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| Don't want to post this on Tumblr. More than anything, I just want to return back to this whenever I want. This entry won't make sense to anyone but me. I just came home from my internship and I feel really good. I'm super anxiety ridden all the time. It's to the point where I have full days open, I try to do things, I barely get shit done, and then I wonder where the hell all the time went. And, of course, I worry about things I should be doing if I want to achieve this or that goal. Every time I go to my internship, without fail, I feel better than when I came in. To explain how I feel right now contrasts with empty days: 1.) On empty days, all I'm saying to myself is 'I gotta get this done, by this time, I gotta, gotta, gotta do it'. It makes the time approaching up to that point stressful - even if I'm supposed to be relaxing. I spent about 7 hours at my internship. I've always perceived a 7 hour day as a big block in my day in which nothing toward my ambitions is getting done, but that's false. Doing things at work and doing them well only adds a positive reinforcement that I'm capable of doing writing or learning this or learning that. So, right now it's 6:00pm. An empty day if I haven't done anything I'm saying, "oh no, I gotta get it done, gotta get it done!" Now, having been fairly productive the past few hours, this carries over. I feel like I can sit down for 2 hours and write about Ayn Rand, sit down and political philosophy for 2 or 3 hours straight. It would be easy. SUMMARY: Fill up my day with something more productive, reap the reward of a free and productive mind thereafter. It's not like I could write for 12 hours straight anyway, why would I give myself 12 hours to do so? Be productive in other, more stress free areas. 2.) Get a job, get some money, take my mind off of writing and other ambitions while I'm there. Honestly, the way I feel right now (and it's not like I've done a lot) I don't feel as if things are out of reach. I'm not slipping into momentary delusions of becoming President of the United States of America. I'm not slipping into thoughts of being inspired and immediately just getting published. I know what it's like to be in the state of no-mind, but if I'm not productive at all doing anything during the day, I cannot build that state because even subconsciously my mind lies in other places. SUMMARY: Get a job somewhere fulfilling, somewhere I want to be, somewhere I can learn a shit ton, make good money, have fun, and finance my education in French, give me some perspective in business in case I come up with something brilliant, and whatever. Honestly, with the state I'm in right now, I could crack out an SEO book and start teaching myself. I can work on my Ayn Rand article. I can read Anna Karenina without worry for 4 hours. I can learn some HTML5 or programming. Write this out. Remember it. Refer to it. I'll always slip back into whatever thought, so remember this, and try to remember how strangely invincible I feel right now. Badam. | | |
| The thing to remember: -It gets easier. Discipline is difficult, especially when you have no prior success at it that pulls you through the goal. Fine. I'll live with that and start building the successes now. The point of this vacation and these exercises is not to start shitting out dope articles and being able to become intensely focused at the drop of a hat - it's to prepare myself to be this way in days, weeks, months, so that this exact time next year it's easy. That's the point of this all. So, when I finish my intense sessions, just remember: 1.) Holy shit, I'm proud of myself.
2.) I'm that much closer
3.) I've changed, just a little bit, and a thousand of these little changes will lead to huuuuuuge things. Happy New Year, y'all 2 hours of discipline. I sat there doing it. It was hard. It felt dumb and pointless with lots of judging. After I got done, even with only a few paragraphs written, there was such a relief. I do this now, not for the productivity, but for the discipline for tomorrow and the optimism which it creates in me at the end of the day. ----------------------------- If I write it on my Tumblr, it'll just go way down the page. To top it off, I don't want anyone to really read this, but I like to be able to type in a URL and find a document I wrote. Alas, where blog entries go to die - the xanga. Ask yourself these questions. 1.) Am I going to get there? (Yes)
2.) Is what I'm avoiding today going to be something I do in the future?
3.) Do it.
Johnny
The only reason Johnny is so successful and impressive is because the rough childhood he had shaped the work ethic and world perception. That is it. It is a product of his upbringing. And then there's me. Am I really going to know exactly what it takes to get where I want to be and choose not do it? I can change that. I can change my worldview.
----------------------------- 1.) Flow state
2.) Set a schedule, like work
3.) The excitement of existence Set times, be busy, there's no time to dwell philosophically if shit needs to get done. Dude, just go up to random girls and talk to them. Ask them out. And if they say no, whatever, go back to my side of the room and keep doing my work. | | |
| I’m so lonely I could cry. I was standing in my room earlier doing nothing. I was staring at my furniture, my books, and all the laundry I have to do. A lot of my dirty clothes are just strewn all over the room, and in this present state of my life, I couldn’t have it any other way. Mere details. Working meticulously on details is a sign of procrastination, and so I’ve bypassed that problem altogether by ignoring the details completely. There’s bird shit on my car and socks on my desk and a half-empty bottle of Southern Comfort next to my guitar, which inconveniently sits right in the center of the room and occupies good walking space. I was standing there just thinking about all these goals I’ve set for myself. My Facebook status from two days ago is a public message to myself that says: “Don't doubt this, right here. It's working. We're too far past the infatuation of immediate results to justifiably clamor for daily improvement. At this point, this is long term shit. The good kind of shit.” Sure, it’s self-indulgent. The fact that I’ve made a note-to-self public sort of whores out my deeply personal thought processes and sells them for the attention of friends under the pretense of ‘depth’, but it works. Its publicity serves as a reminder, like a tattoo on a narcissistic man’s body, that these moments – the one that I’m feeling right now and ones that can be grouped with it – are temporary and fleeting. To derail any ambitious undertaking in the name of any of these feelings would lead to remorse so intense only fried chicken and a neglectful amount of Dr. Pepper could allay it. I thought about that sentence again, “I’m so lonely I could cry”. That wasn’t the truth. Not the complete truth, at least. It just sounded poetic. “I’m so lonely I could keep being myself”, I corrected. I’ve been so spiritually lonely in this world for such a long time that this, right here, is status quo. I can’t front that I’m on the descending side of a curve. I'm on a flat plane. y = -3 It’s a peculiar way that people make art in response to their sadness. I’m sad, so I’m going to wallow in my sadness furthermore through my self-expression of choice. I’m so deep in sadness that I’m going to sink in it furthermore, with a magnifying glass. And yet, I muse about the seeming counter-productivity of art as a source of healing and yet, here I am, healing myself. By putting these thoughts into words, I guess I’m transcribing my feelings into a language I understand, whereas standing idly in my room and staring at everything is akin to staring at the Preface page of a foreign book and not even knowing that it’s the Preface page. I’d love to go on about this subject further (and indeed, I had wayyyyyyyyyyy more going on through my mind than this), but I’ve got a ball and chain called work to attend to tomorrow morning. I can’t wait for my jobless semester to commence, man. | | |
| An excerpt from the story I'm writing. I wrote on and off for the past 3 hours and I'm a bit tired. I won't finish it in time for the beginning of Spring 2011 like I said I would, but at least I have a framework for the Intro to Fiction Writing class I'm taking.
(...)
It suddenly occurred to him that he was sad. Really, really sad. Was this... depression? Was this what depression felt like? From first hand experience, was he now able to assign an emotion to depression the way that a young, curious teenager could to sexual desire? But what about all those depression medication commercials? Where was the somber piano music and the 30 second montage of hopeless faces shot in a black and white hue, slo-mo'd to exaggerate the agony of life? This depression thing probably - had to be - a rash self-diagnosis, a momentary slip of his mind into over criticality, and, at worst, a phase to be gotten through quickly. He laughed far too much and far too often to be depressed. His social skills in the classroom and in the workplace were too seasoned to fit the profile of the prototypical lonely, depressed person. To be classified as depressed, your life had to be 24/7 sad. And this, his life was not... right?
The hip hop music was still reaching, still hitting those spots unreachable in sobriety. Eyes closed still, he felt peaceful. The bass in hip hop beats was always pleasant to vibe out to; a rough massage of the ears for which alcohol served as the metaphorical oil. He preferred basslines in alternative music though, like the one in 'If You Were There, Beware' by The Arctic Monkeys. But playing rock music was a sacrilegious offense at a college party, and none of the partygoers seemed to be the type to admire Alex Turner the way he did anyway, so why force something unnatural? In fact, no one he knew at these parties showed even passive interest in his his hobbies. The brilliance of David Bowie, the arbitrary nature of ethnicity and religion, the way pretentious people use the word 'modality', the overuse of the word 'pretentious', existentialist philosophy and literature, and arguments about what it is to be a 'hipster', these were things that Derek Garza was forced to store in his mind with no outlet to speak of, for use, hopefully, at a later time. He felt like a pack rat of unused knowledge, and the integrity of these interests of his was being compromised by their lack of practical use in his everyday life. He would eventually have to rid himself of these meanderings if he wanted to rid himself of this constant loneliness he felt.
"Constant loneliness" he said to himself, questioningly at first, but affecting a more stern and neutral tone while pronouncing the last few syllables. That can't be depression. No, that is rash self-diagnosis. That is not worthy of being a sad, slo-mo'd face in a Zoloft commercial.
(...)
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| Right now I'm sitting in my FIN 327 class. It's about investing. Instead of listening to the professor - this really off-centre, quirky character, fun, but totally tangential in his lectures - I'm reading music blogs. I'm reading reviews of Tao Lin's book Richard Yates. I'm trying to memorize which notes go to which strings on which frets on my guitar so that I can refer to them easier in the future. I'm trying to type quietly in an effort to diffuse the attention in my direction because loud and vigorous typing is always a sign of indifference, and I don't want to be "that guy" in the class.
I often tell my story about how I started studying Finance. It's kind of cute. I always bought nice sneakers in high school. I knew the whole eBay market and frequently checked every 5 to 10 minutes, most of the time in futility. I knew price ranges, and I knew what was underpriced immediately, especially the part of the market with sneakers less sought after. This is why I started studying Finance after film and EE fell through - because I wondered if buying low and selling high in the sneaker world could translate to buying low and selling high in the grown man world, in the Financial world. And, honestly, it did. It really did. This is everything that I thought it would be - arbitrage, shorting, taking advantage of overreactions of the market. This is exciting. This was the field that I was destined to study.
The problem is, I'm no longer the same person that I was before. I'm no longer the kid who only cared about fresh sneakers and dollars in my pocket. Good investing decisions, yeah, it's interesting as hell. I know it'll be something I'm eventually savvy at - I just don't know if I've got the passion in it to carry me to good enough grades to eventually attend a top B-School, to look at a job as a portfolio manager as my absolute destination as a human being, to be happy every day making shit tons of dough, practicing indifferent blindness to the consequences of my actions to people in obscure parts of the world. I'm not that kid who refuses to spend my $20 of allowance every week in order to buy that $100 pair of sneakers every month. That kid was destined to be Buffett. That kid was destined to open an E-Trade account the moment he stopped caring about the shoes on his feet and start trading with the big boys. That kid was destined to go to UCLA, meet future big shots, and go to New York. But I guess most importantly to me, that kid was destined to go to class every day, do his homework excitedly, and spend hours on end staring at the numbers on the market, reading about investing theory, openly marketing himself to others of his ilk.
Richard Feynman made me realize one thing: it doesn't matter how absolutely smart you are, it's about your passion and where you put it. You have to have some natural ability at whatever field you're studying, but the passion isn't there in the first place without that ability so it doesn't matter. There are smart people out there who are going to be great doctors, pharmacists, mathematics specialists for whatever firms and what not but will never be more than just folks in their respective fields. What distinguishes greatness from goodness is this: where are you and what are you doing during those hours where your homework is done? When you put down your pen, close your laptop screen, finish the final problem on your homework assignment, where do you freely choose to put your mind? That's when you become great. When you start honing your talents beyond what's asked of you.
I could've been that guy when it came to Finance, I really believe that. In retrospect, just looking at my personality, just looking at the type of person I was, if I had known about stocks I could've been on a path to rise to the top.
But I'm not that anymore. I don't spend my time on eBay, or on finance.yahoo.com, or on E-Trade. I spend all my free time wondering what's out there for me. I spend money now without really taking into account where it's going. I mean, shit, I'm saving money to blow it all in Europe someday. The old me would probably be building a diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds, ETFs, all that stuff.
I'm going to do this. I'm going to enjoy the jobs I get because this stuff still interests me. But I won't be great at it. I won't be defined by it. I'm slowly, slowly coming to that realization. Even now, writing this entry, it's sort of preemptive. I still can be saved. Maybe something happens. Maybe next week I open up my investopedia profile and get absolutely hooked. But hope is running out for that.
No, wait, expunge that. It's not hope that's running out. Hope indicates that my situation is a dire one and it's not. Merely, my situation is one of change: I discovered what was for me after it stopped being for me, and that's fine. I honestly like me the way I am, though I wouldn't know I would like me the way I am if I was still the other way.
I'm totally fine with my situation. It's just kind of sad knowing that the old me, the me I'm so different from that I already lost contact with him, it's sad knowing that he lost his chance. It wasn't his fault, really.
But I guess that just sparks the age old question: what now? | | |
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