Hey.  I wrote this a few weeks ago, basically, for no one but myself.  For the want of a post, I'm putting it up.  It's forever long, so don't feel bad for skipping it.  (I think it's kind of preachy at parts too.  Hope you can forgive me for that).

On a side note, for a truly deep thought (in a much shorter piece of writing), look up the "for the want of a nail" poem on google. 

I wanted to be a writer, and I ended up working a government job. Cosmically & karmically, there's something profoundly hilarious about all of this. I'd probably be somewhat bitter about the whole thing if I wasn't too busy laughing at the life of it all. Life will take you, dip you, spring out of nowhere, bring you back up from the depths of your despair, and then at some point, inevitably, take you back into despair. However, fear not close friends, for at some point, you come back up again. It's the simple, tragic, beautiful palindrome of life: cry when you die, cry when you're born. In between, we should probably try to genuinely smile as much as you can, and cause as many genuine smiles as we possibly can. Unless you're the son of God, the palindrome is basically inevitable. What you do in between it, however, can make all the difference in the world to more people than we could likely ever imagine.

I was sitting at my cozy government job last year while working the day shift, and I got a call from an old friend. My old friend is pretty serverely epileptic, so when she asked me to watch her kid because of a doctor's appointment, I didn't think much of it. However, when I asked if she was okay, her response surprised me a little.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I had breast enhancement surgery, and this is just a check up to make sure everything's okay."

"Oh, okay" I said, not really listening. Then I caught myself.

"Wait. What kind of surgery?"

"Breast enhancement surgery."

For whatever reason, my friend was pushed to this limit, and separated with a few thousand dollars in order to...actually, I'm still not sure about that. For the record, I should note that my friend has previously done some modeling, which - through the power of my amazing "connection of thought" - leads me to believe that there were already a large number of people who found her attractive. I remember being at a rock show with some friends, and walking her back to buy a cd. Some guy in one of the bands signed it, and then after she turned away, stopped me with a "Hey dude," and a thumbs up. This point, I hope, accomplishes two things.

1. Dispels once and for all the theory that being in a band makes you cool. Granted, subtlety is not a luxury which is afforded to us all, but there should be at least some code of decorum afforded to perfect strangers when in non "meat-market" environments. Yes my friends, "rock stars" are just people like us with odd parents just like ours who occasionally act in peculiar ways (like giving a "thumbs up" over a perceived girlfriend) that make other people judge them...just like the rest of us.

2. Guys (who are mostly stupid I'm told) by and large found her attractive. However, this doesn't seem nearly as important as point one, though it is the one which is relevant to this piece, so I'll focus on it for a bit.

Why, then, would a person who was already accepted by some standard of judgement feel insecure about it, and thus take extra care just to make sure that her acceptance in this category was not in question? Why would she?

Why would we all?

More importantly, why do we all?

I kind of got lucky in high school in the sense that I'm not sure if I was well known or not, well liked or not, and well thought of or not. It didn't matter much to me then as it still doesn't now (10 year reunion: should I stay or should I go?), but I was lucky enough to be able to bump into a handful of people who would just randomly open up to me on occasions for whatever reasons people randomly open up to people they're not tight with in the traditional sense, and through some of these conversations I learned a few things, and I'll get around to dropping a a nugget or two into the bowl that is the following four paragraphs.

My school was really too big to have "popular" kids, which was good. It was also too big to have anybody on the opposite end of that, which was even better. Still, we had Homecoming and we had Prom, and so I guess if you were to really try to define the stereotypical "popular kids" (like an old friend of mine always did and still does to this day), that might be a good place to start.

One day during a study hall I started talking to a girl who was a buddy of a friend. Rather, she started talking, and I was just the guy sitting next to her, so I got to be on the other end of the conversation. We talked about a poetry project we both needed to complete, and a mutual teacher that we both had, and then she let her guard down and started talking about her friends. One sentence led to the next, and I realized that she had next to zero confidence in the reliability of her chosen relationships.

Fast forward a few months, and it's the same story with a different cheerleader. The people who perceive themselves as popular worry about staying as such.

They have something that they feel is looked upon as good, and they go out of their way to maintain it. That's not dissing the concept of popularity (though that'd be easy to do), but that's just a statement of the human condition. Even people who think they're well liked worry primarily about whether they are well liked or not. My friend who is pretty worries about whether or not people think she's pretty. I have no idea if people truly enjoy my company or not, but I've spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about it, which makes me realize that the thing I'm pointing out is not something that I'm above. I breathe the same air as the affirmed insecure. I think we all do it in some way or another.

Fast forward to the future of my friend, which is now the more immediate past, and she has gotten involved in a Bible study. My friend had been considering the concept of God, and what that means exactly for a mentionable amount of time. Not really "actively seeking," as we the religious disenfranchised like to say, but just thinking that admist everything, there has to be more. This was the same process that I went through, so I sort of felt like I didn't want to interfere or rush things along to make myself feel good. Fast forward to the past's future (but still not to the current's present), and while her newly found Bible study group was deciding to give up things like chocolate or whatever for lint, she says she wants to give up her bitterness. The fact that she even came to this conclusion shows how sincerely she was examining herself. The fact that she was going to fight against something that could make her into a happier, more well adjusted adjusted, and better person relationally speaking made it even more profound. It sort of made my "sacrifice" seem shallow by comparison.

After some tulmoutous times, she asked me to lunch about four or five months ago, and told me she was pregnant again. I was happy for her for a couple of different reasons, and though she was nervous, I knew she would come out swinging like a champ when it mattered most. What's even better is that I'm pretty sure she knew it too. It's amazing how accomplishing a small goal like "bettering yourself" can build your confidence. However, life happened again in a far more tragic sense than I referred to earlier, and she miscarried the baby. It's common, like aids and cancer and child death due to malnutrition are common. Common and sad and dispiriting and heartbreaking. Yet, somehow since she was thinking about God or for whatever reason God does things, God took care of her. She didn't snap. She didn't leave her Bible study, and to my knowledge, she didn't stop watching the same shows she's been watching on A&E for the last five years about the scientific debates over Biblical issues. She even seemed to come out of the tragedy as a bigger gift to the world around her. She's got spirit, that one, probably more than most.

To know her previously, you might think of her as self centered, shallow, and maybe annoying at times. She was also fun loving, out going, and fiercly loyal when she thought she should be. I don't think we as people have "sides" as much as we act like we do. We can feed or starve behaviors. My friend may have some bitterness still tucked away somewhere that her plan for a family wasn't what she was dealt. I know I would (and will, because things hardly ever go to plan). I can, in my own way, train behavioral patterns into myself of not trying to please people, and just trying to do what I truly believe in, whatever that is, but of course even when I do manage to act as I should when presented with an uncomfortable situation, I'm going to sit there and worry about what the people think of me now if I've pooped on their party.

If we can go to church for just a second, something in a sermon from a couple of months ago (I think) has really stuck with me. "When Jesus told ZachAttack (okay, that wasn't said, but man it should've been) "you need to be born again," he didn't mean it in the way we think about it now." What he meant was that ZachAttack needed to have something happen to him that would turn his entire world upside down and force him to rethink his views on everything. I'm not sure if this interp is right or not (argue it out, theologians), but it really stuck with me because I think it's happened to me.

That being said, I'm a couple of years removed from my real low point now, and I think I'm pretty becoming better adjusted from everything. I'm even proud of myself at times for how I've bounced back in some ways.

That being said, it occurred to me in the shower about an hour ago (hey, I had to bathe in between all of this) that if the exact same series of events were to happen to me in the mindset that I'm in right now, I don't know think that my reaction would be any healthier or much different than it was the first time.

I've had two things that rocked me hard enough to rethink my outlook on life. One was when I was seventeen, and I decided I needed to decide what was important in life, where the misfocus was, and what adults were missing from their lives because way too many of them (at least the ones around me) seemed unhappy. Marriage, jobs, whatever - I didn't want to grow up and be like anyone around me, except maybe my older sister. I realized that I was missing a feeling that there was something pure in the world, I started looking & praying for something, and it came unexpectedly enough (to me at least) in the praying and the searching. God was there in the hunt for something that was sincere and good and innocent to think about. The goodness of God was what I was seeking. I just had no idea about that at the time.

The next one was the dreaded Summer of doooooooooooooooom, where Randy Orton got the World Title and some other things happened too. The reaction to it came in a unknown fight from yours truly against it, and truth be told, I've never been that good in fights. After about eleven or so months of fighting, I was beginning to realize that I was trying to convince myself I was happy instead of honestly smiling about things, and once that sets in, depression is a tough thing to avoid. I had a Godsend show up to do ungodly things like watch South Park and eat obscene amounts of snow cones with me to keep my spirits up, but the bottom line was that this was my fight to fight, and I had to man-up to this one myself. So life intervened (in a good way this time) for my friend, which actually worked out decently in some ways because it forced me to start being proactive in looking for good feelings again. It wasn't an "all in" search like the last time (I didn't have the confidence or energy for that effort), but I was keeping my eyes open and running with things when I'd notice them jogging up beside me.

Go through the mistakes and rebounds, highs and lows, slam the gas ahead as we pass a lot of inner turmoil and slam the breaks as we reach the present day, and when left to my own devices outside of pressure and expectations, I can find a lot of things to be happy about. Not the least of which is waking up in the middle of the night to find yourself staring at a ceiling, just to think to yourself "Ah, it's there. I'm a pretty lucky guy."

You know, I've had tons more rudimentations tonight that I could go on into, but my typing hasn't been able to keep up with my mind, and you probably gave up reading this a long time ago. Besides that, I have to get up in three hours for a free meeting with a personal trainer. There's no time like the present to start the future's habits - even if I can't afford further lessons (which I explained, but he was insistent on me coming, so huzzah).

During English courses in college (and really since fifth or sixth grade), we're taught to sum up our point at the end of a piece. However, I'm not sure what the point of all this is. I wanted it to be sincere, and I think I've accomplished that on a personal level. I wanted to talk about how we can change our lives and reactions by simply making it a point to change our habits (oops, got veered away on that one, but the beginning part of it was there. You can read it twice if you want, take a logical enough leap and you might come to the same conclusion on the matter that I did).

I also think that what we accomplish doesn't really matter to most people. What we do on the way to that accomplishment does. "It's the journey, not the destination." You've heard it. You may have said it. You wonder how many high school yearbooks it's appeared in over the years. The cool thing is that if we're paying attention, we're always trying to figure a little bit more out, and if we pay enough attention and get lucky simultaneously, we may even cough up a grain of truth that we never knew we had in us to begin with. If June through September of 2004 happened again, I might not go through a different process than the one I went through the first time it happened, but at least I'm aware of that, so that I might not get freaked out by that realization later if such a reaction (preceded by such an event of course) does come to pass.

After all, it's just life. Spouses really can and often do love each other. Kids love their parents. Married people (and single people to) make love as an act of vulnerability to each other sometimes. Homeless people will joke around a steel can fire for both warmth and company. Approach a stranger and the joke they make may not be to ease the discomfort, but it may be worth it just to share life for a minute.

After all, it's just life. There's crying at the beginning and end. In the middle, if we're lucky, maybe something worth writing about will happen.

That being said, I love my sister, my best friend, my biz-natch, and all of you too. Now cue the indie song as I go to fade out.