Monday, 09 March 2009

• Currently Office Space (Widescreen Edition) By Jennifer Aniston, Diedrich Bader, Joe Bays, Josh Bond, Gary Cole see related

  Mad Video Game Skills (as in, my skills at handling video games that used to make me mad)

  Wow.What a year it’s been.When I look back at events beyond one year ago, sometimes I feel like I am looking into another life, the memories of someone who grew up with me but is not me.Not that I've developed a split personality.In fact, I’d say I'm more of a whole person now than I ever have been – a person more aware of whom I am and willing to accept every part of me.

   

  After I quit student teaching, I found myself delightfully lost.For the first time in my adult life, I was without a clear direction or path.It was incredibly refreshing.You know that part of “Office Space” where the main guy gets hypnotized so he doesn’t worry about anything?It was like that.I had this chemically induced epiphany of how little what other people thought of me mattered.My wife and I have always been great at communicating and now it just got better.I care about her and she cares about me, but it was so freeing to be able to talk about what we wanted out of life completely apart from what we thought we were “supposed” to want.And this led to all sorts of revelations.

  One of the small but in my mind significant revelations was a definite change in the way I played video games.I love video games.I always have.But I used to get so irritable when I was playing them that I could only play them when no one else was around or else I’d snap at them.Now I realized how insane this is.I used to look at that little score in the corner of the screen and, totally without realizing it, a little part of me would actually let that score determine how I felt about myself.I was so adrift in a sea of external expectations that I even let 16-bit code tell me how I should feel about myself.It’s a revelation that I still use in my life when I come up against a negative person.Where I used to feel bad about myself, now I just visualize that video game score going down. And as it goes down, I recognize how silly it is to gauge anything real by it.

  Sorry for dragging this out.This whole series of reflections has gotten a lot longer than I meant it to be.But I think I’d rather take this slow and really examine all the ways my life has changed.So more revelations to come.

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