Mortality Blog

Okay, six months since the last entry? How’d that happen? Do I really have nothing new to say?

I mean, what’s it take to make me write an update - a good book? (The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, in this case)

For about a year, I kept a fairly frequent journal in highschool. And most of the things I complained about seem petty now. I’m pretty sure they weren’t petty back then, but the Matt in 2010 thinks the Matt in 2003 had it better than he thought. Not that things are bad now, or anything.

The point of these has always been thinking aloud, and posterity, maybe, and a little bit of showing off even. I mean, I like my life, I like me, and I flatter myself by wondering whether what I’m feeling and thinking might be intriguing, interesting, even entertaining to everyone else. To be honest, it’s a little censored, but maybe I’ll get over that eventually - or maybe there are some things that you have to censor, in order to get along with everyone. Even if it’s a little vain to think that everyone reads the mortality blog.

I was thinking that if you were to plot my life on a line graph, where Y is time, X is frequency, and each line represents any particular activity, you’d see two shapes appear most often: A quick peak and a long gradual dropoff, and a fairly steady line, or maybe something close to a low-amplitude sine-wave. In other words, some things I don’t do, and I don’t do, and suddenly I do all the time, and then I do less, and I do less, and I barely do at all. Things like parties, drinking, drugs, sex, making music, maybe even jobs - I’m not sure what those things have in common, but they’ve never been constant, always a peak and a decline. Then maybe another peak. The other things happen fairly regularly: reading, writing, listening to music, playing video and computer games, that sort of thing. Again, not sure what they have in common - maybe I should actually make that graph and look for a pattern. But those things tend to always happen, and keep happening, with little dips or spikes in frequency but overall very steady occurrence.

Which makes me think about the future, a little. For instance, let’s say how much I weigh, and any hypothetical plans I make to ‘get in shape’ - would regular exercise be a peak and a decline, or a new constant line? If I get a gym membership tomorrow, will I go less and less until I find myself paying a monthly fee for something I don’t use, and putting on the weight I’d previously lost? Or more to the point, beyond idle speculation, if I had reason to believe that was the case, would it be reason not to try?

But that’s just an example. I can live (well, for a while at least) with being about 50 pounds heavier than I remember feeling in highschool. I’m thinking about work, though. That’s the main thing that concerns me at the moment. Actually, I’m trying not to let it concern me, but I’m wondering about it.

In highschool, and in lots of other areas in my life, I have this sort of weird thing I do, which might be procrastination, but almost borders on… I don’t know, some sort of distraction, or something. Where something is important, and I know it’s important, but for some reason it becomes more and more important that it not be so important. That sentence makes sense, but I’m not sure it’s easy to follow. Let’s try an example. I work on a project, and there isn’t anything particularly special about that project, but this thing happens - and it starts out being important (because it’s fun, and I like the people I’m working for, and I’m getting paid on top of it all) but gradually, it becomes more important not to care. Maybe my sleep schedule is unrelated, which’d be easier, for sure, but maybe not. Either way, when I wake up at 9 in the morning after only getting 4 or 5 hours of sleep, it becomes harder and harder to just get up and do work. It gets harder to look at code instead of youtube vidoes - and youtube videos are completely unrelated, it could be anything, singing songs I like out loud, or tracing patterns in carpet, or literally anything I know isn’t at all important instead of doing something that I know is actually important. I know it, and yet…

… so that’s weird. At first I kind of wondered if this was a new thing, due to whatever, finishing puberty and hormones, or a change of scenery as I ‘grew up’ in a more cultural sense, but I’m betting it’s actually always been there, but it never mattered before. Because it was only school, or they were only friends, or it was only piano lessons, or it was only church, even only college. But when there’s rent, utilities, and “the lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed,” it’s hard to say “it’s just work.” Already I’m wondering if I’m over-analyzing this, and just feeling a little melancholy and loquacious because I just finished a good book. But it’s happened, this thing, it’s happened at work, and so it isn’t not a problem (which isn’t an unintentional double-negative.)

Now, I’ve only recently started to notice it… to really recognize it. I suspect that CMD might have been the first casualty, and I’m thinking Ascentium might be the second. Although if I’m really rolling with this, AIPD might be before that, and even my grades in highschool, and maybe even a few things I can’t mention specifically here because of the people involved. My point being, I might’ve screwed a few things up in the past, which makes me wonder how I’m going to do in the future.

Arguably, I could just make the line on that chart I mentioned earlier marked ‘job’ turn into a constant line over a long period of time - my lifetime. If I keep getting jobs, then losing them, then hanging out for a bit before getting another, and then losing it, it’ll make a nifty little sawtooth wave that’ll average out to a straight line. But as long as I’m waxing metaphorical, a sawtooth at a short frequency sounds sweet on a synthesizer (thin and bitey) the whole quick cycle of jumping in and out of work doesn’t really sound right for me in the long run. It’s hard to be secure, although I’m awfully lucky to have found a career that pays so much that I can afford to be lazy about addressing things like this. See, I’m bragging.

So that’s what I wonder. What happens in the future? Do I try working out a bit, doing some running or some lifting, eat a bit less, and burn off some fat? Or do I fall off of that and go back to 230lbs? Do I continue to get peak and decline jobs until I’m… 60, or whenever I end up retiring, if ever?

The silly thing is, I kind of don’t care. If you ask me whether I’m an optimist or a pessimist I’d have to say the former, although only because I feel like overall things have generally worked out well for me, and so far I have no reason to believe that’ll change any time soon. I can’t tell if I deserve it or not, because then we’re talking about free will and determinism and I like the idea that there is no free will though it’s a moot point because we will never become powerful enough to map all the variables and accurately predict the ramifications of any particular action in such a complex system as human life, let alone the string of choices and related activities that put people like me in the place where I find myself. That’s a lot of writing I just did there. Anyway.

I guess I’m thinking that it’ll turn out alright, however it turns out, I don’t feel like I’m wasting my life by any means (not that it’ll be any less easy to die as a result.) But now that I’ve got this theory, I’ve got this observation about that thing that I’ve been doing, it makes me want to play with it, to see if I can figure out when it happens, and what to do about it. I guess it’s kind of a revelation, maybe not an epiphany (or maybe, if it illuminates other things about myself, who knows) and I’m happy with it, especially now that I’ve thought it out enough to actually articulate it a little, even in writing on my little blog that no one reads, ha ha. And if I manage to figure it out, I feel like I’ll have a responsibility (not to anyone but myself, arguably the only responsibility that’s important) to follow through and try to do something with it - get rid of it, work around it, overcome it. Because I’m embarrassed, I’m unsatisfied, I feel like my mostly smart self is being held back by this craziness.

So we’ll see about that. Maybe I’ll keep a little spreadsheet, or a new notebook journal thing, or whatever. I do think (as I usually think when I write a new entry for stuff like this) that I’ll start keeping a journal again, a personal one where I can make a post-college rendition of my highschool self’s petty complaints about stuff that doesn’t matter - I mean, it’s cathartic, maybe not even at the time, but certainly in retrospect, reading back in the future. That was Matt in 2003, or maybe even 1998. What was that kid thinking? So this’ll be me in 2010 - can you believe that stuff he thought was important?

If only I could see what it is that I’m stuck on now that I’ve circumnavigated then. Being a time traveler sucks when you’re stuck going one second per second, eh?

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog - not since sasquatch. I blame my facebook account, which has surplanted myspace as my most commonly visited website. In fact, my myspace is gone now - all that remains is about 20 pages of blog entries that I saved out.

So as I sit here, listening to “Hefty Fine” by the Bloodhound Gang (for the first time) and wonder why it’s somehow worse than “Hooray For Boobies,” I thought I’d take a moment to catch up on where I’m at. I mean, 23 - my well-known traveling plans for my quarter-life-crises looms nearer, but to be realistic, I kind of want to be in a certain place by the time I reach my 25th birthday: specifically, graduated, making good progress on paying off student loans, but otherwise out of debt. I want a full-time job, and I want to quit it in order to travel, more or less. I want to throw my electronics in storage, fix up my car, buy a decent laptop, and freelance from the road. But for now, I’m 23, I’m in debt, I’ve still got plenty of school left, and my job situation is tenuous. Good at the moment - but only for the moment. Next month could be bad as easily as good - I’m at the mercy of my ‘industry contacts’ who are of course at the mercy of their clients, and the economy.

So it’s August 11th, so late Monday night that it’s technically Tuesday morning. I’ve been working on a website for a local construction corporation, which has been going well, despite a few delays. I’m still living in The HoytHouse, which is a good place to live, although we don’t really see a lot of Ryan these days - I’m glad I get along well with everyone, though, as it seems that several friends have bad roomate horror stories to tell.

This is shaping up to be a long rambling “taking notes for my memoir” blog entry.

Anyway, I’ve got to admit, I’ve been having some interesting issues with sitting down and getting stuff done. It’s the same old odd sort of procrastination/aversion that I’ve experienced ever since I was a kid. It doesn’t feel like an inability to concentrate. It’s almost like a lack of… will, maybe? Typically, I stay awake until 5 or 6, when it’s getting light outside, regardless of what I’m doing the next day. As a result, it’s really tough for me to wake up before, say, 2 PM. Even on nights when I try to get to bed earlier, I just toss and turn, or otherwise sleep unsoundly, wake up feeling tired, and go back to sleep until the afternoon anyway.

It’s a weird sort of nearly compulsive justification of procrastination, I guess. If I know I’ve got to be somewhere at 5PM, leaving early never occurs to me. Starting at 2, I’ll wake up, go to the bathroom, then lounge around in my room for several hours, sifting through new emails, new facebook stuff, new artiles and comics that I’m following online, and finally glance over at the clock. 4PM? I ought to get ready to leave - but I don’t. I do anything else other than that. Finally, at 4:45PM, I jump up, take a super quick shower, and leave, only to arrive half and hour late. This sort of thing happens A LOT.

Unfortunately, this has a sort of ‘crying wolf’ effect as well. For the first few minutes after I wake up, especially if I haven’t had enough (nearly 9 hours at this point) sleep, I am a complete zombie animal - I mean, sometimes I literally have no memory of what’s happened. There have been a few times where I can only assume that I’ve woken up to my alarm, flipped it off, and gone right back to sleep - and missed whatever I was trying to wake up early for. Similarily, when I wake up, it’s easy for me to think, “Ah, I’ll just lay here for another fifteen minutes.” What really happens is I go back to sleep until 2PM, right? After a while, I guess I get to be the guy who almost never shows up on time.

Like other things that’d be to my benefit to change about my life, I don’t seem to be able to find the motivation to do this differently.

Let’s say my life is a river. That’s a good metaphor. Earlier, I was waterskiing - and now, even after I’ve let go of the rope, and the boat has sped off, I’m still skimming over the water. But this momentum, wherever it came from (highschool? CMD?) is starting to get killed off by friction, and eventually, I’m going to start sinking, and when I do, I’m going to need to start swimming. What I’m debating is - where am I now? Should I be getting ready to start swimming, or am I already up to my shoulders underwater, and need to start doggy paddling right away?

There’s some sort of weird little priority list in my head that’s got some weird little priorities flipped around regarding the economy of my activities. School takes up a significant amount of my money - you ‘d think I’d pay more attention to it. And work makes me a significant amount of money - you’d think I’d pay more attention to it as well. But somehow lazing around, thinking about Magic Cards and the Internet, staying up late and sleeping in late have all gotten bumped to the top of the list. What does that say about me?

I’m suspicious that this is what I get for being so lucky - throughout my life, just about the time I’ve needed something, I’ve caught a break, and recieved it. Not all the time, not reliably, but enough that I’ve noticed it. I’ve wondered about what causes that - is it pure luck, or am I somehow subconciously putting myself into profitable situations - but I guess it might be worth thinking about the result as well. Am I spoiled? Do I think that I can just not make an effort, and things’ll work out anyway for me? Logically, of course, I don’t think that - that’d be stupid. But then again - why didn’t I go talk to my department director today about my classes in school, after planning to last week? There’s a post-it note right there on my monitor and everything - I literally bought a new pack of notes so I could write it. I spent all day doing nothing productive (until this evening) and glancing at the clock, thinking, “Oh, I don’t have to leave for another hour - another half-hour - another ten minutes - I can be a little late - I’m not going to make it - might as well not go.”

I kind of wish I was at least preocuppied by something constructive. I kind of wonder if I need something constructive to do as a hobby. I really wish I did as much music as I used to - how did I get out of the habit of doing that? It seems like now, whenever I sit down and grab my keyboard, everything sounds boring - nothing’s new, or interesting, and nothing’s worth pursuing. I have some good ideas, but never anything worth finishing.

So like I said - coasting, maybe sinking, need to start swimming soon. Well, if nothing else, writing all this out is a good way to organize my thoughts on the matter.

I also need to work on designing up my little group of blogs (mortalityblog.com, musicblog.mattlohkamp.com, and storyblog.mattlohkamp.com) - as well as adding another site for my music, now that myspace isn’t there to provide an easy host anymore. Should I go back to the old ANDR artist name, or find something new? Hmmm.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll try to remember to write more often.