Long ago during the early days of the Internet, I had a personal website that would later be known as a "blog". This was during my time in high school and college and was predictably filled with stereotypical teenage angst and ridiculous black and white notions about the world. Eventually I decided to grow up, see the world in a wider color spectrum, and those random musings passed away to be long forgotten.
As I've grown, I've slowly realized that my life has become very compartmentalized. When I was young, I used to run around town with the rest of the neighborhood kids without a care in the world. As we went to junior high and then high school, we started to split into different cliques and new groups of friends. This was followed by heading out to the wider world of college halfway across the continent, which was a completely different experience. Finishing college, I traveled to the other side of the continent to start graduate school, which again was something that I had never experienced before. Five years of graduate school life was followed by two years of a post-doctoral position and leading to the present two years of a real job in industry (coincidentally back on the other side of the continent).
Each compartment was entirely unique and full of new trials and tribulations and friends. Because of this, each stage of my life feels mostly independent---I have had different sets of friends and experiences that don't quite fully mesh. It feels more like a patchwork quilt rather than a interweaved tapestry. Moreover, each compartment of my life feels like it's getting shorter and shorter. Time flies.
As a guy, it's probably not surprising that I'm not very good at keeping up with old friends. I like to think that technology may have something to do with it---the standard technological alienation that luddites like to play up. In reality, I think that technology makes communication seem almost too easy. It's so easy to call someone on their cellphone or send someone an email that it's too easy to say I'll just do it later. And then later turns out to be months and years later.
Fast forward to today. For years, I had felt no urge to publish a blog. I had always felt that writing a blog would be similar to looking at an old yearbook---did I really write that? How embarrassingly public! However, after luckily being able to find a job (especially during this economy), I moved to a new area on the East Coast. As each compartment of my life gets shorter, it's become harder and harder to find new friends (and increasingly difficult to keep in touch with old friends). I'm friendly with my coworkers, but they all have their own separate lives and it's really not the same type of connection. It really is harder to make new friends as you get older. Modern alienation. My closest friends now are now my wife and my cat and I don't know what I would do without them.
The toll this has taken has been increasing stress and pressure. In the past two years, I managed to find my first real job, relocate across the country, buy a new house, and get married to my best friend. And everything has rapidly accelerated this summer---we've had to suffer through layoffs and uncertainty at work, get ready for the wedding of one of our good friends from grad school, go to jury duty and then get my wisdom teeth out. To top it off, our cat is slowly dying from chronic renal failure. When we came back from the wedding, he had crashed and was barely able to move or eat. I'm on the verge of losing fifty percent of my closest friends. I need some way to release this pressure.
So this blog is really a way for me to vent and express myself. I don't know who will find this or who will read this. It's value is more let me release my stress and find an outlet for my random musings. Consider it my therapy. To be fair, it's the lazy way out---I should probably reach out to my old, genuine friends, and that is something that I will do. But it's all the little steps that matter.
And that's that for an introduction. Hello world. Thanks for listening.
