{"id":751,"date":"2009-10-07T15:34:19","date_gmt":"2009-10-07T23:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/?p=751"},"modified":"2009-10-07T15:34:19","modified_gmt":"2009-10-07T23:34:19","slug":"how-i-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/2009\/10\/07\/how-i-live\/","title":{"rendered":"how i live"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m reading <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0805080872\">This I Believe<\/a><\/em> right now, and want to be reading it more than doing anything else. That desire isn&#8217;t too ultimately distracting, although some other thoughts are, and here we go.<\/p>\n<p>A year ago, for the first time ever really, I started thinking about my future. I&#8217;ve never been particularly interested in the long-term future. Two questions became important. 1) How do I want to be living and 2) Who do I want to be there. Do I want to change how I&#8217;ve been living? In this introspective search for what constitutes the internal definition of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/?p=537\">normality<\/a>, I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about what is different between how I live and how I want to be living. Nay, I&#8217;m wondering what I&#8217;d be sacrificing to &#8220;settle down&#8221; and if it&#8217;s worth it. See how the two are linked?<\/p>\n<p>Flipping back through old journal entries I&#8217;m easily distracted by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/?p=574\">faintly similar topics<\/a>. This is all so familiar. &#8220;me: My <a href=\"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/?p=368\">endgame<\/a> is finding a cohort I can love and support who wants to do crazy things with me, live according to our ethics, and have a positive impact on the parts of the world that around us.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The first question in the discussion of how I live is choosing at what level to evaluate; how deeply. Lets start pretty shallow with a brain dump of how I&#8217;ve been spending my time.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>riding bikes<\/li>\n<li>drinking<\/li>\n<li>drinking and riding bikes<\/li>\n<li>organizing events (seattle bmf, toorcamp, shmoocon)<\/li>\n<li>bicycle advocacy<\/li>\n<li>spontaneous road trip to montana<\/li>\n<li>sleeping in the back of a dump truck in montana<\/li>\n<li>drinking in montana<\/li>\n<li>welding bikes<\/li>\n<li>writing memoirs<\/li>\n<li>reading non-fiction<\/li>\n<li>working on open source software<\/li>\n<li>computer conferences<\/li>\n<li>built a shed<\/li>\n<li>took up cyclocross<\/li>\n<li>built a picnic table<\/li>\n<li>canoing the duwamish<\/li>\n<li>camping<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Alright, there&#8217;s been a lot of drinking. I can probably part with that either way. There&#8217;s a lot of building, both projects and getting involved in events. What do I identify with and want to do? Will 2009 have been a good year? I don&#8217;t know. It was a hard year. I still can&#8217;t stop pushing those boundaries, ignoring my wounds and pushing hard for emotional truth. Jesus though. I can&#8217;t fucking believe where I was a year ago. If by no other sign than that; I need to find a lower gear.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>build (carpentry, welding, etc)<\/li>\n<li>travel (spontaneously and aimlessly)<\/li>\n<li>meaning (volunteer? social? heart?)<\/li>\n<li>simple (utility > design, carhartts > dockers)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I keep feeling like I&#8217;m supposed to be heading down a path of forming a long-term relationship, finding a house, with a garage for my projects settling into working normal hours so I can be home for dinner. Like there&#8217;s an expectation of that, but I don&#8217;t know from who. And for what? Why make this sacrifice? For love? Should I have to? <\/p>\n<p>No. I&#8217;ve proven to myself that traditionally education not only wasn&#8217;t right for me, but it was holding me back. I keep making the connection between dropping out of high school and going through a period of soul searching with this last year. There&#8217;s a reason for that. Some day I&#8217;ll learn to trust my intuition a little better. I simply don&#8217;t live a traditional life and it&#8217;s not going to ever be that way. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s funny having friends that think getting drunk and sleeping in the back of a dump truck is totally an average day, but running a web operations infrastructure for a large company is totally something else. Then I have friends who are the complete opposite. Friends who find building and riding a tallbike is a Tuesday, and others who think it&#8217;s amazing. I&#8217;m feeling some degree of this is normal, but we&#8217;re getting a point. I live for today, without structure, because structure inhibits. Sure, it&#8217;s reliable and comforting, but I don&#8217;t want complacency. It&#8217;s only good for so long. There&#8217;s no fear of becoming a couch potato, or emotionally devastated to the point of holing up, because there&#8217;s too much left to do. I just can&#8217;t still that long. Something is out there, and I&#8217;m still looking for it.<\/p>\n<p> &#8220;I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final destination, but its pursuit&#8221; &#8211; Andrew Sullivan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m reading This I Believe right now, and want to be reading it more than doing anything else. That desire isn&#8217;t too ultimately distracting, although some other thoughts are, and here we go. A year ago, for the first time ever really, I started thinking about my future. I&#8217;ve never been particularly interested in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=751"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":752,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751\/revisions\/752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}