Archive for the ‘ Observations ’ Category
I have, at this very moment, many drafts.
I have so many unfinished thoughts.
I could swipe my right index finger from right to left – like a manga comic – and they and all they contain will be gone as though they’d never been.
Sometimes I think life is a lot like that.
Swipe, swipe, swipe…
❤
I am sometimes confusing. Confused and/or confusion.
I wonder what goes unsaid. I wonder what is between the lines I read and why those words aren’t in bold.
I wonder often of late at my complete inability to concentrate.
I am in a place, a place I don’t want to be, surrounded by people I do not particularly care for and some of whom I fervently wish I’d never met.
I think that the world is sometimes very dark.
I sometimes hear a sentence in my mind, a line from a book I once loved:
“…holding their swords with the ease of trained warriors and the sorrow of awakened dreamers…”
I identified with that line long before I was a trained warrior – I’ve always held the sorrow of an awakened dreamer just beneath the surface, where it is invisible to onlookers.
I prefer it so, I know not (now) why.
I am sometimes unquantifiable; I cross lines, blur boundaries, I am an odd amalgamate of often mutually exclusive qualities – I am the exception to many rules.
I don’t quite know what to make of that.
❤
I just realized that I went about three months without posting anything – only posting when I was able to start running again.
Apparently the amount of free time I have had has declined drastically, because there is hardly ever (read: never) a time when I don’t have something to say – even if I’m just commenting on my lack of something to say.
I’m not quite certain that qualifies as a paradox but for the purposes of this post let us suspend the rules, or perhaps merely bend them a bit.
I’m actually not certain where I was originally going with this post so I’ll be back later to finish it.
Back about 2 days later: some combination of earth rotations and movement on its orbit of Sol, and you’ve been deceived readers – I still have nothing much of interest.
Running, that’s interesting, I level design in my head sometimes when I run, it’s math mostly so I can do two things at once (and enjoy it) that most people hate to do period, and while we’re on that I’ll paraphrase Dawkins, I’m not super into polarizing figures but I like this one: why is it so shameful to admit to a lack in literacy but perfectly acceptable to admit to deficiencies in science and a compete inability to handle mathematics of any level above basic arithmetic?
I’m just saying, if someone tells me that matrix theory makes no sense or that they can’t wrap their mind around string theory or super-symmetries that’s one thing but I’ve run into a startling (and disheartening) number of people who don’t even know what the order of operations in (very) basic algebra is.
Algebra. That was sixth grade. Seriously I always loved to solve for y – if you know me or read this blog then you know why I like Y.
Be back again to finish this later-ish.
Annnnnnnd another eight or nine days later: it’s the playoffs, my beard is actually coming in quite nicely (for me anyway) and one of my teams has advanced to the second round. Once again, if you know anything about me (chances are, if you’re reading this you’ve stumbled here because of my categories and/or post tags) then you know that I love hockey. Playoff hockey in particular. It’s the best month of the year and not just because I don’t have to shave.
Aren’t artists and intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals (read, hipsters) supposed to have beards? I feel like I’ve read that somewhere.
This post has been completely disjointed. Broken up into its constituent atoms it retains only the barest semblance of coherence.
I rather enjoy that. It’s my blog I don’t have to make sense if I don’t want to, now do I?
I thought not.
❤
There’s a website called reddit – you may have heard of it.
At any rate I read a comment about running that resonates and I thought I’d share it:
This is sort of how I started running too. When my life was falling apart and I thought nothing else could go right I started going to the gym to force myself into something social everday. Just to interact with people. Just to do SOMETHING.
And then I started running. And then it started being about me. And that feeling. And the act. And how free it was. How independent. How strong. How I didn’t have to hold back anything like I did with the rest of the world. On the treadmill, on the trails, on the track, in my running shoes I was allowed to be raw anger and pain and frustration and loneliness and strength, too, because fuck the world that doesn’t think it takes strength to be alone.
Fast forward six months – my first 5k. Six more – half marathon. A year – marathon. I’m still the only one I know who’s done it. I’m about to start training for the triathlon. And yeah, I like my body a lot better now, not so much because of the way it looks but because it is a powerful, independent, free extension of the strength I carry and I can show that any time.
So you, more power to you. Run. Run for as long as it makes you happy. There’s nothing like that first ten miler that you take in the middle of the night without your phone or telling anyone where you went and you think it’s never going to end and when you finally finish your legs are fucked for the next three days, but fuckitall if it wasn’t worth it.
Running’s like that. Welcome to the family.
Actual post on reddit with comment.
A little off-topic but ever in my heart and thoughts – to my best friend holding down that bar, keeping my seat open: I’ll see you again someday buddy, but not yet.
David R. Greenslade
Kandahar City, Afghanistan
04/08/07
“The modern world is not necessarily a runner’s world. Many other physical variables affect our ability to stay healthy. We detrain our glutes and tighten our hamstrings sitting at our desks for hours, grow tight in the shoulders from stress and eat genetically modified foods with consequences we don’t yet fully understand. The variables are as different as the circumstances of our lives, with one thing in common: They all hamper the body’s ability to deal with the forces of running.”
-Philip Latter, April 2013 Issue Running Times
That pretty much sums it up, I have no problem quoting when someone else can say what I’m trying to say more eloquently than I can.
❤
It’s true.
There are a million applicable little quotes out there designed to deceive you into believing that life is in any way meant to be perfectly happy for every being.
Life is about balance: dualities – ergo for me to be happy someone else must be sad. I’ve been both and I bet you have too. It’s why people born into privilege will never understand what struggle means. They will never have balance.
As for the title, life is busywork…isn’t it? What do you think you were created for? What do you believe your purpose for existing is? Now think about your days, your time, your life: now think about the fact that the most valuable resource those that live and breathe have…time.
What do you trade those precious seconds for?
If you answered paper, printed with portraits of dead guys, then you’ll probably be sad.
And the guy stealing your time with those portraits is going to be happy.
Balance.
❤
So it’s the end of 2012, I suppose that I should have something enlightened or at least semi-enlightening to say…I really don’t think I do though.
I wish all of you luck, love and life in the new year.
❤
I am building things. Creating something from nothing. Odd sounding, I suppose it’s not nothing but whenever I create something – art, writing or games I start with a blank page and put words, line or code on that page. So, something from nothing feels like it fits.
The catalyst is me. Without me those pages would stay forever blank.
I often wonder what it is I’ll leave behind when I’m gone. Something more than a memory of the person I was for those whose lives I’ve touched.
Something more than ephemeral thoughts that will die with those that think them.
Legacy.
❤
Level design actually doesn’t feel like work. . .is this what they were talking about when they said find something you love to do and you’ll never work a day in your life?
I would’ve never believed that one.
❤
As the title says…at any rate 2012 is almost gone and it has been a year filled with both normalcy and insanity.
I rather like that.
I deleted my Facebook. Absolutely liberating that.
I dissolved the LLC I was partnered in, the short of the long – my partner never held up anything remotely resembling a fraction of a portion of a workload.
But out of that experience came my company. I’ve begun to build it ground up; bootstraps firmly held. Only gravity holds my feet on the ground these days it seems.
I’m learning several new programming languages concurrently…I wish I could say that it were easy to do so, but it’s real work.
I’ve thought rather intensely when I’ve got some free time about the major events of my life, many of which have been the kinds of things that can break people.
I tend to jump back and forth on the idea that things happen for a reason. If you asked me today I’d tell you that they do, and that they have built me into something that can take almost any hit right on the chin and grin through it.
Somedays I feel it more than others but I’m still looking up and that is pure encouragement.
I’m building worlds, some with words, some with pixels but I’m making dreams real, my own for the moment and hopefully someday I’ll be able to build it into something so big it can make other people’s dreams become real and tangible – to make those secret hopes they cling to in the deepest hidey-holes in their hearts become their lives.
I know that in person I can “come off” as arrogant, egotistical, hard, irreverent and sometimes (more than) a little crazy.
I am wild. I am unapologetic. I am the me I am because I was molded by time and experiences: in that I am just like you.
Underneath all of that still lives the little boy that looked up into the night sky and dreamt of setting foot on the planets that orbited those visible stars.
Well, failing that, the man that encapsulates that boy will do his best to bring those stars down here where we can all marvel at them.
❤
curro ergo sum 