Status Report

Feb 5, 2015 (6 days before my 39th birthiversary).

I have emerged from yet another long hibernation to survey the unattended clutter that has accumulated while I slept and find myself, once again, displeased.  Troubled along so many vectors I have a hard time plotting the shape of it.  Maybe it's best to tackle this topically.

ROMANCE

While it's probably not a terrific idea to go into details, new and exciting challengers have emerged in the romantic life of me, super-pal Jimmy Wholesome, that have prompted the current round of general house-cleaning.  While I am grateful for the boot to the ass the universe has graciously bestowed upon me as motivation to clean house, I resent the general untidiness of the universe and it's inhabitants and lament my inability to self-motivate.  As it turns out my life needs constant tending.  Who knew.

WORK

Is a mess and a mess I've been unhappy with a long time, so long even I am tired of hearing myself talk about it.  But it doesn't have to be a mess forever.  I am optimistic I will figure out a good course of action for myself.  Eventually.  Hopefully sometime before the heat death of the universe.

SOCIAL LIFE

I have let my social life whither on the vine in the last year or so.  So I am preparing a new socializing push to refresh existing friendships and forge new ones.  This will likely involve getting out of the house.  And maybe being on a schedule that leaves me free in the evenings when, I'm told, human types like to congregate and talk about consumer products and TV shows.  But I look forward to it.  I've got the chops, I just need to sharpen them up.

GENERAL EXISTENTIAL MALAISE

I think most people just call it depression, but I think I've been struggling with it for years.  Coming out of the closet made everything, in many ways, better, and I am grateful for that.  Although there are some of other core problem areas to sift through.  I have a hard time finding my motivation to thrive for a variety of reasons I am still trying to understand and I'm very hard on myself for it.  I never felt a part of my childhood church culture and now that I've left it I find I haven't found a place to land in the "secular world" where I feel I belong.  I have not found my people or my place or my purpose (the all-important 3 p's) and I think it leaves me feeling generally untethered and listless and anxious.  For some the answer is to just DO something which I understand, but I also understand myself and my tunnel vision obsessive tendencies so I'm loathe to just grasp on to something and go with it for fear I'll wake up 10 years down the line and wonder, "what the fuck am I doing?"  If I can train myself to recognize "the wrong path" sooner rather than later maybe I'll be more comfortable of the idea of "just doing something."

ANXIETY

I am generally an anxious creature, which I am working on.  This is something that developed later in life and I am not thrilled with it.  Most days I have a general feeling that I need to be anxious about something, about who I am or what I'm doing or what I've done and I generally fill in that gap with some reason without really thinking about it.  This is probably my strongest reason and motivation to exercise as I know from experience that helps a great deal.  I've also set up a reading corner of my own with a turntable and a nice reading chair to provide myself with some "chill the fuck out" space. Sometimes the inner animal can't be reasoned with, it just has to be soothed.

CRIME & PUNISHMENT

I've been having tremendous difficulty the last few years letting myself move forward in any meaningful way, or even allowing myself the pleasure of consuming art that I would find very edifying.  I pretty consciously know what I want to work on and I generally watch myself in amazement as I deny myself the privilege.  There are some truly wonderful and imaginative TV shows for instance that I would love to start/finish but I generally choose to marathon trashier TV that I'm not that interested in instead.  It's become pretty clear to me that some part of me desperately wishes to be punished, for being flawed or being gay/bi, or being something other than what other people want me to be.  I carry the explicit and implicit judgements of other people FAR too readily and I really need to stop, but I find it really challenging even though I know pretty much what the issue is at this point. I would dearly love to stop carrying the real and imagined judgements of other people forever though.  Note to self.

WRITING

There's really nothing standing in the way of me writing except my own foolish self.  The above mentioned sense of deserving no good thing and maybe some more punishment and a REALLY bad case of smart kid syndrome are the big culprits here.  It's clear to me that I need to write to be a happy person, not because it's going to make me rich and famous or well-liked but because I have thoughts I want to articulate and things I want to share and stories ideas that pop into my head non-stop that I would love to realize in some fashion.  But the smart kid in me won't let me do it without being perfect at it the first time and the silly sadist in me wants to punish me for not being a smart kid.  It's silly bullshit and I'm tired of it.  I hope to get past it and finally write stories I'm happy with before the Big Crunch and the next Big Bang recreate the universe anew.  The same goes for my stalled progress in learning piano and Japanese.

POLITICS

Man, fuck politics.  The corruption and structural stagnation that has brought our government to a standstill and feeds and endless culture war seems insurmountable to me right now.  I am sure it is NOT, but jesus.  We desperately need to get our collective shit together.  I find it all very depressing.

SCIENCE and WOO

I've been reading a lot more "WOO" material recently, including books on near-death experiences, evidence of life after death, UFO sightings, and so forth.  Except Sasquatch which I find completely uninteresting.  "A big primate lives in the woods!" Who cares.  While I am myself a scientist and believe strongly that it's a good way of accumulating many types of knowledge, I don't really love the way people talk about it sometimes.  I've been struggling to articulate it in ways that don't make me sound crazy.  People seem to have a hard time distinguishing between beliefs that have some scientific evidence in support, and beliefs about science that reinforce their worldview.  Science is good but it is not all that is true or necessary to consider.  Reason is good but feelings exist and have their moments of primacy and importance.  I largely read woo material because I've always been interested in what's outside the comfortable assumptions of the crowd and I like entertaining a reality bigger and more interesting than the current bullshit.  So I like to read about other people's strange experiences and consider whether they might actually be true, or at the very least indicative of a grander, more interesting universe than the common wisdom currently assumes.  Do I think they're all telling the truth?  No.  Do I think some of them might be a little delusional or unbalanced?  Yes.  Do I think that mean's it's all bunk?  Not necessarily.  Anecdotal data is not as good as scientific data, but it is evidence of something nonetheless, and even if it just turns out to be evidence of the many twists and turns of human psychology I find that in and of itself interesting.  So I don't know how much of it is real, and to be truthful you don't either, we just have beliefs about "how the world must really be." But I'm happy to consider these other possibilities and not assume can't have experienced something I haven't experienced.  I just don't recommend making any big life decisions or wasting too much time on unsupported anecdotes or just really incomplete information which is where I think people tend to go wrong either way.  So no, I'm not falling off the deep end just yet, just looking into the water and wondering how deep it goes.

MORTALITY

I used to be terrified of dying with sins left unforgiven and burning in hell.  Or dying before accomplishing God's purpose for me here on earth.  Or dying before seeing the prequels Lucas was rumored to be working on like a decade before they came out, which was an extremely misplaced fear as it turns out.  And then dying and having it be nothing.  And then dying and having it be something worse.  And then just the ending of fabulous, wonderful, conscious me (despite the fact that my consciousness disintegrates nightly).  Now I'm just worried about dying before I get my shit together.  Of dying before having said all the things I want to say and art left unmade and people left unloved.  Of having wasted my time dithering on this anxious bullshit rather than using the time I have doing what I want to do.  Which is a nicer fear of mortality really.  But really the ultimate currency is time and I want to spend it better.  Relatedly but not causally, I'm also thinking of volunteering in a hospice somewhere in town.  It seems important to tackle death head-on both in oneself and in others and I can think of no better place to start.

SPIRITUALITY

I've been finding myself less hard on religion recently.  For all the problems in most major world religions, they still seem to consciously address and attempt to answer important existential questions for more directly than the secular world which just seems to shrug at some of it, as if embarrassed to be associated with anything religion even talks about.  I'm still trying to define for myself what spirituality is and why it's important to me, but it is.  I will not likely be returning to christianity in this lifetime and will also avoid anything predicated on making you feel like shit for existing and offering themselves as the only absolution (because the mind fuck there, once you see it, is too obvious to ignore).  I may try one of the westernized buddhism churches in town soon, just to see.  I'm not sure I can even buy into buddhism that deeply, but I think spirituality has a value, and spiritual practices may be very useful in finding emotional and intellectual peace of some sort, even if there's nothing supernatural involved.  I respect the search for meaning, I respect the search for peace, I don't think religion ruins everything and I don't think all religious believers are nuts or delusional and I'm trying to find a way to live with them more or less amiably without too much antagonism.  To be sure, it seems like religious types could be meeting me half-way a bit more on that, but it's not an excuse to succumb to cynicism.  Who knows, maybe I'll find something half-worth believing in, or at least practicing.

WHEREVER I GO, THERE I AM

It's weird to be days away from 39 and still be writing self-absorbed "what the fuck am I doing?" updates like this.  This is really, really not how I imagined yours truly at age 39.  I'm not quite sure what I expected, but I think I expected ... more grown-upedness?  Confidence?  Capability?  Stability?  Clarity?  More and more I feel I can be that guy.  Or perhaps am becoming that guy.  I can feel him impatiently wiggling and straining against the current man-child artifice I've carelessly worn for years, wanting to take charge.  Or at least have a say.  My child-self is a nice kid, but maybe he shouldn't be running the show, you know?  But I am still proud of myself sometimes.  Yes, I'm a bit of a late-bloomer, but I came out of the closet, I moved to a better city, I left an abusive relationship and I'm asking myself a lot of the right questions.  Questions I hope to answer before the universe forces the issue one way or another.  Or ends in a fiery conflagration only those outside of time and space will be privileged to witness.

And that's the update this year.  For those of you still reading, I thank you.  For those of you who quit two paragraphs in, you're off the list!  Not enough changes to talk about, a lot of omphaloskepsis, but there it is.  Me in a nutshell.  Cracking ever-so-gently.

James Haus
Age 39(ish)

Transmission ends