The Gym Synthesis

What I’m about to describe to you feels vaguely pretentious. But I tell you, it’s as far from it as we can get. I joined a gym in the beginning of March, a month away from my birthday when I always feel like I’m getting old and I need to do something drastic. I realize joining a gym isn’t a drastic change in a life, but getting my butt off the couch and to that gym on a regular basis is. Anyway, everything is going great I’m getting to the gym after work 3-4 times a week for the most part and I am physically feeling a lot better. But at some point I realize that I can’t just keep going in and doing the same thing over and over again because I’ll get bored and stop making all of this progress so I sign up with a personal trainer.

Already, I feel pretentious to mention that I have a personal trainer. It seems that only movie stars or people with a lot of money have a personal trainer… and there’s a good reason for that. Personal trainers can be quite expensive. Somehow I talked myself into employing the services of one because I am not a gym rat and left to my own vices likely would make much slower progress. My personal trainer, who I will call JT, is a 19 year old all-star football player type but a genuinely nice guy.

When I started up with JT he asked me what my goal was, I said I of course want to lose weight, but I want arms like Michelle Obama. He just smiled at me in a way that made me wonder if he knew who she was or even what her arms looked like. I’m sure he would have carried on his marry way if he did or not. So the basic plan for each one hour session is I come in and we work on a muscle group (arms, legs, or core) until I’m utterly exhausted and unable to further use said muscle group.

Yesterday it was arms and shoulders and as I’m struggling through a third set of incline pushups he declares “It is my goal for you to do a full push up.” I can’t help but think, “Well, good for you.” I have never in my 28 years done a full push up and never really had any goals to the contrary. And then I am suddenly aware while doing weight assisted pull ups that he is likely to reach his goal dragging me kicking and complaining the whole way. After all, isn’t that what I signed up for?

Is there such a thing as TOO crafty?

I had some one tell me that I was too crafty for my own good. At first, I wasn’t sure what she meant, and then I thought about it. I realized what she meant was that I’m dividing my focus among too many things trying to be amazing at all of them with only being good at most of them. I love to make jewelry, I love to write, I love to travel, I love planning events. I like to sew, I like to garden, and at times I enjoy working for an online high school, but where do my passions fall? I know I’m not one dimensional, no one is, but for me to be ultimately successful with any one of my endeavors involving something I love to do, then it’s quite likely I’ll need to buckle down and focus on the thing that I want the most.

So my good friend, and coworker, MINIGirl asked me: Why do you have to choose? My initial thought was: Yeah, why do I have to choose? But the reality is: do I want to be a Jack of all trades, but a master of none?

So, how do I decide? Why does it feel like so much of what I decide is going to define me as a person? A big part of me wants to just cut loose from the traditional work world and endeavor to pursue all of the things I love and some how make a living by doing it. What would my life look like if I did do that? Do I really have that kind of drive an initiative to achieve what I feel like I deserve? How long am I willing to be the starving artist before I can achieve something that may never come?

Creative Drive

This morning I found myself trying to suppress the urge to just call in to work and just go home to be creative. On my walk from the MAX station to my office I can pass by two different stores that sell art of local artists, and at least one artsy clothing store depending on the path I choose to walk the eight or so blocks. Having a full time job I find that I often don’t have time to do the things I really want to do: write a novel, make jewelry, sew something or dig in the dirt of my garden. With that full time job comes paid time off, luckily, but there are only so many days that I can take off to balance with the work week.

Many other creative types understand the need for creative time, the desire to have a space dedicated to the goal of making something. For me, if I go too long with out indulging my urge to create to satisfaction I end up where I am now: longing to run away somewhere so I can do just that.

Welcoming the End of 2009

I keep saying that I can’t wait for this year to be over. What a horrendous 365 days this has been. I’m done, ready for the good things to start spilling in. Therein lies the rub. At some point I have to stop counting the bad things and tallying the good things, and when the bad things seem to start piling too high I need to look back at my list of good and hope that they balance out. Because in reality if I let myself get thrown off, if I allow the scales to become unbalanced then what view of my life am I left with? I have to remember to see all of the trees in the forest, and the beauty of the forest as a whole.

You Can’t Transition-Proof Your Life

I’m beginning to learn more and more each day that life is about transitions, and how I deal with the transitions is what shapes me as a person… as a functioning adult in today’s world. I still think that it’s strange to refer to myself as an adult. I know I am of that age group and actively functioning as one, but part of me still feels fresh out of college barely prepared for the responsibility handed to me. At what point does someone transition from a “punk college kid” to a “makin’ it in the world adult”? Does the Mary Tyler Moore theme suddenly erupt as you’re walking in to your office one Monday morning? Does it become really truly adulthood when you buy your first new car? Make your first mortgage payment? When you have your first child?

Like a lot of things being an adult is a state of mind, one that needs to be transitioned in to. Here in the U.S. you can drive at 16, help decide who runs our government and be sent to war at 18, and drink legally at 21. The rates on car insurance go down at 25 and you can join AARP at 55, retire and collect social security at 65 and then what?

In the past two weeks the reality of the working during a recession hit my company, and for the first time I experienced companywide layoffs, gracefully masked as a “reorganizing”. Fortunately for me I was spared the pink slip but returned to the office missing the 15 people that had been let go. Talking to one of my coworkers who works at another office in Arizona that lost 27 people, a large majority of their office staff, he compared it to grieving the loss of someone to death. Suddenly they’re gone and the reminders of them are everywhere but you have to pick up the pieces and move on. It is a horrible thing, but you learn from it and hopefully your company is better for it, and you all transition together to making it work.

27 Years, and All I Got Was This T-shirt

One of my coworkers pointed out today that now that I am at the ripe old age of 27, my age is a cubed number. He’s in the accounting department, and has a love for numbers, that’s all I need to say to explain that.

It’s strange to think that at 12:35am this morning I changed from being 26 to 27. You always hear people say things like “You’re only as old as you feel,” or “Age is just a number,” and even “Act your age, not your shoe size.” All are relative truisms, but I think I have come to mark my life more by events than by my age. A quote from the character Leonard in the show Big Bang Theory rings true to me: “My parents focused on celebrating achievements, and being expelled from a birth canal was not considered one of them.” It couldn’t have felt truer than it did a few weeks ago when I found out that a job I was hoping would be created was not opened due to budget constraints. This event sent me into a swirl of self doubt and to revisit my quarter-life-crisis stage. My first, and returning, thought was “I’m going to be 27, and a receptionist. I thought I would be doing more than that by now.” The thought that I should be doing something else haunts me frequently. It has haunted me since six months after I graduated from college.

All those thoughts disappeared though after I took a minute to reflect on my current position. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people in this country alone that have found themselves without a job because of the recession. So, first I count my blessings that I have a job. Second, I have a good paying job with benefits. Third, and not the least of all, I actually enjoy my job. Yeah it’s not the most thrilling thing and not what I thought I would be doing but there’s something to be said for enjoying your job. I have always told myself to get a job doing work I enjoy and everything else will follow. I’d have to so that the only bad part about this job is the commute.

Here’s to another year, and more achievements to come.

A Blog About Blogs

I feel as if maybe I have traversed to an ultra lame topic here, but it has been almost a month since my last post and Gods be damned if I go a month without submitting something bordering on intelligent thought to the web world.

I like to surf the web and read other blogs on occasion – okay, quite frequently. In fact, I have a list of about ten blogs which I read frequently. One or two of them are just funny pictures and things that make me laugh, like the Cake Wreck blog (http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com) for example, another is someone local that I admire, like Marc Acito (www.marcacito.com) who is doing something new every day for a year, and others are blogs that search through other blogs for interesting stuff. The thing I like about these blogs and the others that I read, and many of the other popular blogs out there, is that they cater (if you will) to a specific niche interest. These blogs rarely if ever go off the topic of what they were designed for, and that is their draw. So I couldn’t help but think what my blog’s draw is. Not that it much matters since I’m writing it more for myself than anyone else. At least that’s what I like to tell myself anyway.

I’ve been blogging in one form or another for quite a few years now. The former incarnations of my blogs have been something similar to the boring teenage chatter one might find on MySpace, which is partly why I started this one. At the time, and perhaps still, I was struggling with a quarter-life crisis – trying to figure out where in the world I belong now that I was done with school. Well, now that I’ve found my place in the world for the time being, I keep this blog going as I evolve, knowing that I will never be a finished product and that someone else might get some solace in my experiences. Trust me, I’m not getting full of myself or my writing abilities here. All I can do is just write, think I’m saying something valuable, and just be who I am.