Posts Tagged introspection

Date: June 20th, 2010
Cate: matt's life, things to think about
1 msg

updated infrequently.

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?

Date: January 16th, 2009
Cate: matt's life, society + culture, things to think about

when did this storm begin?

Blog title is a song reference, see Shiny Toy Guns’ latest album ‘Year of Poisen’, track 1. This is probably one of the first blog posts I’ve written that I’ve (briefly) considered keeping to myself – it’s really just me talking about me, but I figure that you, my friends, are probably nearly as interested in me as I am, and that complete strangers certainly don’t have anything to lose. It’s kind of rambling, as usual.

So – after reading an incredibly good book (Spanking Shakespeare by Jake Wizner) I’m thinking about typical highschool experiences, and how I missed out on some major classics: drinking, drugs, parties, and dating. Or rather, I’m wondering, did I miss out?

Obviously, since highschool, I feel like I’ve more then caught up – and while I rarely regret any past actions, I do wonder a bit about how I might be different if I’d been exposed to some of that stuff before college – or, honestly, before working at CMD, ha ha. I mean, if I’d had a date to the prom, smoked some weed in the parking lot before we went in, spiked the punch or whatever, laughed at whoever was crowed prom king, then drove up to Mt Tabor to fuck around and drink tequila, where would that leave me today? Socially, things never really lined up – I was too nervous about the repercussions of being gay in highschool to ever really persue any romantic interest, and all my friends were straight, anyway. Well, not that a lot has changed since then – my sexual preference is pretty low-key, and my sparse encounters with the ‘gay scene’ have been disapointing. Most of my friends are pretty straight, and I don’t even remember who ‘knows’, ha ha, which might be because I just don’t care, or perhaps because it almost always sounds forced to me – like I’m trying to come out of the closet, when I don’t think that should even be necessary.

But what if I’d had all that stereotypical stuff – maybe not even a boyfriend, just a somewhat gay friend, a fuck buddy, perhaps, who I went to dances with and got super drunk with? It feels like it would’ve been totally out of character – but honestly I’d always wanted to get a taste of that sort of lifestyle, but wasn’t ever really assertive enough to seek it out. Now I wonder if my parent’s hypothetical “you’re not old enough to be doing that” response might’ve been right? I’m egotistical to think that i have a fairly supreme outlook on life and people and things in general – would I have developed it if I’d partied my way through senior year and into college? I don’t know, it’s like there’s a weird parallel universe version of me, who’s probably pretty simliar, but not quite the same as the me that’s writing this. I don’t believe in the theory about alternate universes constantly fractalling out every time a choice is made, but it’s an appealing concept. I’m attracted to that idea of there being more of me, ha ha.

The reason that this has relevance and isn’t just fanciful speculation is that it has bearing on how I make decissions today, and in the future. Should I be more adventurous? (another music reference, whee!) I might just feel this way because of the group of people I hang out with, but getting drunk, high, sleeping with guys, and living in a house with some friends and owning all this stuff just seems like a normal thing to do – it’s not really an accomplishment. All of these things were sort of milestones, in my mind, and yet they’re pedestrian to people a few years older then me. They would’ve been pedestrian to people a few years younger, even. So is that something that I’m concerned about? Reaching sort of cultural milestones, being recgonized for ‘being ahead’ by my peers?

I think it’s one of those rare occasions where peer pressure, societal pressure, cultural expectations, and maybe even basic animal instinct slip through my otherwise expertly maintained self-confidence – not even to the point where it degrades the trust I have for myself, but at least to the point where I occasionally question it. Why don’t I have a boyfriend? Why didn’t I try harder to stay at CMD? When I think about stuff like that, I can’t help thinking back to being younger, to a few of my brief often nerve-wracking encounters with girls, and my petty little spats with teachers – I’ve always been mulish about submitting to authority, especially if doing so would make me uncomfortable, or if I perceive that I’m being coerced into a decision. I’ve always second-guessed myself like crazy when it comes to starting and maintaining relationships – my ideals, my hunches, and vauge notions of cultural expectations all collide and leave me fumbling for the right thing to say, or the right move to make. And yet, despite all that, it doesn’t really bother me. I mean, thinking about it at this moment, it certainly seems like a big systemic problem in my life, but an hour from now it’ll be completely gone from my mind – I won’t lose any sleep over it.

Actually, the swing between not caring and caring, frank examination and frank indeference, is probably worth thinking about as well. Am I not interested in striking up a romantic relationship because I already lead a fulfilling life, or have I convinced myself that my life is fulfilling because I never had what I would consider a real ‘going out on dates’ relationship, and I’m 22? That sounds like the sort of thing that cultural expectations would interject into my thought process, and there is the overwhelming evidence that the subject only rarely surfaces in my near-nightly introspective pondering (again, is it because I have trouble sleeping, or a cause of my trouble sleeping?) and if I hardly ever devote much thought to it, can it really be that important to me? I think more about dying then I do about dating, and I try to think about dying as little as possible due to my fear of mortality (which this mortality blog refers to.)

 

… after writing all this, I kind of wonder what my motivation is. Do I have a somewhat compulsive desire to inform my fellow members of humanity that I’m gay, haven’t had a real date in forever, didn’t drink or smoke at all until I started working at CMD, and et cetera? Are these really all important factors that contribute to Matt Lohkamp? They must be – I mean, they seem kind of tame, but I’ve pretty explicitly identified them as important to me, what with all this thought I’m putting into them. My guess would be that it’s cathartic more then anything else – that was such a freaking good book I just read, and the main character sort of got his whole screwed up life together at the end, and now I kind of wonder if I’m in the process of doing that too. Well, my life isn’t exactly screwed up, though. Actually, it’s probably a sort of preliminary life story telling – I would’ve discussed any of this with anyone, if that conversation had happened, but if it does now, it’ll be easier because I’ve essentially already talked it out pretty thoroughly. I actually do that quite a bit – carry on long hypothetical conversations with myself, or play out hypothetical events, all in my head, and I’m honestly not sure if doing that ahead of time helps me any when the situations or conversation actually occurs – it’s more likely that it just calms me down if I’m nervous about something.

To end, I’m going to tell a story about one of my first almost-girlfriends, one of the crazy ones. We walked down the dark path to the beach, where the ocean crashed invisibly against the sand, and we huddled together next to a driftwood log. In between french kissing, she told me that she saw ghosts, and spirits, and angels, and devils. I felt incredibly akward, because I didn’t believe in any of that stuff (despite the fact that we were both currently attending a christian church camp.) She went on about how demons had come after her while she was talking to her counselor, and they had held hands and prayed, and a white sheet had fallen around them that protected them from their supernatural assailents. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to kiss more, or maybe try having sex (I might’ve been a virgin at that point, I don’t remember), or if I wanted to seriously debate the existence of angels. I wasn’t brave enough to make any sort of sexual moves, or to do the conversation thing (she was a cool person to hang out with, appart from the semi-girlfriend thing, and this new supernatural revelation) so I opted for more kissing. A year or two later I told her I was gay, and she told me that she was bi.

Good story. The character in that book I just finished was supposed to write his memoirs as a senior highschool assignment – and I for sure would like to give that a try. I wonder – would I change the names to protect the innocent?