Terrible Analogies

I am an unintentional collector.

At any given time I can look in my wallet and find no less than ten receipts from various stores.  In my car I have a vast assortment of long-ignored pennies.  My desk drawers at work contain mini mountains of scribbled notes that consisting of information so vital to me that I locked them away only to forget that they ever existed.  On my pantry shelves are stacks of tinned food missing their labels that I’m afraid to open.  My closet is stacked high with old computer parts, Christmas gifts still in their packages, and manuals to electronics that I don’t recall ever owning.  And in my bathroom medicine cabinet are expired medications, Band-Aids whose paper wrappings have yellowed with age, and that half-filled mini-bottle of mouthwash that’s desperate to be put out of its misery.

All of these things, and more, surround me.  They’re all small.  Insignificant.  After all, they’re just coins, scraps of paper, and tiny pills.  They normally thrive in the void where ignored things live, happy in the fact that they exist at all.  And I’m guilty of living the lie that my life is orderly.  Neat.  Uncluttered.

That is, until I investigate my wallet to see why it’s so darned fat, only to pull out receipts so old that the ink on them has faded.

Then I get to thinking about all of those little things that take up space.

The kitchen spices so old that they’ve frozen into columns of concrete inside their containers. The magazines secreted away under the coffee table.  The junk drawer whose depths haven’t been plumbed in years.

All of these things have turned me into an unintentional collector of the mundane.  An accruer of the banal.

These placeholders…these unnecessary watermarks of a life in motion must be purged.  Starting today.

First things first.  Let’s clean out that wallet…

…I’ve gone camping. Will return on Tuesday!

In elementary school a teacher once asked me the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I dunno,” was my reply. What did I know? I was just a kid. How could I possibly know what I wanted to do with my life at such a young age? I specifically remember the very question as sounding odd and contrite. My world at the time revolved around cartoons, seeing if my friends could come out to play, and riding my bike around the neighborhood. What I wanted to do when I grew up was the furthest thing from my mind at the time.

When I entered high school we were asked to take a test that was supposed to reveal our personalities, what our talents were, and what future professions would best suit us. My test revealed that I was a highly functional malcontent with an artistic bent. My future profession would most likely be an artist, actor, or (surprisingly) accountant.

Although I agreed with the first two conclusions, neither teacher, actor, nor accountant sounded appealing to me.

In short, I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life when I grew up.

I started college with no idea of what to study. After two years of floundering around from class to class, subject to subject, with no professional field really calling out to me, I decided to join the military. After four years of the Air Force, I knew that it just wasn’t the best fit for me (but it’s an experience I’ll always treasure).

With my four-year contact with the military over, I left and completed college with a BS in Information Systems (thanks to the military for introducing me to computers) and landed a great job in the tech industry, in which I do quite well in to this very day, and it’s a job that I actually enjoy.

But I still don’t know what I really want to do with my life.

It’s as if I’ve been wandering along a nebulous path whose very makeup seems to materialize underneath my shadow mere moments before I set my foot down upon it. I never really had an ultimate goal in life. I never had a singular desire to be rich or famous, amass power and wealth, or make a lasting dent in the world. Luckily I was always smart, stuck with problems until they were solved, and never fell into the easy trap of sloughing off responsibility.

Seemingly without trying I obtained a modicum of success.

I married a wonderful woman who’s clearly my better half. We bought a house. We had a son.

I accomplished all of this without a real game plan.  It’s funny what life gives you.

What do I want to do when I grow up?

Honestly, I still don’t know.  I guess I’ll just see how far this ride takes me.

My website has been down for the past four hours. It’s finally back up (after a marathon phone session with my hosting provider), but it’s nearly midnight and I’m mentally and physically spent.  And because I’ve yet to win the lottery or write a best-selling novel I’m going to have to wake up in a few hours and drag myself into work.

So, my apologies for the lack of content today.

In the meantime, please enjoy this (unrelated) pic:

See you tomorrow!

A friend of mine asked me this weekend if I could live forever, would I?

I replied, “No.”

The way I see it, I’m not independently wealthy, so that means that I’d have to work the rest of my life.  I would forever be trying to make ends meet to afford food and shelter.  If I became injured, lost a limb, went insane or was beset by any other similar calamity then I’d have to suffer with it until I died (read: never).  If I ever committed a serious crime then the sentence of “life in prison” would take on a whole new meaning.  And if everyone chose to live forever, how quickly would the planet become overpopulated?  How could we grow enough food to support a population of immortals?

There are just too many factors to consider in this particular scenario.  I believe that humans have just right amount of life in them to grow, learn, experience, multiply and eventually die.  I myself am not anxious to leave this mortal coil, but I’m of the mind that there’s something else waiting for us beyond this life, and I’m quite curious to see what that is.

Live forever?  Count me out…