Year: 2013

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Where am I?

For months now, I’ve kept hoping against hope that I’d have time to organize my thoughts in some coherent manner, but I don’t think that will happen any time soon. I’ve overcommitted to things (work and extracurricular) and haven’t had nearly enough downtime to process some of these long strands of thoughts that I really need to resolve. On the one hand, being super busy keeps the demons at bay; on the other, things just pile up and will come to a head eventually. Anyway, these thoughts will be quite incomplete and not quite the magnum opus of posts envisioned in my mind.

Yes, I am actually going to move to San Francisco on what has been a more-or-less spur of the moment decision. I know a lot of friends were quite surprised when I told them, and to be honest, so was I. It was an idea that I’ve entertained for years, but never thought I would actually do. This is going to majorly derail what I thought I was going to do this year: buy a place in the South Bay or peninsula and settle down. Instead of laying down roots, I will be upending a good chunk my current life. I hope for the better, but I have lots of doubts. To say that I’m not a city person is an understatement. And to follow friends into the city and become a part of (and in some sense, buy into) that false cachet of living in San Francisco life pains me to the core. We’ll see how long I can stand the hipster snobbery, and whether through prolonged exposure I’ll become one of them or not.

But it’s been clear that my life has been stagnating of late, and with the recent, all-too-evident failures to progress on certain life goals, some self-imposed shakeup is absolutely necessary. I must admit that my not getting the promotion has affected me more than I would have expected, even having been warned beforehand that it would have been a tossup at best this cycle. I really could use a spark of inspiration on the work front, because my current set of projects are draining me and leaving something to be desired.

And the fact that I still can’t talk to this girl for fear that I might fall for her again really depresses me to no end. It’s just so stupid that I want to cry. Also, the fact that I keep having these dreams/nightmares does not help at all — even when I sleep 8 hours a night, I don’t feel rested at all in the morning.

Wedging some physical distance from work I hope will help combat the doldrums I seem to be in, as well as enable me to detach more from work. A change of scenery and a change of pace will likely do me good. I am not too keen on the longer commute, but if I can get some work (or sleep) done on the shuttle, I hope the extra 2 hours a day will not be a complete loss. And as much as I will miss whatever reduced contact with my friends down here, I’m excited to hopefully see more often my friends up there (whom I don’t visit nearly enough, and who also never seem to come down here). And to meet new people, even though it scares and exhausts me to do so.

At some point, I will have to go through the exact logistics of what I will and will not be able to do after the move. I really hope that I can stick with WB, but I’m really unclear if performing will be a real possibility. Maybe it will be good to not spend all non-work hours in ballet, to have some forced downtime and to explore new things. But I will really, really miss the friends and the experiences it’s given me. A lot of things are in the air right now, which is probably a good thing because I don’t know who I am, and now is as good a time as any to go exploring and figure some things out.

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My World, Strand 1: Hope

The past couple months have been quite interesting, and not at all in a good way. It’s taken quite a while to claw myself out of a very dark place, all the while under immense stress from both work and ballet. Which makes me wonder why I chose a hobby which I knew I’d be bad at, and why I keep at it — a clear sign of my masochistic tendencies. My health is slowly failing me; it’s probably a bad sign that I need an inhaler just to start the work day, and that I feel nauseous and short of breath while at work. (I still can’t tell if the nausea is from coffee or rejection.) I’ve been constantly on the verge of tears, just so frustrated with everything in my life, which maybe is a promising sign in the sense that to be frustrated means I still care about something, right? That my heart hasn’t completely ossified?

Not all is doom and gloom, though. I’m genuinely excited that a friend has proposed hiking the John Muir Trail this summer, even if it depletes my vacation days and then some. There’s nothing like buying a bunch of ultralight backpacking gear to brighten one’s mood (and empty one’s wallet). Plus I heard that there’s a USGS store in Menlo Park which has all the 7.5-minute topographic maps for California. I’m eagerly anticipating going and purchasing a bunch.

I admit that lately there have been days when I pretty much lost all hope in life and strongly considered quitting everything and moving somewhere far away, and it was only then that I realized how badly I need to keep hope alive. Maybe it’s stupidly obvious that one needs hope of a better tomorrow to get through the drudgeries of an imperfect today. But I guess my life really has been quite blessed, much as I complain about it, and most of the time I don’t really need to think about hope.

I am probably one of those guys who lives too much in the future and not enough in the present. I have all these plans and dreams for the future, and when they start failing or becoming infeasible, my world collapses. Despite the knowing cold and finiteness of life, it’s really hard to not think about the future when the present seems so incomplete. So I guess I do need to spend a little time nurturing those hopes and dreams instead of hiding behind this giant wall of work. And it’s comforting to hope that one day I will meet a girl even more wonderful and beautiful than ___, and that she will find me wonderful and beautiful, too.

Luckily, hope springs eternal, and it renews itself.

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The essential is invisible to the eyes

It’s strange how I’ve been so busy the past six weeks or so that I haven’t been able to post anything here. And now I see that my previous post was a list of new year’s resolutions, and how off target I am.

Just to reiterate the resolutions, which were not in any particular order:
1) Get promoted.
2) Buy a house.
3) Love ballet.
4) Be in a relationship.
5) Accept that I’ll be 30 soon.

The title of the post is from The Little Prince, which I’ve recently re-read in some of those few waking hours when I’m not at work or at ballet. After this re-reading of it, the book has basically vaulted into my top 10 favorite books of all time. It’s so beautifully succinct in its themes, so forcefully yet whimsically and mysteriously direct in its message.

And maybe these feelings are also compounded by the fact that I also recently read Tuesdays with Morrie, but looking at my life now — in a moment of reflection while having a nice, much-needed chat with a friend after a rather grueling workday — I see that almost none of what I’m doing is essential; and that furthermore, all but one of the resolutions I’ve made is essential. The rest are inconsequential.

What is essential? I think only resolution #4 truly matters.

Take #1, for instance. I’ve been pushing myself this year as a stress test to see where my breaking point is, and I think I’m near the limit. I’ve gone from essentially needing at most one cup of coffee’s worth of caffeine to three recently. Work and other life stresses I believe have contributed to my being sick this year, and while I can’t say for sure, I think stress is also related to this skin allergic reaction. It’s not that I don’t enjoy my work: I do, and I believe that most of what I work on is for the greater good (one of the benefits of working on the search side and not the ads side). Maybe this is not the most impactful way to contribute to the world, but I do truly believe that the projects I’m working on are steps in the right direction towards a vision of the world that we would want to live in.

The work-life balance pendulum swings in one direction and then the other, but when I start having nightmares about work, when I’m able to get 8 hours of sleep a night and still not feel at all rested — these might be signs that I’m overexerting myself. (Writing this, incidentally, means I’ll be short a couple hours of sleep tonight and tomorrow will suuuuck.) I’m straining to figure out how I can be more efficient at work, or how I can offload some projects. It actually does distress me a little knowing that last year I “won” our team’s award for writing the most launch reports (one of the bread and butter tasks of our team), and that the previous two recipients were the only two teammates in the past three years that have quit the company. One can’t say that my coworkers aren’t a smart and ambitious bunch, but working at this sustained level of stress is probably not a great long-term, steady-state solution.

Why do I even want to get promoted? Partly it would be for recognition. There are some interactions that are inherently difficult for my position: it’s part of my job to ask others to do things, and sometimes rank does play a noticeable role. But as long as I can do my job, which is true for the vast majority of cases, the title (and thus promotion) itself should be meaningless. Except for the part regarding compensation.

#2. As much as I keep repeating the mantra that I should be satisfied with what I have — which, objectively speaking, is tremendous — it’s so hard to not try to keep up with the Joneses. My income level is more than enough to let me do anything I can modestly desire. I feel like I should be able to afford to buy a place around here, and yet it seems so difficult to put together that 20% down payment when housing prices are rising so quickly. When you have enough friends your age who are millionaires, I guess it’s impossible not to feel a little envious, even if your materialistic desires are not as great as others’.

Part of me wants to own a place just so that I have an anchor somewhere. A mortgage would give me a much greater incentive to care about working (and #1) and to be vested in the Bay Area. Because while I enjoy living here, this is still not the place that I can readily call home. A part of me still yearns for San Diego. Having a house would also let me more easily get that Welsh Corgi or Scottish Fold.

The thing, though, is that there’s no reason why I can’t wait another year, or a few more years, before purchasing a home. I’m not even sure I’m in the right stage of my life to be owning a place, especially when other parts of my life are not settled down — does it really make sense to own a place if you’re not in a relationship? And if I don’t need to buy a house, I certainly don’t need any additional income from a promotion.

As for ballet (#3), it certainly has its benefits: good physical and mental exercise, a welcome and very different way to spend time outside of work. But it’s also a huge time sink: its very nature requires a huge time commitment to improve, and progress is glacial. (Of any activity, ballet is among the most time intensive to be passably okay at it. You can train for a year and run a marathon. If you do ballet for a year, you’ll still be terrible and look like absolute shit. Although maybe this sentiment is due to the fact that I knew it would be difficult for me even to begin with; the challenge was and is a big draw.) And frankly, the cognitive dissonance of it all has made me want to quit many times over the past few years.

I think my friends are right, though, that I’m not meeting any girls (or at least none within dating range). One of the secret (i.e., secondary) goals of my doing ballet was that I had hoped that I would feel less awkward around girls. I’m not sure that’s worked out at all. And while there’s probably nothing *inherently* wrong with spending practically every non-working, waking hour with teenage girls and married or older women, it’s also not particularly constructive in my search for a girlfriend.

And maybe there’s actually some truth in my friend’s statement that my devastating crush on ___ might be as much due to the fact that she’s conveniently *there*, rather than the fact that she’s, you know, absolutely perfect. (She also implied the same thing when she rejected me. I still don’t agree.)

And as others before me have pointed out, for #5, the other option is to be dead.

And so my friend has brought to focus that I’m currently spending all of my time pursuing #1 (for the sake of #2) and #3 (which admittedly does make me incomparably happy at times), and trying to quell those doubts of #5 and whether I should bother or if I’ll just die alone, that I’ve denied myself the energy and ability to spend on what really matters: #4. Maybe it’s time to re-prioritize my life to focus on what really matters and not these other distractions. That is, to spend time finding someone to love, to be able to share the experience of living with somebody, to finally be able to see the essential.