May 2013 - mindjames

The Wandering Twenties – A Few Thoughts on Feeling Lost

Lately, I find myself spending a lot of time trying to figure out what I’m doing. In our age, it’s the common struggle of twentysomethings; all the uncertainty, bumbling around for years, worrying about careers and the future, but meeting it with a special kind of indecision that ends up being the equivalent of that really out of shape dude struggling to walk the treadmill right after New Years.

At 26, I feel like I’m beyond most of the general struggle as far as my peers go. I’m not stuck waiting tables or shriveling up in misery each day at some dead end job that I can’t get out of. I’ve got a good job. I don’t see myself needing to find something more substantial in my foreseeable future. More key, I’ve got a general career path etched out. I’ve got goals, ambition, and all that stuff, but I also have an idea of how I’m going to get there; a rough map, and I feel well-equipped enough to have no problem maneuvering myself in the direction I want.

And that really handles the biggest thing I tend to see as far as those around me come. In fact, it almost feels like my friends my age are almost exclusively in two classes. Married, on average, now with a kid or kid on the way, and projecting the sense that they have their life ‘together’ because they have no choice but to, or the others. Those of us who aren’t married, ranging from single with no idea when or how anything substantial is going to surface as far as companionship goes, all the way to the ones in long-time relationships, where you have no idea what they’re doing or thinking because they don’t, they just are in it because they always have been. And that class commonly projects all the uncertainty, all the wavering.

I think the emphasis from that last paragraph should be perception….. (click the title to read more)

The Shame About Respect

It’s a shame we live in a world where restraint, respect, and consideration are viewed more as disinterest, lack of confidence, or unattractive behavior as opposed to coming on to women with half-assed sweet talk and unveiled attempts of puffery to appeal to ones self-image; because I don’t use some cute way to tell you that I think you’re sexy or beautiful, doesn’t mean that my reverence of that fact preventing me from buzzing about your ear like some mosquito is disinterest– instead, it is probably the highest honor I can give.

Smiling Practice

This morning, I made it my personal goal to hold a good, genuine smile during my drive to and from work. I did OK on the first leg, and we’ll see how the second leg goes, but besides being a mood augmenter, the personal challenge is eye-opening to a lot of things.

The thing about smiling is that it seeps into your mood. If you’re smiling, and by that I mean replicating a genuine looking smile, then eventually the line will cross from just forcing that smile to actually smiling, and because pleasantness and happy emotions are so strongly bonded with that facial expression, that smile gets you feeling better; feeling good.

Hoarding

I want an endless collection of mason jars. I want to be a hoarder. I want to store all of my dreams in them, and put them on shelves all over the walls. I’ll light the halls of my house with the faint glow of each of my dreams. I’ll call myself a collector. When I have friends over, I can lean in and ask them; do you want to see something cool? Then I’ll show them that dream I had in first grade with the giant black and purple vortex in the sky.

I want to arrange them by how they affected me. I’ll put all the bad, realistic ones in the closets and in the crawl space. Nobody wants to see those, or remember them, but if you’re trying to hold on to all of your dreams, then you can’t throw anything out. All the most nonsensical and bizarre dreams can replace the magazine rack in the bathroom.

All of the dreams that made me feel weird and hopeless after I woke up, I’ll cover with curtains, and all the fantastic dreams that made me sad to return back to consciousness, I’ll line the boundaries of my bedroom with. The dreams I’m most moved by will be the first thing you see when you enter my home.

Certain dreams of sentimental value, I’ll share with people I know as a special gift, and hope that Wonder laminates their mind as they did mine. And anytime any of us aspires to adventure away from any of our lives– we can stare into the jar for a spell and revisit somewhere distant, somewhere secret, somewhere hidden, and somewhere beyond this universe.

Once you forget a dream, it is lost forever, so I’ll store all of my dreams in glass jars, so that I can always revisit them, and never forget any of them. I’ll dream away until there is no room in my home for anything but dreams.