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.