minnesota is, itself, the wallflower at the sock hop. By which I mean, I have a very hard time with self-promotion, or opening up, or whatever. This is undoubtedly part of the reason I avoided blogs for so long in the first place. But things like Facebook are the gateway drugs to this new expression – once you start obsessively following you just throw yourself in headfirst.

I understand all too well the gratification of having someone read your thoughts, and comment on your ideas. I love it, everyone loves it. But recently, my wife’s blog was featured on the front page of wordpress, and in the comments I noticed something strange – multiple one-sentence comments above prominent links to other blogs. This brazenly flagrant self-promotion stirs me, as you see, to multiple adjectives in trying to understand it. As a fan of webcomics, I’ve seen and understood John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which might be a strong application in this instance, but still valid. Is it the promise of anonymity that allows people to so shamelessly market themselves?

Again, may be purely cultural. I didn’t even vote for myself when I ran for class President in middle school, so obviously, the need for humility in me is deeply bred. Are you comfortable leaving inane self-advertisements in every featured blog for a few more hits? Tell me I’m a snob.

Still, I bet you danced with more girls at those sock hops.

New joys and old

I can’t tell if I’m normal or not, most of the time. Nearly all of my leisure time is spent lovingly retracing the steps I’ve already taken – you can tell how much I enjoy a book or movie or video game not in how much I enjoy experiencing it, but how many times I return to it. For instance, I’ve read Catch-22 at least 10 times, and played through Fallout 2 more times than I can even count. And though I find new things each time and all that, that’s not the point – the point is to retrace those steps.

This is not to say that these joys are indefatigable. My wife was loudly bemoaned this tendency, mostly because I burn things out too quickly. I’ve left a long list of things I can no longer enjoy (ranch burritos at Taco John’s, for instance – or Chicken Enchiladas Suiza from Lean Cuisine) because when I find a food I like I’ll eat it again and again. And while the repetition’s a little more normal, at least, with food, there are even games and movies I avoid now, their charms too familiar to delight.

When I was younger, in my teens, every experience I would have was always touched with sadness, partly because I was a whiny douche and partly because I knew that everything I enjoyed could never be perfectly repeated, though I knew I’d try and fail to do so.

Is that normal? I know from casual conversations the whole re-reading/playing/watching thing isn’t, really – but do you feel that way too?

Hmm.

Whatever you do…don’t tell anyone.

Being a reasonably introverted sort of person, you’d expect a sort of appreciation of the idea of blogging in someone like me. The whole deal makes sense – I still go into my numerous pretentious child/teen journals and chuckle knowingly to myself. I like introspection of that nature – to read my evolution as a person in its fits and starts. I revisit each of them every year or so and make cryptic updates, shaking my head at the primitivity (probably not a word) of entries as little as a year ago.

But I was introduced to blogging almost immediately after its inception, in school. Perhaps our high school was more liberal than most, but in my freshman year we were assigned to start a “weblog” and keep it up, all semester, for a grade. I failed that assignment miserably. It’s not that I don’t enjoy writing, especially about myself – I’m as masturbatory as they come (get it?). But the whole idea of a public journal is so unpleasant that I instinctively avoided it. Maybe I’m boring enough to only be interested in my own little doings, I thought – I don’t want to share because when someone inevitably finds it they’ll find it not worth reading, and then neither will I.

Well, I’m caught in my own trap. I find myself refreshing numerous blogs throughout the day, hungrily trolling for new content. It’s not dependant on the business of my day – often I have enough to occupy me at work from sunup to sundown. But I’m never more than a second away from entering that old refresh cycle. So, I figured, fair is fair. I’ll try myself out here and see if anyone is drawn into my own mundanity. Instead of leeching I’ll seed here.

Now excuse me, I’ve got to go do some refreshing.