Gaze Deep Into My Navel And Despair...

How am I supposed to grow up?

I want to grow up.  I really do.  No, more than that, I need to.  I need to grow the fuck up.  I'm almost forty years old, but I still see myself as if I were twenty-five.  That might sound appealing on some level, at first; "young at heart" and all that.  And maybe it would be, if that's what I wanted for myself.  But it isn't.  I want to grow up.  I need to grow up, because I can't keep living like I'm twenty-five.  I'm not twenty-five anymore.  I can't eat like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  I can't move like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  I can't party like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  Fuck, I can't even sleep like a twenty-five year-old anymore.  It all hurts me now in a way that it never did, and I can feel myself breaking down at an astonishing rate, as if the force of Entropy inside me were being fed by some radioaction of chemical combustion.  Accelerated Decrepitude.  But on the other hand, trying to live within my almost-forty means, while still feeling like a twenty-five year-old inside, is so monumentally depressing that I can't even fucking bother; I always just end up feeling like I already have one foot in the grave.

A twenty-five year-old trapped in a forty year-old body.  How incredibly pathetic.  How incredibly modern.  How incredibly privileged.

But how am I supposed to grow up?  I don't know.  My observations tell me that for most people, this happens as a natural side-effect of breeding.  That creating a child shifts all perspectives, and forces the new parent into a maturity that cannot be achieved through any other means.  That makes sense to me.  I can understand that.

But I'm never going to have any children.  So what am I supposed to do?  How am I supposed to force myself to achieve a state that, for most people, requires quite possibly the single most life-altering event they will ever experience in order to achieve?

Sometimes I think, maybe I don't actually need to grow up?  If I don't have any children, then what do I need to grow up for?  Why do I feel this need anyways?  I can only assume it is because I reflexively compare my life to the model my parents set for me.  When I look at myself, and try to judge whether I'm doing well or not, I compare it to the life they lived.  And I always feel myself coming up short.

They went to college.  They got degrees.  They worked hard.  (My father still works harder than almost anyone else I know, and while my mother never worked as hard as he did, she still inarguably worked harder than I do now.)  They bore and raised children.  They owned houses, with yards and multiple floors and everything.

But I dropped out of college.  I have no degrees, and probably never will.  Yeah, I have a career that doesn't leave me wanting to kill myself, but I still hate it, just because it's work, and I hate work of any kind; I hate being forced to sell myself every day in order to sustain myself.  I don't own a house.  I own an absurdly tiny condo that I hate and will never be able to sell for as much as I paid for it.  I am almost certain I will end up having to live in that tiny little box for the rest of my life, watching it deteriorate around me, with me - and that thought terrifies me on a regular basis.

And even these modest achievements - a well-paying job that I can sort of do well and tolerate, and a tiny little condo I'm trapped in like a prison cell - even these barely note-worthy accomplishments I never actually earned; I didn't work hard to achieve these things.  I got this job because some well-meaning middle-aged women that I worked with took pity on me, and talked to their bosses, and told them they knew this kid they thought would do well as a programmer.  And they were right - I am a good programmer.  At least, I'm alright.  But again, not because I try to be, or because I studied or worked hard or went to school or anything else.  I just have a natural talent for logic and pattern recognition and symbology, and so I am a naturally decent programmer.  I could be a great programmer if I wanted to be; if I tried to be and put forth the effort.  But I don't.  Because I don't care.  I only want to put forth the minimum amount of effort to get by, and save the rest for indulging in my life's pleasures.

And it's a similar story with my "home."  I didn't work hard and save money every day so that I could eventually put a down payment on my dream home.  My grandfather died, and since my mother (his daughter) was already dead herself, the portion of his life's wealth that should have been hers (and he had worked hard all his life to achieve that wealth) came to me instead.  And I used all of that money to buy the apartment I had been living in for almost a decade at that point.  The biggest, most "adult" accomplishment of my life - becoming a home-owner - and it only happened because I was in a position to profit off of the deaths of two of my close family members.  And so it has never felt like an accomplishment to me.  It feels like blood money.

(It's true that I performed magick to get the job and the money and the apartment, but even taking the assumption that my magick worked doesn't help the situation any.  Magick is a short-cut.  It's easy compared to actually working hard to learn or to save money.  And it's fun to do, and for that reason alone I wanted to do it, whether it worked or not.  So even assuming that I came by these things through sorcery, it still doesn't feel like an accomplishment to me.  It still doesn't feel like I really earned them.  It feels like I cheated.)

And I will almost certainly never see that much money again in my lifetime.  I can barely maintain a savings of more than a couple of thousand dollars at a time.  I live paycheck-to-paycheck, even with my fairly significant salary.  I've always been that way.  If I have money, I want to spend it on making myself feel good right now, and I can't seem to deny myself comfort or happiness in the present, in order to save it for some undefined future.  As I've written here before, I feel like the Grasshopper, fiddling away as the first snow begins to fall.

But why do I determine the value of my life by comparing it to my parents'?  They were completely different people, living in a completely different time.  And who wanted completely different things from their life than I want from mine.  And I know this.  But I still can't shake this feeling that I am somehow failing at life, because I seem to remember my parents being so much better off in their twenties than I am in my thirties; or will be in my forties.  I just want to be happy, like anyone else.  But I constantly and consistently feel that the things that make me happy aren't good for me.  That they are self-indulgent, or immature, or masturbatory.  That I am a bad person for living my life the way that I do.  But trying to live my life any other way always leaves me just as miserable, if only in a different way.

I just want to spend my life relaxing in the bathhouse, playing games, reading, writing, watching TV and movies, sleeping, eating, drinking and getting high, and punctuating the whole thing with the occasional orgasm.  That is really all I want from life.

And I feel like a worthless waste of a human being for feeling that way.  I hate myself for feeling that way.  But even so, I have no idea how to change it; I have no idea how to want anything else.

Okay, sure, I want other things.  Bigger things.  I want to have a big house with a yard and a basement and an attic.  I want to be able to support myself through writing, or some other form of creative expression.  (If only I could make a living playing games!)  I want a sense of accomplishment.  I want to feel like my life mattered, in any way.  I want to feel a sense of confidence that when I'm gone, I will have made some mark on the world that is all my own; that I will leave behind something more than a pile of carbon dust.  I do want all of these things.  But when I think about them, and I envision the monumental amount of work it would take to even try to achieve any of them - with no guarantee of success! - I lose any hope I may have had about ever actually achieving them.

Because I know that I will never do that work.  I just don't have it in me.  Achieving anything of any real significance requires a single-minded devotion that I just don't have.  Have never had.

Because deep-down, I don't want to be great.  All I really want is to be comfortable.  And I guess I am.  So I should be happy, then, right?  Then why do I feel this way?  I just wish I could learn to be happy with what I have, instead of hating myself for not being able to be great.

I guess what it all really comes down to is this:  I feel lazy, and I hate myself for being lazy, but I don't know how to make myself be anything else.  And I hate myself for that, too.

+          +          +

Or maybe I'm just depressed because winter is coming, and I'm all out of drugs, and I can feel both of these things gnawing at my bones.

Seoul Bath...

I went to a Korean Spa for the first time this weekend.

My friend had invited everyone to spend the day at the spa with him for his birthday, before the party he was throwing that night.  A few of my friends showed up, but most people were waiting for the party.  I'd been wanting to check out this spa for awhile, so I jumped at the chance.

Now, when I say "spa," think more, "communal bathhouse" rather than "salon/day spa."  You pay $20 to get in, and stay as long as you want.  (They're open 24 hours-a-day on the weekends, and they even have a "Nap Room" to sleep in when you want.)  There's a restaurant (awesome Korean food); a PC room with computers, video games, and internet; and a gym.  But the real attraction is the bathhouse.

As soon as you walk into the place, before you even get to the front desk, you encounter signs indicating "No Shoes Allowed Beyond This Point."  So, you have to carry your shoes up to the front desk, where they give you a key to fit a locker there by the entrance, just big enough to hold a pair of shoes.  Once you get your shoes off, you can feel that the dark wood floor is actually heated; feels so lovely.  Once you pay your entrance fee, they give you another key to a bathhouse locker, and a uniform of simple cotton t-shirt and shorts; men get robin's egg blue, and women get prison orange.

Inside the locker room (men and women each have their own locker rooms, and their own bathhouses, naturally), you can change into your uniform and head out into the communal area if you want.  But inside the locker room is the entrance to the bathhouse, and I headed straight for it.  Inside were showers (regular and Asian style - a little stool on the ground in front of a mirror, with a handheld showerhead and a large bowl); two large, tiled, bubbling hot "tubs" (they were more like small pools), one of them herbal; two saunas (one wet and one dry); and a cold water pool (only about knee deep and three feet wide, but running the length of the room; obviously meant for bathing, not swimming).  In one corner was a massage table, with a naked man getting scrubbed down by an attendant.

In fact, except for the attendant, everybody in the place was completely naked, and making no attempt to cover themselves up, which I found very comforting.  I'm used to puritanical American gym locker-rooms, where everyone gets dressed and undressed either with a towel wrapped around them, or in a shower or toilet stall, out of some ridiculous sense of homophobia or something.  That environment always leaves me feeling very uncomfortable.  It freaks me out to be surrounded by people who are clearly all very afraid of something, and not really have any understanding of what it is that they are so clearly afraid of, exactly.  Are they afraid that some "faggot" will see their penis and somehow become aroused?  (And if so, why does that frighten them?  What does it matter to them at all?  And how would they even know that it had happened?)  Are they worried that if they get naked the other men will think they, themselves, are a "faggot," trying to show off their penis?  (That seems more likely.)  Or are American men just incredibly modest and shy?  (Haha!  Yeah, right!)  So I found it incredibly refreshing to be in an environment where nobody had these ridiculous hang-ups that I couldn't understand, and everybody could just relax and enjoy themselves, without getting all squirrely and nervous about something so completely innocuous as being naked in the same room with other men.  I think it helped that all the men there were either Asian or Russian.  (Apparently, this spa gets a lot of Russians, because it is the closest thing to the traditional Russian bathhouse in the area.  They even had one set of their pamplets listing their services up at the front desk printed all in Russian.)

The larger, regular hot bath was empty (presumably out-of-order), so I headed to the herbal hot bath, which probably would've been my first choice, anyways, now that I think about it.  This bath has a large cloth sack filled with various herbs hanging off of the faucet so that the water is running down through the bag and into the bath; the bag is also hanging about half into the water, steeping like a tea bag.  (They had a sign listing all of the herbs they used, but I don't remember them all at this point; several of them I had never heard of before.)  In fact, it felt very much like taking a bath in tea - the water was brown, had little bits of plant matter swirling around in it, and was incredibly aromatic.  After about ten minutes in this tub, my skin felt softer and smoother than it has since I was a teenager.  In fact, even now, it still feels much softer than usual.

After the herbal bath, I took a quick rinse-off dip in the cold pool (and when they say "cold" they are not lying - it was like ice water!) and then tried out the dry sauna.  It was just over 200 degrees in there, and so it wasn't long before I couldn't take it anymore, and headed back out to cool off in the cold pool.  Going from the hot to the cold like that is the Russian style, and I find it unbelievably refreshing and invigorating and sensually satisfying.  (Maybe it's genetic.)  The hot opens up my pores and loosens my skin, and then the cold tightens it all back up again.  The heat brings all my blood out to my extremities and into my skin, and then the cold sends it all flying away from the surface and down into my core.  And the simple juxtaposition between the two sensations is very-nearly overwhelming.  It leaves me light-headed, but pleasantly so.

After that I tried out the wet sauna, but I couldn't take it for more than a minute.  The air is so thick with moisture that you can barely see your hand in front of your face.  Whenever I would breathe in, I would feel like there was more water in the inhalation than oxygen, and since I was already a little light-headed, it wasn't long before I felt like I couldn't breathe and had to get out before I passed out.  It's a shame, because, other than that, I liked the room.  It wasn't as hot as the dry sauna (only about 150 degrees), and the wet air made it feel more like a bath or shower than the dry sauna, which felt more like an oven.  And the water that they used to produce the steam was apparently infused with some herb, as well, because it was, like the herbal bath, incredibly and pleasantly aromatic.  (The dry sauna actually had a small wicker basket full of cinnamon sticks in the corner, as well, producing a pleasant aroma as they baked in the heat.)  I think next time I'll have to try this steam room first, before I do anything else, and see if that works out better for me.

I spent the next hour just going around between the dry sauna, the herbal bath, and the cold bath.  It felt amazing.  We had agreed to meet in the communal room at that point, so I dried off, dressed in my powder-blue uniform, and headed out into the communal room, which is between, and connected to, the two locker rooms/bathhouses.  The communal room is a large, central room, lined with thick tatami mats on the floor, and little tables to go with them.  (At least, they're called "tatami" in Japanese; I have no idea what they are called in Korean, but they are the same object.)  There were also large piles of these small, traditional head-cushions used for lying down on the mats.  There was a TV on one wall, playing Korean television.  There were Korean newspapers and magazines lying around the room.  There were boards for playing Go, Chess/Checkers, Backgammon, etc. scattered all around.  At one end was a line of massaging recliners, and beyond that was the "Napping Room" - a small, dark room lined with more tatami mats for sleeping.  I tried out one of the massaging recliner chairs, expecting a vibrating massage chair.  What I got instead was ten minutes of, essentially, being pummeled in the back by a robot at high speed.  It was more percussion than vibration.  It hurt like hell at first, but by the end it felt fantastic.

Along the walls of the communal room are smaller rooms of varying temperatures, all dry rooms.  The hot rooms were each lined with different materials all over the floor, walls, and ceiling.  The Himalayan Salt room was lined with pink rock salt, presumably Himalayan judging by the name, and kept at 130 degrees.  The Jewel Room was 150 degrees, and lined with smooth cut slabs of green amethyst.  And the Charcoal Room was lined with small cylinders of charcoal, and heated to 170 degrees.  (I didn't go into the last, hottest room, and don't remember what it was lined with.)  There are also two cold rooms.  The Cold Room is about 40 degrees, and then inside the Cold Room is the Ice Room, which is well below freezing, and lined with, predictably, ice.  (The sign said it was -21 degrees Fahrenheit, but it had to be Celsius; -21 degrees Fahrenheit would be dangerous in just a t-shirt and shorts, and while this room was definitely cold, it wasn't painful or distressing.  It felt more like about 25-30 degrees Fahrenheit.)  Again, I spent a bunch of time going back and forth from the hot rooms to the cold rooms and back again.

We ate lunch in the restaurant, sitting cross-legged on pillows at low Asian-style tables, eating delicious, cheap Korean food.  I reflected on the fact that the place was full of families.  I could tell that this was a regular family event; you bring the wife and kids and spend the day.  It was a like the Korean version of a community center or a YMCA.  There was a father and son in the bathhouse while I was in there, the son maybe six years-old.  They sat together, naked, at one of the little Asian-style showerheads, the son laying over the father's knee, as he washed and scrubbed his son's whole body over and over for what seemed like at least half an hour.  To my Western eyes, this looked decidedly creepy, and I couldn't imagine an American father and son doing this.  But at one point I happened to notice the father try to put the son down on the floor next to him and attend to his own washing, but the boy began to pout and plead until the father agreed to pick him back up and wash him again, which made the boy incredibly happy.  I tried to look at it through their eyes.  This was a bonding moment between a boy and his father.  In our culture, we're taught to sexualize nudity in any form regardless of context, and so something like this instinctively seems gross to us.  But this wasn't sexual at all.  It was loving.  And when I stopped myself from seeing it as sexual, and started trying to see it for what it actually was to them (non-sexual, familial nudity) it became a touching display of affection between a father and son.

I lost track of the hours I spent there, and didn't want to leave.  I could easily see how someone could spend all day there.  I can't wait to go back.  They offer massage services as well (foot massage, body massage, Thai massage, body scrub, etc.) for very reasonable prices, and next time I'm going to book one of those and make a day of it.

Confounding Conundrum Countered, Conclusively...

Regarding the question, "if I'm still getting high, but just in healthier ways, am I really changing?  am I really getting better?" - a question I have been asking myself here repeatedly for some time now - I think I finally have an answer.

My counselor read my blog entry yesterday regarding the SMART meeting (I sometimes send him pertinent entries to keep him updated between sessions, and he is gracious enough to read them), and he sent me this reply:

A desire to want to get high and/or altering our mind/mood state is part of our genetic, biological, and chemical make-up as Humans. It is an underlying instinctual desire that we all have. That's why we have serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, adrenaline, and various other chemical neurotransmitters in the first place. These chemicals are a vital part of our survival mechanism, that's why sex, eating, and exercise can feel ssoooooo gooood! These chemicals are a part of [our] neuro-chemical make up to ensure pleasure when we engage in these activities. These activities are necessary for the healthy survival of any species. A desire to feel good or even feel high or to alter our mental status is very much a part of who we are as humans. This is why every civilization known to Man has developed some sort of mind altering practices or substances. The harm is when we lose the capacity to regulate the chemical process either internally or externally. Excess is what changes the dynamic from healthy to unhealthy and triggers addictive behaviors.

Short answer:  getting high is just a part of who we are, and we wouldn't be here without it; so, healthy methods are okay, but everything in moderation, always.

It seems so obvious now.  And in hindsight, I feel like I already knew it.  I just couldn't find my own way there, for some reason.  I was over-analyzing the situation again, I think.  Missing the forest for the trees.  I'm glad I had someone there who could explain it to me in a way that I could understand, and use.  Thanks, Doc.

I enjoyed my workout-induced endorphin high this morning, guilt-free.


PS - I kind of want to talk about this at my next SMART meeting, but I don't know if that's because I want to update them on my progress, or if I just want to start a confrontation with the panicky facilitator and prove him wrong in front of the rest of the group.  Can't deny that'd be fun.  But definitely a dick-move, too.  We'll see how I feel next week, I guess.

Access...

I really enjoyed writing code today.

I get to do a lot of different kinds of programming for my job.  That's one of the things I like about it, actually - the variety keeps me interested.  But there are definitely some jobs that I like better than others, and today was one of those lucky days where I get to just pour myself into one of those jobs I really enjoy.

I have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft Access.  I hate it, because it is buggy as all fuck.  But I also love it, because I know it.  I'm intimately familiar with all of its quirks and eccentricities (READ: bugs), and I know how to program an Access database/application system better than I can do just about any other kind of coding.  There's also just something satisfying about it.  I build the database from the ground up, one-step-at-a-time, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, and by the end I have an application that works, that does what the client wants and that anyone can use, and it's streamlined, and it even looks good.  It's a creative process.  I get the same sense of satisfaction and accomplishment from building a really good database application as I do from writing something that I enjoy and think I did a good job on.   More, actually.  Because coding a good app takes more time and effort for me than it does to write something.  And also, I'm better at it.

So today I got to work on one of my old database apps, adding in some new features that the client was asking for.  The features they were asking for were not things I'd ever done before, so I got to learn something new, which is always a plus, and happens less and less with Access lately.  And, of course, Access threw me a series of its usual curveballs, giving me several WTF-is-going-on??-problems to try and work out.  Which is another one of the things I enjoy about Access, actually.  I never know what to expect (except the unexpected), and anytime I work on an app, I get to spend a significant amount of time just sitting, pondering some completely impossible error, trying to solve this unsolvable puzzle.  And when I finally figure it out, when I have that Eureka!-moment - ooh, baby! - that's what I live for.  Those moments are why I can still enjoy my job.

I realize this was a ridiculously nerdy post, but it's what I was inspired by today.  It can't all be deep-spiritual-exploration all the time.

Sometimes, it's just gotta be about, "Today, I really enjoyed my job."

Take What You Can Get...

Well, it was inevitable, really.

Day's almost over, and I've really got to concentrate on my work.  I've got an appointment right after work, and by the time I get out of there I'm going to need to eat dinner.  And then by the time I'm done with that it's going to be nine-thirty or ten o'clock, and I'm fairly certain I'm not going to feel like writing anything at that point.  So, it's now or never.

But despite the fact that I've remained open all day to any form of inspiration that might happen to come to me... nothing has.  So, here I am, feeling like I have to write something, but not having anything to say.

What I realize as I observe this, is the Tao of Acceptance.

I made the effort, but I can't force the issue.  Inspiration is not an act of Will.  All I can do, is try my best, and try to be happy with the results.  And I've done that.  Sure, I would've preferred to have written something meaningful, or beautiful, or profound, or poetic.  But I gave it my best effort.  And in the end, I still took what was inside of me, however mundane it might feel, and cast it out into the world.

And I'm satisfied with that.