If that's the way it is, then that's the way it is. Cope with it.

Edit: I also added an older, drunker post... it's after this one, I put the real date I wrote it, since I left it in its near original state.

Well, I haven't written in quite some time... so I apologize. It's amazing how fast a month passes. I did write one entry, but while really drunk, and I still haven't brought myself to editing it for the web. Not that I'd care if drunken writing was put on the web, just it got a little more personal than I was expecting. If I'm any good I'll force myself to edit it after this.

I just wanted to say thank you to all the people who've read my last blog and the feed back and discussions I've gotten out of it. In general the responses were positive. The most unexpected / hilarious one I had was (paraphrased) “who the fuck do you think you are writing essays for blogs.” With that being said, I'd just like to say that any and all feedback is welcome, don't be afraid to talk shit, I'm pretty good at taking criticism, and I generally find it funny.

Now that we got that out of the way, we can move right along. In this entry I really just want to talk about my self perception and how I work to maintain it. I think this will be really interesting to look back on a few years from now, and plus, I'd love to hear if/how people see me differently.

Back in September I remember having a conversation with my brother that spawned a question I hadn't really figured out the answer to until recently. I was pretty much telling him that at this point in my life I have accomplished everything that I truly felt was important and that I was in a position to make sure that I could most likely sustain it. That is, I had finally achieved what I always wanted when I was a growing up: complete independence from relying on others, financial stability, a handful of very good friends, and for the icing on the cake, a stable relationship (note: Erin and I have since broken up). I really didn't have any more clear cut goals in life left. There was a void in my life, in that, in some ways, I felt like I had beaten the game. I won life, good job, but at the same time, I felt, this really can't be it. What else do I really want to accomplish?

George didn't know the answer, but I didn't either. I mean, I didn't just want to fill my life with activities, like becoming an adrenaline junky, just to keep myself from being bored. I never wanted to become a engrossed in my job or my work, or be in fervent pursuit of the all mighty dollar either. I've watched plenty of people do that shit, and it's not what I want. I crave working towards worthwhile goals. I want to live each day knowing I'm doing more with my life than just trying to maintain and/or improve my quality of life. I have my material needs satisfied—I don't need or want all the shit this consumer regime tells me I do. As such, for me, making money merely solidifies that stability; I've maxed out the comfort that money-alone can provide.

I've also seen the opposite end of the spectrum, where I think many more people are, living life without any real direction or goals, just sort of riding the waves of others, rarely making any big changes or tough decisions with their life unless their backs are up against a wall. As much as I love just riding my impulses and going with the flow, I don't feel it necessarily will bring me to where I want to go (happiness), but rather, where the current is taking me. Living life without direction is inefficient and slow, living life as a workaholic seems to just be a big rush and grind to keep yourself occupied while in pursuit of a false dream / ideal. So what the fuck should I do?

What I came up with seems painfully obvious in hindsight, and it's something I did anyway, but nothing well defined. So what did I come up with? Since I have satisfied to a reasonable amount my physical needs, I must work on the only thing I can be sure I will have for the rest of my life: myself. That is, my goal in life is now to make myself into the person I want to be and remove the aspects of myself are inhibiting such progress. This idea may sound just like what I've preaching before, but I don't think I ever spelled it out in plain English: My goal in life is to improve.

When I say I want to improve myself, I mainly mean it in the sense that I want to eliminate bad habits, understand how more things work, have greater exposure and more well-rounded abilities. I love feeling useful and helpful. The more knowledge I possess and more capable I am of sharing and expressing that knowledge, the better. It's not that I don't think I'm good at doing these things now—I really do think I'm good at all these things, but I want to be great. I feel that happiness is not a destination, the final stopping on the train of life, but happiness is the trip itself and the satisfaction that the places it takes you are the result of. If I don't keep trying to learn more and improve I eventually drift towards just feeling stagnant and unfulfilled.

This is a much trickier task to tackle than the problems I used to work towards in the past, which were mainly external related, are now internal. This is a task I cannot really accomplish through the direct guidance or over sight in others. To change myself, I have to define what I want to be, I have to create the yardstick for measurements, I have to decide what habits need to be culled and which need to be fostered. I have to force myself to wage an internal and non-essential war against my own impulses and instincts. There is nothing straight-forward, clear-cut, or easy about this. It requires being brutally honest with myself, frustrating myself, breaking habits of convenience, and figuring out how best to change myself. There are many techniques and tools I've developed to help me on this journal, and it's safe to say that this blog is one of the tools. Ultimately though, tools and techniques are only as good as their user, so the burden can never be shifted anywhere else, it lies entirely on my shoulders.

One of the cool parts about this war is all the shit that I continue to find out about myself. With the desire to improve comes the requirement to know where I stand now, so I examine my own habits as objectively as possible. Combined with the intimate knowledge of my own memories and insight, I can even generate theories onto why I act, how I act, to the point where I find myself pretty predictable. Isn't that a silly concept? Being able to predict yourself? I feel the general notion I feel is that you would never need to 'predict' how you'd act, because you have this magical thing called 'free will,' and when confronted with a situation a person can decide their actions against their beliefs and moral values. But if anything my personal observations have told me, it's not the case. Not even remotely. Most behaviors are quite predictable. There is always a root reason and causation for your actions, just usually we aren't aware of them. You have to really step back and eliminate that root issue if you ever want to solve the problem. Otherwise, you're just treating an immediate symptom. Just like makeup can hide flaws, hiding your bad habits and tendencies or merely finding environments in which they are acceptable doesn't really treat the issue, it masks them. It delays the inevitable, doesn't make you a better person, but makes you look better on paper. That is not good enough for me. At the end of the day I want to make myself happy, and as a harmonious byproduct make the world appreciate me for that. I don't' want to make the world appreciate me for something and then derive my happiness from that, but I see a lot of people work that way.

At the moment, my major personal improvement projects revolve mainly revolve around what I would call mental discipline. Through the wonderful powers of meta-cognition, I realize quite easily when I'm bored or distracted, but I don't always have the willpower to force myself to be productive. It's odd to say this, but I really don't control my thoughts that much. They are very fluid for the most part and my active mind more or less has to corral them to go in the right direction. For something as focused, specific, and needs to have a wholesome feeling as this writing or a blog entry, that requires a great deal of active thought management, and sometimes I'm just too lazy or unfocused to do it. It's seems paradoxical to be able to think that you don't want to be thinking about something and then think about it anyway, but it happens all the time.

One of the other things I've been working on is trying to make myself more open, transparent, and social. There are very few things I hide about myself or wouldn't be willing to tell someone. I don't have secrets and I'm not going to try to pretend that I haven't ever fucked up or been foolish in the past. Yet, I don't share this with many people, not even myself really. It seems so pointless for me to have all these ideas and thoughts and then not share them with others. There are plenty of people who would appreciate hearing them, as well as plenty of people who would not be too fond to hear them. But, my bodily instincts keep me very hermit-like. I'm not socially awkward, but for whatever reason my impulses to keep myself at home instead of going out tend to prevail. It requires a lot of energy for me to want to go out, but then when I do, I almost never regret it. It's like my imagination is my worst enemy. But even still, I usually do get very worn out from going out and need to spend alone time. Achieving a healthy balance is what I'm striving for.

Well, I hope what you can take away from this blog is that I believe we all can be better ourselves. I didn't want to merely rant that I have issues that I need to fix, but I wanted to lay out the argument for why I want to improve, how I hope to go about it, and share what I've learned so far. I'm open to questions, and I encourage you to ask and give feed back. I'd encourage you to use the 'Add Comments' link below, but feel free to comment on facebook or just drop me an IM or whatever.

Just as an aside, here are some of the things going on or recently going on in my life:

• end of Feb, Erin and I broke up after ~2.25 years
• I learned how to make my own pizza dough, om nom nom
• Yesterday and the day before I saw two concerts, Bloc Party nd private concert, respectively
• I'm getting visitors! Hooray. My cousin in the beginning of April, and my Dad and Brother for my dad's birthday May 22nd. We're going to see the Mets vs Red Sox
• Ratatat Concert 4/20
• Read the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, then World War Z. Both awesome. I'm now working on One Dimensional Man... so dense... next book is definitely going to be more leisurely