If ten years ago you had told me that there would come a time when I’d be sitting at my computer looking up recipes for FUN, I would have told you that you were crazy.
Then I would have gone back to trying to draw pictures using a mouse and MS Paint, most likely painstakingly creating images pixel by pixel (I had a lot more patience back then).
As an aside, I did get surprisingly good at drawing with Paint, despite its limitations, though I always longed for something better, and assumed that if I did have something better, I would produce truly amazing images. To think there was a time that I actually had faith in my talents…
Regardless, the point is that, there is a great deal that can change in the course of a decade.
For example, since 1994 I have moved a total of 18 times. Eighteen. That’s a lot of time spent in transition.
And that’s only one example of the things that have changed. At the start of 1994, I was a married college senior working a part-time job and living in married student housing on campus. By the end of 1994 I was an unemployed married college graduate living in an apartment that he and his wife really couldn’t afford.
By mid-1995 I was still unemployed, but I was separated from my wife. By the end of the year, still separated, I was employed full-time in a grocery store, after a brief stint as a garbageman, and I was living in a very tiny, crappy apartment, and I was beginning to develop a drinking problem.
By the end of 1996 I was divorced and still employed full-time in a grocery store, for the first time since the end of my marriage I had taken an interest in a woman and fallen in love, and I was well on my way to having a drinking problem.
By 1997, still divorced, I was the Director of Communications at a small, private college in Michigan and my drinking had really taken off.
1998 is largely a blur of poor decision after poor, alcohol-fueled decision.
By 1999, once again unemployed, I had moved to a small town in Minnesota, and was pretty much a raging alcoholic.
By mid-2000 I had been fired from yet another job and was making my way back to Michigan for a disastrously drunken summer.
In the early days of 2001, newly sober, I moved to Tucson.
After losing yet another job, I started working for the company that I still work for three years later. After a year I had moved to Virginia, a different position with the company, and into this apartment.
So far I’ve been here for nearly two years, and soon I’ll be signing a lease that signals my intention to stay in this apartment for at least one more year. Not wanting to move to a more conventional schedule, or having any particular ambitions, I’ll most likely stay in my current position at work for some time to come as well (barring any unforseen difficulties, at least).
After all, why would I want to leave a job that allows me to spend the better part of my Wednesday mornings looking up recipes on the computer?
If there’s a point to any of this I suppose it would be that the current stability that allows me the luxury of spending the better part of my Wednesday mornings looking up recipes on the computer, for fun, is something that, in contrast to the past decade, is something relatively new.
While most of my adult life hasn’t exactly been a whirlwind of activity, stability hasn’t exactly been a major component of it. Transition would seem to be the defining characteristic, as I made the move from student to graduate, married man to divorced man, Midwestern to Southwestern to Eastern.
As I sit here and reflect on the current lack of change in a life that was once filled to overflowing with change, I realize that despite the fact that virtually everything around me seemed to change on a constant basis, I never really did.
Certainly, some of my behaviors changed, and the way I’ve defined myself has changed many times, but at the core of it, Jon, the real Jon, hasn’t changed at all.
Years ago, I once heard my friend Eric explain to his then-fiancée, Sally, that in the time that he had spent away from home between being in the Air Force and going to school in Minnesota, whenever he returned he was always somewhat dismayed by the way things had changed in his absence. New stores went up, old stores were torn down, and nothing ever really seemed the same, not even people. Nothing, it seemed, could be relied on to remain constant.
“Except,” he said, in summation, “Jon. I can count on Jon to never change. The circumstances of his life might change, but Jon is always the same.”
I don’t know whether or not I was ever pleased by the notion of being the one constant in his life. Certainly he intended it as praise, but can it really be considered praise to learn that you are viewed as being stagnant and inflexible?
Is that at the heart of the problems I experienced throughout my “Decade of Flux,” my inability to adapt to changing circumstances? Or does it go even deeper; was I incapable of even seeing that my life was in transition? Honestly, as I look back, I realize that there was a lot of change, but at the time all I ever saw was the tedious, unending sameness of it all.
Am I utterly incapable of changing at a fundamental level? Despite my efforts to make changes to myself and my definition of who I am (staying sober, exercising, quitting smoking, developing my new-found culinary talents), at the core of who I am, nothing changes, and nothing has changed. All of my old insecurities, regrets, hopes, and bitterness inform my decisions in exactly the same ways they always did.
When I first arrived here I had decided that I was going to present a different face to the people I worked with, to find some new Jon that I could present to the world.
Inevitably, though, I fell into the same patterns of negativity, barely suppressed rage, and bitter humor. I fell once again into the role of the slightly scary but sort of lovable anti-social curmudgeon I’ve always been.
I guess the real question is whether or not that’s so bad. I don’t know, honestly. It’s not as if there’s NO aspect of myself that I like, or that I think is worth keeping “as is,” it’s just that sometimes I wonder what it would be like to view the world through a different set of eyes, to interact with others without falling into the same old patterns.
After all, those patterns seem to inevitably lead to me spending my Wednesday mornings alone, just like most mornings, looking up recipes on the computer for fun, just as I used to spend them alone drawing with MS Paint pixel by pixel, or playing Solitaire, or writing an entry for my blog, or doing all the things that I do in which I find myself, invariably, alone, and wondering why I can’t change.
Sorry to go off on that somewhat self-pitying track. I had started out wanting to write about something else entirely, but sometimes plans change (even if I don’t).
For those of you who like to see pictures, I have to apologize for my lack of delivery in that department lately. I just haven’t been up to the task for some reason. These sort of picture slumps are not unusual, though, and I’m sure somewhere along the line I’ll suddenly have a streak of successful (for me) pictures.
I’m sure I’ll write some more later, and maybe I’ll even manage to address some of the topics I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, like online dating.
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