What is this thing?

I just turned on episode 247 of This American Life. I'm passively listening through the first 37 minutes. The last ten features Sarah Vowell telling us of an American love story, the one between Johnny Cash & June Carter.

I fell for Cash because he was simultaneously admired and pitied. He had great music and a waned career, and he found love but didn't know how to maintain it. This was two years ago and I, too, was starting to nail down the path I wanted to walk in life. I fessed up to my parents how I wanted to pursue theatre in any capacity and that school would take me another as-yet undetermined amount of years to finish. I had just met then-girlfriend, and after overcoming a huge hurdle (I lost my voice!), we got together. I had high hopes for that time of my life.

I learned more about Cash. I watched the movie and compared it to my own. I became envious of the bad parts of Cash's life, the drinking, the womanizing, the lack of control. As a theatre kid, I started thinking that my own life lacked weight, that it didn't matter as much because I hadn't overcome anything. I didn't have Obstacles. My Objectives were easy to achieve.* I didn't need Tactics. Life was easy.

And I think that's what caused the last year and a half of college to become a meaningless blur.

It sounds antithetical to the way life should be lived. Being happy, that's all I ever wanted out of life. But at that time ego got in the way and I think I started causing trouble in my personal life, both to shake it up and to give me something to overcome. It reminds me a lot of middle-class Caucasian teens in the early 90's who listened to NWA and envied the black struggle. The admiration sounds misguided, warped in its envy, unsure of the emotion that's derived in the triumph.

I wasn't sure what I was doing. My eyes wandered. I drank a lot, went to parties, purposely put myself in situations that threatened the integrity of my relationship, and for what? To push buttons? To challenge my loyalty? I think I was setting myself up for failure. Truth is, I wasn't ready for my life at that point. I didn't know what in theatre I wanted to do, or what about relationships was so great. I wrapped the college life to fit the only life I knew: school. A set schedule that I had to make work, person that needed an "x" amount of my time.

In my life's current incarnation I'm finding myself more lost than ever. I'm looking to work to give my life structure, to measure its success. I still get overwhelmed and tired and dizzy from figuring out if its turning out "right." I get mad at myself for copping out on friends who supposedly "bug me" at work, who only tap my shoulder because they miss me, not because they want to see me fail. And I give my girlfriend a hard time because at any given moment I'm unsure of whether we're working or having a relationship.

Where I am now is where I used to relish being: in the gray area.
Oh good. "Act Three: A Love Story" I'll have to listen to it again in a second.

What I'm learning to do is forge my own path. What I have to keep in my mind is that I am not alone. Where I trod and how I do it affects others. As Manager, it's not my vision but my execution. As a friend, when I'm alone it makes my friends lonely.

I am:
Lover > Fighter
Observer > Doer

How this is gonna work out is anybody's guess.
Here I go listening to Sarah Vowell again.

Tabla Rasa

All the e-mail from my various accounts now forward to my Gmail.

I'm deleting everything I haven't read in six months, or have read and the matters are finished.

I also deleted the one e-mail from this time last year that I kept because... well, I'm not sure why.
Maybe to remind myself that I was still a part of someone's life.

But I'm not now, and relations are amiable, so no reason to cling.

My life is everything on my plate, and today I've switched to bite-sized portions.

CurrentReading List

1. http://www.43folders.com/43-folders-series-inbox-zero
2. http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/08/getting-started-with-getting-things-done

I have the following as an uncomplicated, simple .jpeg on my desktop:

GETTING THINGS DONE

1. identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (close all open loops)
2. get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now
3. create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
4. put your stuff in the right place, consistently
5. do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
6. iterate and refactor mercilessly

So, basically:
A. Make your stuff into real, actionable items or things you can just get rid of.
B. Everything you keep has a clear reason for being in your life at any given moment—
both now and well into the future.
This gives you an amazing kind of confidence that
i. nothing gets lost
ii. you always understand what’s on or off your plate.

Chris Is

I've done a whole lot of nothing in the past days. Well, there's always something, and it's hard for me to think of the things I do for myself as productive. Those things I do that are deemed necessary will get done because they have to, otherwise I fail in my objective.

Clarify: CHRIS is an essay, that must include a thesis, supporting paragraphs, and a summed-up, why-didn't-I-just-read-the-ending? paragraph. As Manager, his supporting paragraphs are a must, otherwise he automatically fails the minimum criteria. As a Human Being, those things that sustain him--air, food, water, downtime--are his grammar, punctuations, his structure. The content won't make sense without the form. Neither makes sense without the other, and only together can we achieve a cohesive whole.

The Content is constantly changing. CHRIS is more a collection of short stories than he is an essay; as a singular work, he is annotated, ripe with the author's commentary of could have been and what he was thinking at the time.

Revelation

All these late nights that despite my thinking better of it, they are addictions. It's not just a need to unwind, but when my day revolves around a very loving girlfriend, an attention hoarding day job, and a night job that is constantly at its unfunnest point, I realize that I am experiencing all of the things that I want.

The jobs, girlfriend, I have very realistic expectations of their time commitments, and still I commit myself to them. What I am doing in the middle of the night on Wikipedia, on YouTube, is looking for something to amuse me. I'm looking for novelty.

I surround myself and purposely make decisions to set my life in a certain way and then I agonize and loose sleep trying to break the mold.

I told myself and many others that I wanted to start running a game at my house: again, molding my life to have time commitments in addition to other already established commitments. I don't know if this is self-destructive or if this is something everyone does.

To top it off, I irregularly have a recurring dream of a time in my life that I thought I didn't regret, and accepted as had happened, but the resulting feeling of this dream, as I wake up, IS regret.

I don't know. I know it's a good thing that I understand why I stay up so late all the time. I could consider holding myself to so many relationships. Maybe be more open. I do what I want anyway, and I still uphold Quality Sleep as a worthwhile goal--but I also know you can't ever "make up" for lost sleep. "Lost Sleep" cuts into my time to enjoy things in the future. I don't actually gain back anything, I just loose out on future endeavors.

Why would any one do that to him or herself?