How to reflect on a decade

This year ending isn’t just an ordinary ending of a year, because it’s also the end of a decade.  Naturally, a sentimental person like me tends to want to reflect on an entire decade, because much like individual years, a decade is a nice round chunk of time that one might think it would be easy to reflect upon, but in the greater spectrum, it’s ten full years we’d be trying to look back onto.  Now I like to think I have a good memory, but even without the aid of my trusty brog, it’s difficult to really look back at an entire decade.

Regardless, that’s not going to stop all the self-important jobbers of the internet who will try their darnedest to speak with authority and copy and paste all the same milestones the major news outlets will when it comes to trying to summarize and reflect upon the entire decade.  The funny thing is that most of the internet savvy generations probably aren’t that much older or younger than I am, which means that in the grand spectrums of our respective lives, we’ve only really lived through 3-4 decades, whereas I’d probably estimate that 1.5-2 of them are pretty invalid, because we’re simply not articulate and/or educated enough to have the capacity to reflect on entire decades.

So combined with the advent and growth of the internet, and the notion that everyone has a voice, I’d wager this is probably, at the very most, the second real decade of the modern high-speed internet that people really care to really reminisce about; and I’m being generous by calling it the second, because DSLs and cable internet didn’t really flourish until nearly the mid-2000’s; I couldn’t imagine people trying to use streaming, auto-refreshing social media on a 56K modem, so frankly I see this more as the first real decade that everyone and their literal mothers on the internet are going to be writing about.

Anyway, I’m going to attempt to try to recollect from mostly just my own memories, and stick to things that are more relevant to my own little world, and not the big gigantic depressing one we live in.  If I had any readers, they can google any decade in review, and probably find more worldly and probably more high-profile shit than the things I have to say about the things going on in my own little life, like the start and finish of Game of Thrones, Pokemon Go, the sad state of American politics, all the endless mass shootings, and Bill Cosby being outed as a rapist.

And the reason that I disclaim the whole “if I had any readers” because one of the most devastating things that occurred for me is the fact that despite my WordPress going online in 2010, at nearly the very start of the decade, midway through the decade my brog went down indefinitely, when my brother relocated from one part of the country to another.  A lot of hardware changes meant no more place to host my brog, and despite having the supposed backups, I simply haven’t taken the time or allocated the funds necessary to get my site up and running again.

If I were the type to do New Years resolutions anymore, I think I’d resolve to get my site back up and running again in 2020.  TBD on if that will actually occur, and frankly with the things I have on my plate going into the next decade, I don’t want to commit and then fail to deliver.

In spite of the brog blackout, that hasn’t stopped me from writing.  Even to the day my site went down, I have been writing on a fairly regular basis, taking no more than two weeks off before the internal guilt gets my fingers flying across the keys again, and I’ve got at this point, hundreds of folders of dated and timestamped Word docs, all awaiting their day in which they can be posted retroactively to a brog.

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A car manufacturer’s reputation is only as good as their product’s owners

After nearly ten full years, I’ve said goodbye to my Kia Forte.  It’s still a little bittersweet at the time I’m writing this, in spite of the excitement of having a new car after nearly ten years.  But with a sliver under 150,000 miles, degrading brakes, a baby on the way, and just the fact that I simply wanted a new, larger vehicle, I felt that the time was right for me to make a switch.

I wanted to capitalize on being in a position to where I had the luxury of time to do research, test drive multiple cars, and play a little bit of negotiation, as well as have the ability to sit on the bench and wait things out if things weren’t looking promising.  I wasn’t as fortunate the last time I was in the market for a car, but things still worked out well for me, seeing as how it was then in which I drove off in my Forte, and it served me extremely well over the last 9+ years.

But the point of this entire post was that I wanted to give an appropriate swan song for my former car, because throughout their entire existence, Kia has often been perceived as a below-average car manufacturer, but seeing as how I just traded in one that had nearly 150,000 miles on it, never had any mechanical problems, and where I did pretty much no maintenance other than oil changes and new tires whenever they were needed, I can confidently vouch for the quality of Kia cars, and can proudly say that I owned one for the better part of a decade.

When I was in the market last, I was in a pretty bad situation.  I had a lemon of a Mazda that I still owed money on, but I was fed up to hell repairing it and willing to punt on the rest of the financing just to be free of it and have a car that was just plain reliable.  I wasn’t working full-time and was still in my life of freelance, so I couldn’t afford to get something that I’d risk being unable to pay the financing on it, so I had to accept the fact that I probably wouldn’t be getting a dream car or anything of the such this time around, and that I just needed something that could be relied upon.

The Ford Fiesta was actually my top pick going into my search back then, but I told myself to drive anything and everything that was in my limited budget, and put aside all previous stereotypes and perceptions, and think of the greater good of getting a reliable car.  I took a weekend day to go to a part of town that had a large number of dealerships, and I went on a spree test driving cars.  Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Hyundai Elantra, Chevy Cobalt, whatever was a compact car that I could make the numbers work.

Eventually, I found a Ford dealership that had a Fiesta that was also a stick shift, and I looked forward to getting in and taking it for a whirl.  But from the moment I sat down, my expectations were immediately souring.  The seats felt small and cheap, and the interior was cheap-looking, plasticky, and everything I touched from the console to the door handle felt shoddy and sub-par.  When I took the car off the lot, I shift from feel and sound, and I realized that I was revving to like 5,500 rpm before shifting, because the car just had no power and needed that much juice in order to get moving.  There was a lot of body roll, and the brakes felt soft and uninspired, and frankly I was ready to get the fuck off the lot when I was done with this.

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The Twenty-Year Club

Going into the wedding, there were two pictures that I had pictured in my head that I was determined to make happen during the reception.  I didn’t tell anyone about them, I didn’t try to organize and plan a specific point during the reception when they were going to occur, but I kept the idea in my head, and planned on making them reality when it was time for the reception.

Despite how harmonious everything ultimately ended up during the wedding weekend, the reality is that I had three pretty defined groups, representing for lack of a better term, my side of the guest list.  Family, my friends, and then my groomsmen.  This isn’t to say that my groomsmen are not my friends, frankly as far as I’m concerned, they’re just a little bit more, and more like additional family than they are just friends.  However, that being said, it was with my two groups of friends in which I had two particular photos that I wanted to take during the reception.

I’m fortunate that I was able to make them occur, and they were among the photographs that I was looking forward to seeing the most after the wedding.  The significance of these particularly desired shots was simply the fact that among all the players involved in these shots, I had reached the point where I had known all of them for (nearly) twenty years; two-zero.

I’m doubtful that I am I going to ever really be the guy on social media with thousands of followers and a number next to “friends” that is anything over like 200.  I’m far too guarded, paranoid and too much of a shut-in to just willy-nilly friend every single person in site, not to say that those who do are any lesser than I am; it’s just not me.

But the people in my life that I do call friends, these are typically the people that I will do so, for a span of time that’s more accurately compared to severe jail sentences than quick and meaningless short relationships.  Friendships with me are always more likely to be long-haul endeavors than just relationships out of conveniences, which isn’t to say that I’ve had my fair share of those, not that there’s anything wrong with those either.

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Life as a married man, brog post #2

Honestly, there’s not nearly as much to say about the honeymoon as there was the wedding.  Frankly, much of this was split into two posts mostly because of my OCD of wanting to make sure a wedding photo was with the wedding post, and so that some picture from the honeymoon can also get displayed independently, therefore necessitating its own post.  Still, not to say that I can’t spout off about a honeymoon, but in the interest of transparency, this is the true impetus of this post coming to fruition.

Frankly, we’re just happy to have done a honeymoon, especially immediately after the wedding.  We’ve seen it happen to enough couples, where a honeymoon is planned anywhere from months to an entire year after the wedding to actually happen, and in some cases not even happen at all.  Yeah no, no disrespect to those who embark on similar paths, but the both of us most definitely wanted to have an actual honeymoon, where we could actually relax and take a well-earned break from the life of planning a wedding on top of our normal working lives.

In a nutshell, we went to Disney World for a few days, stayed at the Polynesian resort, and then transitioned onto a Disney cruise for the next week, where we sailed to Mexico for a few days, hit Disney’s private island Castaway Cay for a day, and then came back home.  The wife drove most of the itinerary, since she’s at least 200x more into Disney than I am, but I’m more than happy to go along for the ride, as long as the vast majority of my trip could be spent relaxing, eating like a pig, and generally having very little commitments at all.

Overall, my missions could very well be considered accomplished.  Maybe a little too much, because I still have no earthly idea what I’m doing with my life whenever I have free time back home.  I just watched Chinese Super Ninjas for the 80th time in my life last night, because I couldn’t triangulate on one better thing to do with two free hours than that.

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Life as a married man, brog post #1

photo courtesy Matt Altmix

Let this be the first time I put in writing that I am now an officially married man, and this is the first time that I’ve had the time to sit down and write since both the wedding and the honeymoon.  After planning for both of these things for the better part of the last year, and then actually doing both things, I have to say that it feels kind of like having been on a train for a while and then having to adjust to the speed of walking all over again.  Literally, I’ve spent parts of the last two days sitting there in a dazed stupor, not having any clue of what to do next with, life in general. 

There are certainly things that should get done and need to get done, but I’m having a hard time bringing myself to make the first step in any direction to actually get started on doing anything really just yet.  It’ll all fix itself pretty quickly as daily life and routine begin to settle back down, but for the time being, it’s definitely taking some adjustment on getting back to normal life after finishing up a journey with some finishes in extreme rhythms.

As for the wedding, I have to say that I think the wife and I put on an excellent weekend for our celebration of union.  Trying to be as objective as I can for my own event, but I really genuinely believe that just about everything went so well and smooth, and I really couldn’t have asked for anything else,* as far as how the entire weekend went, from the arrival of friends and family, the rehearsal party to the wedding itself.

*except maybe some actual leftovers from our catering, which was completely obliterated by everyone, regardless of a few no-shows, resulting in nothing left for wifey and I after the wedding, but I guess that’s just another sign of success that we picked a good caterer who put out some irresistible food

I think it started with the location, and getting hitched in downtown Decatur made for a fantastic location for guests to stay where they were right next door to the venue, in an area where there were tons of restaurants and bars to eat and hang at, and a rarity in the Metro Atlanta area, somewhere that was MARTA accessible, meaning people could easily hop aboard the train and actually do tourist things.  Plus, the hotel was brand-spanking new, and the staff was outstanding beyond belief, and there’s little reason to believe the weekend wouldn’t have been as great as it was without them themselves.

Throughout the weekend, fewer things made me happier than seeing friends and family decisively doing their own things, and going out to eat or to the aquarium or the World of Coke, and making the most of their free time.  I took great pleasure and enjoyment in seeing people having a good time in Decatur and Atlanta, and not feeling like they were just humoring us, and like they actually got some time for themselves instead of feeling like they were just here for us.

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The last singles

If I can pull the curtain back a little bit, whenever I sit down and write, there’s no guarantee that the most recent thing I’m writing is actually the most recent thing that’s actually happening.  Especially these days, I often times come across things or thoughts that spark the want to write, but I just simply don’t have the time to write, because I’m always busy at work, and by the time I get home, I’m either too busy to write or too fried to write.

In times like those, what typically happens is that I have a cloud-based document where I jot down the date and the general theme of what was going to be written, and if there’s any links that I want to refer to, that too.  And when I have the time and the motivation to do some writing, those are the things that I try to tackle first.  Typically, I don’t like the queue to grow too big, because then it gives me anxiety and a feeling of being worthless as someone who likes to write.  But there are exceptions to the queue, where I start writing about something in the true present, because usually there’s some degree of time sensitivity to where it’s not something that I can go back and write about retroactively.  At the time I’m writing this, there are three posts queued up that I still want to write about when I get the time.

Right now, is one of those moments.  Because the last few days, I’ve been coming to the realization that a lot of the things I’m doing, are the last time I’m doing them as a single guy.  Yes, melodramatic me is actually writing about the slow farewell to single, unattached life, because I’m two days from entering the wedded bliss of holy matrimony, and getting married.  What started out as mythical gf became mythical fiancé, and now I’m about to have a mythical wifey, and I’m actually going to be somebody’s husband.  Sucks to be them!

But anyway, it’s a lot of little things that I’m doing that I’m realizing are the last times I’m doing them as a single person.  All throughout the week, I’ve had my final chest and tris day as a single guy.  My last time running on the treadmill as a single guy.  Today was my last bis-shoulders-hamstrings day.  As the weekend progresses, I’ll have my last meals and drinks as a single person, and then when I’m at the altar, likely watching down at mythical fiancé coming down the aisle, probably looking radiant and beautiful, I’ll be ticking down my last minutes and seconds as a single person.

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I lost a mythical gf

On this day, I no longer have a girlfriend. 

I have a fiancée now.

Marriage is one of those things that I always imagined would be in my future.  Even though jaded people like to claim that it’s an archaic institution or something that doesn’t really mean much these days, the eternal romantic in me always saw it as something that I figured I’d want to attain in my life.  I’ve watched couples that I’ve always thought were great, mothers and fathers of children, and even my own parents dissolve and divorce which I’d be lying didn’t give me concerns for pursuing it myself, but it just seems like one of those things that always had a place in my life, personally.

And fortunately, I’ve had an accommodating partner throughout this journey towards marriage, and the once-mythical gf has stuck with me throughout the last four years, and kind of made it something of a no-brainer that we just might work out in the long haul.  I’m lucky to have a girl in my life that loves and accepts me, is supportive of my pursuits, and encourages me to be the best person that I can be, and I’m pretty stoked and excited to go through the awkward transition of calling her “my girl-I mean fiancée,” and eventually, my wife.

It’s funny because despite the fact that it took four years to get to this point, this is something that has been on my mind for a way lot longer.  But I didn’t want to be one of those people who were just giddy to be in a relationship, and rush straight into marriage, without really knowing their better halves, and despite the fact that I was wondering if this could go in this direction, I always erred on the side of steady, to let things grow, feel things out, and really be more and more sure of, well everything.

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