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Journal perfessor multigeek's Journal: Losing my treasured tunnel vison 5

I guess I truly *am* getting older.
I did conciously decide to become visible on slashdot when I created the perfessor multigeek login, ending five years as an Anonymous Coward. I had a plan, which I don't think is any too secret to anybody who has read my posts.
I was annoyed at what I felt to be the increasingly trivial orientation of many of the posts (no, I don't think another reply about 1.)x, 2.)x, 3.)profit is likely to be funny), I felt that the topics were heading more into territory where I had some expertise to provide, I was looking for a chance to do some low-stress writing for an undemanding audience, and, yes, I wanted to build a more public identity to help promote myself and my business.
What I wasn't expecting was this whole journal thing and the stuff that I've found there. What I wasn't expecting was to be pushed into thinking about aspects of my life and the world that haven't a damn thing more to do with computers then they do with door knobs or watermelons.
This was NOT in the plan. Dammit.
What am I talking about, you may ask? Well, all of you journal folk out there who are talking about your lives. And insistantly refusing to be ignorant or unmeditative or dismissive about who you are and what and why. It's causing me to take you seriously. Your views are subverting mine planned narrow approach. I did not have it scheduled in to be thinking about these things at this time of my life and it's unsettling me a great deal.
Now, you probably think that I'm joking. To put things in perspective, when I was a freshman in high school (and a year young at that) I sat down one morning and tried to determine what my body would look like and how I would dress over the course of the rest of my life. I predicted thin, I predicted muscular, I predicted when and how and why. That was in 1980 and I haven't deviated much from those expectations since. I expect certain parts of my life to go according to plan and what subjects I will allow myself to think extensively about is certainly something that I am accustomed to controlling.
I'm not ready to think about life. I'm not ready to think about reasons. I'm not ready to think about mortality. I'm not ready to think about death.
You see, the biggest impact that these journal entries have had on me is that I keep going through the same sequence. I see an entry, usually describing a plan to figure out some part of optimizing daily life ("how do I deal with this class", "I need to work on my schedule", etc.) and I drop into fixit mode. "Hmm. Good question; well, some possiblities are. . ." and sometimes post those thoughts, usually not.
And as I run through the problem I see my own approach to those same problems (mining those memories and those skills for data). And to do that I have to look. Really look. Seeing my life in ways that I had not expected. And what I see is how much I have changed. I look at an experience I had in college and am struck by the vast otherness of this strange boy who was me so very long ago. He is not, overall, a worse or better person but he is not me. We would have trouble talking to each other.
Of course others look at me and see what has not changed. After all, I still get carded, I still look, maybe, like somebody in their late twenties. My hair is now undoubtedly salt and pepper and yet people mistake me for an undergraduate. But my closer friends know the profundity of the changes and see them well. The finally fading anger, the awareness of those around me, the hard-won flat-out sanity of my life and my self.
You see, I was not a serene young man. Only my oh-so upscale leftist intellectual surroundings kept me from surrendering to the desire for violence. The towering and grand satisfactions of ego-saturating, world-tearing rage. I spent my teens and twenties battered back and forth in a recurring storm of seething hatred, vast ambitions, mindwarping loneliness. I tore holes in walls, ripped and slammed things to pieces, tried to walk it off, bike it off, scream it off. I wrenched this fury into less pathological passions, diving deep into anything that demanded enough of me to work off the internal fires.
In '97 I worked again with a woman I had known at a job back in '90 and she told me of a betting pool, evidently large and of long standing among my coworkers, at that old job. Evidently they were taking bets on when I would finally break and violently attack some coworker. Since we, in fact, had had one staffer dragged away violent and screaming by the police (it was not a low-stress job) and knowing what I was like in those days (I used to take pride in the way that gangs on late night subways quickly gave way when I walked through the train) I could see that she wasn't kidding.
And I'm fixing it all. I've been finding the parts of myself that were diseased, malformed, and discovered why and how. To a great extent I've taken away the reasons for that malformation and it's been working gloriously well. I've worked to view myself like any other system, working hard on my self-diagnostics, scrambling to get external input from people I respect whenever possible.
And now I focus on one task at a time, making sense of my world as I can. My mantra has become "if I can just get through this next X few weeks then I'll be able to get to Y milestone". Just a little longer, just a little more. For the better part of ten year now I've had running through my mind the line from the last battle of the real first Star Wars, "Stay on target. Stay on target." I've heard it in my mind all this way, making my way along my chosen path, though admittedly through some pretty unexpected weather and I can hear it. That one voice, calming, reminding, an audible tension conveying the importance of doing it right, the dangers of losing focus.
Just stay on target. Don't lose focus, don't get distracted or weaken. The threats you hear around you won't go away just because you choose to fight them so stay on the path to reaching the real cause, the true root of it all. The dangers around you, the little ones, the distracting ones, may kill you or not whether you fight them or not. So don't turn around and look, don't acknowledge them.
Those shots you hear aren't shots, you don't have the time or energy or resources to say that they are shots so call them pretty bursts of light and keep barrelling along the channel as fast as you can, looking for the deep answer and the place that you can reach the core at last and wipe it all clean. Fight the problem you see and the ones you don't see will kill you anyway. Judge your sanity by your effectiveness and your effectiveness by the speed that the world rips by. This has kept me going. Gotten me out of bed and off to do the necessary things for a very long time.
And now I'm reaching the fundamental first goals and FUCK! I'm still not there yet but I'm starting to see the world more than I'm ready for. I'm starting to see myself more then I'm ready for. Reality is sure enough a bitch and like every smart woman, after a while she stops taking excuses and starts cutting in.
This was not in the plan. It wasn't like this in the Raymond Z. Gallun novels. This didn't happen in Dune.
When I look at myself and my life the same progression keeps happening. I first see how well things work now. And they do. The little things work very very well. Then I see how much better they work then they did when I was younger. Then I follow the progression on the chart in my head, seeing that at this rate in another twenty years or so I'll have all this day-to-day stuff down to a science. I'll make my way through life running negotiations, and flipping crepes, and sauntering comfortably through any of a hundred cities, able to feel at home, chat with the locals, and do business in all of them and no part of all of that will raise a sweat. Unless, of course, I want it to.
But wait, another twenty years? okay, lessee, take my age now and another twen- hey! I'll be over fifty! I can't wait to get things done until I'm fifty! I can't wait to have children/take time off/find out what I want to do for myself when I'm FIFTY. I may not make it that far. I mean, even barring accidents, this body has taken a few hard knocks. There are already indications that I may not be around much longer. Shit. I'm not ready for mortality. I'm not ready to understand that I'm going to die. It just seems so unfair.
Yeah, that's original. "It's unfair."
Yeah, but it is. What's the point of all this work if I don't even get to finish the job?
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Losing my treasured tunnel vison

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  • Things NEVER follow the "plan", and it is a good thing that they don't. Plans formulated while young and inexperienced tend to be idealistic and incompatible with reality (though somepeople do follow through and are either terribly dissapointed or transparently overexuberant) If my plans of youth had happened I would have married while at BYU, had two kids by now and be a stay at home mom. But *NO*, I had to choose the difficult way...now I'm questioning anything and everything, not sure of what the future will bring and glad at the turmoil that my life is in. Easy it is not, having someone else make the decisions for me is so much simpler(whether those people be the church or my younger self), making decisions based on the present is hard.

    Plans need to constantly be scrutinised and revised and sometimes thrown out completly.
    • Hrm. I'm kinda torn on this one. You see, however it happened, by a very early age I was thoroughly inculcated with a drive, almost a compulsion, to accomplish certain things. Or at least things of a certain scale. And it was clear to me by the end of junior high school that if I could find an approach and stick with it I'ld be far better able to get those sorts of things done.
      And the things I planned out mostly had to do with either putting resources (material or otherwise) in place so that they would be there if I needed them or with providing some degree of stability in what I already knew would be an utterly (otherwise) fractured life.
      I mean, when your biological parents have seven marriages between them (now nine) and nobody in either side of the family has stayed long in a nine-to-five job ever (all troubleshooters or academics or other roving sorts with mutable lives) you get deeply hungry for something that you can count on.
      Now that I've finally reached the point where I no longer feel bound and defined by those "required" accomplishments, the structures are starting to crumble. both from age and stress and from inattention.
      I wouldn't say that I've needed those few planned aspects of my life, but mighty close. And it's very scary, no matter how healthy, to give up such certainties after having them for almost thirty years.
      Also keep in mind that a large part of why I can afford to be looser about all of this now is that, by and large, these insane plans of mine *worked*. I'm living on no money, being appallingly dismissive of most aspects of day-to-day normal life while viably taking on jobs that I *know* are stumping serious, well-funded groups of people (both corporate and non-profit) with thousands of times the resources. I wouldn't be able to afford my cavalier behavior if I hadn't done twenty-three years of preparation.
      So, yes and no. Making decisions inordinately early can be stifling and foolish, but in truth some of what I'm now outgrowing deserves enough respect that I am finding it hard to give it up.
      After all, what would you think of Linus' security blanket if the Peanuts gang got caught outdoors and only Linus escaped frostbite? Especially if he was able to truthfully say that this had been one of his reasons for hanging on to it?
      Rustin
      P.S., if you *had* become a stay-at-home mom I would like to think that at the very least those would have been some pretty doggone cool kids. From what I've seen of you, there's no WAY that any kids raised by you would be anything less than formidible.
      • Yes, planning is good, being prepared for all eventualities is better. However, following plans set in store for you that were developed for you by others are the ones that I deplore.

        The ones that we choose for ourselves have different levels of relization, from daydreams to detailed buisness plans.

        PS. I don't like the idea of stay at home mom's that do so because of no other choice. Being dependent on someone is not something I do well, it's just a negative pattern that feeds on itself until there is nothing left but it's own pool of ick. Maybe that's why I got my Masters in structural engineering by 22, or picking a major because I wanted to design my own house and not filter my ideas through another. But back to the mom thing, I do plan on kids, but doing it my way as a structural consultant part time so I can go to the soccer games and dance recitals as well as be self-sustaining. And thank you for the compliment that I would have cool kids ;)
        • First of all, re the compliment, it was only stating the obvious.
          But moving right along. So, now that you've got the MS, what kind of house *are* you planning to build for yourself? You can't keep tempting us (well, me at least) and then moving on. You *still* haven't talked about your paintings. Fer crying out loud, you never even told us how the Ninja Chicken Bingo Night (did I get that right?) went!
          Well?
          Rustin
          • Well...

            The house will be 2 stories adn have a courtyard in the center (picture the house as a U pointing northward, with an entertainment room/family room/dining/cafe' feel in the s/w corner with the kitchen adjacent for easy acess. There will be a workout/gym/playarea (2nd floor removed for celing height) with wood floors on the n/w end with an atrium looking out onto it from the second floor. There will be an office/library somewhere. The master suite will be 2nd floor south end with high celings and a large stained glass window that shatters the morning light into rainbows accross the room. Most of the house is so visual that it escapes being put into words, but can be found in doodles alongside my college notes. But building it is still ~10 years in the future, my dream home is for a family and I'm still party of 1, so I'll get a town house in the interim.

            As for my paintings, I did put a link to some pictures the other day. Right now I'm trying something new every time so as to avoid focusing on one aspect too early on.

            Ninja Bingo was 13 hours of fun. I was in the kitchen all day putting together the lunches with the other volenteers. For some reason people were amazed at how hard a worker I was. I guess sthat I take for granted that I know how to ask when things need to be done, rather than stand around until someone tells me what to do. And I enjoy doing things that people don't expect me to be able to do, like lift heavy boxes or change the Sparkelettes water bottle in the break room or ride motorcycles or other mundane tasks often delegated to the male gender.

"You know, we've won awards for this crap." -- David Letterman

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