#KickAssBy50

Photo by David Talley on Unsplash

Back in July 2017, Melanie and I took our boys to Seattle.  They had never been there, and one of Melanie’s brothers had moved to the area several years earlier when he took a job with Microsoft.  We stayed with his family in the quaint and pleasant suburb of Duvall.  It was a really great experience.  Something about the Pacific Northwest speaks to my soul.  I fell in love with it within minutes—literally—of exiting SeaTac airport on my first visit back in 1992.  As soon as I felt the crisp Washington air and beheld the gray skies and abundance of lush green trees, I was absolutely smitten.  Fortunately, I’ve been able to visit this particular corner of the world many times now.  Melanie and I even honeymooned in Seattle and British Columbia.  Without exaggeration, I often feel “homesick” for the place.  Of the very few items on my bucket list, living in the Pacific Northwest may just be at the top.

If you’re like me, being on vacation—especially somewhere that you really love—naturally leads to an examination of your life.  Freed from the burdens of everyday life—from the day-to-day responsibilities, obligations, and “have to’s”—you have an opportunity to connect with your true self, to take inventory of your hopes, dreams, and ambitions, and to reassess your life trajectory.  I have always found myself in a rather self-reflective state when visiting the PNW.  It has always left me inspired.  Of course, the weeds of normal life grow at an alarmingly fast rate; they often choke one’s motivation within a day or two of returning home.  But thanks to a little catchphrase, my 2017 visit to Seattle has stuck with me a little better than most.

“Kick ass by 50.”  That’s my goal.  And it’s a holistic goal.  By the time I am 50 years old, I want to be living the best life I’ve ever lived.  It’s not just about me as a person.  Yes, I hope to be in very good physical health, even if that is necessarily followed by an asterisk that notes “some restrictions apply.”  Yes, I hope to have made tremendous advancements as a musician.  Yes, I hope to have read a lot of great books and to have seen a lot of amazing movies.  But it goes beyond that.  I want to kick ass at 50, but I also want my life to kick ass when I’m 50.  Do you see the difference?  To the maximum degree possible, I want every moment of my waking hours to feel like a manifestation of me.  This means I need to be in a career that feels like me.  It’s not enough to have a secure job that sufficiently pays the bills.  This means the way I spend my free time needs to feel like an investment in and/or an expression of the me that I like the most.  At the risk of sounding like a whiny, entitled, self-absorbed teenager—although I’m probably ripe for the type of midlife crisis that would lend to such attitudes—I want my home, my clothes, my car, and everything else to feel like a manifestation of me.

Let me be clear.  I’m not talking about being a selfish prick.  I’m not talking about being immature or irresponsible.  I’m not talking about being a self-centered asshole who doesn’t care how my actions impact the people and the world around me.  If you know me, you know those sorts of attitudes don’t describe me at all.  (Well, mostly.)  What I’m talking about is something that I believe any rational and reasonably intelligent person would agree with and endorse, and something that we probably all seek.  I even believe there is a moral obligation to pursue the type of life I mean.  (More on that in a future post.)  I have felt all too cognizant of the fact that life is fleeting.  Because of that, I can get pretty depressed when I realize just how rarely I see the me that I absolutely love and adore.  Yes, there is a me that I think is pretty darn awesome.  And unique.  And I believe everyone has that inside them.  Which is what makes it so incredibly tragic if those beautiful, unique, wonderful individuals are mostly kept in a box and rarely see the light of day.  No offense to anyone who believes in reincarnation, but none of us is coming around again.  This is it.  If the best you—by which I mean the real you—gets to come out and play only once in a blue moon—that is, if the one person whose life you’ve been most intimately entrusted with—yourself—only gets to make an occasional guest appearance in this world … well, that’s just a tragedy beyond anything else I can possibly imagine.

I consider myself fortunate that my life has been moving steadily in the “kick ass” direction since moving back to Utah in 2014.  There’s still plenty of work to do, which is probably why I chose “kick ass by 50” rather than “kick ass by 45” or what would’ve been the extremely ambitious goal of “kick ass by 39.”  I’m now 40, a little bit more kick ass than I was at 39 but nowhere near the kick ass I’ll be at 50.  That said, I hope to make great kick ass strides every year between now and then.  I really believe I will, and that’s rather exciting.  Oh, and lest there be any confusion, I don’t plan to retire from kick-assery at 50.  I’ll keep going with it.  Perhaps I’ll set a new goal at that time.  Bad ass motherfucker by 80 or some such.  We’ll see.

Of Carrots and Chord Progressions

This past weekend, I participated in a two-day concert event put on by my guitar school.  Approximately 10 bands played three songs each on both Friday and Saturday night.  Even though things never go quite as smoothly as I hope—sometimes I feel destined to do my worst when I’m in front of an audience—it was nice to spend a whole weekend devoted to being a musician.  Not only do I enjoy the opportunity to perform, but I enjoy the validation I get from a solid performance.  When I know it went well, I feel my musicianship confirmed.  When I leave the stage and a teenager stops me as I pass by to point his finger at my chest and state with the utmost conviction, “You!  You.  Are.  A-maaa-zing!” I think maybe I’m not so crazy for feeling like music is my calling, that I really am most in my element when I’m playing it.

On Sunday night, I thought of the day job that awaited me on the morrow.  The incongruity I felt is hard to put into words.  In the past, I have tried to capture my feelings about my job by saying things like, “It feels so foreign to me,” “it feels so unlike me,” “I feel like a phony, an outsider, a pretender,” and so on.  I worry these descriptions conjure the wrong ideas in other people’s minds, however.  One could easily suppose I hate my job, that I find it depressing or miserable.  But I don’t think those descriptions are accurate, at least not a majority of the time.  Instead, my job feels like it has nothing to do with me.  And that’s why I don’t think it’s a good fit.  Sure, I could be much more miserable.  Being in the military is the sort of job I would absolutely hate, find depressing, and feel 100% miserable in.  Thank God that’s not my life.  And yet my current job is one from which I often feel wholly detached.  My team at work was recently assigned a book to read.  The book is one of those self-help for the business-world type of books, all about how to be an effective manager.  When I encounter business jargon—revenue, return-on-investment, spreadsheets—I cannot explain how utterly dead those words are to me.  It’s not that I recoil at them.  It’s that I feel absolutely nothing toward them.  It’s the same emotional response you’d get from me if you had me read a book that was just a series of random numbers.  It is sterile.  Lifeless.  Non-existent, somehow.  I wish I could better put it into words, but I don’t know what else I can say.  If you created a Venn diagram where you put everything that seems real about me into a circle, and you put all of this business crap in another circle, there would be no overlap whatsoever.  But of course, my day job does revolve around the business world, so my life does overlap with it in some sense.  But not in a way that feels real.  It truly feels like the business world has absolutely nothing to do with me, and I don’t want really want it to.

Today, on Facebook, a friend of mine who is also a college professor posted that he had submitted final grades for the semester.  Once in a while something innocent like this reminds that another world exists, a world that I once knew and occupied.  There’s always something startling about it, this realization that a world better suited for me really exists and somehow persists without me.  Part of me wants to cry out in genuine bafflement, “What the hell?  How is this happening?”  It’s not because I think that world needs me.  It’s that it doesn’t make sense for me to be outside of it.  There is always a sharp pang of recognition in these moments, a quasi out-of-body experience wherein I catch a glimpse of a life I once occupied but am now wholly invisible to.  It’s weird and a bit unsettling.  Have you ever tried to break a really thick stick, one that requires you to strain with all of your might and teases you with several seconds of cracking noises before it finally snaps in two?  Has it ever required so much force that, once the stick does snap in half, a stinging sensation shoots through the overexerted muscles in your arms like a needle-thin bolt of lightning?  That’s how it feels whenever I encounter this other world, the one that I should inhabit, and see that it doesn’t exist only in my imagination.  It makes me homesick.  I long to be part of that world—a world that revolves around intellectualism and artistic endeavors.

I was recently told at work that, over the next several months, my job will be expanding in such a way that I can look forward to a nice pay raise.  One manager even told me I could end up making “lots” more money in the relatively near future.  I was glad to hear that; it means the company is invested in me and that I don’t need to worry about losing my job any time soon.  It also means that, if I stick with this company longer than I currently expect, I’ll at least have a better income.  But you may be surprised how little I care about the money.  That’s just not the type of carrot I need dangled before my eyes.  It won’t motivate me.  I don’t want to run this race.  I honestly think they could double my salary tomorrow, and it wouldn’t change anything about what I plan to do.  The more they pay me, the more at ease I’ll be if it takes me longer to abandon ship than I think.  But nothing’s going to stop me from climbing into that lifeboat and heading for a new shore.  Wish me luck.

Resurrecting a Repository of Ruminations

It’s likely premature to declare this blog resurrected, although I have rechristened it, changed the appearance a bit, and find myself posting for the first time in over a year. This will again be a living, breathing blog only if I post consistently, which is something I haven’t done since early 2016. Why would anything change now? Well, I have my reasons for thinking this could truly be the beginning of a blogging renaissance for me. I’ve been on quite a “gotta-get-back-to-being-me” kick lately. Granted, much of what I’ve done over the past five years—leaving a Ph.D. program, changing religions, getting a job, re-immersing myself in music, and later leaving religion altogether—has been the result of my seeking to make life more perfect, more my own, more what I personally desire it to be. And life has gotten better over the last five years—in rather tremendous ways. But I feel I am on the cusp of yet another monumental transition, one that will reclaim elements of my past that I love and dearly miss, and yet that somehow became the proverbial baby who was thrown out with the bath water.

I’m eager to share my intentions, because I find them exciting. And yet I also fear certain people learning of my intentions before I want them to. It’s a ridiculous paranoia, I know, given that nobody reads this blog. There’s no doubt that I’m speaking into a void. And yet what if a random Google search by a co-worker were to land them upon my page? Or has in the past, and that person subscribed to my posts without ever telling me? As unlikely as that may be, it’s not a totally absurd notion. I’m pretty sure I Googled all of my co-workers at some point in time or another. It’s what we do as humans nowadays, isn’t it? I’ve never used my surname on this blog, but it’s otherwise been a pretty open book. Hell, anyone who’s talked to me for five minutes can deduce that “Ben + Diet Mountain Dew” would make a strong Google search if you were trying to track down my online presence. It wouldn’t surprise me if this blog were the #1 search result for that particular phrase.

Alas, I shall throw caution to the wind and speak as if there is someone listening, but only someone I feel safe talking to. Like any other story, the one I’m about to tell could be made longer or shorter, and the longer version could be made longer still. I will aim for brevity, but it’s never been my strong suit, particularly when I’m writing about my own life. There are so many thoughts and feelings, and I have a tendency to try to capture them all. But enough of the preliminaries. I will skip right to the juicy stuff, then backtrack and add details until I grow sufficiently bored. The bottom line is this: I am actively pursuing a career as an English teacher on the secondary school level, preferably high school. I haven’t applied for any teaching jobs yet, but I’ve taken steps toward acquiring my teaching license. In Utah, this includes signing up for a Praxis exam and doing a background check. So long as I pass the exam (which I take in early July) and the background check (which I already have), then it’s just a matter of filling out some forms and paying some fees before I’m officially licensed to teach. This is because I already have a bachelor’s degree. In something. It doesn’t even matter what my degrees are in, provided I pass the Praxis. Isn’t that awesome? Up until a few weeks ago, I had no idea it could be this easy. Fortunately for me, a teacher shortage compelled the State of Utah in 2016 to allow people like me to acquire teaching licenses in the manner I’ve described. If that weren’t exciting enough, I looked into the necessary exam for someone wanting to teach English at the secondary level, and I was shocked just how many of the practice exam questions were absolute no-brainers to me. Questions related to poetic structure and/or pedagogy aren’t my strong suit, given that I didn’t major or minor in English. But I can learn enough of that stuff between now and July to pass the Praxis exam without a problem. I’m thrilled! So thrilled, in fact, that I now find it almost unbearable to be at my current job. I just hope I can land a teaching gig for the fall. It’s rather late in the calendar year for me to be starting down this road, but I remain optimistic. Perhaps I’m more optimistic than I deserve to be, but I’m optimistic nevertheless.

For the record, it is both my desire to teach and my desire to leave my current job that motivate me. I enjoyed teaching college as a graduate student. I didn’t abandon my Ph.D. program because I didn’t like the idea of teaching. On the contrary, I realized I only liked the teaching. And that was because I was teaching undergraduate courses. The idea of seeking a tenure-track position at a research university, where I would teach grad students and be held to the “publish or perish” model of professional accountability, was anything but appealing to me. And that’s why I decided against completing my Ph.D. The idea of teaching, however, is one I’ve never completely given up on. And I’ve long been open to the idea of teaching high school. I just didn’t know it was such a live possibility for me. I thought it would require going back to school and getting an education degree, and that just feels like too much to take on at this point in my life. But knowing I can teach as easily as I can—well, it’s rekindled a fire I thought was all but permanently extinguished.

On the other side of the same coin is the fact that my current job is, at its best, unfulfilling. Up until recently, I’ve been rather content in my job because it has been low-stress and there are so many great perks—schedule flexibility, the ability to work from home, tons of PTO, etc. But there has long been a part of me that is fully aware I am wasting my potential by staying at my job. I have always wanted to do something meaningful, something existentially valuable. A job in marketing is never going to fit the bill. And so it feels like a genuine tragedy—and I actually mean that very literally—when I think of the time I’m wasting in a job like I currently have. Recently, my dissatisfaction has only increased as the aforementioned perks have been scaled back and new management has taken my job in a different direction. The pay has increased, and I’ve been promised another raise around the corner. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I couldn’t care less about what I do. It feels so wholly other to me, so ill-fitting for my personality and interests. I want my life to be a manifestation of me. Anything else is bat-shit crazy, isn’t it? It’s just a damn shame I’m in my forties and still have to iron out so many wrinkles.

Dragon Lights, Dragon Lies

Dragon Lights is a Chinese-themed festival running through May 6th at the Utah State Fairpark. I saw something about it on Facebook, thought it looked pretty cool, and bought tickets for the family. Our tickets were for yesterday, Sunday, March 25th. I bought the tickets only a couple of days in advance, on a day when Weather.com showed absolutely nothing worrisome in its Sunday forecast. The plan was for us to have an early dinner at one of our favorite Utah Chinese restaurants (located about 25 minutes away) and then backtrack to the fairgrounds. It would be a fun and different way for us to spend time together as a family. I was really looking forward to it.

Sunday morning came and went. The weather was nice. Then, around the time we were to head out, it started snowing. And then it started to snow harder. And harder. While this was disappointing because it didn’t sound fun to walk around in such bad weather, we didn’t have the option of changing our plans. The tickets were date-specific, and as the Dragon Lights website reports in their FAQ section, the festival would be held come “rain, snow or shine.” Plus, even when the snow started coming down fairly fast and furious, Weather.com showed nothing in the hourly forecast about snow. Probably, it would all let up quite soon.

Melanie, the boys, and I piled into our car and headed to the freeway. As we cruised down (up? We were going north, after all) the Interstate, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with our commute. I suggested we go to a much closer Chinese restaurant, one I had been to a couple of times but that Melanie and the boys had not. Nobody had any objections, so I exited the freeway and quickly found the alternate restaurant. It was closed for the Sabbath. Damn!

I shrugged and figured I’d try again to head to Bountiful, the location of our first-choice Chinese restaurant. Meanwhile, Melanie started searching for nearby Chinese restaurants on her phone. My rekindled determination to get to Bountiful quickly fizzled when, once again, I found it very difficult to see through the snow while driving on the freeway. Melanie suggested that we eat at Sampan, a nearby Chinese restaurant Melanie and I were quite fond of back before we got married. I had no interest in driving all the way to Bountiful via city streets, so I agreed. Within a few minutes, we were safe, cozy, and relaxed, sitting at a table and looking over our menus.

Our food was great. It’s probably the best Chinese food I’ve had since moving back to Utah. I don’t know why we haven’t revisited Sampan before now. I’ve tried several other Chinese places since moving back, and only a few have seemed adequate, much less quite tasty. Perhaps because I so loved the Chinese restaurant we used to frequent while living in Tallahassee, I had zero hope of finding anything of note in Utah. Adequate was the best I had hoped for. And maybe I just assumed that Sampan would be as mediocre as anything else, after being disillusioned by my first few forays into Chinese cuisine as a recently returned Utah native. But, man, Sampan was yummy. The boys thought so, too, as did Melanie. Hanging out together at a restaurant in-and-of itself was also quite lovely. We really enjoyed our time. And, wouldn’t you know it, the snow let up quite a bit while we dined. It didn’t stop snowing completely, but it had been reduced to small flakes falling in slow motion. Nothing to worry about whatsoever.

With full bellies, we climbed back into our car and headed to the Utah State Fairpark. A minor detour was involved, thanks to a slow-moving freight train—a common occurrence in that neighborhood, as I remember from my childhood. (I grew up relatively close to the fairgrounds. A junior high field trip even involved walking there, which I thought was nuts at the time and perhaps even more nuts now.) But, despite arriving nearly 90 minutes later than I had wanted and planned to, we finally made it.

Then we saw the sign. Dragon Lights had been canceled for the evening, I can only assume due to weather. The bastards.

As I said, the festival runs through the beginning of May, and according to the posted sign, we can use our tickets for any other day. But the only reason we fought through the snow in the first place was because the Dragon Lights website had ensured us that it would not be canceled due to inclement weather. It wasn’t pee pee in my Coke, but it felt like a joke, that’s for sure.

Oh well. We still had a good time.

Trimming the Fat

As much as I wish this were a post celebrating weight loss, it’s not.  I’m probably heavier than I was when I last wrote a blog post, which was back in February.  Heavier physiologically, but not heavier emotionally or psychologically.  And that brings me to the real point of this post: the simplification of life and the joy it brings.

Though there is not a single defining moment to point to, the summer of 2017 was a revolutionary one for me.  In some ways, it was a time of embracing.  In other ways, it was a time of letting go.  The end result is that I am more happy and satisfied in life than perhaps I have ever been as an adult.  Or maybe ever.  And because I’m quite pleased with the ways in which I’ve fine tuned my life, I have every reason to be optimistic about the future.  The course I am on is a rewarding and fruitful one.  I am eager and excited to travel further down this road.

So as not to be obnoxiously vague, allow me to say more about the changes that have taken place over the last few months.  The most important is my involvement with music.  Every year, the guitar school from which I take private lessons offers various summer programs that are meant to supplement one’s private lessons.  I did not participate in any such programs in the summer of 2016, at which point I had barely become a student at the school.  But for Summer 2017, I enrolled in a program that put me together with three other guitarists and a drummer (none of whom I had ever met).  Every Thursday evening, we got together to learn and rehearse songs that we would eventually play at an end-of-summer outdoor concert.  I absolutely loved it.  Almost every time we got together and played, I found myself thinking, “This is me.  This is who I am.”  I felt more connected to my “true self” than I ever had before.  Not that I don’t play guitar on my own, but it’s different to be in a band setting.  And the fact is, playing with others made me so much better.  We’re not talking about minor improvement here.  It’s hard to put into words, but if the player I was at the beginning of summer could see the player I was by summer’s end, I would scarcely have believed it.

In a similar vein, I have made great strides as a vocalist.  I actually sang one of the songs we did at the end-of-summer concert—a cover of The Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues,” which isn’t the most flattering song for my voice, really—but that’s not what I regard as an accomplishment.  You see, once I knew I would be singing a song at the concert, I started paying even closer attention to my vocal abilities.  Not only did I spend a fair amount of time singing along with the radio on my way to and from work, as I had always done, but I started doing things like recording myself as I sang and then listening back to it.  The outcome?  Soul-crushing heartbreak, to be quite honest.  I sounded so much shittier than I expected.  I never thought I sounded amazing as I was singing, but playing it back on a recording, I sounded so much worse than I had ever realized.  And it devastated me.  So, in desperation, I started looking into some vocal exercises.  Truth be told, I didn’t even do that much in this department.  But the extremely little that I did—and I’m telling you, it was next to nothing—had instantaneous results.  Seriously.  There were like two or three little things I did, but from the moment I started doing them—and I’m not kidding, I really mean within the first 30 seconds or something—I noticed things about my voice or what I was doing with my throat, etc., that gave me better control and more awareness of how to use my voice.  And so, once again, if the me from May or June could see where I am at today, I would have been a bit flabbergasted.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m nowhere near incredible.  Nobody’s ever going to want to listen to me sing just because my voice is so gosh darn beautiful.  But I am way, way, way, way better than I was just a few months ago.  It’s quite shocking.  And now I drive home from work singing my guts out and not even sheepishly trying to hide it when other cars get too close, like I used to do.

My involvement with music has definitely played the biggest role in making me happier than I’ve ever been.  But so has the general overall focus my life has taken.  That is, outside of work, music, and my family—which I list in no particular order, so don’t read into it—I have almost nothing else on my plate.  And it’s blissful.  It’s such a 180 from how life felt one year ago.  As my poor wife can tell you, I spent so much time complaining and freaking out last year because I never had time to do anything that mattered to me.  I was constantly stressed, and I never felt able to get done the things I “had” to do, much less the things I actually wanted to do.  In hindsight, I’m not even sure what it was that occupied so much of my time.  But I know my to-do list was always a mile long, and I know it felt like at least 50% of the items added to that list would not be completed before another 10 or 20 items were added on top.  It just felt like chaos, and it seemed like there was never any time for me.  Well, focusing on music, which has always been my first love, certainly helps matters.  It ensures that I don’t feel like an ignored aspect of my own life.  But it’s the cumulative effect of focusing more on music and less on other things that really makes life grand.  And there have been many things I’ve cut back on.  Purposely, intentionally, and giddily.

One thing I have proactively reduced in my life is ecclesiastical responsibility.  The church I attend has a rather small congregation.  Because we are small, simply being a member of the church provides one with ample opportunity to help out.  On the other side of that coin, it provides one with ample opportunity to feel guilty and/or stressed out.  I’ve never had the time to commit to the church that some of my more enthusiastic (and less-employed) cohorts do, but I’ve tried to be very involved since I started attending this church nearly three years ago.  For almost two years, I’ve served in the pastorate.  I’ve had many wonderful experiences that I sincerely cherish, and depending on whom or what you compare me and my situation to, a case could be made that my church responsibilities are not all that burdensome or time-consuming.  Be that as it may, church had recently become a consistent source of anxiety for me.  Many weeks, I found myself thinking that, if not for church-related duties, life would be well-balanced, wholly manageable, and rather pleasant.  The addition of those church duties, however, was just enough to make everything spiral.  Time and time and time again, church was the tipping point between calmness and chaos.

Eventually, I realized that my mental and emotional wellbeing were not a tithe I could afford.  In late August, I reneged on my agreement to preach an upcoming sermon and declared myself unavailable to preach or preside (i.e. oversee a worship service) at any point between now and the end of the year.  In and of itself, I don’t see this as a huge deal.  I still attend church regularly—though I also skip it regularly, and usually with great satisfaction—and I am even teaching one of the Sunday school classes this week, a responsibility for which I volunteered without having to be asked.  (I’m the one in charge of asking people to teach Sunday school, as a matter of fact).  So, it’s not like I’ve decided church has no place in my life.  Far from it.  But as simple a change as this is, it feels tremendously freeing.  I feel so at ease, so content.  I look forward to preaching and presiding again at some point in time, but my involvement is going to be significantly scaled back for the foreseeable future.

There are other ways in which I’ve reallocated my time, but nothing quite as noteworthy as what’s already been discussed.  A lot of little changes have contributed to a more satisfying life.  This includes minor adjustments to my work schedule, adjustments that have come about in response to a variety of factors.  Long story short, I tend to get to work a little bit earlier than I used to, and often I’m not staying as late into the day.  Consequently, I get a surprising amount of things accomplished in the evenings, and I feel much more connected to my family.  It’s a win-win, and it’s definitely part of why I’m loving my life right now.

As I draw ever nearer to being a middle-aged man, I am repeatedly convinced that adulthood is—or should be—about fine tuning one’s life.  Call it living authentically.  Call it self-awareness.  Call it confidence.  Call it a combination of the above.  Call it whatever you want.  I just think it’s great.  I still get my hopes up that my best years are ahead of me—which may be naïve and may be a recipe for utter disappointment.  But if these past few months are any indication, I think it’s quite possible that my greatest joy is yet to be experienced.  After all, if you had asked me at the beginning of summer, I would’ve said these last few years have been my most satisfying.  And look at how much it’s improved since then.  This is what a focused life can do for you.  I don’t “want it all,” as the saying goes.  That strikes me as immature.  No, I want relatively few things.  And usually, I have too much.  But the beautiful thing about cutting out the excess is that you suddenly find yourself with a shitload of the relatively little that you want.  And that is when you know you’re living the good life.