Changes Abound

I know it's a bit of a cliché, but it's also pretty much true: You never really know what life is going to throw at you. All you can do is hold on for the ride and hope to get some fun out of it in the end.

A year ago, my husband and I were ramping up for the holiday season. He would need to be working insane retail hours, and I would need to be investing unhealthy amounts of time gazing at shopping sites and deciphering the maze of downtowners as they hustled through the department stores. Not that I really enjoy shopping, mind you, but there's a certain allure to watching the madness of it all.

This year is a bit different. This year we're hankering down and learning to enjoy the quieter, family-focused side of life while celebrating the end of old things that Winter has been known to represent.

My husband isn't working retail anymore, so gone are the days of never knowing when we would get to see each other for the next six weeks. In fact, that's one of the ends we're celebrating. He's starting back at school in January and he's going to be working toward a brighter future for us while doing work that he wants to do.

As for me, I'm celebrating another kind of end. I'm leaving the company that I've spent the past five years working for and moving toward the career that I've really wanted since college. I'm currently working in logistics for a large food service company. It's a very corporate environment with the typical corporate trappings: politics, red-tape, HR. It's been great work, and I've met some amazing and intelligent people, but it's really my time to move on.

My new company is quite a different direction. It's a marketing research firm that focuses on social media. They have a very progressive concept of employee relations and they are still a very young company with a strong sense of "start-up" still built in to their core. But most importantly, I'll finally be able to start working in the field I fell in love with back in 2003 when I took my first marketing research and consumer psychology course.

It's scary. Our lives are full of changes right now. New jobs, new careers, new schools, new lifestyles… Lots and lots of new. It can be difficult to say goodbye to the things we know and are comfortable with, and that's what we're working through right now.

I always had a vision of the 30-year old me (well, when I got to an age where I could conceive of myself being that old) that was put together, calm, and settled into his life. I just knew that the "adult" me would be the bastion of security and boring repetition. I'm learning now that things will always be changing, and I'm becoming OK with that.

I can't always plan for changes and I can't always be prepared when they come, but what I know I can do is learn to accept them as they happen and realize that, with just a little work and effort, things will turn out alright.

Smells Like 30-Something Spirit

I can remember thinking in high school that at some point, much later in life, I'd look back at the music I was listening to at the time and reminisce about the "good old days" of music and how the "music" them there kids was listening to was just plain garbage. I'm thinking that the "much later in life" thing may have crept up on me sooner than I thought it would.

Slacker Radio is web music service like Pandora, and in any tangible sense that won't take paragraphs of tech blah-blah to explain, they are pretty much identical, although I generally prefer Slacker's iPhone app over Pandora's. Anyway, Slacker creates these special stations from time to time to celebrate whatever is going on in music at the time, like they had a VMA station a couple weeks back. Right now their featured station is "Grunge: 20 Years Later."

For those reading from my generation, I'll let that sink in for a moment. It's been 20 years since Nevermind and 10 came out, 20 years since the most significant cultural shift in the music industry of the 90's hit the scenes, 20 years since flannel shirts were not solely owned by lesbians and boys with long, ragged hair were the cool thing.

In other words, we are now old enough to say "remembered when" and for the music we grew up on to be considered "old school." I about cried when that dawned on me.

I still love grunge music though. I still listen to old STP and Live and Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Foo Fighters and Smashing Pumpkins. And I may as well be waving my cane at kids screaming "get off my lawn!" while I listen.

I'm not too fond of this feeling, but I suppose it's just one of those feelings I'll have to learn to deal with. I'm only more likely to have these type of moments as life goes on. And hell, if Slacker having a station dedicated to Grunge helps a few young pups out there really understand why Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream was such a big f-in deal of an album, it can't be that bad.

In the meantime though, I need to go sit on my porch and rock in my wooden chair while I whistle Smells Like Teen Spirit through my dentures...

I'm Not Bored, But They Really Are That Long...

I mentioned a little while ago that I had started reading Game of Thrones and I had also started playing Fallout: New Vegas. In that post, I worried about the time investment of those books and games and pondered whether I'm getting to a point in life where that commitment wasn't realistic anymore. Essentially, I was worried I was too old to enjoy the kind of things I did as a kid.

I'm now almost finished with A Clash of Kings, the sequel to Game of Thrones, and am more than 20 hours in to Fallout: New Vegas, and am I extremely happy with both!

The difference between when I started the game and the book and now, I supppose, is that nostalgia kicked in somewhere. A love of long-form fantasy with twists and intrigue and a love for open, fleshed-out worlds packed full of stories and interesting tidbits to find. It also helps that the series of books and the F:NV are phenomenal products.

What George R.R. Martin has done so perfectly in this series of books is create characters that you feel for. You may not like the character, but you certainly have an opinion about them. You cheer for them or revile them, but you are never bored with the characters. They feel real. And the storytelling mechanic he uses is just great. Each chapter jumps between a different characters point of view, but the timeline never goes backward. You learn of new events happening to one character while following the adventures of another. All in all, it's very engrossing.

Fallout: New Vegas does so many things right so far that I can say my only true complaint is the inclusion of zombies. I HATE zombies in video games. Usually, their inclusion is enough to get me to stop playing a game altogether. But Fallout's don't bother me. In fact, I just helped out a charismatic pack of zombies pile into rocket ships and fly off to a highly radioactive area of the country. My character is that nice of a guy.

While F:NV was made by Obsidian (who also made some other great games, like Neverwinter Nights 2 and Dungeon Siege 3), the basis for the game comes from Bethesda (who made Oblivion), so the game still holds true to this grand scale of a huge world to explore with danger and mystery around every corner. The characters you meet are believable and the stories are still shocking to me, like when I found out an adorable town matron was responsible for selling one of the town guard's wife to slavery… then I hauled her off to the desert so the guard could kill her. Disturbing, but amazing!

I plan to keep on with the Song of Ice and Fire series, even if I have a feeling that'll keep my reading log full for the rest of the year, and I have every intention to keep plugging away in Fallout. Maybe that adventure-loving kid in me is still there, I just had to wake him up a bit.

Am I Bored, Or Is This Just Too Long

As I get older, I've noticed my taste for entertainment has changed, but I'm not sure what aspect has changed. Have I grown impatient of longer form entertainment, or do I just lust for more diverse entertainment options?

I've been reading Game of Thrones lately, George R. R. Martin's epic modern fantasy novel. The book is the first in a long series of book called the Song of Ice and Fire and has recently been adapted into an HBO show. The book is a monstrous 800 pages in paperback form. I suppose for a fantasy novel that is probably normal, but for someone that hasn't read a true fantasy epic in a while it seems a bit much.

I've also recently started up playing Fallout: New Vegas on my PC. The game comes with rave reviews and has a spiritual ancestor in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which is at the top of my favorite video games list. Both Oblivion and New Vegas feature huge, vast open worlds each with more than 60 hours of gameplay, and that's at the low end of game time.

With both Game of Thrones and Fallout, I've jumped head first into the venture with a lot of anticipation and excitement. I've been loving watching the HBO adaptation (we haven't finished it yet) of GoT, and I adore the idea of a post-apocalyptic spin on the Oblivion-style gameplay with updated mechanics that Fallout offers. But in both cases, I'm wondering if I didn't bite off a bit more than I care to chew with regard to the time commitment it'll take to finish them.

It's not that I'm not enjoying reading and playing. Both are fascinating and very well done. Each time I crack open the book or fire up the game, I'm enthralled by the world presented to me. But when I step away from them because I'm getting off the bus or because diner is ready or it's time for bed, I'm left wondering if I'll ever reach the end of these gynormous adventures.

That feeling, for me, is both awe-inspiring and annoying all at once.

When I was younger, I can remember burying myself in the Lord of the Rings books and relishing every moment of their often-times dense text, regardless of how long it took me to read through them. I can recall racing home from class in college to figure out what was going to happen to Yuna next in Final Fantasy X, or even coming home from work a few years later and not being bothered at all by losing my entire evening and even some of my scheduled sleep hours to dungeon crawling in Oblivion. I enjoyed the time I spent in those worlds and I did not once think that I was missing out on something else.

Now though, as I read Game of Thrones or fire up New Vegas, I find myself wondering what else is going on that I'm missing. I'm not enjoying the time spent any less, but I'm wondering if I'm cutting myself short on other experiences. I know that I can tear through the new Sookie Stackhouse book in less than a week and that I can blow through a game like Dungeon Siege 3 in less than 15 hours of game time, which then allows me to move on to something else, some new experience.

But I can't say that I enjoy those experiences as much as I enjoy what I'm reading and playing now. I like them, and they are fun, but not quite as deep and rewarding. Which makes me wonder if I'm just becoming impatient. I need the reward of completing, of knowing I've finished X books/games this year and I liked them, even if saying I've completed (X-5) books/games and I LOVED them seems like the wiser thing to do with my free time.

So I can't really tell if my tastes are changing because I want to have more and varied entertainment options at the expense of better or more rewarding options, or if I just bore easier with longer-form entertainment now that I'm older. /sigh...

Now That I Am Actually 30...

I've been full-on 30 now for a couple of weeks, and I can't say that I really feel much different. I know, HUGE shocker that one more day in your life doesn't change things that much, but I did still harbored an irrational fear that everything would change once the big Three Oh hit.

I have noticed one change though. That irrational fear of aging is fading. I still hold a bit of concern about what life will be like in my later years, but overall I'm more confident that I'm not going to fall over crippled by various spontaneous ailments.

There are still quite a few problems I'm working through: after knee surgery last year, I'm still trying to recover fully. I just learned (the hard way) that running on pavement is a big no-no for me at this point in my knee recovery. I'm still struggling with stomach issues, but it seems I've learned what combination of foods, drugs and activity will keep things under control. And I'm constantly fighting the prime gay fight: what is the optimal hair cut that enables me to look cute and young while maintaining a modicum of professional presence and without looking like one of those ridiculous gays I use to make fun of that still wear Abercrombie and Fitch well into their 50's.

Of course, I am keenly aware of my age these days. And, also of course, I know 30 isn't ancient or old by any means. But there was a few year period in my mid-20's where I would frequently forget which age I was. Someone would ask my age and I would have to think for a minute. Not any more. I'm 30 and I know it.

A good friend told me that when he turned 30, he had a moment of realization that he, much like the honey badger, just didn't give a shit. He stopped worrying so much about what others thought of him and stopped worrying about upsetting random strangers in social situations. I don't know if I've achieved this level of nonchalance, but I will say that I have reached a point where I am growing more comfortable with myself as a whole, which bolsters my confidence.

I'm 30, and just about everyone I went to school with is 30. My husband isn't far behind. Personally, I'm more than happy to welcome the next chapter in my life now that I've crossed the line into 30-something territory.