apathy and exhaustion were not always my best friends.

Clinched jaw, I kinda hide. I'm just going to sit this one out, wait for this feeling to pass, grab a beer, glance out the window. It's snowing. It looks cold.

And now I'm starting to feel like a whiner. Like all I do is just sit here and say poor me - poor me, all the while pining for the times that I would sit on the back porch, glancing up at the stars as the crickets twittered at me, peeling the dried mud from between my toes.

And the past few days have been lists and lists. Lists of things I love and lists of thing I hate and lists of places that I love and miss and lists of places that I would never live in, lists of worst jobs to have, lists of the happiest times in my life. And I kinda feel like I've aged 20 years in the time it took me from being 24 to my 25th birthday, which is fast approaching.
I feel like the irritable man in the sitcoms, coming home from a long day at the office just to snap at the kids he hardly knows on his way to the easy chair. No time to look at his wife, just snarfing down the food on his plate, looking through everyone he meets and flying off the handle at every little thing that goes wrong.
I'm impossible without a beer after work. I hate that feeling. I'm up to 2 cigarettes a day, which is putting a permanent brick in the back of my throat and I'm sure wrecking my voice, but at the same time, it's all I can do to limit it to two some days.

This is the part of the sitcom where the flashback happens to happy little me taking the test in 6th grade when a career specialist came in to class to bestow upon us each a future, bright and wide as our eyes and only wavered when the boys in the back row would scoff at the mention of any boy.... OR girl... could become president.
It didn't take me long, I know what I like and what I don't like and even from a young age, I would keep the mice in glass jars as part science and part odd fascination. I picked weeds with my grandma and ran around in the sun, and the rational part of me always hated art, swearing that it was a really fun way to pass time, but nothing more.

I don't know how I feel about making money. I think I'm going to make a giant equation of energy and time and money... for starters, there is only a certain amount of energy that one person could have, save for time spent sleeping and factor in whether this being is eating good foods, consuming legal stimulants or depressents, and the small environmental factors of decreased vitamin D intake during the winter. We'll call this factor M.
There are a few things that you can go to decrease or increase factor M, but for the most part M is stable with a calculatable entrophy as every year goes by. For the sake of continuity, let's just say that M = 100
I would say that being winter with the frigid 3 degrees currently with very little sun and nothing but blustery cold snow building up on top of ice, that would decrease my M by 8 points.

100M - 8 = 92m

but it's not just winter here. I'm not sleeping right because it's cold, so that's another 2 points off. Stress of living next door to my parents is about 4 points off.

92m - 6 = 86m

My fucking goddamn job though probably sucks 68 M points out of me. Fucking full time, stealing the best hours of my day, taking all the daylight time for a stupid paycheck and a dirty rotten feeling about my life with little if anything in return....

86m - 68 = I'm a shell of a human being.




So the point of this excercise is to point out in some sort of science that I don't like where I'm at. I'm sure that I can have another shitty equation to say that doing what I want = no money but that's for another day.

In any case, I'm coming to the conclusion that I just sit at my desk and buy things. i'm no better off making 10 dollars an hour working full time as I was at Bittersweet farms making 7.25 working only part time. The way I see it, if you are doing something that you love, then you don't rely so much on buying shit to make you happy outside of work. At bittersweet, I didn't come home and crack a beer to make my eye stop twitching. I pretty much just danced around and called people up to make some music and had weird movie night.... but then again, maybe it's not all just my job, maybe some of it is the area. I do have a lot of faith in canton/akron. I guess one shitty city in Ohio is as good as any other. I'm just have a bit of a tough time right now.

I don't know, maybe I went through bouts of depression before, but never really realized it until I had stable people around me. Maybe my mom staring at me during breakfast every morning, asking me if everything ok and my dad just chiming in "make the best of it" before I go to work has a little bit to do with this whole confusion. Maybe it's Jason saying "just quit" combined with this nagging feeling in the back of my brain that I couldn't get a job doing what I like to do that's causing this internal struggle.

All that I know right now is I'm 24, turning 25 and I feel like I've pissed away a damn good year with nothing to show for it.

mission one......

So I think that I'm verifyably having a midlife crisis.

I don't know what I'm doing. I kinda feel like a robot, like I'm stuck in this body that keeps moving, eyes blinking... but it's not actually me.

I don't want to get out of bed most mornings. I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that my brain stays in bed and my body goes around and does stuff. I can't even tell you the last time I read a book or wrote something that I cared about or really laughed.

And then I think it's guilt for feeling the way that I feel that keeps me going in my relationship with my family and with Jason. I'm irritable a lot and I'm not sure what I'm doing. Damn, I didn't think when I moved here that this is how bad I would feel. If I knew, the worst moments at Toledo weren't even near this. I guess it is better to be broke and happy.


So this is it. I guess I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that I'm going to be a poor traveling musician. Me and Ryan are getting our stuff together and hitting the road, with an open French Horn case in front of us, we'll beg for change with beautiful melodies as couples pass by on date night, tossing a couple quarters our way just for the effort of making the space around us more beautiful.

I guess my first step (according to my wonderful new therapist) is to write out where I see myself in a year. All that I have to say is I'd better not still be here.