"Are You Living Your Dream?"

I just saw a photo of this tagged on a wall with a tired-looking older man walking in front of it with sloped shoulders. Instead of feeling bad for him, I suddenly thought: who the f*@k are you to judge a persons life from one snapshot of a downtrodden pose? It angered me. What a presumption! To assume that someone is pathetic because they're old and tired is such an egotistical thing to do.

This, of course, was my reaction and my own assumptions and all of that. But still, it's a trend seen often among art and film. So it got me thinking about my dreams and ideals.

I realize that as a young(ish) American, I have an ideal of My Dream. It's not exactly The American Dream, but it's in the same ballpark. Now as I look closer at this Dream, I realize something odd. It's not just that I want and yearn for it, although I do most of the time, but I also feel responsible for wanting it. I feel like a failure for not having it, but worse than that I feel almost blasphemous when I consider whether or not it's something I even care about. In the right light this lovely Dream of mine starts to look like a standard that I've set for myself. A bar that if I fall short of, I consider failure.

Now, I feel I should backtrack a bit here, because last I posted I was feeling like I had lost that dreaming part of myself and was mourning that loss. Well, I found it. With the help of a good friend, and for a few days it was lovely! Pure bliss as I constructed dream houses in my head and googled business plans and real estate. But now I'm questioning those dreams. Where is the true desire coming form? To prove myself to the world? To myself? How do I know that is really what I want to do? How do I know if any of my dreams are really what I want?

And why do we look at someone's life and judge it based on whether or not they've fulfilled their dreams? What a terrible burden to put on someone: Fulfill Your Dreams.

Now this is not to say that I'm against dreams now. I love dreams, I think they're wonderful. And I think it's possible to fulfill your dreams. I just want to lose this feeling that I have to fulfill my dreams. That I have to make something of myself, show the world what I'm capable of. What's wrong with just living a quiet, comfortable life? No fanfare. No spotlight. No giant accomplishments.

So this is my next quest: I want to find the heart of my dreams. What I really want in life, not for the admiration of others or what I feel compelled to do, but what I want to do. Really. What I want to experience, see, accomplish. It will take a balance of my right and left brain, which will be interesting for me. I usually give over completely to one or the other, but now I must use both to construct my new dreams.

So wish me luck! I have no idea where to start.

I guess this is growing up...

I just watched "With Honors" (Brendan Fraser, I had a huge crush on him back in the day). It's about college students and a house where they all live. Lots of other things, but that's what struck me. Their age, the way they act and interact at that time. 

It was something that I first watched when I was about 15. I really liked it, and watched it quite a few times. I remember it being something that I looked forward to, before my life began, before things really started. They were so cool. And grownup. I was in awe of their world, their life. 

Watching it now has been emotional. I'm now past those times. It's this strange mix of remembering how it felt at 15 looking forward to my life, and remembering my twenties. I had big houses that I stayed in, roommates and friends. We'd run around, goofy and unsure. I had so much fun, and when viewed in snippets, it would make quite the movie.  

But I never dreamed of life in my thirties. Never got that far, past the wild college years. And now that I am  I guess I'm feeling strange. My exciting years have past, and I don't really know what to do with myself. I have goals: I want to get healthy, lose weight, make money. But they're not the same as dreams. I had dreams growing up. So many, so fun. Now I don't know. I'm not sure if I want kids. I may want a house, but where? I do want a husband, but later, I guess. 

It's like, I've gotten here. I've grown up. And what now? It's not the end, but it's not the beginning, either. It's not that I'm unhappy with my life. I have stresses and very unpleasant things that keep me awake at night, but it's more than that. I don't dream, I don't have crushes, I don't imagine how amazing my life could get. And I know that's normal and that's what happens when you grow up, but I feel like I'm mourning my wide-eyed, daydreaming self. 

Is google+ stalling?

I believe it's time for facebook to be turned into a dinosaur. They change things that don't need to be fixed and make them worse, they don't fix things that should be. All their innovations end up falling flat and all we can do is bitch about it and pray that they change it back.
So who have we turned to when yahoo ate our hour-long email and we've just had enough? Gmail, of course. To look something up we google it, google docs is a thing of beauty, and being able to have a multitude of to-do lists anywhere I log in is amazing. Of course there are the many, many failed attempts. Buzz I still don't get. Google Wave happened and died before I even realized it. That is the way with most of google's failed projects: they come and go without a ripple in our collective digital consciousness. They've become pros at failing, which is actually a daring, brilliant way to do business. Without failure there would be no success. The fact that they're constantly trying new things is great.
But my humble opinion is that they've gotten too good at failing. With a social networking site to work, it needs members. Lots and lots of members. To create a social networking site and have a limited release to just try it out is like partially building an airplane to see if it will soar. It's got to be all or nothing.

Google+ is failing. It's faltering. It's losing momentum. And this, to me, is tragic because we're primed for a new social networking site. We're all savvy facebookers at this point. We know what's what. We know how to keep our grandmother from seeing our post about how much we f#@king hate our job. What we want now is the next level. The site where navigation is easy and flawless. Security is completely in our hands and straightforward. We want the controls now. Because we know what to do with them.

Now if Google can't give that to us, who the eff can?

What is age?

So this morning I got a terrible song stuck in my head. It actually might have started last night, I don't remember, but this morning is when I started to really sing it nonstop. The song is this: 

Which I've shared cause I'm an evil person. (How it got stuck in there is anyone's guess, I might have seen a part of the lyrics on an ad, or said something about age. It's ridiculously easy to get pop songs stuck in my head.)

So what happened this morning after I was singing it nonstop is I actually started to analyze the lyrics. I started to wonder where this person was coming from. Is it so important to act your age? I think if you think it's important to act your age, your a youngster who is trying to be mature. As a 31 year old, I really don't find it important to act 31. In fact I prefer not to.
And who are his friends, anyways, to tell him to act his age? What bitches. Will he start to have a low self esteem because of it? But then listen to the rest. What an immature asshole! I mean, who does that?!
When I realized that I was, in fact, analyzing a Blink 182 song while I dressed and got ready for work I was both discusted and amused. Obviously my brain was overwhelmed by the simplistic and extremely self absorbed lyrics and fought back the only way it knew how. Not by stopping the constant reply of this terrible song, but by finding depth where there is none.
So in this way I'm proud of my brain, even though it put me through hours and hours of bad music.

When Sheep Just Don't Cut It

I've always had issues sleeping. It usually takes me between 1 and 2 hours to get to sleep. If there is stress or excitement it could just be a battle all night. You'd think I would have tried the gamut of sleep aids by now, but actually have hardly delved.

The reason for this is that I have a distrust for drugs. It took me years to start taking asprin for aches and headaches, I had always opted for just dealing with the pain. I tell people that I get too drowsy the next day when I take sleep aids, but in actuality this is just the theory I have and I don't know if it's true. I did try melatonin for awhile, but heard something negative about it somewhere and stopped using it.

The thing is that I truly believe my sleep issues could be solved through naturopathic means, both herbs and diet. The problem comes from my inability to put these into play. When trying to solve health issues by natural means, it takes time and determination. You can't pop a pill and make it go away, you have to stick to it and live with the discomfort for awhile before you can even expect any sort of change.

So since I don't have the stamina and willpower for a natural approach, but I don't believe in taking drugs for it, I do nothing and am plagued with insomnia and low energy from it.

It's absurd, I know. The worst part is that I tend to use this model of thinking in many areas of my life. I end up locking into a state of inaction rather than taking an action that I believe in but find difficult or easy but immoral.

I suppose this is why I find the self-help phrase "knowing is half the battle" so frustrating. Knowing, in my case, does squat. And may even be detrimental, since if I didn't think about it I would probably just take the easy way and move forward.

With that, I'll make another attempt at sleep. And tomorrow I will break down and get some Advil PM, goddamnit.

Dreams, serial killers, childhood nightmares

So I had this dream last night about a serial killer. He is was very rich, lives in on a large estate and lures his victims to him before killing and eating them. It was a very realistic dream. So last night I wake up 3 times from this dream, and each time go right back into it.

I mean, why can't that ever happen with good dreams? Good dreams you can never get back into them, but this dream. This dream was waiting for me each time I closed me eyes. Granted it got less scary each time. Most of it was spent on the estate, running from this guy, trying to keep him from killing me. The second bits got more proactive: finding out ways to get away, working with other people to make escape plans.

Thing is I have an irrational fear of serial killers. Not that it's irrational to fear them, more that it's irrational to imagine them coming after you at night. The first time I ever thought of it was when I was young, 9 or 10. I lived out in the country down a long, winding driveway. I remember one night when the moon was really bright I imagined that a man was slowly making his way down that driveway towards the house. He wasn't a robber, or anything like that. He wasn't anyone we knew, he was just coming to kill us.

I think this fear was based in fact. Not that anyone ever attacked our house or even came down our road, but the news of the time was all about a serial killer in Spokane, WA, which was 3 hours away. I don't remember any details at the time, but you hear things and see things and while I was living there he was never caught. It took them 10 years to finally get him, and he had killed 16 women during that time.

So between this and me having an amazing imagination, I was terrified of serial killers as a child. And apparently still am.

But no more dreams about them. K?