{"id":686,"date":"2006-01-08T02:53:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-08T02:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/?p=686"},"modified":"2006-01-08T02:53:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-08T02:53:00","slug":"this-post-brought-to-you-by-boredom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/this-post-brought-to-you-by-boredom\/","title":{"rendered":"This post brought to you by boredom*"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone&#8217;s shuffling around this month. Kristin&#8217;s settling into her new apartment in Nashville. Ditto for Jason and his triumphant return to the &#8216;boro. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brandonmorrison.com\/brandonian\/index \" target=\"_blank\">Brandon<\/a> is now here in Memphis. <a href=\"http:\/\/jrlind.blogspot.com\" target=\"_blank\">J.R.<\/a> will be stateside shortly (does this mean yet another change to the blog title? &#8220;Tales from Stateside?&#8221;). I think Patrick moved into a new place, too, maybe in late December. And Phil and I are slowly crouching and getting ready to pounce once moving day rolls around.<\/p>\n<p>Januaries have traditionally signified stasis and boredom in my life. The start of the new year is virtually meaningless to me, especially since I still think of the start of the school year (August) as the start of the <i>year<\/i> year. Throughout my life, January hasn&#8217;t brought much change; it&#8217;s just been a continuation of whatever I had been doing for the past several months. Now I sort of feel like I&#8217;m in limbo, not tied to the school calendar, and completely irreverent when it comes to the Gregorian calendar. It&#8217;s sort of like how days of the week lost all meaning once I stopped going to church, and even moreso once I got out of school and got a non-Monday-thru-Friday job. Sundays are Tuesdays are Fridays. And January is April is August is November.<\/p>\n<p>For me, at least, this is part of why the passage of time seems to be accelerating as I age. What an inescapable cliche. I just float from one day to the next, with no real sense of meaning or goals to guide me. The result is a mish-mash of meaningless days that leave me at the end of a month thinking, <i>Holy hell, where did all the time go?<\/i> Don&#8217;t get me wrong; it&#8217;s not a bad existence at all. It&#8217;s much less stressful than the life of a broke student with three jobs. There are certainly much worse ways of living. But it feels peculiar to me; <a href=\"http:\/\/theogeo.blogspot.com\/2004\/01\/we-are-accidents-waiting-to-happen.html\" target=\"_blank\">I have always fed off of the constant drumbeat of ambition<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Last year, January brought enormous change. And I&#8217;d be lying if I tried to play it off as an entirely welcome change. It&#8217;s been a year of struggle and self-doubt, and a year where I had to face the fact that I am fully in charge of my happiness, and that I can&#8217;t rely on anyone else to give my life meaning. But it was also a year of independence and self-reliance and self-actualization. I&#8217;m trying to figure out what that means, exactly, and how I can handle all that stuff better than I have before. But I guess the important thing is that at least it&#8217;s all on the radar and that I feel like I&#8217;m growing.<\/p>\n<p>So there&#8217;s really no telling what this year will bring. I&#8217;m not going to look at it as a fresh start or any of that. That&#8217;s too much pressure to be shouldered by one measly little year. At the end of 2006, I will be  25 years old. Who will I be in a year? What will I find meaning in? What will I know then that I don&#8217;t know now? What sorts of annoying rhetorical questions will I ask on the blog (if it survives)?<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s interesting to think about the future, but I&#8217;m sure it will be more boring than I&#8217;d like to imagine (I&#8217;m more boring than I&#8217;d like to imagine). I suspect the mid-20s lull will persist until I decide to have kids (read: get knocked up) or win the lottery (which I never play) and jet set around the world. I might throw a wrench in the gears and go back to school and get out of the news business. You never know. You just never know.<\/p>\n<p>*<font SIZE=\"1\">The official sponsor of Saturday night.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone&#8217;s shuffling around this month. Kristin&#8217;s settling into her new apartment in Nashville. Ditto for Jason and his triumphant return to the &#8216;boro. Brandon is now here in Memphis. J.R. will be stateside shortly (does this mean yet another change to the blog title? &#8220;Tales from Stateside?&#8221;). I think Patrick moved into a new place, too, maybe in late December. And Phil and I are slowly crouching and getting ready to pounce once moving day&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1jWWl-b4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}