2014 And Other Years: A Retrospective That Turned Out To Be Longer Than I Expected

There are less than 24 hours left in 2014, and I can't say that I'm sad to see it go. Typically when the end of the year is imminent, I sit and reflect on everything that happened throughout its course. Usually this process is touched with some bit of melancholy just due to the nature of my personality (my unwillingness to move forward and my general hatred of change), but really the only loss I have to mourn over the passing of this year is the fact that I watched 365 separate dates go by that will never come again. That's it.

I don't think I could be more excited about 2015. I don't know if I could be less excited either, unless I was saying goodbye to a truly fantastic and life changing year (see: 2011), but again when it comes to a new year, all we're really looking at is another cycle of days and nights with distinctive numbers attached to separate them from all the others. It's only as special as we make it.

I'm not even really sure how to proceed. It's not like 2014 was an utterly terrible year that I'd like to scrub from my memory. I guess it's just that there were very few highlights. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one thing that truly stands out as great, and that was Summer Jam. That was far and away the best day of the entire year, and I'm extremely grateful to be able to be a part of it. As a matter of fact, that was probably one of the highlights of my entire life, as I got to check off quite a few bucket list items that day. If some kind of cosmic wizard told me that I had to live one day of my life for the rest of eternity and that day would never end, but I could choose whichever day I wanted, that would be a top contender.

So there's one shining beacon amidst a whole year of meh. And again, it's not like there were a great number of tragedies that befell me this year either. My dad was diagnosed with cancer, so that's been a bit of a trial, but he seems to be beating it, so that's also something to be thankful for. It's just that when I look back, that diagnosis (and its ensuing consequences) and Summer Jam are the only two things that seemed to have any real impact on my memory of the year. Otherwise it was just a tranquil lake of mediocrity that occasionally lapped on the shores of disappointment. 

I suppose the most interesting thing to do would be compare 2014 to each of the rest of the last five years of my life, since those are the years since I entered the "real world."

2009 was a cataclysmic year in my personal timeline. The first half of the year was fantastic, and contained what may have been my favorite semester of my college career. It introduced me to Magic, which may seem trivial, but that game actually helped shape my life over the course of the next year and a half or so, so it's nothing to scoff at. Over the summer I was forced by financial limitations to drop out of grad school. On one hand that was fine, because I hated grad school, but on the other hand, it was terrifying for a number of reasons. For one thing, I had to commit myself to the "real world." For another thing, it meant my days of hanging out on campus with my friends were over, and to me that was the most distressing aspect, particularly because it came so abruptly. It seems silly, but it hit me hard, and I didn't know what to do with myself. I didn't have any friends at home, and I didn't have any job prospects lined up. So I did what I could to make some money and took a job as a janitor. By the time the year was over, I was on okay footing, plodding along through life, even if doing so with no real purpose. So while 2009 was sort of a roller coaster, for that very reason it was pretty spectacular, and the ups and downs gave me something to remember it by.

2010 began with little fanfare. I did my thing as a janitor for a couple months, and that was that. Then my brother decided to introduce Magic to his group of friends, who up until that point I considered to be insufferable dorks. I had no real desire to ever hang out with them... but if they were gonna play Magic, that was a different story. I desperately needed someone to play with. They played, I had a good time, one thing led to another and I realized they weren't actually as insufferable as I thought on first impression, and suddenly I had friends again. Moreover, I'll always remember that summer as the only time I've ever really reached that zen state of mind where I was completely content with my life and social circles; or in other words, the only time I've ever been single and totally fine with it. I didn't need a girlfriend and I didn't want a girlfriend. I had a good group of friends with which to play Magic till the wee hours of the morning every night after work, and that was all I could ask for.

I wanna keep this as abridged as possible, but that all changed when I met a girl, I was kinda into her, we hung out for a bit, I realized I wasn't as into her as I initially thought, and I broke it off. I wanted to end that year with as little to do with her as possible, but that wasn't really in the cards considering she was part of a new group of friends that formed on RPI's campus. I still don't know exactly how all that went down, but at the end of 2010, which was again an overall solid if somewhat unremarkable year, the stage was set for an unprecedented turn of events.

2011. Man. This year deserves so much attention I'd probably have to split it up into multiple blog posts. I can easily say it was the defining year of my life, but because there were so many intricate details and complex series of events, I'll keep it to bullet points.

-I moved out of home

-I got a girlfriend for the first time in my life

-I got a second job, quit my job as a janitor, and got another nighttime job as part of a planned transition to a more responsible adult life

-I got my dream job

It was a freaking whirlwind. Everything happened so fast and so unexpectedly that even now it's hard to believe some of it really happened. As I mentioned before, 2011 was one of those years I was actually sad to see go. I don't think it's a stretch to say it was the best year of my life.

2012, by contrast, was actually one of the worst years in recent memory. It started off great, like an extension of 2011. January 2012 is another one of those times in my life that I can look at and say "you know, I was really content then." And of course that's always when the rug is pulled right out from under you. At the end of January, we moved out of Troy, and not long after that my girlfriend and I broke up. It wasn't a bad breakup; honestly it wasn't much of a breakup at all. We still lived together and did all the typical couple-y things, so it was like dating without the stress or responsibility of the title, and honestly that was pretty great. But then she met a new guy, and that's when things got messy. To make a long story short, she ran off with him, and that was when the classic bad breakup stuff happened. I don't want to get into it too much right now, but I will say there is no one on the planet I have more disdain and less respect for than the guy she left with. Anyway, I spent the last couple months of the year dealing with the fallout from that, and it was rough, as breakups are.

2013, however, brought with it a ray of hope. I met a girl very early on in the year (actually at the tail end of 2012, but we didn't start talking until 2013), and I knew she would be the one to help me get over my ex once and for all. I had never met a girl like her before, she was pretty much everything I was looking for. I even went so far as to say I was going to marry her, which is something I've never said before or since. Spoiler alert: I didn't. Surprise surprise, I was wrong about a girl. In any case, there wasn't any real emotional baggage attached to that one since it didn't get far enough off the ground to warrant that, so it was just another set of stories for Dr. Love to mine a little bit of wisdom from. The other big thing about 2013 was that it was the year I finally bought a car. I also got my own health insurance (which I was supposed to have as soon as I started work full time in 2011 but I had never filled out the right paperwork), but having a car was so huge. I could finally go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted without having to bother someone for a ride or to borrow their car. On top of that, 2013 was the year I was introduced to League of Legends, and that's been another defining aspect of my life ever since. Overall, 2013 was a pretty solid year.

And that brings us up to speed. To recap, 2009 and 2012 were years that were both great and terrible (though 2012 more terrible than great), 2013 was more-or-less positive, and 2010 was pretty middle-of-the-road. I guess the year that has the most in common out of all of those with 2014 was 2010. So in that sense, if I'm setting myself up for 2011: The Sequel... then I guess I'm okay with that.

In any event, peace be with you, 2014. You gave me virtually nothing worth missing, and I suppose that's for the best. I miss enough things from my lifetime as is.

I Am Still Here

I think I'm the only one left, and that's okay. I really should do this more often, though. I've only written three other posts the entire year, and the year will be over in less than a month.

I have so many things on my mind; so many things to say, but now is not the time for any of them in particular. The best time to say them is when they're formulated clearly and cohesively. Of course, it so happens that whenever that time comes, I'm at work and will be for the next 7 hours or so. And by the time I leave, all motivation to sit down and wax philosophical on the ole blog machine has departed, replaced by a desire to just plop myself down at my computer and get in a few hours of League with my internet friends before we all go back to reality for the night.

I guess that could be what I'm doing wrong in the first place. Maybe instead of waiting for a particular jolt of inspiration, I need to just sit down and go with the flow of whatever it is that springs to mind. Yes yes, I know this blog is a veritable sinkhole of metaphysical "maybes," and I realize that I've addressed this very topic on more than one occasion before. But there's certainly some merit to it. I have these grandiose concepts that I can never bring myself to commit to internet space because I'm concerned I don't have the correct lead-up or the proper closing paragraph. I'm afraid that whatever I write will, in the end, have no impact on the reader because it wasn't packaged properly.

Ah, but that's it, isn't it? There ARE no readers anymore!

It's just me. Sitting here plunking away purely for my own benefit. But I am still here. And as long as I am, I might as well make it worth my own time and at least put down the fragments of thoughts and the concepts that I have when they do strike, so that they don't become forgotten and go totally to waste.

Heck, I've just written more than I imagined I could write about really nothing at all. I wrote three paragraphs on not writing. Although there's more to my lack of posting than just a simple inability to properly organize my thoughts. Part of it has to do with the fact that, for me, these blog posts are a form of catharsis. Typically I review and assess my own issues by way of strange pieces of symbolism that I hope can be translated into something meaningful and relevant to whoever might stumble across this blog (which, again, at this point is most likely no one). The hangup I have is my fear that, once I address a particular issue, if simply posting about it on the blog wasn't enough to beget substantial relief, then I won't know how to deal with it henceforth. So rather than face that potential problem head on, I just kind of put it off. It's the kind of thing where, say, you like a girl and want to ask her out, but you're afraid she'll say no, so rather than risk failure, you just avoid her entirely. That way the possibility of her saying yes can always exist in your mind.

That's honestly a terrible way to go about your life, but I usually let it get the better of me, due in large part to my underlying existential dread of not having a goal to accomplish or anything to look forward to. So for example, if I have an idea for a blog post, I have two options: I can post it and end up with something concrete to look back on which may not have perfectly captured my abstract thoughts on the subject; OR I can just keep putting it off and keep the possibility of that perfect post alive forever.

So that's where we're at right now. So much to say, but the mostly self-imposed inability to actually say it. Although I must admit, it does feel good to have the fingers navigating the landscape of the laptop keyboard at this pace again. I should probably get back on the bloggery train. It might help me sort some things out. Goodness knows there are quite a few things I need to sort out.

But for now I just stopped by to update my tagline and my picture. The old ones were outdated. And because I know Future Bill, when he reads this, will want to know what they were (his memory not being what it used to be), the tagline said "Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt" and the picture was the icon for Fiddlesticks' fear. They made sense at the time, which was back in May. Oh and I guess last time I posted I also noted what the previous tagline and picture were. Neat. I'm such a good historian.

We Are One... We Are Powerful... We Are...

AFRAID

I guess I need to update the tagline of my blog, since Frozen Heart (which is what my icon is) no longer reduces the attack speed of nearby enemies by 20%. It's 15% now... but I should probably just find a different icon, because Frozen Heart doesn't even seem applicable anymore.

The interface round these parts is rather difficult to navigate. It's a terrible chore just to find where I'm supposed to go to even change that little picture.

There. I found it.

I'm scared. Scared that I've been too complacent, but that if I do anything more I'll overextend; scared that I've waited too long, but that if I don't wait longer I won't let things run their natural course.

I was playing Dr. Love to a 16 year old girl the other night. She, a sophomore in high school, has one of those delightful pseudo-relationships with a senior, a fellow who's gonna be going to college several hours away come Fall. She asked me for my opinion on the situation, and I didn't have the heart to tell her it wasn't gonna work out. Those kinds of relationships rarely do. Of course, I could be wrong. As I told her, I know guys who have been with their wives since high school, so successfully navigating that relational minefield isn't totally unheard of, it's just quite uncommon.

To her credit, she did show a reasonable degree of apprehension, if only because of the uncertainty attached to a long-distance relationship (especially between one person who's in college and another who's still in high school hours away), but I told her if it's what she really wants, then there's no reason not to at least give it a shot. I said to think of it this way: you walk by a table. There's a ball sitting on the table, a bright and shiny ball, and it's very enticing. You want it, so go ahead and pick it up. If it turns out that the ball is radioactive and burns your hand off... well that's what robotic prosthetics are for. You just get a new robot hand and say "that didn't turn out so well, so now I know for next time not to pick up the shiny ball." So you keep walking and on the next table is a cool looking box. You're curious as to what's inside the box, so you open it up, and it turns out that it's poisonous gas that burns up your lungs. So you go and get robot lungs, and now you know not to open that kind of box again. And you keep walking along and picking up intriguing objects until either you find one that isn't harmful or you're entirely robot, and neither of those outcomes is really bad.

For once, I handed out some advice that I actually believed in, at least for the most part. The point of my analogy was not to let the fear of failure or loss keep you from trying or having. If you want something, you have to go after it, and you can't let the notion that you might lose it or not even get it in the first place stop you from taking your shot.

And here I am tonight, watching The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and that seems to be one of the central themes of the movie. I'm only about halfway in, so I'll have to assess that with finality once it's over, but maybe I could stand to learn a thing or two from this movie. And from myself.

Mayday

I'm not sure where I'm going with this one. I just know that I've had a lot on my mind for a long time, and I can't seem to let it go.

I suppose that's one of the real secrets to life, letting go; not being able to distract yourself, but having nothing to distract yourself from. Being mentally free. I wonder if anyone really feels that way, at least in the long term. I've experienced it in short bursts, but it's always interrupted eventually with some issue or another.

I can't believe it's been three years... three years since I started that walk to Walmart, three years since it was interrupted by a call asking if we wanted to play tennis, three years since we were dropped off after the tennis outing at the very same spot along our walk where we were picked up. Three years since we finished that walk to Walmart and when we were most of the way back, I finally mustered enough courage to do what I had set out to do several hours earlier.

Three years since I got the answer that I both dreaded and expected.

Of course, I wouldn't have put myself out there if I didn't think I had a pretty good chance. I thought my odds of success were pretty high, actually, maybe even higher than 90%. I never take risks like that unless I feel like I have a really good shot at succeeding. But at the same time, I almost always expect to fail when it comes to that kind of thing, mostly because if you set your expectations low, it's much harder to be disappointed. And that's where expectation and hope differ. Hope is the mitigating factor that encourages you to take stupid risks even when you think you won't succeed.

May 1st, 2011. It was the night that it was announced we had finally gotten Osama Bin Laden. I remember the distinct sense of irony I felt that such a great victory for our country would occur the day I suffered such a crushing defeat. But even then, as I contemplated how the next few months would play out, I hadn't resigned myself to total failure. The early stages of a long-term plan had begun to form in my mind, though I didn't realize at the time how short that "long-term" would be.

If you told me that day what I'd be putting on the line by making that initial move, what I'd be setting in motion and everything that would happen as a result... if I knew then what I know now about how things would turn out... I'd do it all over again. I'd think that maybe I could do things differently, maybe I could get things to turn out right, or at least better than they ended up. So I suppose that's the answer to the question of whether or not I believe in destiny. You can't very well hope to change the future and still believe in destiny.

There's no grand lesson here. There's no moral to the story, I have no bit of wisdom to offer. I used to post here hoping that what I wrote could do some good for whoever might read it. But I know, whether due to the infrequence of my posts or their increasingly more self-serving content, nobody really reads this anymore, which is really more comforting than anything. I understand that someone someday will probably come across this, and to you, whoever's reading, I apologize. I'm professionally upbeat, I do my best to maintain that air most of the time and I hate to betray it.  I just can't keep all this in anymore. It's gotta go somewhere.

It's funny though, because the answer I got that night three years ago was simultaneously exactly what I expected and even worse than I could have imagined... and yet it still turned around completely five days later. Maybe that's the lesson. Maybe I just need to wait it out, to be just proactive enough to get things started, and then bide my time and play it safe until things turn out the way I want. Or maybe I'm just reading into it, like I tend to do. There probably isn't any cosmic correlation.

5/1/14

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I can't help but feel like so many things this year have mirrored the events of years past. The other night, for instance, as we approached the RPI student union for the first time in a long time, I mused that on that very night three years ago (May 3rd, 2011), I had walked to the union with a friend to get food. The circumstances were a bit different, because on that night it was raining, and on this particular night it was quite nice out, but still. Constants and variables. In either scenario, walking to the union was an uncommon occurrence.

Just like I did the other night, I spent that night in the union three years ago in a kind of melancholy daze. My failure from a few nights prior was still fresh in my mind and was compounded by the fact that the object of my affection was out with the guy for whom she shot me down. So I made the best of the company and conversation at hand in an effort to take my mind off of it. Anything's better than brooding, right? As we walked back from the union that night, it had gone from raining to pouring. I spent the majority of the remainder of that night sitting on the railing on the porch outside the house, facing the road and listening to music while the rain came down overhead.

This past Saturday night, a beautiful May evening exactly three years later, we once again left the union... and once again, it was raining.

Again, there's probably no cosmic significance to any of this. It's probably just a coincidence that on the very same day at the same times and in the same circumstances three years apart, I happened to be doing roughly the same thing. But for me, the rain is the kicker. If it hadn't been raining as we left the union this time, I would have thought nothing of it. Of course, we couldn't finish a trip to Troy without at least passing by the house I lived in back then, and this time we actually got out and stood outside it for a decent chunk of time. I even walked up and sat on that railing for the first time in three years, and I pondered, as I have been for the last few days, the difference between expectation and hope. Of the former, I have none. Of the latter... I suppose I have an abundance.

And now here I am. Three years ago (May 5th, 2011), it was a Thursday night, and I was doing my best to get to sleep on a reclining armchair, because I had offered the aforementioned object of my affection the couch. Things happened so rapidly and so strangely over those three days that I could barely take it all in. My disposition turned from hopelessness to total confidence over the span of 48 hours. At that point, I certainly couldn't have predicted what would happen over the next three years. But here I am.

I can only wonder where I'll be three years from now.

Cynical Optimism: An Approach To 2014

Crafting the first blog post of a new year is always a daunting task. I mean you have to start things off right, right? But heck, it's already the end of February. I missed my five year anniversary post, though that's made a bit less of an issue by the fact that I also missed my four year anniversary post last year for the first time in the blog's history. But just the fact that I've kept up with this (however infrequently in a given year) for the last five years is kind of impressive to me.

Just think about that for a second. I started this blog over five years ago. Back then, my primary inspiration was a girl who was way out of my league, and the main purpose of the blog was to channel my frustration over being smitten with her. It's weird, because at the time, I never would have acknowledged that one simple fact, though I'd find ways to kind of dance around it and incorporate indirect references in my writing, because I had to get it out somehow. Plus, a bunch of my friends actually read this regularly back then, and while I'm fairly certain they knew what I was getting at (and they definitely knew who I was interested in, as discreet as I tried to be it wasn't really a secret to anyone), I couldn't be so bold as to come right out and say it. That would be... pathetic, I suppose. Better to hide behind a thin veil of misplaced irritation at all of female-kind, right?

But I guess distance gives perspective, because now I have no misgivings about addressing my frame of mind from that point in time. Though in retrospect my efforts were futile, I thought maybe all I needed was confidence and to try really really hard. And in some small measure, that was true. I did end up managing to score a date with this girl, which, as a friend recently pointed out, is a badge of honor I alone amongst our friends was able to claim. It was a sympathy date, doomed to failure from the start, but hey, I worked hard to talk her into it, and that's something I'm still proud of.

It's amazing how so many things can change over five years, and likewise how so many things can stay the same. I was hung up on that girl for a long time; way too long, and that fact had a profoundly negative impact on things moving forward. But it was the same way with the previous girl that I was involved with. When things ended with her, I had a lot of trouble moving on. I get attached to things, and it's incredibly hard for me to let them go. That's just the way I am, it's the way I always have been, and it's how I always will be.

A while back, as I was driving to work, I heard a song on the radio that reminded me of that first girl. It was pretty popular right around the time she and I broke things off, and it sort of spoke to me of our situation (it's funny and wonderful how music has the ability to mean so many things to so many people). For the longest time, whenever I heard it, it would take me back to the implosion (well, I guess "explosion" is a better term, because it was pretty spectacular and dramatic) of our relationship, and dredge up a bunch of feelings of helplessness and regret. But this time, seven years later, I didn't feel any of that. It was just a song playing on the radio, devoid of any particular inspiration or meaning. And that was amazing to me.

In that moment, I had a bigger problem that I was dealing with, and it struck me that what I felt was a kind of cynical optimism; optimism because the old issues no longer troubled me, but in a cynical sense because I knew that they had been displaced by new issues. The lesson I took from that moment was that any problem you may currently face and the stress it entails won't last forever. But it will be replaced by something more troubling. In sense, that's okay, because you'll get over that hump, whatever it may be, it's just that there will never be a shortage of humps to get over.

So maybe five years from now, I'll be able to speak freely of the things that frustrate and sadden me now, without having to hide them under references to video games or TV shows. Maybe I'll be able to listen to Vices & Virtues again, because that's something I'd really like to do. Maybe it won't even be that long. Heck, I think just admitting that there are things that bother me is a step in the right direction. I never would have dreamed of doing that five years ago, at least not without attaching it to some snide remark. Granted, this is far less likely to be read than anything I posted back then, so I have that measure of comfort, but still. It's the internet. Anyone looking for it can find it. And I'm okay with that.

I'd love to end this on some kind of profound or inspirational note, but to be perfectly frank, this is not at all what I intended to get into when I started writing this post. Actually, I'm not really sure what I intended to write; I just knew I wouldn't be able to sleep yet and wanted some place for my brain to wander. I suppose that kind of organic development is what keeps it honest though. At least I now have one post logged in 2014. Here's to the next five years.