Category: life

Finding Rhythm

Matt

I’m in a strange new place. It’s a bit warmer than I’m used to, and there are hills everywhere. There are more bigots riding around with Confederate flags proudly displayed on the back of their red pickup trucks. I’m in the world capital of the type of fundamentalism I’ve spent the last decade extracting myself from.

It’s weird.

Instead of commuting to an office each morning, I’m remoting into the computer I was working on back in Michigan. That brings its own set of challenges, like what time to start working and how to deal with local distractions like my adorable cat.

Some of my stuff is 600 miles away. I’m not exactly sure which stuff. I do know that I have a guitar and a mandolin, so if I can find some microphones I might be able to put out a folk album.

Or maybe I’ll take myself out for coffee every night and slam out a novella.

It’s also a good time to play through Ocarina of Time again.

My days are starting to take shape, to meet the bare minimum standard of “routine”. It helps that my office is set up now; I have a space that is all mine, a haven, a refuge. There are still things to be done, but it’s functional and very cool. We’re managing to make it to the gym three times a week. We finally cracked and got a DVR, and now we’re keeping up on all the shows we want to watch.

Things are close to feeling normal.

New Monday

Matt

On Saturday I packed up my car and drove to Virginia to begin a new chapter of my life, free from the clutches of Lord Winter, in a land with no ice or snow.

Whoops.

Yesterday, my wife and I adopted a cat. I named her Gwendolyn Stacy. She spent the last two years in a shelter, being passed over because she stayed curled up in her bed while the other cats ran out to fawn over the visiting humans. Sarah visited her a few times before I moved out here, and during one visit a random person warned her that this cat would bite or scratch for “no reason at all.” So far, I have sustained no bites or scratches, and Sarah has one tiny scratch from her first visit.

When I met Gwen at the shelter, she let me pet her, but she stayed curled up the whole time. Within an hour of getting her home, she was exploring the house. She even slept on the bed with us for a bit.

Gwen is a total sweetheart, and I’m glad to welcome her to our family.

Artifacts of Life

Matt

I hang onto things. All sorts of things. Books I won’t re-read, hats I don’t wear, notebooks full of ideas I’ll never revisit. In my mind, I know these things are dead weight and should be donated or thrown away, but whenever I sit down and sort through the boxes I find it difficult to part with much.

Today, I took a look at my box of action figures. This isn’t the first time I’ve done this — over the years I’ve slowly culled the collection, whittling it down to things that were either super cool, or super sentimental.

For example, I have some some X-Men from the early 90s. They don’t have much in the way of articulation and they suck at standing. Even if I had a display case, these would all be on their backs within minutes, which doesn’t look particularly cool to guests. But! I have memories. Like a friend and I throwing them as high up in the air as we could, resulting in Wolverine and Sabretooth each losing an arm. Or playing in the snow, and finding one of them in the Spring. Heck, a few go back to the days when I was playing with toys in the bathtub — that’s how Cyclops’s light-up eyes stopped working!

Cyclops has been gone for years. The memory is obviously still intact. So why am I hanging on to Nightcrawler and Magneto?

Then there are the Mega Man figures. Sometime in college, I acquired Mega Man, Rush, Proto Man, Guts Man and Cut Man. My brain kept telling me that I had these radical Mega Man dudes that were too cool to part with. But I’m moving soon, so I figured I’d take another look, thinking I might be able to let go of Guts Man.

See this angry blue dude? That’s not Mega Man. Relative standing capabilities aside, he’s not something I want to show my guests.

When I ask myself, “What do I want other humans to see?”, there doesn’t end up being much worth hanging onto. If I’m going to give up space in my home for something non-functional, I only want the best non-functional something.

The rest can go.