I recently ventured to the Pacific Northwest on a business trip to the city of Seattle.  I had been there twice previously, but I had never been able to venture out of my hotel to roam the city.  This time was different and I had quite a bit of free time in the evenings.  The weather was phenomenal during our stay and thus people were out in droves enjoying it.

While I can't claim to fully understand or appreciate a place after a relatively cursory walk through it, it was obvious how different it was from any other place I had been.  I've never before seen so many people moving about in such a concentrated area seemingly content with exactly what was happening.  I know that's a relatively generic statement, but it's difficult to describe.

For example, normally when you have a large public market you get one of two extremes.  Either the people are strolling through passing time at what is the cultural center of town or you have people intently focused on either acquiring or selling goods and services.  But this was some mix of the two that was strikingly odd.  The people at the fruit stand weren't content to just display their wares, but took a preemptive approach by having people out front ready to cut slices of fruit to passers buy.  Yet, when you walked by you weren't greeted with a pushy sales pitch of the owner or a half-hearted one by someone waiting to get off work.  Rather a simple, polite offer was made only to be met by an equally polite and clever retort by another competing vendor.

After visiting the market I meandered up the coast through a park that sat on the edge of the bay and went on for miles and miles completely landscaped and attended to.  And rather than being met by endless streams of parents spending their appointed time for the week that was alloted to "family time" and passing efficiently through the park, I encountered all sorts of people involved a vast array of random and unassuming things.  Being such an expansive space it wasn't all that crowded, but every person or group of people I encountered was doing something different as though there had been a potlock assignment of evening activities that each person signed up to bring to the table.  And yet nothing seemed pretentious about it.  It just seemed as though people showed up and added their own personality to the place they were inhabiting which then gave the entire place a personality all its own.

I don't pretend to be a professional photographer, but I have long since left the days of being even the slightest bit interested in posed photography.  It isn't real and it isn't something I want to use to remember a place or time.  Yet, people are in many ways the only thing worth remembering and thus I find myself fixated on how people say what they say, why they think what they think, and do what they very much choose to do.

While on my trip I took a handful of shots of the view from the Space Needle, but the ones that left a lasting, meaningful impression on me were the ones of people.  I don't like to make people feel uncomfortable so I use a lens that is more expensive than my camera to get shots from far away and tend to shoot pictures from behind unless I shoot from the hip while walking where you can't tell that I took a shot at all.  While the shots I take and keep are always meaningful and personal to me in ways that most people don't really understand, I don't usually want to enjoy that at the expense of someone's privacy or self-consciousness.  You may wonder why I bothered to explain all this just to display a couple of mediocre shots of my romp through a city millions have previously documented far better than I, but I suppose if you knew why I needed to do so you probably wouldn't have needed the explanation at all.

If you're like me, and I think we both know you are, Mondays are quite an exciting day.  You wake up from the weekend that was too short and meander your way to work only drudge your way through the day waiting expectedly for what is to come later that night -- a new episode of The Hills.  Sadly, there are oh so many Mondays and oh so few new episodes.

I'm not exactly sure how they came up with the idea, but MTV has a very good method of making me care (even if it's ever so remotely) about people simply because they're daily events are played against a soundtrack of great music.  This phenomenon has been around for awhile and is starting to be commercialized (as can be evidenced by the fact that every show on television is required to use a One Republic song at least 5 times each episode), but there are still quite a few gems to be found.  This week, was no exception.

Most people are going to find out about this song by simply going to the official homepage of the show and checking the "music from the show" link.  Many are going to just look at the bottom of the screen while the song is playing that say "song you're hearing now" and simply remember it long enough to punch it into their music service of choice.  Still others are going to just type some of the lyrics into Google and hope for the best.  Since I didn't find those lyrics anywhere else, I thought I'd enliven my neglected blog with a post that may prove of some use.

The song is called "Tightrope" and is by a guy named "Paul Freeman" (seemingly referred to as simply "Freeman").  You can hear it at his Myspace page is http://www.myspace.com/paulfreeman.  I haven't seen it on iTunes, Rhapsody, or Amazon, and as far as I can tell it isn't for sale anywhere.  I could be wrong, though, and will update this if I find out more.

freeman - tightrope
i don't wanna wait too long, and i don't wanna break it down, the stars are sinking just like stones, it's hard for me to breathe, my mind is missing pieces of you, the fear and the pain have gone, so i'll keep looking, looking

now i'm higher before than i've ever been, i was talking a tightrope till you came in
but nobody wants to be alone, i've been walking a tightrope, so can you catch me,
if i let go, don't let go

as far as i can see, the world is turning out of time, your gravity will pull me close, and it's all i'll ever need, now my mind is missing pieces of you, if all we are is skin and bones, just keep holding just keep holding on

and i'm higher before than i've ever been, i was walking a tightope till you came in, but nobody wants to be alone, i've been walking a tightrope, so can you catch me, if i let go

there's no way back, if i let go, know where i'll land, so don't let go, cause it's hard enough to live, and i just wanna feel it, i just wanna feel it

now i'm higher before than i've ever been, i was walking a tightrope till you came in, but nobody wants to be alone, i was walking a tightrope, can you catch me, don't let go

Sometimes it feels as though my life is a giant todo list.  I don't have a great number of people depending on my ability to complete various tasks -- it's more of a self-imposed behavior.  Defining a need, planning out a path to meet that need, and then following through with it satisfies a deep seated desire that's been with me for as long as I can remember.  As I've gotten older I've gotten better at solving problems, more mature in defining my needs, and more accepting when problems arise.  But despite all that "growth" I still strive for and depend on everything going according to plan.

It's such a bizarre feeling growing up.  I don't think I ever thought about what my life would be like when I was 30 or 40, but I most certainly thought about college and the first few years after college.  Now that I've gone through that period in my life without replacing it with thoughts of what comes next I find myself coasting in a sense and latching onto the routine that takes me from day to day.  I've found a niche in my job and find it to be a creative outlet.  At the same time it's flexible enough to allow me free time such that I don't feel oppressed by it.

And somehow I find myself 20-something and so entrenched in a routine that venturing outside of it to the slightly more infrequent tasks like going grocery shopping and getting a haircut seem like real work.  I'm weighed down by the ruthless efficiency and practicality that I find alluring.  Yet, at the same time, I still feel like a dreamer trying to capture the magic in everything that I encounter.  I'm not sure I know how to reconcile those two characteristics of my personality.

So much of my life is fueled by this dichotomy.  I carefully research multimedia equipment so that I can enhance the visceral effects that music and movies can have.  I create a place for every item I own to "belong" so that I spend very little time looking for anything thus freeing my from interruptions and distractions when an inexplicable desire hits.  It's as though I've spent my whole life getting good at being ready for my real life to begin.

I suppose the biggest problem with all this is that the more you plan, the better you get, and the more invested you become in your own plans.  I'd love to say that I have some secret or have reached some conclusion about what this all means or where to go from here.  Part of me feels like taking a chance and the other part thinks that's just discontentment and boredom talking.

And yet even so I'm reminded of the classic lyric "the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true."  More than anything I wonder if maybe my real problem is that despite, or perhaps even because of, all my growing up I haven't quite dared to dream the dreams I really want to come true.  Though, looking at a picture of myself as a toddler looking so very happy on my tricycle I highly doubt that I had at that time any trouble daring to dream.  I just hope that I haven't completely forgotten how to do that.

As I get older and supposedly more mature, I find myself thinking back to who I was just a short time ago and wondering how I went from there to here.  I have a reasonably good sense of direction and don't get turned around too often.  Yet, even though I took every step of the path to who I am today, I cannot even begin to understand what must have been going on in my head to do some of the things I did at times.

While I can't claim to be a risk taker I am not nearly as interested or bewildered by the single acts that seem to step outside of the person I normally claim to be as I am with a persistent action that confirmed a line of thought every time I partook.  I once jumped off a cliff into water 60 ft down that not only required an outward jump of 8 ft to clear the rock face halfway down, but was surrounded by circle of jagged rocks at the bottom about 10 ft across.  If I landed 3 ft to the left I would have died.  And yet, as I think back to this departure from the norm, I eschew it by remembering I was trying to impress a girl -- another case closed.

What isn't as easily explained was my desire to play lacrosse in high school.  Every day for months I would stay after school for more than 3 hours to practice a sport that I was deathly afraid to play.  I never really became a typical player because most of my play was centered around getting through each practice and game without being seriously hurt.  As it turned out I was quite an effective player due to the fact that I was left-handed (inexplicably so as I write right-handed) and very fast.  However, that still didn't negate the dread I felt going to practice sacrificing sleep, grades, spring breaks, broken bones, and more.

To this day I don't know what made me want to play.  I certainly don't regret it as I gained experiences and memories that were unique to that venture, but the confusion still remains.  Perhaps it was some sort of unconscious manifestation of my desire to do something considered "tough".  Even though I can imagine a possible scenario I find it strange that my hyper-aggressive sense of rationality didn't kick in an expose the desire, from wherever it came from, for what it was and find a way to classify and categorize it for future consideration and reflection.

I am often quite skeptical of the romanticized, visceral attitudes people have towards their own lives and tend to think of them as a way for people to cope with their decisions.  The danger of course is that people only chase the dreams that make them feel like the idealized idea of themselves rather than facing the reality of who they are and who they want to be today in every small action they take.  And yet still, I cannot deny the effect those exact kinds of moments in my own life have had in shaping who I am.

I suppose in the end we are who we are whether or not we do it on purpose.  Still, I'm reminded of a refrain from one of my favorite songs that I labor to ascribe to: "I don't want to be anything other than what I've been trying to be lately."  Here's hoping I can do just that.

Oh how the time flies.  Another year has come and gone and it's again time to catalog what was.  Keeping with my long standing tradition of a whopping two years we'll cover it all on both the personal and global fronts.  This year we'll start with the personal.

Looking back on the post from last year I am surprised how little seems to have changed.  Being in the same job and living situation probably has a lot to do with that.  It's odd how the perception of how things are going or are changing on a daily basis is different than when considered against a more substantial amount of time like a full year.  Today might be completely different from yesterday, but it doesn't stick out in my mind as real change.  It's merely a minor diversion from my final destination of normalcy that I assume I will always return to.  Perhaps life isn't solely a journey or a destination, but rather a series of destinations that help define and demarcate our journey.

While far from engaging in 80 hour work weeks, I have become more attached to my job.  Most days this doesn't seem detrimental as it simply helps provide basic motivation to get out of bed and in to work as well as assisting me in being reasonably productive and even creative.  Yet as I sit here mustering the energy to be introspective enough to post I find myself distracted by the desire to remote into work and check my email in what I can only assume as a misguided attempt to feel useful.  At times like these it seems obvious how arbitrary the expenditure of motivation can be and how easily it is to become ruled by the routine.  And as time passes the promise of routine fulfills itself and becomes more entrenched making it harder to give up.

I once heard someone say that having money only makes a man more of who he is -- if he's a drunk when he's broke, he'll be more of a drunk with money.  But, as we all chase our own version of the American Dream we sacrifice so much of our time and energy to acquire money.  We solidify who we are in the pursuit of happiness we all engage in and inevitably become entangled in the dreams we chase.

So as I reflect on the past year I wonder who would I have been this year if I had come into a lot of money.  When I ponder the answer it's interesting how much it seems to reinforce the idea that money simply amplifies who we are.  I would buy all the things I considered buying this year (albeit probably nicer versions of those items) and inevitably find myself in the same predicament of searching for who I want to be.

This year that ongoing quest led me to start playing golf, take up photography, join facebook, and take a trip to new york.  While each of these activities may have started as a simple distraction to pass the time they have each become an escape from the routine and thus represents a much bigger part of who I am.  Perhaps these intermediate destinations will lead me somewhere else that sticks out as more substantive of a change.  For now, I suppose it's good enough to know I'm on my way.

As always, I will conclude with the ever-important short list of songs that make me feel like me this year.

• Mat Kearney - What's A Boy To Do
• James Morrison - Undiscovered
• Matt Wertz - The Way I Feel
• OneRepublic - Say (All I Need)
• OneRepublic  - All We Are
• Regina Spektor - Samson

I recently acquired an iPhone much to the chagrin of everyone who knows me and how much I tend to dislike Apple.  More on that exciting development at 11 -- and by 11, I mean 3 weeks from now when I finally get around to posting.

But for now, I was jumping through the hoops to get my computer and iPhone to sync exactly the way I want and it involved me sorting through some email and other assorted Outlook features.  I stumbled across a note I had written some time ago that was an ongoing list of random things that came into my head while I was sitting at my computer.  Rather than solve this problem today, I decided I might as well post what I have and start fresh when I figure out a good system for syncing my list of useless thoughts.  Here goes nothing.

I get excited like a little child when I see a box of fruit snacks.

I like to think that sunflowers talk to each other when no one's around.

I like to tell babies that they're babies even though secretly I think they already know.

I often imagine that if there really were leprechauns they'd eat cornflakes for breakfast.

I talk to most animals (in English -- not animal sounds) and I like to think they appreciate the effort.

Recently, I've noticed that whenever I see someone that I haven't seen in a few months or even longer and they ask me what's going on in my life I generally respond with a generic "same old, same old".  This isn't some sort of canned response that I offer up simply to avoid a long discussion.  I mean, there's not too many times I'll turn down an opportunity to talk about myself.  I usually take a second, think to myself, and come up with nothing of note to say.

Yet, even so when I sit down and try to write one of these posts I reflect and come up with a completely different story.  Maybe that's because when I write these posts, as public as they may be, I try to be as honest as I can with exactly what's been occupying my time and, more importantly, my thoughts.  Of course, I don't want to bother the Internet with the monotony of daily life -- it has to listen to so many people in that vein already.  But why bother write if it's not going to be me?

I think we become programmed to respond the way society wants us to.  Each person you encounter on a given day has a certain relationship to you even if it's just a fleeting acquaintance.  The rules and protocol created by all of us at large apply to every conversation we have.  When someone asks "how are things" I inherently process their relationship to me and respond appropriately.  It's not outright lying -- more of a filter.  One of the quickest ways to create conflict is to put two people together who don't have the same views on how general discourse is supposed to occur.

Yet, despite all the pragmatic value our verbal filters are in the operation of society I often wonder if we'd all be better off saying what we think when we think it.  I think there's a fallacy that exists in the minds of most people that in order to care about someone you have to hide things from them.  We often call it "being polite" when we refrain from expressing our thoughts and feelings as though having the bad thought and not sharing it is somehow preferable to the truth.  So then we all walk around wondering what everyone is thinking of us, knowing that even some of the most polite are silently judging what we say and do.

Most would say that the differing levels of friendship we have are predicated on differing levels of trust.  We inherently trust our close friends the most for a variety of reasons.  There's certainly no doubt that the more you know about someone the more qualified and informed your opinions about that person can be.  But why does that necessarily stop us from being "honest" with everyone?

I guess in the end I wonder why we expend our energy deciding what we should say to who and when.  It seems to me that the sole requirement I desire from anyone addressing me in any way is that at that moment they care more about me than the statement or point they're trying to make.  Whether they're right, wrong, boring, funny, informative, or any other adjective it comes from a person.  If we take out the guile and apathy we're left with people, caring about people (even if just for a moment), and sharing who they are.  In the long run, everything else is just something to do to pass the time.

It's been so long since I last posted that I actually forgot how.  I couldn't for the life of me remember even a vague idea of what my most recent posts were about.  Interestingly enough in going back to find that out I came upon the very reason I started this blog in the first place.  I seriously never expected anyone to ever read this.  Perhaps it's the decades of blank stares I've encountered from countless people when I begin to talk about, well, anything that has shaped my notion that I was unlikely to find an audience.  What I did hope to gain out of this blog was a way to look back months or even years at what I had to say when prompted by and in response to nothing.  Thus, it seems as though the power in a diary/journal isn't that it provides a mechanism to have a cathartic experience of expressing oneself through words -- if it were, people would write an entry and then simply throw it away.  It's the ability to go back and read what you wrote and hopefully catch a glimpse into who you were then to better understand who you are today.

Looking back just a few months ago it becomes apparent how quickly my mental state changes and how much it affects how I interact with the world.  In some ways I am the same person I have always been, but in other ways I cannot replicate feeling the way I did just a short time ago.  It guess it's odd being able to remember a time that I felt a certain way, but can't remember how that feels.

Because of the short-lived nature of any particular mental state we experience, the ruts we find ourselves in originate from our emotional reactions, but are perpetuated merely by a force a habit.  So even though we quickly lose the desire to be in such a rut, we nevertheless find ourselves in them for quite a bit longer.  Thus, inevitably we define who we are by a pattern of behavior and thinking that stems from a single point of emotional distress that we would like to claim as an aberration from how we view ourselves normally.  In short, we're not the people we think we are.

Perhaps this downward spiral explains why so many of us are surprised by the way others see us.  We like to think of ourselves in terms of the noble goals we claim to have, but often never make sacrifices to obtain.  Yet ironically, without those goals we would have nothing to fall short of and would merely be defined by the act of doing nothing.

In some sense this all explains why you see so many famous quotes about trying and failure.  For example, "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take."  It also explains why so many people who have achieved their claimed goals are still unhappy.  We get the pot of goal at the end of the rainbow, but we have no idea who we are when we get there.

To sum it all I suppose the only way to move forward is to look back.  It's too easy to remain standing still or blindly chase a dream.  Yet even so, there's no denying that trying is the first step towards failure.

Have you ever noticed how often doctors seem to issue a diagnosis only to be proven completely wrong?  It seems as though just about everyone has been told by someone in the medical community that their life is essentially over and they'll never again.  While I'm sure doctors often hedge their bets when giving estimates of recovery time and extent, I seriously doubt most of them speak in absolutes mostly for fear of being wrong and subsequently sued.  It's as though we've become so accustomed to hearing the tear-jerking, dramatic stories of perseverance through injury that unless someone stands in direct opposition to our goals we have nothing to work for.  The motivation to prove someone wrong, even if that person is imaginary, seems to be the currency of the masses.

Similarly, the notion of "stepping up" has become the minimum requirement for accomplishing anything.  Anyone who doesn't succeed at something clearly didn't want it bad enough and needs to have given it their all.

I suppose I find this so odd because of how often I lazily "phone in" my daily activities.  A work day generally begins with me rumbling out of bed after a prolonged period of agonizing about the prospect of leaving the solitude of my warm and comfortable bed.  I typically make actual groaning noises not so that anyone can hear them, but because it feels more authentic that way.  I meander mindlessly through my morning routine that is in place solely so that I don't walk out of the house without pants on.  After a series of left and right turns taken in random order I arrive at work.  I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.  If for some reason you haven't seen Office Space, you may want to ignore those last few sentences.

But back to the point, the idea that anything is possible is the classic American dream.  It's the remnants of a culture born of dreamers searching for freedom and manifest destiny who were content to declare their independence even when all it secured was the pursuit of a happiness that was never guaranteed to be found.  For everything America has become as of late teeming internally with polarization over recent political affairs and struggling globally with an image of renegade bullies, it is still made up of people with unfettered optimism who believe that happiness is still worth pursuing.

So while trying is in fact the first step towards failure, it's also the essential ingredient in success.  Trying harder doesn't always guarantee success, but it guarantees the next best thing -- hope.

As an astute reader pointed out, I forgot to post in March.  While this is certainly not good news vis a vis my adamant stance on uniformity and consistency, it does highlight a very interesting development.  While I currently live with roommates it used to be a bit of a concern that if I I were to expire suddenly and in private no one would notice for some time.  I find this neither depressing nor something that requires drastic action -- it's just the way things go.  However, I worry that if such an occurrence were to happen, some people would feel guilty or sad that an inordinate amount of time passed before anyone realize I was, in fact, not coming back.

With the advent of the Internet and more specifically, the emergence and popularization of online communities, many people's circles of acquaintances have dramatically increased, at least geographically speaking.  Almost certainly then, no person who knows you can possibly know all the people you know.  How then, does the unfortunate news of someone passing away get passed around so that everyone knows?

Perhaps this is somewhat of a morbid topic, but it's something that needs discussing.  That is why I think we need to utilize the most infallible and revolutionary system ever conceived -- the buddy system.  Quite simply, if you die, your buddy informs the world of your demise.  If you both happen to die at the same time, well, then -- I suppose the buddy system fails miserably.  Apparently, I haven't worked all the kinks out of the system yet, but it's got some potential.

Perhaps a more useful solution would be some sort of website in which people can sign up to be informed if a particular person dies.  Sort of like facebook, but for one singular purpose.  Since there's no telling how many of your friends may be taken out along with you, the responsibility of marking you as gone thereby pulling the proverbial trigger on the mass-notifications would have to be a community-based responsibility.  If more than a certain number of your friends declared you deceased you would receive a warning message asking to validate your existence.  If you failed to do so in a certain amount of time you'd be assumed dead and your circle of friends would be informed.

It looks like once again, the Internet has saved the day.  I guess until such a system is implemented, you can just assume that if I stop blogging for a few months that I'm probably gone.  Either that or I'm just incredibly lazy.  You can never be too sure about these things.