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curlycollegekid
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Name: Ryan
Birthday: 7/11/1985
Gender: Male
Interests: Drumming, Guitaring, Writing, Watching, Zoning, Sleeping, Dreaming, College-ing (which, by definition, is all of the above)
Expertise: Psychology, Reverse Psychology, Inverse Psychology, Diverse Psychology, Acute Psychology, Obtuse Psychology, Bland Psychology, and Bathroom Psychology
Occupation: Student
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  CurlyCalvinKid
Member Since:
7/14/2005
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| A Paradigm ShiftNary three hours after I wrote that post, I had a bit of a realization. Well, two, actually. First was that a chunk of my feelings of failure have come from my father, and second was that I have been looking for truth about me in the wrong place. Permit me to explain.
The whole thing started when my dad came downstairs to rail on me for not registering my license plates to my new car. When some crazy chick in a Durango totaled my Exploder last January, I still was able to salvage one of the plates, and so when I bought Veet (my new car), I took the salvaged plate from Eddie the Exploder and put it on Veet. Problem solved.
Or not.
See, apparently swapping plates willy-nilly is against the law. However, I couldn't afford the $400 or more in sales tax and licensing fees to change my plates over, so I've spent the last seven months tooling around in a coupe with an SUV's plates. I knew it was illegal, but didn't really see any way around it, as I simply couldn't afford to re-register my plates.
So, a few days ago my dad gets my plate renewal form in the mail (you know, the little sticker you have to put in the upper-right corner of the license plate?). Apparently, the illustrious Jesse White and all his little buddies at the Secretary of State's office still think I'm driving Eddie, which would present a problem if a cop ever decides to pull me over and finds the plates on a little green sports car are registered to a big green SUV. So my dad goes off about the fact that what I'm doing is illegal, and blah, blah, blah.
Now, I've known for the last seven months that what I've been doing is illegal, but for him to shove it in my face was too much. See, when he said, "What you're doing is illegal," I heard, "I'm disappointed in you as my son."
Boom. There's the first clue.
Now, keep in mind that this same pattern has been occurring for the last year — it's not always about the license plate: sometimes it's about the bathroom, or the cleanliness of my room, or the dwindling size of my bank account, or, heck, even what time I choose to go to bed. The words he and I use aren't important; what's important is the implication of those words, the pattern, the meaning I assign to them.
So, just after my dad went back upstairs, Ben, my brother-in-law, called. No particular reason, he said, just wanted to check up on me.
I started telling him about what's been going on for me the last year or so: "It's like I'm up to bat at a baseball game, and my parents are sitting in the front row. Up until now, they've been my biggest fans and have cheered me on even when everyone else in the crowd had left the stadium. And now, I can't hit a single pitch; I can't even tell a ball from a strike anymore, so I alternate between swinging at everything and not swinging at all. And now, my parents are booing. The people that for my entire life have been my biggest fans are now my worst critics. The worst part is, they actually bring me down. When they go on vacation, or even when they just leave me alone and don't bring up money or job issues for a few days, I actually improve; I start on an upward spiral. But the second they bring up concerns about money or jobs or grad school, I plummet downwards again."
Ben replied, "You know, I think that analogy really applies here. You think about a hitter who has a slump in professional baseball — it happens to everyone eventually. He's striking out at every single at-bat, and the fans get really disappointed because they know he can do better than he is doing. And eventually, he'll come out of his slump. And when the press asks him about it afterwards, he says he didn't really do anything different — he just kept trying."
I realized that this is exactly what I've been doing. I don't know any other way to live my life, so I just keep doing what I've been doing: keep getting work, keep trying to make money, and keep hoping that sometime soon it'll pay off.
"See, the problem," I continued, "is that my parents don't realize that this is a phase. I was talking to one woman with whom I've been doing karate for the last year or so and I was explaining my situation to her. She's a mother of two little girls, she's a parent, and yet she expressed nothing but empathy for me. And yet I get little to none of this from my parents. Everyone else I explain my situation to understands that this is just a phase, that this isn't who I really am, except my parents."
The image of my parents booing me in the stands started to become more and more real, and I began to feel it more and more deeply. Then, something inside me changed. I had an epiphany.
I realized that, for the first time in my life, my parents are incapable of giving me truth about who I am.
See, for my entire life, my parents have been my biggest fans and my best source of truth about who I really am. They were the ones who, in my darkest hours, re-recorded messages others had given me about who I am. They had replaced "You're a loser" with "You're loved"; they had replaced "You are worthless" with "You are precious." But now, they can no longer give me truth, at least not for the time being. I realized that I have to find that truth elsewhere. In one epiphany, I cut my umbilical cord.
And I suddenly felt free. Once I realized that my parents were human, and were thus flawed, I was free to discern where the truth about me truly lies. And I found truth from Ben. I found it from my friends and my mentors. I was able to find truth from people who weren't so emotionally involved in my life that they couldn't step back far enough to see the bigger picture. I was able to see myself through the eyes of those with whom I share my life, and their eyes do not condemn. Their eyes are kind and say, "Man, I've been there before. And I promise it gets better." Their eyes share my struggles with the understanding that I'm not a Failure, but a Success who has simply hit a slump and will emerge the wiser from it.
As I let my new sources of truth sink in, I began to sense another source of truth. I, for the first time in my life, fell to my knees. I cried. And then I heard a soft and powerful voice:
"My precious, strong, and tender son, I will finish the good work I have started in you."
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| Moving OnIt has been so long since I've posted on this blog that it took me ten minutes to find the "Add New Post" link.
I've been thinking about the last year and a half of my life, and I've come upon a realization: This last phase of my life has been inundated with failure. Since July of 2007, I have been fired from every single job I've held. I was fired from Ecker for "negligence" (which is a whole other series of blog entries in and of itself), I was fired from FAST for being late, and I was "fired" from Starbucks because I was leaving for school in two months. Now, I am nearly $1000 in debt due to not being able to afford my living expenses (with another few grand on the way), and my dad just finished railing on my because my plates aren't registered to my new car because I can't afford the $400 sales tax that I would have to pay if I transferred them.
I have hit wall after wall after wall without a break. I have messed up professionally, and I have messed up relationally. I have seen things in myself that I hoped to never see, and watched myself enter a state of hopelessness that I haven't been in since my childhood.
And yet somehow underneath all this, there must be hope. I have let go of so many things that kept me going through dark times in the last few years of my life: hope of love, hope of life; memories of my adventures through Europe and the Amazon, and hopes for my future. It is so easy to slip into depression and forget not only those things that lay behind me and give me solace when I remember them, but also forget those things that lay in front of me and pull me forward into my future.
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| A RevelationFor the last half hour or so, my roomie has been sitting in the living room arguing with his fiancee about bringing his stuff to their soon-to-be shared apartment. He's insisting that he bring his stuff, and I'm guessing that she's opposed to having two people's clutter in their new apartment.
As I sit here eavesdropping, I'm beginning to wonder what their conversation is really about. I'll bet my next paycheck (all $30 of it) that their conversation isn't really about couches, golf clubs, and bookshelves. I'll bet their conversation is about identity. I'Il venture a guess that my roomie and his fiancee are trying to figure out how their individual identities will be maintained once they become a married couple, and for my roomie, her first infraction on his sense of identity is his fiancee telling him that he can't keep all his stuff.
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| Good old Xanga. You know, deep down, we're all exhibitionists...and voyeurs. We all want to see what no one else thinks we see, and be known like no one has ever known us before. It's part of being connected, connectedness. That's why we all want blogs; we want people to subscribe to our Xangas because then, then, we know that someone truly wants to hear our thoughts.
There. I waxed poetic for you all. At least all of you that still read this cobweb-infested webpage lost in the dank attic of the internet, nestled up close to Pets.com and that Hamster Dance website.
I've spent a lot of time reminiscing over the last few days. I've been thinking about Dance Guild my sophomore year, how innocent it was, how exciting. If only I knew then... I've thought about France, London, even high school. I think I'm scared of my future so I'm searching through my past. I know that it'll take a small miracle for me to do what I think I want to do with my life. God's hand will have to move if I'm going to get into a Clinical Psych program, but yet I feel... I feel right about it. Maybe it's just the fact that I've decided, perhaps arbitrarily, and the fact that I actually have a direction to push towards alleviates some of the void of insecurity, like turning on a flashlight in a dark forest. It's true you won't be able to see everything, but dammit, at least you have some light, some vague, nebulous idea of where you're going. Yeah, you can't see the entire forest, but having two double-A batteries' worth of light is better than not having any at all.
I long for my past, but I think the only reason I long for it is because I know what happens in the end.
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| Memoirs encore une fois de la franceI woke up this morning to find snow on the ground.
I'm dreaming
Of a white
Halloween...
It felt like a Norah Jones morning, so I let her smoky voice soak in as I walked to class.
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Walking back from work, I still see huge lake-effect snowflakes floating down all around me. I don't remember it snowing this early in Grenoble.
Norah was still bouncing around in my head, so I let her sing me a few songs as I walked back to my apartment. I started thinking about what I'd do this Halloween, and then I remembered it was tech week for Suck and Suckability and I'd be spending my entire Halloween there. I kept walking.
My mind wandered to what I'd done on Halloweens past. Two years ago, I asked Amber out on Halloween. Last year...
Last year, I spent Halloween in Rome.
Well, the Vatican, specifically -- St. Peter's Basilica.
That night, Paola and I, overcome by the majesty of the cathedral, cried together in Piazza Vaticani. She had sensed God for the first time, and I had sensed Him in a way I never had before.
Then I remembered the many times I walked down Rue Grésivaudan from the tram stop at La Tronche after a night on the town with Ms. Jones as my personal chanteuse. My heart broke. | | |
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