Blog for the Ordinary

I have never done anything in my life that would be classified as extraordinary. So far the whole arrangement has worked out swimmingly.
Who wants to be extra-ordinary anyway? Being plain-Jane ordinary is bad enough, but extra-ordinary? I might as well disappear. I know that I am now coming across as a confused exchange student trying to grapple with the English language, but I had to frolic down that trail for just a moment as I pondered on the interesting sum of those two words. Some English words are so enigmatic in their confusion that they cease to confuse. Such is the case with the word extraordinary.
I digress.
I have never done anything in my life that would be classified as extraordinary. Truthfully I don’t feel a need to, nor do I feel my life lacking in anything as a result of my apparent flippancy with the issue. I go about my days trouncing from work to home, swinging my lunch bag full of food in one direction, and swinging its empty vessel a little higher in the other direction. In between these events fall the workings of a banking center, conversations with those I like and those I do not, laughter, unexpected sneezes, bathroom trips, the cracking of knuckles, text messages, cross-word puzzles, and a MAX trip or two. I can’t say that I have ever been handed a gold statue for most exciting life, and if I ever did I would be the first to cry foul play, but I would say that I have a satisfactory amount of unplanned events that’s keep my life popping. There is at least an occasional pop.
Extraordinary people intrigue me. What is it like to have their schedule and submit to the self discipline that they must endure in order to rise to their level of greatness? It seems like an impossible feat—like trying to hold your self underwater in an attempt at drowning. Eventually your weakness overrules your desire to die. But I am not extraordinary, so of course I would not understand. People like JRR Tolkein, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Batman—they all embodied some sort of crazy drive that I simply don’t possess. They are jet engines in a world full of four cylinders.
The thing about being extraordinary, however, is that there soon ceases to be any balance in life. These people have a drive, but it is a concentrated drive, which leaves little room for relationships, hobbies, deeper probing of human thought… Unless, of course, those things are the objects of their extraordinary nature. Suicide is indicative of this common thread in The Extraordinary. I am not taking anything away from how amazing these people can be, I am still truly spellbound by the product of their dedication. It merely solidifies my desire to be ordinary. Hold that extra.
This topic was fluttering around in my head because I have been thinking about writing a book. Thinking—keyword—we can all share a chuckle now. The thought of being an extraordinary writer, one that would take captive the souls of readers and refuse to render them until the very last word, whose images would bead up above the surface and then soak deep into the pores, like a glistening sweat when the sun beats down—that’s an author I would love to be. But. I have since discovered that the drive which places those at an extraordinary level, that tilts back the heads of those who stare—it asks too much. So I will write a book, on that I am determined, but a dream is not enough to sacrifice life and love.
To have a gold statue at the end of life and then have no one to thank save the Academy? Let’s just say a gold statue is a poor conversationalist.
I’ll stick with just being nominated.

Token Motivational Tool

Negotiations

My mind has proven itself a formidable enemy and I am currently attempting peace talks.

To write a book one must find oneself writing. Specifically a story. This is my battle. I have not begun what I fear I will never venture. It is this fear that, strangely, binds my fingers—puppets—and henceforth my mind—puppet master. The strings have become tangled and they wind around and around, twisting and knotting until only a noose for dreams is visible in the circus of twine and flesh. Will this be where I see my dream buried? Will it prove itself to have been always smoke and mirrors which for a moment flashed at me a desire and a will? I cannot wait for the bindings to fall lamely at my feet—their strength unwound in the presence of some miraculous energy. No, if I truly want to take on this feat I must fight against my restraints and transform a mirror into a canvas. I know that writing a book is not something that comes about merely on a few boring Sunday afternoons or a night or two of inspired ideas. Word by word it comes, and most of those words will have to be erased and rewritten, shuffled and recalculated. But I cannot even write one sentence. I have no words to even critique or muse upon. What story waits to be written, eagerly pressing up against a stained glass prison for which there is no door save the one that has been barred with a sign labeled ‘Fear?’ It is this silenced prisoner which I long to know, that I force myself not to know as I would never want to paint its story on a canvas with ripped, jagged corners and colors of coffee stains speckling the surface. That is my problem. I see an empty, imperfect canvas and I think there is no right color to cover over its blemishes. This is how I fail.

Peace talks continue. Bindings weakened.

Dreams at Auction

Insurance salespeople. An occupation which brings to mind those who have push-broomed their dreams into a scraggly yard of dirt and weeds in the name of money and stability. Images of cheap briefcases and personas that of George McFly come to mind. A knock at the door and a cheesy smile lets them slink into your kitchen and unclick their arsenal of brochures and diagrams. Their products may be worthwhile; it’s just that the process and the people seem so nauseatingly lame.
I have no basis whatsoever to make these broad-brushed claims. In fact I know one insurance salesman who does not wear glasses or have greasy hair—although I do not know the quality of his briefcase—so I honestly do not know where this occupational distaste originated. I only know that it is there and it tastes a bit like earwax.
If I was to pose a guess, I would say that insurance salespeople symbolize, to me, the ultimate sellout. I have never met anyone who wanted to grow up and sell insurance and thus I do not believe that people in the profession are saying to themselves; “I can’t believe I finally made it! I am LOVING this!”
Most likely what happened to the poor souls in this industry was that they majored in marketing, all set to become the next dreadlocked, flip-flop-wearing protégé at Wyden Kennedy, when WHACK! Rejection. All of a sudden they realize they are not quite as chicly creative as they had troubled themselves to be. Next they will pitter around for a while, trying to cling on to some corner of the dream that they had wrapped so tightly around themselves. At the funeral of this effort, however, many will begin looking for jobs in sales—not marketing—sales. This is the Big Compromise—the number four ‘safety school’ if you will. This is when Big Insurance scoops up the ragged, hungry, soot-smudged young graduate and tells him he’s going to be a star. ‘You’re not so bad—hell you’re even handsome! A shower and a shave is all you need and you’ll be dancin’ in a barrel-full of money in no time, son!’ Soon the monkey suit is donned, insurance licenses acquired and the dreads sacrificed. All to the tune of rehearsed sales pitches and babbling middle management. Ugh.
It is this profession which causes my most violent occupational recoil mainly because I too am a marketing major with no chance at Wyden fame. Not that I envisioned working for the advertising agency which throws out award winning Nike commercials like a Vegas dealer on crack—my sights were never that high. But I certainly do not foresee a career which entails selling anything to anyone. I would like to assist sales. Assist.
As irony would have it, however, I have recently interviewed for a position at an insurance company. How much is the soul going for these days, you ask? Well, wait. The sole reason that I am not standing on a tottering stool with a noose around my neck is because the position is for an operations director—not sales. I handle operations at the bank and I actually like it, so this would not be a half-bad opportunity.
I have two hesitations. The first being that I would be working for an insurance company and just the thought of that makes me wince. How boring. I would forever hate the question, ‘So what do you do for a living?’ The plus side, however, would be that I would get to know some insurance salespeople and maybe, just maybe, they would prove all of my biases wrong. I would realize that they are not sleazy, slimy, boring people and that I had been ignorant and stupid for having assumed so. Hah. Right.
My second hesitation roots in my desire to enter into some sort of communications job somewhere. That would be my career ideal. I can see myself taking the operation job, however, and doing nothing but just that for the extent of my working life. I don’t mind operations, but I’m not quite ready to give up on a more challenging and interesting career. In a fight between writing and filing, writing still wins. In the first round.
This seems like a weighty and difficult decision regardless of my ideals, however. This choice could potentially determine whether I will become some wondrously unimpressive insurance worker with a huge phone attached to my belt and desperate skittish eyes, or a neurotic chain-smoking writer who has five cats and a gun.

Not a bright future either way. Good thing life is not that dark. Just this blog.

Trains and Tumbleweed

Motivation is like one of those trains that you sometimes see in old western movies. It chugs along fueled by the coal of its own existence, passing young and old through sooty urban industrial areas and scratchy deserts speckled with tumbleweed and cacti. It doesn’t stop, but sometimes it slows down just enough to allow a dozing bystander the opportunity to swing up into one of its abandoned boxcars and start going somewhere.
Over the last month I’ve seen this train go by a few times and I have seen that abandoned boxcar slide past my vision until it was only a sliver of an image and then gone. Every time I knew what it was offering and I knew what I was turning down. Motivation. The conditions had been right on several occasions to get back into writing blogs or searching for jobs, but I was simply not ready to jump. Maybe it was due to frustrations pertaining to those areas. Bruised egos and nauseating disappointments tend to prod some (namely, me) to leave their motivated state and settle on land for awhile, where the ground isn’t moving so quickly below your feet and the wind doesn’t sting at your eyes with the same ferocity.
Eventually I wanted to get back on, but when I hit this stage there was another obstacle I had to first combat. Comfort. It’s like I had been waiting at the train station so long that the thought of a tin, cold, echoing boxcar, although appealing in its destination, was not springing me from my cushioned chair. After all, I had constructed a nice little area for myself at the station. I had made a footstool out of someone’s forgotten luggage and a coffee holder out of little Tommy’s play dough. I had a great system which consisted of me slowly give a pinch of the play dough back into Tommy’s eager, waiting hands in exchange for coffee from his father’s coffee shop. Then I would give the coffee to old Mr. Edwards in exchange for cigarettes and porn.
Okay, that’s going a little zany even for a metaphor, but you get the point. Comfort is a strong motivator in itself.
My purpose in all this is simply to headline that I am now the proud inhabitant of my very own abandoned boxcar. It was only a halfhearted jump in so I was dragged a couple miles and swallowed a shovel or two of chalky dust, but it’s all worth it! I am now back on track, so to speak, and I feel that I am finally moving forward again. I know the wind will come and piss me off, the train whistle will occasionally disrupt my sleep, and the dizzying ground will induce cold sweats from time to time. That is life though. No one said it was not going to occasionally bring on a gag reflex or two.
And we all know, even now, that I am occasionally going to jump off the train. It’s a pattern I have noticed and it is biased towards no one. Everyone loses that motivation. When you’re getting everything you want, you lose motivation because it is all too easy. When you’re getting nothing you want, you lose motivation because it is all too hard. Life’s irony never rests.
Just don’t get too comfortable with life on pause as you rock in the hammock of stagnant indulgence. You may melt into such a deep sleep that not even a train whistle can wake you up. I say this to myself too—my hammock sings a sultry lullaby.

Seeing Red

I glance to my right at the small glass cup holding the remains of my vodka tonic. It looks just like water and I am really thirsty. Foremost on my mind, however, is not the liquefied ice and diluted alcohol tempting me from it arms-length away perch, but the burning, itchy sensation which has leeched onto my eyes with Kong-sized tenacity.
You see, somewhere there is a small child gleefully smashing glue and sand into a thick paste and cramming it all over my eyes while I sleep. I’ve been battling with this grainy sealant for the last few mornings and quite frankly, its time for that kid to go down. The lovely AM challenge of pulling my eye lashes apart in hopes of seeing what the world has to offer has yielded nothing but eyes which resemble those of a crack addict. Or someone who has been hot boxing since the Y2K scare. Either way, drugs are involved—thanks a lot World.
Eye drops are usually a magnetic draw in situations like this, but I have the God-engrained inability to consciously put anything in my eyes. Many people have been able to evolve past this instinct and stick all sorts of things into their visionary globes; hard contacts, soft contacts, liquids of various sorts, gum for later etc. I am sad to say, however that I am still very much in the Neanderthal stage of that eye protrusion mentality. The only way I can get eye drops into my eye is by having Ty drop them in as I hold my eye open. Even with that, I am nervously laughing the entire time and have to psyche myself up for the experience.
I would never make it as a pot-head.
The reason for my misery, according to the docs, is simply that I have a cold in my eye. The cold that I was experiencing apparently decided that it was bored with my lungs and throat and consequently packed up its things and headed for the big blue globes that they had seen in so many postcards. The Promised Land, where water flows from rocks sans speech or rod. Well, I hope they are having a fabulous time popping all of my eye veins or whatever they’re doing, because it will be the last time. I’ve got homeland security on them. Phone calls are being tapped and 'random' baggage searches are being executed. This evil must be purged!

For now though terror level is at red. Bloodshot red. Be advised.