I Plan To Live

Bleck. Decreasingly productive days at the tail end of last week led into a pretty slothful weekend which, even now, bathes my mind like the fog of a fresh hangover. So here I am, trying to put the pieces back together of precisely why it occurred in the first place.

First, as it was elucidated to me in a conversation I had with a few friends at our campus coffee shop, I perform much better when I DO track everything that I do. Without tracking what I eat, I feel less accountable for eating crap and then feel depressed when I feel sluggish and not feeling like going to the gym. When I don’t write down my workouts ahead of time, I end up feeling directionless and wasting time while I’m at the gym, or worse, make excuses not to go in the first place (because I’d need to put together workouts first, and I “just don’t have the time.” Bullshit. You’d have the time if you’d actually managed to keep up with your schoolwork earlier on in the week…). My day-to-day tracking of task completion helps me notice patterns and blind spots of productivity I might not otherwise notice, and I need to remind myself of this fact. My ravenous desire for knowledge about the world and about myself is possibly the deadliest weapon I have in my arsenal, and this is one of the best ways I can make use of it.

I feel like the reason I periodically stop tracking things is part laziness, but also part negative self-judgment. I’m still self-conscious about being considered “weird”, or “obsessive”, or hearing people’s worries that I’m pushing myself too hard by doing this. Ironically, it seems in the last few days, quite a few words of wisdom have aligned themselves in my sight, and as such have helped to give me some direction. The first is a quote from Seth Godin, entrepeneur and public speaker: “You will either be judged, or you will be ignored.” I’ve been struggling against the tide of caring about what others think about me, and letting it distract me from doing what I need to. I have a primal drive to reach towards what I want, but sometimes those years of conditioning are too much to overcome, and I lapse into conformity. But a fear of being ignored? Or being irrelevant? Or being forgotten? It chills me so deeply that somewhere along the journey the isolating cold turns into this burning fury; a driving anger: One that says, “I REFUSE to be forgotten. I WILL be heard. I WILL change the world, and god DAMNIT, people are going to know that I was here.” And that gives me the desire I need to pick up and keep moving forward again.

The second set of wise words comes from the incomparable Henry Rollins, whose work I’ve been foolishly ignoring up until now, to my detriment (a pattern I hope to cease in the near future):

To not be afraid to work your ass off, and to have someone who also comes from a working-class background acknowledge what it feels like to not come from money, and have to struggle for things that so many people around me take as given because, well, they were given it… it’s incredibly vindicating. And just… the encouragement that, YES, you will have to work harder than you ever have before, and that the one thing you can never afford to give up is your personal dignity, your identity, your morality… just… FUCK. I’m reminded of the famous Morgan Freeman quote from Shawshank Redemption: “Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.” I feel like I’ve spent the grand majority of my 21 years on this planet drifting, isolated, awash in a womb of apathy and sloth, afraid to reach outside for the fear that my hand would be slapped away, and I would be shamed for my attempt.

With today’s culture, which revels in the delight of watching people fail at their dreams (take a look at the ratings for the American Idol tryouts to see…), thereby validating their own choice not to try, I now recognize that to some degree, I WILL be ridiculed or shamed. I will be put down, criticized, told to give up, even by people who care about me. “We just want what’s best for you”, they’ll say. But there comes a time that I just can’t listen anymore.

I’m Vincent Smith. I’m 21. And I plan to live.

Sheer Wonder

Haven’t written in a couple days, figured I’d catch up. I’ve been thinking in the last couple days about answers to the question of what I want to do/be. I know in a previous post that I said I want to write movies, but that no longer seems like a sufficient enough answer to the question. The real answer is that looking at any one profession and going “That’s the thing I want to do” is no longer enough. Everyday, I absorb more inspiration through my experiences interacting with people, reading, watching, listening, working out, writing, etc. from EVERY outlet I can possibly find.  And with every new fount of information and experience I find, I find new ways to connect those experiences to other ones in novel ways. Ways that apply knowledge in ways you might not normally.

The fundamental nature of what I find interesting isn’t any one particular profession or area of expertise, but rather, the fact that all of them have enough analogous qualities that almost, if not every, domain of human knowledge could be modified and improved by taking into account the discoveries of all others. Therefore, it’s the interactions and relationships BETWEEN different domains of knowledge which fascinate me. The connections are all there, and the fact that there are so many more to be explored, examined, clustered and recombined into new ones, which then can ALSO be recombined is mindbogglingly wonderful. It almost makes me sad that I only have a certain amount of time on this planet with which to check all of these really cool things out. So much to do, so little time.

So when someone asks me what I want to do for a living, I don’t know what to respond, because I want to do everything! I want to write, blog, host, talk, voice-act, storytell, innovate, produce, edit, revise, CREATE. The career label is merely the incarnation of choice which I use to accomplish any of those given tasks at any given time, and so the question seems almost inappropriate in the tiny scale at which it is asked. But I’m comforted by the fact that such great minds as Henry Rollins and Chris Hardwick have felt the same kind of itchy curiosity to rip up the carpet of contemporary culture and look at all the little, intricate wires which connect every single aspect of them. Even moreso, I’m driven by the idea of the urge to mix and match the way those connections are structured, and pontificate and experiment with what the potential results can be.

There’s a level of beauty in the adjacent possible, the potential of one thing to be something entirely different to someone else at any given moment in time that almost exceeds any single incarnation of that thing that exists at a single point. Even typing that sentence, it’s like art and quantum physics and engineering and business and internet culture all colliding at a hundred miles an hour into an infinitely dense, hot mass of ideological potential, ready to birth an entire new universe of possibility.

And the fact that I have the desire and resources to explore that is… simply beyond words, beyond concept in how grateful I am for it. I won’t stop doing it until I am long-dead and in my grave, and I can only hope, can only dream that the fervor of my passion will be enough to inspire yet another to take up the cause once I’m gone. Inspiration: the most beautiful form of immortality there is.

A Silver Lining: Academic Probation and It’s Benefits

In my last post, I talked about how I’ve been feeling stuck in a rut lately, without much means for getting out. Well, life sometimes has a way of kicking you in the face to force you out of that rut. I, in particular, seem to be someone who, like an academic version of Forrest Griffin, needs a few life-event haymakers to the face before I actually wake up, and remember that I’m in a fight for my life.

Case in point: last week I got served an academic probation notice. The last couple of semesters, I’d worked too often, and not prioritized my time well enough, so my academics suffered. So, instead of dropping my GPA with shitty grades, I just dropped the classes I did poorly in. Unfortunately, OSAP student loans frowns upon dropping to what is technically part-time studies when one is receiving “full-time” academic support.

I initially panicked at the prospect at having the “high-level student” part of my identity questioned for the first time. I was aware I’d be skirting the edge under the radar for a while now, but so long as no one noticed, I could just pretend it was no big deal. I could ignore that I can never focus when I want to, and that my academic capabilities are at the whim of the severe mood fluctuations I occasionally suffer. But now that I’ve been called on it, I scheduled an appointment to see a counselor at the Centre for Students With Disabilities to see if there actually IS something up with me mentally that keeps me from performing, and just to address the number of mental illness issues I’ve been dealing with for as long as I can remember. At the same time, I went into the on-campus clinic to get a physical done, to see if there was any physical abnormality that might be contributing.

I think it’s what I needed, honestly. The momentum of moving towards solving THAT problem rolled into me wanting to work out again. I switched my work out plan to a more traditional upper body/lower body/core/conditioning day split, largely thanks to being reminded from Jason Ferruggia’s site that “muscle builds while you rest, not while you exercise.” According to my spreadsheet, I’ve hit a significant plateau in my lifting gains in the past six months at least compared to those I made through Sept-Dec 2011. The same can be said for my losses in body fat percentage. So I’m going to give this a try until October, and see if it makes a difference. At the very least, it provides a much-needed dose of novelty into my routine to entice me into going regularly again (without it feeling like a chore).

I feel like I’m on the right track. Now I need to focus on remaining consistent.

“I want to write movies.”

For a really long time, anytime someone asked me what I wanted to do for a career, I did my best to re-phrase my hopes and dreams into something respectable (or at least less preposterous-sounding). “I want to write.” “I want to be a freelance editorial writer.” Sometimes, I’d just lie and say something I didn’t even want to do. “I want to go into Research Neuroscience/Philosophy of Mind.” Just… something sufficiently academic or fancy-pants sounding so that it didn’t sound like I was wasting five years of my life on something that it was absurd to think would happen.

This evening, I was sitting outside my grocery store after a particularly grueling, under-staffed shift, when an older employee on his break came over and stood beside me (apparently some panhandler was bugging him at his usual spot :P). We got to talking, and he started telling me about his son, who just graduated in History and Philosophy this past May. “I was worried about how hard it would be for him to get a job with that,” he said, “But then I came to realizing… if you love what you do, really love it, chances are you’re going to be outstanding at it, if not at the top of your field. You’ll find a way.” He then turned to me, and asked quite simply, “What do you want to do?”

Maybe it was because it wasn’t prefaced with the usual “What are you going to school for/what is your degree in?” I usually get, but the answer just seemed to slip out as naturally as breathing.

“I want to write movies.”

Not “screenwrite.” Not “write editorially for magazines/websites,” nothing that had me desperately screaming “I CAN get a job with this, my dream is legitimate! You’ll see!!” in the undertones. I just said what I felt. I love writing. When I’m down, one of the few times that I feel happy again is when I’m writing something. Either here, or a book review for the Bookshelf, or something for The Rogues’ Gallery, or even something for class. I. Am. A writer. Not professionally, but the only thing separating me from that reality is the qualifier “yet.”

He just smiled. Not in the way that many older adults will with the “Oh, that’s nice. It’ll never happen, but that’s nice…” but just in this way that was entirely un-judgmental. We went on talking for a little bit, and I came to realize that regardless of the walks of life people tread in, there’s a lot of wisdom to be found in listening to those who have made the trek, whatever direction they’ve chosen. The very process of experiencing things, regardless of the actual content of the experience, is something that there is a lot to learn something from.

I walked away from that conversation feeling considerably lightened after such a hard day’s work. I’m sure the fruit and nut laden chocolate bar helped too, but what the heck.

Mediocrity Cannot Stand

I haven’t been the person whom I owe it to myself to be lately. I honestly believe I have the potential to do great things. I see things in different ways than others do, I’m passionate about the things I like and enjoy communicating that passion to others, and evoking positive experiences in those around me. And I have the intelligence and the communication skills to do that. The main problem: I’m soft. I’m quite often lazy. I never had to work hard when I was a kid, or even as a teenager. My mom worked hard enough that I always had what I wanted, and only had to put in the minimal effort. There was always a safety net if I hit the consequences of not putting my all in. I hated my dad, who sat in a chair all day and drank beer while my mom did everything to maintain the house WHILE working to pay for everything. But I know now, I wasn’t much better at the time. Working in Vancouver last summer, I learned what I was capable of, and the value of hard work, faced with the prospect of being homeless unless I worked two jobs. So I did. I worked 16 hour days beginning at 4:30AM, 7 days a week, and biked 30k a day to get to each of them. And I made it. I came back to Ontario weathered, hardened, better. But I’ve gotten too comfortable. My surroundings are too forgiving. I’m encircled by too much privilege, enticed into believing that if other people don’t have to work hard, than neither do I. Bullshit. I let my grades slip. I let employment opportunities pass me by because I couldn’t be bothered to get off of my ass. I’ve had many friends try and be supportive by saying that, “everyone has off days”, “don’t worry, it’ll get better”, and reminding me of positive things I’ve done in the past.

But this this doesn’t help any. I don’t have a problem with beating myself up in terms of my intrinsic self-worth. In fact, it seems the only thing that’ll really get me motivated these days is a good mental drill sergeant. The thing that gets me pissed off is the fact that I often DON’T live up my potential, DON’T take advantage of the resources I have at my disposal, or put in the time and work necessary to be as successful as I could be. I lived a large portion of my life under the “good enough” philosophy. But the thing is, one of my biggest fears is dying in obscurity. I want to be known. I want to be remembered beyond my lifetime for adding something significant to the world. But if I am to be something special, “good enough” isn’t good enough. Everyone may have off-days, but I don’t want to be like “everyone.” And what kind of has-been would I be if, at 21, all I could do is reminisce on what I did in my PAST? Shit, I haven’t lived half my life yet. If I’m at that point already, something’s gone terribly wrong. I’m acknowledging now that with the path I’m on, I’m no better than my dad, or any other snivelling, excuse-making, lazy, live-with-their-parents-at-30 man-child I’ve come across who infuriate me with their very existence.

Whenever I let my brain go on autopilot and fail to reflect consciously, to be in the moment, I make the decisions a boy would make, not a man. I procrastinate, I laze about, I turn my alarm off and go back to sleep, I look at porn online when I should be working, I don’t go to the gym, I don’t eat well. And then at the end of the day I have the TEMERITY to complain that I don’t have enough time. I’m going to make a greater effort in being conscious of the moment, and holding myself accountable (calling myself on my bullshit out loud if necessary) for my decisions. I need plans. I need systems. I need discipline.

I can be better, and therefore, I WILL be better. I deserve the best life I can possibly create for myself, and therefore, I’ll take the steps necessary. Mediocrity cannot stand.

Jealousy and Pedestals

It’s been a couple days since my last post, and I’m going to try and be a bit more regular with this. More things are beginning to be added to my schedule with my summer courses now in full swing, but that’s no excuse. I’ll just have to buckle down and be more consistent with my time management. Anyways, time for an update!
The party went off alright. As expected, a pretty low-key affair. People mostly chilled in the living room and worked their way through most of a season of Archer (really funny show, by the way). I played Halo Reach for the first time! It was odd going back to Halo games after a 2-3 year hiatus, and the series has changed a lot. But I had a good time getting the hang of it again, doing my usual running satirical commentary with a few drinks and some good friends, making it an overall fun night. I’m glad we did it.

Not a lot of luck on the job search side of things, unfortunately. Guelph isn’t great for jobs at the best of times, and during the summer when most the students have gone home, it’s largely a ghost town. I already have a part-time job, it’s just that between rent and, y’know, FOOD, it doesn’t lead to me saving a whole lot for the future. However, I’ve decided not to fret over it. I’m just going to keep consistently putting out resumes over the course of the summer and not put all my hopes into any one application. I’ve realized that lacking in success in one field doesn’t necessarily have to extend to others, and so I’m also focusing on making this summer worthwhile by honing my current skills, picking up a few new ones, and improving my academic habits. I’m writing on a regular basis (hence the blog for practice) for The Bookshelf e-zine, writing scholarship essays, reading up on lots of interesting topics, keeping myself fit and learning new recipes… not to mention my four Distance-Ed courses I’m taking. It’s easy to forget about those. For once I’m actually excited about the classes I’m taking (one of them involves examining the socio-cultural implications of the information age and robotics! *nerdgasm*), and more than that, some new approaches to studying I’m trying.
I’m trying a new type of note-taking called Cornell Notes to encourage a more holistic understanding of what it is I’m studying rather than just rote memorization (the latter I’ve kept on doing for the past few years with continually diminishing returns…). So far I’m liking it, and hopefully I get a few new conceptual toys to play with during the semester as well, courtesy of some useful feedback from the forum users over at studentawards.com.

I had a bit of an epiphany at the gym yesterday. I’m a pretty fit guy, but during the summer it seems to be when the big-time gym freaks come out to play. The dudes at the GoodLife I go have been HUGE lately, and a lot of them are bodybuilders/provincial-national level powerlifters, and so I’d ended up feeling self-conscious and a bit jealous of the hard-won physiques some of these dudes were sporting, and even getting down on my efforts. You know the drill, “I’ll never be as ________ as THAT guy, the goal just seems so far away,” etc. But then I realized that the notion that there were guys who had become that strong through their work should show me the OPPOSITE. That I should be grateful that there are guys who are that much bigger and stronger than me, in that they prove that reaching that level IS possible. Not only that, but if I actually had the balls to ASK, that chances are they could be a great source of knowledge. It’s a common misconception that gym-rats are musclebound morons. In most pursuits, genetics and physical talent only get you so far, and once you reach a certain level, you have to make use of both your mind and body to keep making progress. It’s both training smart AND hard that gets you there. As a result, 90% of the scary-looking dudes I’ve talked to, while looking like they could bend me into a boomerang-shape and toss me, were some of the nicest and most intelligent guys I’ve met. Now, I’m not going to be asking the dude with the acne scars, ray-bans, and bleached blonde mohawk for advice any time soon, but he’s the exception to the rule. 😛

Anyways, that’s my brain spiel for today. Thanks for reading!