I'M NOT OLD

I posted this in one of the forums I oversee. It's in response to two factors; my birthday and the fact that 26 is not old. I like it because I think I was being honest to myself when I wrote it. Anyway, enjoy:

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26 is no longer the old age, neither is 30. Because human life span seems to be increasing each decade due to medical science or what not, the 20s seem like the high school years again. The 30s is where you go solid into your career.

There's a great book I read (almost finished but I got the message before the end) and it's called "Surviving your quarterlfie crisis. It talks about how our generation is faced with much different challenges than those generations before us. We no longer have mentors because those mentors are afraid of losing their jobs to us. So that leaves us to fend for ourselves in the corporate world. We go through a middle life crisis early. Are we doing what we love? Is this going to take me anywhere? We ask these questions early, and while that may seem like a bad thing, the book describes how it can actually put your mind at ease once your answer all the questions in your head at a young age. See, we recognize that there's a problem, people in the past did not. They were blindly rushing into careers at 19 years old, only too look up 15 or 20 years later and "ask what the fuck just happened?". That's a mid-life crisis. They try to relive what they missed. Some of use who went through a quarterlife crisis, just evaluated our life course early and made the appropriate changes so that we can be happy with where we are going. If anyone is going though this, let me know. It's not just you alone out there. There are tons of young people like ourselves that feel the same as you do.

While I having found all the answers to my questions yet, I realize that I don't need those solutions until I ready to handle them. The old saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears" is true. We're an anxious society, hellbent on climbing the latter as fast as we can. When in reality, life is supposed to be lived day by day, not fiscal by fiscal year.

I'm not old, in fact, I feel like I'm getting younger. I feel more playful, more in tune with my creativity and my experiemental mind. I think you just have to adopt a philsophy that lets you smile at everything. Try not to let things get to you because everything is temporary. Take comfort in that as well as understand that the things you love are also temporary. Enjoy what you can, when you can and your own little world will be a better place.

New Year, new outlook.

As we start this new year, it's always good to take a moment and reflect on what has happened these long lost 366 days (yes, everyone, last year was a leap year).

For me, the year was a little more bittersweet than most. I slowly learned just how jaded I was at my industry. You have to come to terms with yourself about where you are going in life. I, like many twenty-somethings, had a quarter-life crisis and I learned from it. Growth really happens silently. We can never really see what experience has taught us until we inspect it retrospectively.

So with that, looking back, I was a dumb young kid who had a little too much of the Golden Boy syndrome. I was running off the notion that if you try hard enough to change the world, you can. That's not true. The harder you try to change the world, the hard the world pushes back to change you.

Learning from that, for me, the idea of life isn't to force it into a new shape. You really have to mold your little corner of the world. While looking at the big picture is good, we have to focus in on the details. The little things. The things that make us happier better people. I feel when I try to attempt that, to become a better happier person, I feel younger, I grow younger, I think younger. This is not a bad thing. Youth is one on the most coveted traits that society has. You feel more alive. You don't feel like those older human drones that are always looking to their retirement for mental comfort. Maybe that's why I seem to be unhireable. No one wants someone too recklessly creative.

Looking forward, 2005 will be a pivotal year for many of us as well as the rest of the world. The 2000's are half over, people. Y2K was five years ago. Time seems to stretch out forever in both directions when you compare where you've been to where you are going. I guess it gets even more expansive as the years roll on.

For me, the twenties are half over. In a blink, I've gone from a dreaming teen to a realistic dreamer in 7 very short years. In another blink, I'll be blowing out 30 candles on the cake that says jokingly "over-the-hill".

My advice to anyone, read Fight Club. Don't watch the movie again. The movie is good but there is a philosophy that is lost in translation from words to television screen. The philosophy is that life is shorter than we ever imagine and we can't spend each day pursuing the things we don't truly want. You have to get out there and feel alive, you have to push the envelop of what you believe you can do. Whatever it is you love, love it unconditionally and you will be a happier younger person.

Happy new year to you all.

CONGRATS TO JASON LAFORTUNE

This is the story of a good buddy of mine, who built a race truck in 12 days, took it down to Mexico and won the Baja 1000 in his class. Jason LaFortune is the kind of guy that can build practically anything. He even built the huge garage where he builds things. Pair that up with our huge entourage of amazing friends, like Dean and "lil" Jon, and they become a lethal mix of talent, skill and sheer focus. That was proven in Mexico last weekend, when they raced against the harsh terrain, the expansive landscape, the never ceasing clock and pure exhaustion, only to come out the other end smiling with the joy of being class champions.

My hat rarely goes off to people, whether it's my cynical nature or my expectation bar being too high, but I do give credit where credit is due. Raise a glass, people! Here's to Jason, Dean, "lil" Jon and the rest of the race team.

1ST MORNING PAGE EXCERPT (NEW TREND?)

(note: originally an excerpt from my morning pages)

Experimentation.

Nice.... I'm going to try and make a few shirts today. I just want to jump out of the current medium and experiment a bit. There's a great website called Stencil Revolution dot com that has some really great guerrilla work. Stuff on walls, stuff that they creatived posters with. It's really interesting work because it's not traditional. And while I'll jumping on the underground public tagging bandwagon a little late, it feels like it's picking up speed. Fuck Kinkos, you know. It's hard to remember that you can create anything if you put your mind to it. Creation is what we humans do. We build things with our hands.

We were not given opposable thumbs so we could repeatedly hit the space bar with them.

A STRANGELY FAMILIAR PLACE....

I moved back home for three weeks. It's a strange feeling returning to home. A nostalgic tone seems to follow you where ever you go in the house. My boxes are not being unpacked because I am going to be moving down to Irvine with Heather in mid-November.

Dial up internet sucks. I'll be writing in my morning pages journal (which is still in debate of where or not I should open in to the public and start posting it online), but all other internet activities will slow to a crawl until about Thanksgiving. I'll post little updates from time to time and I'll definitely not stop writing.