I Hope We Can Still Be Friends

There is no such thing as a clean break.  As soon as emotion and feeling come into play, there is absolutely no way to try to separate yourself cleanly - like velcro, with thousands of tiny hooks that stick in you where it hurts.  They tear and they rip as you pull them out, the split never as clean as you had wished.  Break ups are hard.

That said, I am not breaking up with you.  However, I will be going away for awhile.  This is hard for me.  I don't always show a lot of outward emotion, and that is probably the number one reason this blog is good for me, but I have gotten through the panic and excitement of the last couple weeks by trying not to think about the preparation as anything more than something to do.  Mindless tasks rarely elicit my panic response.

So I will make a request.  Let us, readers, not break up.  Let's keep in touch and be close.  I want to hear from you, I want comments, questions and ideas for things that I should try.  I will try and do things that will be interesting beyond me prattling on about how I feel.  I'll go for walks and take a camera.  I'll do challenges and I will take requests for topics.  There will be the standard updates, the routine pouring of my soul, but I encourage you to help me through this big transition in my life.  You guys lose me, but I lose everyone.

Commenting is easy; at the bottom of every blog there is an option to post a remark.  You don't need to sign in and can easily post as anonymous - but I hope everyone will leave their name after their message.  You can also reach me through email and let me know how you're doing.  I will take requests for postcards, but state up front that I'm not always great at staying on top of that kind of thing, and your date of receiving will be between now and next April (2013).  My email address is easy to find, and if you don't know it ask any of my close family or friends and I'm sure they'll send it on.

Everyone has been very supportive of me through this big period of transition, and I'd like to acknowledge how truly lucky I am to have such wonderful friends and family.  Mom and Dad, thank you for being willing to support me both emotionally and financially every step of they way, I could not have done this without your shoulders to lean on.  Jess and Kase, you are amazing and I expect to see you soon (bring Gryphon and Finny).  To all who came out for my goodbye party last Wednesday, I thank you, but am not sure all those shots count as friendship the day after.

If you have a google account feel free to subscribe via the little bar to the right of your screen.  Thank you everyone, I hope that through the coming year I give you something worth reading!

Lots of Love,

Sean  





  

Why Are My Children Tiny?

The title of this is post makes sense to me and maybe one other person. It is the result of late evening, summer musings on a cramped balcony; the warm night accented by the harsh smoke of bad cigars and that eerie, haunting, flickering light that only a candle flame, distressed by the wind, can create.

The talks were of life, where we were and where we might end up.  In the thick of it, I was told that there would be no surprise to see me living in the suburbs, with the condo, a wife and some 'tiny children'. The accuracy of this prediction aside, I couldn't help but ask: why are my children tiny? In a wine induced fit of laughter, I then set out to find why I had been blessed with a bunch of abnormally small children, and if there was any specific factor influencing my Thumbelina-esque offspring.

Now, joking aside, I suppose that it is a pretty standard expectation for a lot of people to hit the 'burbs when they get to the 20 somethings; add the spouse and the two and a half kids, call it a life. To be perfectly honest, that is where I always kind of saw myself going. Of course not recently, and yet, not really too long ago either.

I was never a driven kid, and I will say sadly that I never had high expectations for myself. There are people that manage to muddle their way through life; that was me. Do everything adequately, do what you need to do to survive, but never really self-improve outside of the set boundaries. Having a family with children is an accomplishment. That ability to procreate and provide is in every way an impressive feat, the ultimate commitment and sacrifice of self to create and raise new life. As a result, it is in many ways very commendable to make it to the point where marriage and kids are your sphere of reality. Yet, I think that the reason it was always one of those inevitable results to me growing up was that due to the unmotivated way in which I lived, it would probably have been the best I could have done. The absolute maximum of my potential, the top expectations of what I could picture myself accomplishing was the very baseline of normal society.

It is funny to reflect on your life and remember how much time you wasted worrying about really silly things. I can clearly remember that as I met new women, right up to the end of University, there was always this nagging voice in my head asking if she was the one. There was this really sad, omnipresent feel that if I didn't meet 'her' in school, I would be alone forever. How pathetic is that? What a really stupid way to live your life. School provided this really structured way in which to learn new things and create opportunities and of course meet women, that it felt like without that stable safety net to lean on and push off from, graduation spelt the end of excitement, and the beginning of the long haul to retirement.

However, this is a happy story. Due to a few factors, including my own, self-proclaimed intellectual renaissance that can be followed throughout this blog and an absolutely comical lack of an ability to have or maintain any sort of relationship, I find myself with the opportunity to push myself beyond the minimum, and do something that I think I wouldn't even dreamed of doing five years ago. My thirteen-year-old self's prophetic vision of me in the suburbs has been indefinitely delayed, as in the near future I am moving to:

More specifically, to the city of:

Where I will live a block from the largest non-airport transit hub in the country, the Nagoya Train Station, in a tiny apartment that looks like this:

and get to sleep on one of these...

(Woo?)


The apartment was finalized last Thursday, and with its confirmation, I ran out of preparations. I can honestly say that I really haven't spent even a fraction of the time worrying for this trip, compared to when I left for Africa. Yet, the preparations for this trip were far more in-depth, and as I jumped through the hoops, I was able to kind of keep the realization of moving half a world away at arm's length.

So with the end of prep comes the start of the waiting; and waiting for the unknown can be positively correlated with my ability to be nervous, over think, and second guess. There is no regret, and admittedly the nervousness is in truth a nervous excitement. It took me several years, a lot of patience and a good amount of money to get to where I am now, and I think I can truly say I'm ready to go. However, it does not mean that I won't continue to get hit with profound moments of realization while driving, the ones that cause me to shout "I'm moving to fucking Japan!" really loudly, and then sort of laugh hysterically for awhile until I calm down and resume singing alone to the radio. I guess this is happening.

 Thanks for reading,

 Much Love,

Sean


Quickly, I would like to add my thanks to all those who have read my blogs to this point, as I recently reached 10,000 hits. I do take this with a grain of salt, as many of them were probably me swinging through. Moreover, thanks to the stats tracker on blogger, I am aware that a big amount of the traffic I get are people using google image search to look for Haida tattoos, and you will notice that 'Ink'd' leads the list of the popular posts on the bar to the right.

That aside, the feedback for this blog has been inspiringly positive, and I would like to thank everyone that has lent me a kind word after reading a post.   I have never needed to be very creative to write most of my posts, but it has required this ability to remove my filter and attempt to be truly honest. It is that filter that stops most people from saying what they really feel.


Not so coincidently, I wrote this whole post while listening to the album 'The Suburbs' by the Arcade Fire.