Mentalechoes

It struck me again today as I was sitting in a management meeting, listening to two guys go off at each other, that working for someone else is largely a waste of time. I mean lets face it, someone else is making the money off my blood sweat, and swearing (I never shed tears about work).  Which led to the question to myself – what in the hell was I doing there? The answer of course was pretty simple – I got bills to pay at the end of every month just like every other person over the age of 16, and money doesn’t grow on trees.

I started thinking about all the good ideas that I had come up with, and promptly didn’t do anything past daydreaming. And then I look at the guy who thought up the idea on which our company is founded, and realise that he actually did something with his. It was then that I realised that the person who actually gets ahead in life, isn’t the guy who has the best idea, but is the guy that gets off his arse and actually does something with it.

A simple yet brilliant realisation, one that actually could make a difference if I let it’s secret penetrate deep into my slackers brain, and maybe generate a movement or two. I did think up a good idea a little while ago, but now I don’t think it’s so great anymore. I still think that my little lesbian porn production company making content for mobile devices is a winner, but my business partner doesn’t want to do it anymore on account of his wife killing him for looking at other women make out naked.

Maybe a little more thought is needed.

Padwanna!

It is complete now. Two ends of time are neatly tied…

– Andy Priebo, “Tomorrow Wendy”.

I came full circle today. A year ago it started, today it ended. I could talk about all the reasons why, but in the end, what does it matter who’s right and who’s wrong when we both lose everything we had together?! A broken heart doesn’t know logic, only feelings. And there were so many feelings. But that time of life is now over, and so I’m going to draw the curtain on it and let it become part of my past gracefully, because knowing when to let go is just as important as knowing when to fight and hold on.

It’s kind of surprisingly though that right now an old friend from my past has arrived back in the country.  He was pretty much my first friend here in Amsterdam when I moved to this city. Back then Sime and I were just another couple of hedonistic pleasure seekers come to the city of sin in search of vice. Fate would have it that he and I got a job in the same foreigner run european company in the World Trade Center (in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; for those of you who might not understand that Europe has a couple as well), and soon after meeting we became pretty tight friends. Well about 3 years ago Sime left for parts unknown in a monster truck with his then girlfriend (now wife), a laptop computer with a ton of music on it, and a big multinational conglomerate about 2 steps behind with a demand that he pay back the 8 months of contractor wages he was paid, when he wasn’t even working there. Luckily he got out of town in time and enjoyed a further 8 months travelling around lovely Europe from top to bottom with the conglomerates donations. Now he and his wife are back with their new born baby son in tow, for a six month stint in Den Haag, and I’m going to go down there and catch up with him. It’ll be funny that first meeting, I mean, he’s the same ole Sime, but at the same time, Sime with a kid and wife and a middle aged lifestyle. So maybe things have changed! Well, knowing him, I really doubt it, but I sure am looking forward to finding out.

I reckon though, that as tempting as the lure is of a middle aged lifestyle amongst decent people can be, it’s still not something I see myself doing. No, I think instead I’ll end up being this old hedonist, who’s life is populated with stories that come straight out of a Bukowski novel, that shocks some and entertains others. It’s a path that definitely seems to be taking form in front of me.

Padwanna!

I found a definition of a workaholic today that scared me.

A workaholic works or keeps busy with activity compulsively and leaves little or no time to be alone and quiet. Therefore, we usually don’t know who we are and what we really feel and want. Work and activity are the primary focuses in our lives, often excluding others.

We workaholics usually don’t respect time, underestimating how much time it will take to do something, or trying to do several things at once. Because we have an overwhelming need to be active and productive, we enjoy seeing how much we can do in the least amount of time. It makes us feel worthwhile and alive. Work is our drug of choice.

Not realizing how powerless we really are, we seek to control all phases of our lives. We take responsibility for the outcome of our work and worry about how it will make us look. We try to control people, and if we could, the outcome of everything. We usually have little faith in the ability of others, of Higher Power, or of universal wisdom.

After years of this, naturally, our health begins to fail from stress, exhaustion, and related problems. We may find ourselves alone and isolated, having not bothered to form meaningful relationships. Our love was for work, activity, and perhaps money, which we believed would solve our problems.

Taken from this site.

It scared me because it’s sounds like me right now. The funny thing is I never really thought of myself as the workaholic type because really I’m more the bone lazy type, who you definitely wouldn’t describe with the words “work” and “hard” together in the same sentence. But somewhere along the line on this project I am on – which at this point seems like it has been going for the last hundred years – I actually became a workaholic. I’ve got all the telltale signs; ostracised friends, shitty sleeping patterns, some red rash over my body because of stress, and I work on company work seven days a week. I’m pretty sure the rash is from stress, which is to say it better be from stress, otherwise I’m a bit fucked. It’s a bit hard to tell though because I can’t find a good rash site on the internet anywhere. I never used to obsess about money that much either until a few months ago, when I realised that if I was working this hard, I better by paid for it. So far I haven’t been, which only makes me think more about the money I don’t have, that I should have, which could all be put towards buying more useless crap for my flat, and some decent narcotics for the weekends I don’t have off.

I look at the workaholics glamourised on American teevee, like all the lawyers on the lawyer shows now saturating the english speaking dutch channels, and there seems to be a big difference between them and me. For starters they all live in really flashy posh houses and own flash cars, and slick suits, and go to all the best parties with famous other workaholic lawyers. I don’t seem to have those same perks in my life though. In fact, my life now as a workaholic is pretty much the same as when I was unemployed, except I work longer hours, and have a lot less free time. Apart from that, it’s more or less the same life I’ve always had. Something seems a bit off with this.

I’m going to make a promise to myself that this is the last time I trade in my life to work for some company and their “this is the most important project in the whole world and if it doesn’t get completed on time then the world will be consumed by fire before exploding into annihilation and noone will ever pay for this hugely expensive thing we have invested bazillions of rubles on” project. Somehow, just because you don’t have a wife and kids, they seem to think that you’ll always be there to do thy bidding, and slave away. Well if I keep doing that, then I’ll just end up keeping on doing that, and yeah, I’ll wake up and wonder if I still know anybody outside of my office.

Time to organise some time off I think.

Padwanna!

For the last couple of days I have been watching a mum and dad pair of birds building a nest in the bough of a tree just outside my office window. This is the second time they’ve been at this because the first little happy nest got decimated in a force 9 storm that tore through western Europe a few weeks ago. Without a chirp of complaint (that I can make out with my limited knowledge of budgie) mum and dad have been working away steadily in daylight hours to make a new home for the spring, when they will get busy with each other, and make some eggs, which will hopefully be the start of a new family for them.

Now I’m really not the overly sensitive type when it comes to nature, but there is something calming and reassuring watching mum and dad build their little stick palace for the young’uns to come. I don’t know what it is, or even why I feel this way, but deep inside of me I am silently cheering them on, and hoping that they make something quite cool for the kids arrival. Maybe it’s some nature part of me that I’ve managed to suppress all these years living in big cities that is getting a bit dizzy with the excitement of it all. I’m not sure. But I do find myself more often than not looking out the window to see how they are doing, particularly when I am getting a bit stressed with all the work shit happening around me.

Maybe all these years of being told I sound like Steve Irwin are finally having an affect on my psychologically, and I’m starting to love nature like he did. Yeah I doubt it! Truth be told, I find it just a little bit inspiring that two little dinky birds like that are making the best of their situation, even when they have to start all over again after losing everything but each other.

Sickenly sweet, wouldn’t you say?!

Padwanna!

Today is the two year anniversary of my friends death. It’s difficult for me to come to terms with the time that’s past since he left. It seems such a long time and short time all at once. There are times when I can almost imagine him still being here, and other times when I wonder if he was here at all. I don’t have any photos of him. He wasn’t really a photo person, you know. Not really the type who enjoyed being put in pictures. So all of my memories of him are just that, memories.

A close friend said to me last night, “what do we really know”? I knew exactly what she meant, we plan our lives with such meticulous detail – actually others not so much me – in an effort to make sure we reduce the unexpected and uncertainity that we experience, but in the end what does it get you? We can’t see what’s coming minute to minute, let alone, year to year. How can you make plans for life when life itself is such a big question mark. All this reminds me of a joke my grade 12 Anglican teacher told the class one day. Know how to make God laugh? Tell him what you’re doing tomorrow.

I remember for the first two months after the funeral, I couldn’t plan anything, not even what I was going to do on the weekend. It seemed farcical to me to plan anything when this illusion of life could be so easily blown away, like so much mist in a strong breeze. I simply stopped being able to do anything that wasn’t in the immediate present. I found it very hard to talk to people, and relate to their everyday lives, and concerns. I remember even walking out of a party because I couldn’t stand the innane crap that some girl kept talking to me about. In hindsight she was only talking about some concerns she had with moving house, but to me it was all very meaningless. If there was no tomorrow, then don’t bother looking there.

Two years on, I feel some of those same feelings today, especially given the events of the last 24 hours, but I realise something now that I didn’t back then. Life is also about hope. With hope comes belief that there can be a tomorrow, that is brighter than today. It’s true that anything can happen at any time, and there is nothing that we can do about that. But if you let that knowledge take hope away from you, then your life quickly becomes meaningless as you stop believing tomorrow will be something worthwhile. For really, as the Dalai Lama said, the purpose of our lives is to be happy.

Still, this sadness at his passing is a part of me for a while longer.

RIP Gav!

Padwanna!

I got some news this morning that brought back a lot of painful memories that I thought I had let go of. A good friend of mine experienced an enormous tragedy Saturday morning, one which I have seen before. I couldn’t believe that I would ever live to hear that same tragedy happen again to someone in my circle of friends, and yet two years later, almost to the day, it has happened, and brought with it a torrent of emotions.

To have paid witness to a tragedy like this once is enough, but to experience this again – even though I am much further removed from it this time – seems perverse, bizarre and somehow unfair in a way I just can’t even describe in words.

My heart is with someone else today, and I really hope for them that they can find the strength of will to survive the weeks and months ahead. God knows she will need every bit of it she has inside of her, and all the support she can get if she is to make it.

For myself, I am now drawn back to a time when I said goodbye to a close friend, on a cold autumn afternoon in Edinburgh only a short time ago. And all the sadness I felt on that day is with me now. I guess there are some things in life which we never really forget.

Padwanna!

For those of you that have been here before, you might be wondering what looks different about the site from last time you looked. You might see that it looks very uncluttered right now, as in it’s not bogged down with a whole of lot of hard written entries over the last few months. In fact for a blog that’s been going two bloody years, it has only one entry at all! Strange you might say… odd even!

Well it’s not so strange when you consider the fact that with one foolish click of a button I just deleted my entire blog database thereby nuking all my posts back to nonexistence. Stupid you might say, fucking retarded even! No argument there. I’m still trying to come terms with what I just did. A coke can has more brains than that!

But wait you say, what about the backups? You got backups… right?!

Well I thought about backups the way you probably think about a sex disease; accidents always happen to someone else, but it’s not going to happen to me! As with (almost) everything else in our lives, you just have to learn the hard way if you’re going to learn anything at all.

So here I am again, once more starting out fresh and anew. The whole blogosphere is a field of dreams full of hope and expectation for me. And I get to start all over again, making my mark on it. Well at least now my more trashy entries will be spared from public viewing and potential ridicule. Which is a shame because I like the attention really.

Right then… one more time for the gipper! (As they say)!

Padwanna!

(PS: I still have my old posts from 2005 to the end of 2006 on blogger, but I haven’t yet worked out how to get them imported here. Something about new blogger being a screaming bitch not wanting to hand over my entries to some other software. Or there not being an updated import utility yet. Yeah well, the details not important but I can’t do it right now. Soon… I hope, because I can’t stand the wide open spaces here now).