Posts Tagged 'Life'
November 4, 2010
As I recently mentioned, I’m working through moving from one phase of my great Chicago Adventure to another. The Genesis of this transition was a couple of weekends ago, when a friend was in town and invited me to a house concert in Pilsen. “Sounds great!” I said. “See you there.” I’d never even heard of Pilsen.
Pilsen, it turns out, is a large neighborhood southwest of downtown. So I jumped on the L and headed further out from home than I’d yet gone. The apartment where I was ultimately headed was a 15 minute walk from the station, so after getting off the train, I found myself strolling down a street unlike any I’d yet seen in Chicago.
After just a brief glance, its obvious that Pilsen is a predominantly hispanic neighborhood. The restaurants, shops and storefronts were all lined with Dia de los Muertos decorations, the sides of buildings were beautifully painted in huge, distinctly urban-hispanic murals, and the sweet scent of Mexican bakeries filled the evening air as I passed block after block dotted with art galleries and handmade craft shops. From the brief experience I had, it was a lovely, charming neighborhood.
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Posted in Personal | Balance | Chicago | Chipotle | Dallas | Kickstand | Life | Pilsen | Transition | Yelp
August 25, 2010
You know, fortune cookies would be a lot more believable if you got a bad one every now and then. Nothing horrifically doom and gloom, mind you. Just the occasional “You’re going to incur some unexpected expenses.” or “Good friends are indispensable; too bad one of yours is about to split.” Otherwise, all you need to do to improve your circumstance is to order out for Chinese.
Similarly, you need to have some rough patches to appreciate the good. If there were no bad times, there wouldn’t be any good times, either. They’d just be… times. Its a difficult thing to acknowledge and embrace when you’re in the middle of a rough patch, though.
On the other side of things, though, when things are going well, the last thing I want to do is think about bad times. But it’s just as important to remember where you’ve been as it is to look forward to what’s ahead. You need to look back on the less than stellar times and appreciate them and how far you’ve come since.
I’m in a pretty good place right now, and the most palpable way for me to appreciate it in the midst is to remember when it wasn’t quite like this. If I only think about the here and now, I might not even realize how good I have it until I’ve moved on. And sometimes, that little mental acknowledgment is enough to promote a “time” to a “good time”.
Let them roll.
Posted in Personal | Appreciation | Dualism | Fortune Cookies | Life | Perspective | Remembering | The Past
December 12, 2008
It was last Wednesday, and I was plowing through what would end up being my longest work day at Pursuant yet. Most of the work that I do at my job is fundraising for Universities or Fraternities. I usually try to become familiar with all of the projects that I set up and at least see what the client is about, what they’re proposing, requesting, etc. It being our busy season though, lately I haven’t always been able to do that, and I’ve finished some projects without having even watched the entire presentation from start to finish.
That particular day, between watching requests to “support the bond of brotherhood” and “keep our school spirit alive,” I set up a small-scale client called “The Miami Project.” Knowing nothing about them, I did my initial setup that I do for any new project and put all the appropriate video and image files where they should be and then browsed to the video to see if everything was working.
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Posted in Personal | Charity | Compassion | Conviction | Life | Pursuant | Religion
May 16, 2007
Right, so I’m thus far completely failing at my recent “Quantity over Quantity” creed. I have discovered that my life is far too dull to have enough material to write two or three times a week. Won’t stop me from trying, though.
Well, today is my first last day of school. After tonight, I will never go to class again for the first time. At least not as an undergrad. And that’s a pretty nice feeling.
Almost… there…
Posted in Personal | Blogging | College | Consistency | Life
March 20, 2007
That’s right, it was exactly one month ago today that I made my last blog post. Go me!!
But, yeah, life’s gotten a little busier lately. Work has picked up a lot, leaving me little down time during the day to just meander around the internet like I used to be able to. But ,that’s definitely a good thing. And, school has picked up a little, with final projects and the like nearing, requiring me to actually devote a decent amount of time to them when I’m at home. And, well, I just haven’t had much to write about of late. Sorry to have let all 6 of you regular readers down.
Hopefully, I’ll have slightly more regular posts after this one, but I make no promises. Except, I do have a post planned for April 2nd, so keep your eyes open for that one. Who knows, I might even post something else between now and then. Who loves you? That’s right. Caleb does.
And don’t you forget it.
Posted in Personal | Anniversaries | Blogging | Consistency | Life
September 23, 2006
Before you say anything accusing me of plagiarism, let me willingly and gladly admit that I stole the phrase from John Mayer. I heard it in the song “Why Georgia” the other day and realized that it pretty well describes me at this point in my life.
So, I’m barely 23. Still in school. Still at home. Still single. No career yet. Looking back, my status doesn’t seem to have changed much from 5 years ago. Sure, I’ve made some advancements in life. I’m a semester and a half away from graduation. I’ve got a few extremely awesome potential jobs on the horizon. I’ve learned a lot, and I’d like to think that I’m a much different person than I was right out of High School. But, ignoring those things, and really just looking at my “status” here, not considering any emotional, spiritual, or intellectual growth that I’ve gone through, just generally looking at where I am on the journey of life, I’m not much further along than I was right out of High School. Except, of course, for my newfound ability to make insanely long run-on sentences.
But, that kind of frustrates me. And it kind of scares me. And it kind of makes me feel like life is slipping through my fingers.
So, yes, I realize that this doesn’t really make any sense. If life-expectancy is to be believed, I’ve still got a good sixty years left in me. But, unfortunately, emotions rarely listen to the voice of reason, so even though I know that it’s ridiculous, it’s still how I feel. It seems like my life has, for so long, been more an anticipation of great things to come than anything else. While my life has, in reality, been perfectly fine, I’ve been so focused on the possibilities in the future, that I kind of miss out on the “here and now.” Now that I realize that I tend to miss out on things, because I’m so busy thinking about and hoping for the future, I am put in an unusual place. I am still looking forward to the future, and there is a lot that is likely going to happen in the next five years of my life that I’m super-excited about. But, at the same time, I don’t want to miss out on the life that I have right now. I want to take advantage of what I have now and where I am now, but at the same time, I want to be more “grounded” in life with a little more stability.
For example, some people want to wait until their older to get married and settle down. Youth is a time of freedom and self-discovery. You spend the prime years of your life meandering around, having as much fun as you can, experiencing as much as you can, and then after you’ve had your fill, then you get married and settle down. Life as you know it is over, as you start your “new” life with your spouse.
I don’t see it that way. While I’m not at all for rushing into marriage before you’re ready or anything, at the same time, I am not at all drawn to that idea of trying to enjoy as much of life as you can before you are “tied down” by marriage. Whoever I end up marrying is going to be, in my eyes, the most amazing person that I’ve ever met, or else I wouldn’t marry them. If that’s the case, then why wouldn’t I want to start my life with them as soon as humanly possible? I’m probably over-romanticizing this, but I don’t want to wait until I’m 30 to get married, just because I wanted some “alone” time before I settled down with the ol’ “ball-and-chain,” (I hate that phrase) when I could have had an extra 5 or 10 years with that one person in the world who was created just for me. I don’t want to waste the so-called “best years of my life” on myself.
Now, I’m not just sitting on the edge of my seat, waiting to leap head-long into the first opportunity that shows itself. I’m willing to wait however long it takes. But, I can’t say that I’m not a little anxious for that to at least start to take shape. ‘Cause right now, any form of stability and settling seems as distant and vague as it did right out of High School.
Why, Georgia? Why?
Posted in Personal | Growing Up | John Mayer | Life | Marriage | Patience | Transition
