jeff yen

So here I sit, savoring a cup of coffee along with this odd sensation of contented solitude. It’s a feeling I was used to, not that long ago, and it’s something I’m rediscovering.

It’s not unlike opening your eyes early on a Saturday morning, with an empty schedule before you. You know you haven’t yet fully awakened to the world, and there’s a languorous, velvety warmth wrapped all around you. You’re fairly certain that you’re being lazy, but equally sure that nobody cares.

It’s all right. But it gets kinda old after a while.

This was basically the state in which I’ve existed for several years; stumbling out of high school into college, then into a career, cruising through a decade with my eyes closed, my mind still wrapped in hazy half-sleep. I was becoming comfortable with the idea of this as an inevitable constant; my future as a soft-focus blur. Alone, regrettably, not exactly happy, but with no real hardship to speak of.

Safe.

Comfortable.

Then, of course, I went and got into an actual relationship.

It was astonishing.

This tiny woman, simultaneously as familiar to me as my own childhood and as alien as the minds that enjoy NASCAR,  sauntered into my life, took a casual look around, and pulled all the walls down. I was left squinting (yes, I’m aware my eyes normally look like that anyway) against the savage light of some very harsh realizations.

It wasn’t really something I was ready for, so I started wrapping my life up around her, instead of facing it. So, you can kind of imagine (or if you’re anyone I’ve talked to in the past year, you’re probably already sick to hell of hearing about it) my reaction when she propped the door back up on its hinges and walked out.

Yeah. It wasn’t pretty, let’s just leave it at that.

So now I have most of the old walls built up again. They’re familiar. They’re comfortable. I’m (mostly) over her, over it, and trying to get over myself.

But it’s not quite right.

I wake up early these Saturday mornings, and there’s no velvety warmth behind my eyelids, there’s no silky stretch and yawn. Instead there’s a crackling light racing round the inside of my skull, and a hammering in my chest. I can’t do anything but lie there and gasp for a while, then I have to get up and pace. It doesn’t matter where. Lately, it’s been up the side of :gps:Cowles Mountain::32.812607::-117.032216:gps:. Every day. I mean, I’m starting to recognize rocks.

I think it’s actually a good thing for me. Aside from getting me outside once in a while, it’s once again convinced me I have to do something, and learn some things — all those things that make me snicker cynically when other people talk about them.

You know. Like, about feelings and shit.

I’m not used to that. I’m used to analyzing things. I’ve grown accustomed to the idea that I can figure out most of my issues by picking them apart and thinking about each one, because I’ve been under the happy illusion that I’m intelligent.

Of course, I’m not intelligent. I’m mildly clever, which is not at all the same thing. It’s the difference between the chimp who leads his troupe to local dominance, and one who’s figured out his favorite stick makes a dandy ass wiper.

Now I’m starting to understand that it’s not enough. I can rationalize away a lot of stuff, but not a purpose. I need something to do, and not for the sake of doing it, nor just because I don’t really want to do anything else. I’ve been here before, too, and it’s not exactly heartening to see how little progress I’ve made. If I don’t make any more progress than this, so be it. But I probably shouldn’t sit around and watch the next ten years pass the same way. I just have to, you know. Whatever, I’ll do it tomorrow.

Ahem… anyway.

Socrates, Lao Tzu, Shakespeare, &c. have expressed and/or expanded upon the notion that a wise man is one who admits he knows nothing.

For me, and I’m sure countless others, I believe this is a fallacy. If you’re just smart enough to know you’re a jerk, in no way does that make you not a jerk.

It just makes you more insecure than the stupid jerk next to you.

Oof. I need to stop drinking coffee. Gotta wake up at the crack tomorrow to try and find personal growth at the REI used gear sale, or else some other asshole is going to buy it first.

That’s it… show’s over, folks. Expect a gradual cessation of posts like this, and hopefully more stories about getting farted on at the gym.

————————————————————-

I offered a timeline, told her I wanted to work at it, and see if we could keep things going. But she was either too frightened, impatient, or — and I do have to face this as a probability — reasonable and clear-headed to consider it.

We never really had much going for us, I guess. The culture barrier and the distance, of course, would have worked against us. I thought we could have dealt with it, but she saw 12,000 miles and her family dynamic as insurmountable barriers. I guess I can’t be sure if she was wrong.

She has a pretty clear picture of how she wants her life to be, and she’s positive an imminent marriage is the next step to that — even admitting that it may not matter so much who is involved.

The most painful side of it is, I can’t shake the suspicion that her practicality has already moved her further along her path, and she’s trying to keep me in the dark. A lot of the signs are there, but there’s no telling for sure. I guess that’s the part really eating at me; the feeling of a betrayal. I don’t open myself up to people often, nor very much — this place, where I bare my soul to any East European spam bot that cares to drop in, is the exception that proves the rule — and for a while I felt like this might be too much to handle.

It still might be, for certain things. But in all this mess, I have learned a few things. Some are old and known, some are new (to me), and some are borrowed. Nothing blue, sorry. That ship has sailed.

- There are people in my life that won’t screw me (figuratively), even if they’re heartily sick of my bullshit. Also, to my unabashedly abashed surprise, my parents can stand up and be counted among them.

- If I’m being honest, I’m probably not as cynical and disinterested in other people as I think… but I’m also more of a wuss than I like to admit.

- Things will get different. Maybe not better, but that’s largely up to me. See that? Self-actualization. That’s like SCIENCE, that is.

- I’m a narcissist. Self-loathing, sure, but they’re not mutually exclusive properties. I haven’t decided yet whether my narcissism falls within the normal range for human self-interest, but seriously, come on. Look around at this site. This is like, a fucking temple to my self-abused ego.

- I can be unbelievably petty.

- Cherish the good, forgive the bad, learn from it all, and keep moving.

- That kind of sounds like a country music lyric. Except instead of “moving” I would have had “truckin’”.

- I HATE country music.

Regardless of how it ends, the journey was amazing. I’ll treasure almost all of the memories, and on balance I believe we’ll both be better people for it, albeit in very different ways.

Knowing all that sometimes doesn’t help, especially when I remember those special moments we’ll never have a chance to revisit. And I’m positive I still have more blank staring to do.

But it’s good enough for right now.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
— I Corinthians

Ironic as it may be, an agnostic like me (or atheist, depending on your particular definitions of those words) is pondering a passage from the Bible. More accurately, the sentiment of one small part of that passage. And since I’m completely clueless about the context of that line, I have to take it at its face value, which does have a bearing on my current situation.

I’ve already discussed at length my various predilections for apathy, vapid entertainment, and personal indecision. I seem unable to devote myself to a single pursuit, and so I whittle away at the hours left to me by generally wasting as much of them as I can. This was brought home to me with great force today.

I have been in a relationship of sorts for about half a year. To me, relentless procrastinator that I am, half a year is not nearly enough time to come to a serious decision about anything — much less the rest of one’s life. The better half of this relationship, however, is of a different mind. The problem is, I’m not sure who’s right.

I’m on the verge of causing the dissolution the relationship — assuming, of course, that it has yet to pass — and I’m not sure whether this decision is sound.

Am I balking because of valid reasons, or just because I’m good at it? Am I holding out unreasonably, or are my hesitations justified?

I am naturally biased in favor of my own reasoning. I am also, however, just enough of a self-hating paranoid to consider the very real possibility that I am making a terrible mistake based on unsound reasoning.

While perhaps not a graveyard of missed opportunities, my past certainly has its fair share. My concern now is whether I have become incapable of seizing any to my own benefit, and in fact shrink from them. The fear of failure, in short, may prevent any chance for meaningful change.

Should I, then, embrace this situation, and initiate a cascade of events that will force my life down a certain path, or should I continue in this relatively anarchic state, pregnant with potential yet barren of certainty?

I have considered the possibility that any relationship that causes me to doubt my own judgment so severely is not a healthy one. This train of thought is derailed by the fact that my self-confidence is at a fairly perpetual ebb in any case. There’s no way of telling whether the relationship is the cause, or simply one of many contributing variables.

I have tried to evaluate the situation from all possible angles. Why would I want to sever these ties? Why would I want to keep them, or reinforce them? And I always come up against the realization that I do not trust my own judgment.

I honestly believe she loves me; but whether this is a practical kind of love or not, I cannot say. She is determined to be married, but I am unconvinced as to how much this motivation is tied to any person aside from herself. There are ratios at play here that I believe are vital to the decision making process, but I cannot divine them.

I must doubt even this line of reasoning, however, simply because it may be my justification of a course of action taken out of fear. You see my dilemma. If I cannot trust my own thoughts, how do I make any decisions at all? Do I pick a course at random and hurl myself down it?

As for myself, I am unsure. Is this a pale imitation of that emotion, or is this simply as close an approximation to the real thing of which I am capable? Even in the midst of all this, I realize what a sopping, pansy-ass douchebag I have become. I duly apologize to anyone wading through this grotesquerie of self indulgence.

I look around me, and everywhere I see examples of what I do not want to become. The dissolute stoner with no visible means of social or financial support. The mother of two, a month of paychecks away from living in her car, spending her holidays alone but for her cats. The bitter, lonely father of an underachieving son — and an estranged daughter who is forever beyond the reach of conciliation.

Ah, one might say. These examples all have a common thread… a fear of loneliness and abandonment. Ah, I respond. I also see a mother, married to the same man for nearly 40 years, who daily wonders how her life would have been different. Her marriage has absorbed so much of her will and her persona that she is chronically incapable of independent action. Now, she is perpetually berating herself for this weakness and the prison of a life to which it has sentenced her.

So now, I can say with confidence that I am not sure what I dread more: being alone, or the realization that being alone was the better option.

In short, I cannot decide whether it is worse not to live, or to live poorly.

Childish things, indeed.

I’m starting a new job (a contract, really) tomorrow. While I’m happy about it — I like the company, the people I’ll be working with, and the project itself — I have mixed feelings about the ramifications.

I started working with computers because it was basically the path of least resistance. I was already a loner geek in my personal life, so it was really just a lateral shift into the workforce. Like many in my generation and socioeconomic stratum, I’ve more or less been raised to believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I’ve always kind of taken that for granted. Rather like an IRA account or 401K, you feel like it’ll always be there, until one day you log into your account and discover the banks and government have combined in a shitstorm of ineptitude to destroy your financial solvency. Sorry… almost started a tangent there.

So now, it’s several years later, and I’m still working with computer multimedia/programming. I’m not bad at it, either. But I don’t feel invested. The guys in my line of work who get ahead love what they do. They design and program things in their spare time. They’re always sending me links about this or that cool widget or new piece of software. I, on the other hand, don’t really give a shit.

This is, I think, going to be the barrier to my moving forward in this line of work. I’m pretty much stuck where I am, because I’m just not motivated to advance. To be a coder, I think you really need to enjoy it. And I do, sometimes. There’s something about seeing a piece of code come together that is extraordinarily satisfying. Stringing together sets of data to produce something useful and/or fun is great, but it’s not something I get hot and bothered about.

This mild apathy, coupled with at least a middling sense of propriety, means that I end up passing on projects and contracts that I believe may be beyond my current knowledge set. Not because I think it would be too difficult, but because I know that my lack of ambition would lead to a substandard product.

To be fair, lately I haven’t had a great level of interest in anything at all. Or I’ll have a spike in interest, then become quickly relieved of my fascination — kind of an emotional ADD. I don’t think I’m particularly depressed or anything, I’m just… even. A zero sum. So I feel like I need a kind of jump-start somewhere to get me going again. Not sure what it is, but I’m still looking.

Mostly on Digg, which in all honesty hasn’t proven an incredibly rich resource, but there’s always hope.

I’ve been in a funk lately. There really isn’t any one specific cause — my emotional dirty laundry is far too ponderous and embarrassing to air here– and were I in my right mind I’d probably view it as just one of those things. But seeing as I’m in a funk, I’ve been giving some thought to seeing a therapist.

This is kind of a shaky step for me, since I can’t really rid myself of the feeling that therapists are basically whores for the mind. I don’t say that to cast aspersions on them or what they do, but more as a way of explaining why it’s so difficult for me to even consider seeing one.

Just as with prostitutes, with a therapist you are paying a professional to provide you a measure of personal catharsis, and giving quite a lot of yourself to do so. On the other hand, I have always tried to be fairly independent. I hate being dependent on anyone, and I hate being subservient to people. I suspect I inherited this need for personal control from my father.

Hmm… classic self-psychoanalysis going on here, so I’ll nip that line of discussion in the bud.

Back on topic, it seems like admitting defeat. I’m unable to find a satisfying resolution to my own problems, so I have to turn to a surrogate. If this were applied to something like figuring out how to put together a piece of Ikea furniture, it would be aggravating enough. When that failing is as fundamental as knowing how to be content in my own skin, it’s a fairly disturbing situation for me.

So, I’m trying to see it in an alternate way. I could either pay a therapist some money and get my emotional rocks off that way, or I could continue in this rut, and eventually become that attention whore that sends “sigh” in messages to his friends all day.

Or someone who posts this kind of shit in a weblog.