Phew!

It has been... well... it's been a year.  A rough one at that.  I've never really been particularly averse to the number 13, but in retrospect, I've had the kind of year that probably would have warranted a little triskaidekaphobia.  While each month seemed to come with something new to try to beat me down, over the course of the year, continued self-discovery has allowed me to get back up and keep going.

Of course, there's been a lot of actual positive for me this year, too.  I continue to teach and make progress toward my master's degree.  And though my life is still in quite a period of transition, it's a lot more stable than it was not too long ago, and I've been making a lot of progress toward personal goals as well.  So, while I don't have a lot of grand events to look back on here, all in all, I'm pretty pleased with how I'm coming out from this year.

It's still been really busy, so all I have time left to mention is that I've scarfed down my New Year's Eve Nachos and I'm ready to ring in 2014.  Here's to no longer having to fail to write legible "threes" at the end of the date.

Random tangent: The Carson Daly pre-show this year was getting so uninteresting we actually had to switch to a Seinfeld rerun.

Self-Discovery

Stuff like self-discovery never happens when you expect it to.  Although it can sometimes come as the result of seeking it out directly, eventually those paths dry up and you're effectively stuck at a dead end until something comes out from the blue and some new, unexplored path hits you like a ton of bricks.  This is precisely what happened to me over this long weekend.

It also never happens when you'd like it to.  There are dozens of other things I could (and indeed should) be doing right now.  (Grad school and all.)  But there will be time for all of that.  Sure, it may mean a little extra frenzy in the coming days, but it's worth it to take some time out to process things now so that, later, such thoughts won't interrupt nearly so much.

I like being able to describe my experience.  It's part of why I started this blog in the first place.  But, among other things, to do so requires words, which have recently been harder to come by.  When confronted with questions about my identity, my emotions, and my ambitions, I've tended to come up empty.  And for every admonition that "labels aren't everything," time and time again I cling to the descriptors I have because they're so useful in helping me to comprehend and process the world around me — all that I'm going through, and all that others are going through.

I'm not sure, but I suppose I wouldn't necessarily mind if this didn't have to be the case.  If it were possible to shun all of these adjectives, and have such a strong sense of identity and self that one only needs a single noun — the nominal, one's own name — to encompass all of that and communicate it effectively.  If only a single word were all that were necessary for deep introspection about one's feelings, desires, actions, and reactions.

Google doesn't operate that way, though.  You can't just upload your consciousness, pick out a feeling from therewithin, and ask it to give you more information about what it means.  You only have the words you know.  And they're painfully limiting.  Nothing will point that out more readily than a computer.  Or a clustered network of millions of them.

But moreover, it doesn't strike me that people operate that way... at least not generally.  We pretty much all have at least some sort of internal running narrative in our minds, and narratives are rooted in — get this — narration, which requires — have you figured it out? — words.  Without words, we can't possibly begin to explain effectively to others what's going on in that headspace of ours and so we can't get out of it.  And since what's going on in there tends to have some governing effect on our more perplexing outward actions, this can become an issue at times.

And so when serendipity offers you a term, loosely defined, which piques your interest, you seek to learn more about it.  But usually you can only connect with a mediocre proportion of what's written about it.  You might learn something new about yourself, or you might not, but either way, the effect is small.

Which makes it all the more special when, despite all odds, it turns out that, in this case, you can directly relate to almost every bullet point anyone could ever write on the topic.  Suddenly, a whole world and wealth of information is available to you.  All of a sudden, you're not alone, and you have the collective wisdom of others' experiences at your back, rather than just your own.  Sure, not quite every bit of it is exactly relevant, and sure, everyone's different, and sure, it's a bit hyperbolic to say that this new word captures your feeling perfectly or even vice versa... but still, it gives you so much new perspective, because my God, it's the closest thing you have, and it's far, far closer than you've had.

Of course, these new realities aren't all rosy.  While they can point out strengths of an extent you didn't know was inside you, they can also point out deep flaws you weren't aware existed in anyone, let alone within yourself.  And while you may have already known some of these things about yourself in a more abstract and fragmented way, synthesizing all of this information — the new with the old — into a coherent sense of self happens both slowly and all at once.  And this process will never end.

At this point, the reasoned mind takes a step back — perhaps two — and begins the difficult task of embracing the good and the bad, and forming, out of parts, the whole.  Ushering in further self-discovery and -identification, introspecting from a new angle, meditating with a new perspective, and ultimately living with a newfound purpose.  After all, the labels merely describe the experience; they don't define it.

Make no mistake, regardless of what this process might dredge up, I'm overjoyed that I even have occasion to dredge it up.  Because I didn't before, which had limited my ability to learn about myself.

With some of those limits removed now, it is in this new context — which I am just beginning to explore — that I feel I'll be spending much of the fourth quarter of 2013, casting new light on my experiences of the first three.  And, finally armed with a few more words to describe them — empowering ones, at that — it may very well be the case that I'll once again be able to find the words to write.

Mini-Stonehenge

I realize it's been the better part of forever since a normal post, but I had a random thought that seemed to be just too long for a tweet or a Facebook post. So I thought I'd put it here. Isn't that what this blog is was is supposed to be for?

You have to live in a place for a year before you can come to expect all of the weird angles sunlight will make as it enters through your windows. Hopefully, these angles form closer to the equinoctes, so that if you catch them on the sun's southward journey, you can predict it on the northward, or vice versa. For example, if the rising sun shines into your eyes in bed during the second week of August, you can bet it will also happen in early May. And then you know which week to draw the shades.

Unfortunately, if these angles form closer to a solstice, you have no such (simple) predictive power until they happen. And so it is with my apartment, where my desk has been brilliantly illuminated at between around 17:30 and 18:15 EDT every evening for the last three weeks or so. It's like a mini-Stonehenge.

Eight... But Great?

Eight years.  That's how long this blog has been around.  Eight years.

And I've not really written much here lately.  Like, at all.  It's pitiful.  I mean, the seventh birthday post still fits on the homepage.  I'm sorry, Bloggy.

Part of me has wanted to change that for quite a while now, but it would likely mean a major shift in the overall tone of this blog.  Not that that would be a bad thing; on the contrary, it's just about expected that a 25-year-old's blog is going to read differently from that of a 17-year-old.  But I've needed to get some things in place in my own life before I'd be comfortable doing that here.  This has been a slow but continual process.  Watch this space (just not too intently).

So even though eight has not been great of late (see what I did there?), it's time to bake the annual bloggy cake.  Happy birthday, Bloggy!

Meanwhile, 2013 has been a wild ride for me so far.  The last several months in particular have been especially rough, but I've been getting through it and am making concerted efforts to try to stay happy and content despite the difficulties.  A good part of the difficulty has been in trying to find the right lens through which to view my accomplishments.  According to some of the qualitative metrics I've used in the past to gauge my achievements, I've been failing miserably.  But according to other, newer metrics, I'm experiencing a ton of personal and professional growth.  ("Remind me to tell you about that some time," he says yet again.)

I've never been great at work-life balance, but sometime in the last year, things got way off-kilter, and it's not been fun.  But although not all of my efforts to bring things back into an equilibrium have been successful, I'm still working on it.

Starting with a slice of bloggy cake.

2013

It's one of those years that's going to take some time to get used to, I think.  Unlike 2011 and 2012, which I was able to take more in stride, this year is already shaping up to be more like 2010 in that I just can't quite get my head around the fact that it's here.

Of course, I'll get over that feeling soon enough, but I think a big part of why I feel that way is that I spent so much of last year racing forward to what was next that it was over before I knew it.  At its outset, 2012 seemed to offer myriad possibilities.  That was certainly true, in a sense; in reality, though, my 2012 — not discounting all the personal and professional progress I've made — was primarily to set the groundwork for what is shaping up to be a great 2013!

And so, in continuing a long-standing tradition, I dust off the cobwebs on this blog for a second consecutive evening to present my doodle for 2013, which is interestingly the first year in my lifetime to have four different digits.  They don't take too long to create, but it's important to me, because I always take care to inject a small bit of both my general sense of self at the time as well as my hopes and dreams for the coming year — even if I'm rushed, and even if I never make those thoughts explicit here.  And I enjoy looking back at how those aspirations have developed; how many have been achieved while others remain unmet; and how, with another year's experience and the benefit of the hindsight it brings, I'm becoming a newer and better person week after week, year after year.

To be sure, I can't wait to do this again in another year... but in the meantime, I'll strive to enjoy 2013 to its fullest!