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?