Category: Thoughts

By and large, I am a huge fan of holidays. They are a great time to celebrate things that are worth remembering, and a great way to spend time with friends, family and significant others.

The only thing I don’t like about holidays are the social expectations that come with them. You *have* to get presents for people at Christmas, you *have* to visit family at Thanksgiving, you *have* to do something for your significant other on Valentine’s day. Okay, you don’t really *have* to do any of those things – Maybe you can’t financially afford Christmas presents, maybe you’re trying to avoid an argument with a certain family member, maybe you’re stuck at work on Valentine’s day. Things happen. But let’s be real. If you don’t, the people who matter the most to you are going to look at you funny, make silent judgments, and be disappointed in you, so you pretty much do have to take part even if you don’t want to.

“Well Michael”, I hear you saying. “Doesn’t someone not putting in the effort for a holiday mean they don’t care?” Well, sure, not putting in an effort for a holiday or not putting in the effort you’re expecting them to can very well be a sign they don’t care. But this isn’t necessarily the case. If someone really doesn’t care, it will be obvious in areas other than holidays as well. If it’s something that really bothers you that much, have a conversation with that person – open communication is way more important than avoiding an issue. But remember that as soon as you bring something like that up, it will turn that holiday into something the other person *has* to do, and will likely add to their stress next time that holiday comes up.

Generally I am the kind of person who takes part of and celebrates holidays because I want to, and not because I have to. I enjoy holidays, and I enjoy showing the people who mean the most to me that I care. But there’s nothing worse than someone else making me feel like I have to do a certain thing – it turns a holiday from something I take part in because I enjoy showing affection to something I do because I don’t want to disappoint the other person. The former is pursuing a positive emotion / event, and the latter is avoiding a negative emotion / event, and feeling like I have to perform holiday duties due to the latter is a frustrating and draining experience.

If you do need to have a discussion with a loved one in your life who is being a total bummer on holidays, I don’t see a good way in getting around this that will make both people immediately happy. Someone is going to in the short-term future be irked. But I suppose it may help if you make best efforts to be kind and show empathy during the conversation, and if you show appreciation and gratitude for things they do well, and forgiveness for when they try and have honest mess-ups. Improvement can be hard and is a process. Grace is important here.

Anyway, on a definitely totally unrelated note, it is Valentine’s day, and I am single, so since I don’t need to worry about any of that for today, I am going to the gym and playing chess this evening, and it is going to be freaking awesome. 😁 Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

A lot of you have been asking me how I’m doing now that I’m finally living on my own. For the most part I’ve been responding, “Oh, I can’t complain!”, and this is true. I really can’t complain. Other than dealing with the periodic bouts of existential crisis that seem to be typical of young adults my age, I am doing very well, and according to an internet article I read earlier this week complaining rewires your brain to be more negative, so that’s something I’d rather not get started doing anytime soon.

Anyway, living in an apartment has been mostly as expected, though I’ve noted a few interesting things from the experience so far.

Cooking a nice meal for myself is really satisfying. It also takes a very very long time.

When you consider time spent planning, looking up recipes, setup and cleanup, hunting for groceries and, like, waiting for stuff to cook, making yourself food takes quite a while. I’ve stopped silently judging when I read articles about people who eat out nearly every meal, and I’ve stopped feeling inwardly prideful at my frugality when I hear that people spend more at restaurants these days than they do at grocery stores. Time is money, and when you’re young you gotta be working as hard as you can while you have the energy and stamina to learn things faster and do things quicker.

I don’t know how people who live by themselves keep up with houses.

I spend enough time cleaning and maintaining a 1-bedroom apartment that I shudder to think what people would have to do if they worked full time, had any sort of active social life or hobbies, and try to fix all their things and mow all their own grass and clean three times as much space on a weekly basis and keep up with all the extra insurance and bills and still get some sleep at the end of the day! You guys are clearly nuts lol.

Moving out is going to be much harder than moving in.

When I moved out of my parents house, I barely had any furniture to take with me to put in my apartment. I had a bed, a beanbag, a card table and a folding chair, and that was about it. Over the past two months I have procured numerous appliances and furnishings necessary to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, and along with them a grim realization that some day this whole ‘renting’ thing is going to come to an end and I’m going to have to rent a moving truck. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there though.

Doing pretty much everything in my underwear is really satisfying!

Why? Because I can! 😀 From the time I’ve been three until now society has told me to put some clothes on at the beginning of the day, but if I’m living in my own place I can do whatever I want and not only does nobody care, nobody even knows! The only reason I don’t run around my place naked is because I don’t want to get any stray butt crud all over my furniture. I’m definitely not about that life.

As a bonus, it also saves money during the summer since I can keep my air conditioner up a couple degrees.

It’s a really mixed bag as to if I like living on my own or liked living with my parents more.

This is a good thing though! I purposefully stayed living at home with my parents for as long as I could, knowing that living on my own was going to be more expensive and a lot more work. I thought when I had to move out that, while I would be responsible enough to take care of myself, I wouldn’t ever enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the lesser responsibilities of living with my parents. While I wasn’t wrong that it is more work, I didn’t anticipate quite how rewarding it would feel to be living on my own and no longer dependent on them. If the situation had been a little bit different I would have gladly kept on staying with my parents, but living on my own has been a lot more fun at times than I thought it would be.

So all in all I’m doing very well! The rent is very competitive, especially considering the area, size of the apartment, included utilities and temperament of the landlord, and I like the way that I have furniture set up.

For some time now, I have been wanting to start a blog.

I had a blog once before, back a long time ago. I think I was around 14 or 15 at the time. I don’t remember what I said on it, but it sure would be interesting to find and pull up. Maybe I’ll go and do that once I’m done writing this. It may be interesting to go and look back on what 14 or 15 year old Michael was thinking and catch up with him a bit. Then again, it may also be really embarrassing, given that 14 or 15 year old Michael was known less for his social graces or wisdom of his words, and more for being a terribly awkward homeschooled kid who was just beginning to learn about the world outside of the Christian-homeschool-family bubble by working in the backroom of the local computer store. Aahh, good memories, good memories…

ANyway! More recently (four-ish years ago?) I stumbled upon an interesting discovery, quite by accident: I kinda like writing. I had known this growing up in high school in the back of my head, but at the time I was much more fascinated with writing words to make computers do my bidding than I was interested in writing words to convey any thoughts or ideas to other people. Other people, I thought, were mostly very strange. I did not understand them, and they seemed to not understand me either, especially with my speech impediment that I had during high school. Of course I did not think that anybody in my Christian-homeschool-family bubble was strange. These people all seemed fairly magnificent, and while it was a shame that everybody wasn’t more like them and like myself. At the time I didn’t think too much about this or question the underlying assumptions I was making in deciding which people were strange and which were okay. This is not a bunny trail, I promise!

Okay maybe this is a bunny trail, but let me tie it back in with my interesting discovery I made about four-ish (five-ish?) years ago about how I kinda like writing. About four-ish years ago or so, the first endeavor a girl and I had made at what we thought we were supposed to do when you discover the other person feels the same way about you as you do about them ended about as terribly and uglily as this awful run-on sentence is turning out to be which I spent a good seven or eight minutes of my life writing that I’ll never get back. Anyway! Shortly after that, I realized that my social development stunted by a speech impediment and sheltered lifestyle during critically formative years had not really gifted much in the ways of close friends of the opposite gender. As I was a little older and more experienced than I had been back in high school, I realized that this was going to make it difficult to find ladies to have more phone calls and do things on Friday nights with. However, I was single, nearing the end of my education at Harrisburg Area Community College, and I had a bit of extra time on my hands. I realized that this could be an excellent time to work on improving myself in various areas of my life, and ultimately becoming a better person.

So I joined the online dating website OkCupid.

Now let me tell you about what happens when you join OkCupid. What happens when you join OkCupid is that the website asks everybody questions such as ‘Which sounds more romantic, kissing in a tent on a camping trip or kissing under the Eiffel Tower?’, ‘Do you believe in God?’, and ‘Would you squeal like a dolphin during sex if your partner asked?’, and, based off this information, determines if you and other emotionally desperate people could be a good match for each other. And let me tell you, there were a lot of questions you could answer about yourself on that website. Cloaked in relatively thin anonymity, I ended up answering several hundred such questions during my time on OkCupid.

But that was not my favorite part of OkCupid. My favorite part of the site was reading about what other people had written about themselves. In addition to answering questions about yourself, you can also write a short bio of the kind of person you are, filling in sections under prompts for what you’re doing with your life, what your favorite movies or books are, and what kinds of things you’re looking for in another person. Reading what other people had written was fascinating! 14-year-old Michael might have been right in thinking that other people were indeed mostly very strange, but this was wonderfully more interesting than high-school me had ever realized! Some people would put very little time or effort into their profiles, and I would usually leave these people alone. I quickly reached the point where I wouldn’t even check pictures that a girl had uploaded until I had read through her profile and made an assessment about whether this was somebody worth spending time with. It was great!

It was also immensely enjoyable to write up my own bio as well. I made an effort into making my bio interesting to read, and would periodically revise parts of it that I realized weren’t written very well. Messages I sent on the site took on a similar skew; most of the first messages I would ever send a girl would end up at least several sentences long, and I ended up having some great conversations with people that I likely never would have met or had conversations with in real life. Eventually I ended up meeting the wonderful lady I’m dating right now, and also re-discovering something I had forgot about: I really, really like writing.

Obviously these days I am not on OkCupid anymore. For the past year, the main outlet I’ve had for actual writing has come from Facebook, where I’ve enjoyed writing posts about things that purposefully have more to do with how I’m doing and less about whatever-the-trending-thing-to-complain-about-is. However, it seems that social media is a poor platform for really sharing deep thoughts and ideas; its format encourages short posts of a few sentences or less, and obviously harbors all sorts of negativity and complaints about whatever-the-trending-thing-to-complain-about-is. Blogging seems much better suited for detailed explanations, deeper thoughts and long-winded rants than the social media construct does. It also seems like a much better tool to use for honest, real writing, even if it’s really crappy writing that goes off on tangents about girls, internet dating websites and squealing like dolphins. Don’t get me wrong, social media sites like Facebook have their place. But I’ve been looking to branch out for some time, and now that I’m graduated from college and don’t have to worry about homework on the weekends, I’m going to take the opportunity to do something more than playing through several centuries of Civilization 6 on the weekends until my eyes fall out of my head.

I can’t give any promises about what all I’m going to write about on here, how often I’ll write it, or whether the writing will be any good. But dangit I want to write, even if nobody ever reads this and this whole website fades into the sands of time as all things inadvertently do.

The future will belong to the people who are writing things today. A picture may very well be worth a thousand words, but writing is often the most efficient and one of the most effective ways to make a point or get an idea across.

I’m curious to hear what you guys think about all this. Part of why I’m gonna be writing a blog is to get the chance to hear what you think about some of my deeper thoughts and ideas that can’t be expressed adequately on social media.