Getting Back to Basics

Posted on by Jordan

970555_10151673686801068_1147602055_nYesterday was my birthday. This brings a close to another year of change. It seems whenever I get to a point in my life where I feel I have things figured out I am taught another lesson that shows me that I really don’t at all. For the most part my life is stable; home, job, cars, and enough cash to not go hungry and to have fun when it’s time. Nevertheless, those are just the surface material factors that make up only a small percentage of my whole life. The majority seems to be my mind. And that is where I find it counts.

I went back to the place that I usually find peace at last week; Yellowstone National Park. For some reason I always seem to find solitude there that I can’t ever fully obtain elsewhere. I don’t know what it is. Maybe the trees? The sky? The mountains? Just the air? Or maybe it’s just all of it. It’s just simple and my mind seems to slow from its usual feverish pace to one that is much more manageable for relaxation. I sat there one night and just looked up, and thought to myself the always intriguing question; “am I satisfied?” Honestly, I don’t know. What do I need to be happy? I know I was happy in that moment, in that silence, in that harmony. But why can’t I feel that all the time when I am home? No other factors were changed other than my geographic location. All the same stresses still existed in my life at that moment as they do when I am home any other day, just this time they were not on my mind.

A few months ago when I was dating a new girl I found myself being increasingly lethargic. I just didn’t feel the urges to go out and see new things or even do much of anything at all. It was a weird small depression for me. It was particularly interesting because I think back across some of my other romantic experiences and I always lived for going on those fun adventures. Not this time. As I look at the relationship, I know that was a partial factor, but I can’t help but focus on the bigger picture that was simply; I didn’t want to do a damn thing, ever. I know that I was frustrated in many areas of my life in those days that have since been changed and I have since witnessed myself, slowly, start to climb out of the slump and rejoin the world with a desire to see new things again. The trip I just returned from helped me reignite that passion for adventure and discovery. I remember now that I like to travel and look at things. I like to meet new people and see new places. I love to spend the hours in my car, just driving towards the horizon like a modern day explorer in my steel ship, charting a course for the unknown with no real plan or destination. I hadn’t done a trip like this in years and I never thought much about the importance of them, but now I think I see why they are important. I now know what works best for me to repair my broken mind, and it’s a journey.

I spoke with an old friend last week who I used to talk to pretty regularly but lately the literal distance between us has bled over into a distance in our communication. We might only talk a few times a year now, which is sad because I have always felt some sort of strange fondness for this person for whatever reason and enjoyed the pointless conversations we’d have through the years. As I sat there and a new conversation began and the usual small talk that then lead to the deeper conversation I was transported back to those days. It was great. After hearing about what she is up to in her own life and the great and happy person she has become and the adventures she is embarking on that will bring her some of the best, if not the absolute best, memories of her life. I felt envious of her, but not in a bad way, in a way that left ME feeling more inspired to make time in my own life for personal discovery and spontaneous decisions. Opportunities like hers aren’t something that most can make, and even fewer ever will. I am proud that she realized that and is taking the chance while she still can.

I will say that professionally last year was the year that I really came into my own. I found my niche and I am far better at it than I ever expected. The last 2 months have really shown that. The feeling you get when you are presented with the official document that shows you have accomplished your 10 year goal in less than 2 is surreal. Through the fog you realize that, you have taken the correct steps that lead to that exact moment of unreal comprehension. You have done it. And you’re proud of yourself. I had a conversation with the above mentioned friend that same evening about confidence, and as I write this right now, I understand that in the moment when I held that paper and my eyes fixed on the words, I felt warmth of accomplishment that I have never felt before. A feeling of achievement that was all encompassing. And I savored it. I have accomplished so much to be proud of in this life. And I have lost it all only to crawl myself from the pits of desperation and struggle back to where I am today; standing tall and proud of what I have forced myself to do all over again with nothing more than my mind and a focused dream of where I want to be some day. I sit here and look out these windows, 1000 miles from where I was born, in a city that captivated my dreams in my youth. I’ve done it, three different times actually. This last time though, I did it completely on my own. With next to nothing to my name and look what I have built with my bare hands. I see people I know struggling and I have to admit that I don’t pity them. The circumstances that surround their own situations have usually landed them there by choice. They expect things to be given to them and complain about how hard life is. They’re right, it is fucking hard. That just means you have to put in extra work to beat its ass. But, when you let that confidence enter your mind that you CAN beat it, you are limitless. I am living proof of this. I have been knocked down hard, but I got back off, dusted, and push harder.

I feel pretty clear on exactly what I want in my life next. I know I don’t currently have everything that I want, but I know I do possess the confidence to get it. I look forward into the future and I am actually happy after working through these thoughts with these words. It’s exciting and scary. The fear pushes me towards the ultimate goal. I walk towards ultimate happiness, a fulfillment that I don’t have now, but I know I can have. I just have to choose the right path and the right people to walk it with me…

One Year, One Big City, One More Time (Re-awakening a Dream)

Posted on by Jordan

Do you ever look at someone’s life that you used to be extremely close to now and see how different your paths went after you drifted apart? Someone that you used to know better than anyone, now looking at their life you hardly even recognize them.  The only thing familiar is their face in some of the pictures.  It’s a strange feeling.  Then those wonderful “what if’s” start to creep in; what would your life be like if you stayed with them?  What things would you be enjoying now instead of the ones you actually do these days?  What opinions would you have in life verses what you have now?  What would you have seen or not seen?  It’s a strange feeling.  It’s gets me thinking, I always feel like I am making my own choices in life and try and make ones that make me happy. Now I am looking at it from the angle that my choices and opinions today are based more on the environments surrounding me in my past than I ever believed before. I imagined that my mind and will power was strong enough for me to carve my own path in this life, but now I realize that my current desires were influenced more by my past relationships then I ever imagined.  I took a little piece from each and every one of those and made my own life today.  No matter how fulfilled or unfulfilled it is, it’s mine, kind of. That’s a weird realization for me to have just now come to I guess.

I wish I could always get exactly what I want these days.  I have this picture in my head of exactly how I want my life to be and almost all the parts are there.  I feel like I should really be making some solid progress to my end goal of being content across all areas, reaching my goal of complete comfort and stability that I long for, a life where I don’t have to worry or want. If I need it I can provide it for myself or my other.   I am finding that my life is more like putting together a computer desk after moving for the 10th time; some of the parts are there and some have gone missing.  Typically I’d tell myself to just go to the figurative store in my life and buy the missing parts to replace them, but this time it seems like the store is closed and I am driving around aimlessly trying to find one that is open and has the parts I want/need.  Speaking with a friend this afternoon and bitching about my plight I stated that I am just going to “give up” on my search.   What’s the point anyway right?

I have spent the last 6 months focusing hard on my career only and it’s gotten me far.  For the first time in my life I can say that I am truly happy and excited about the company I work for and what we are doing as a company.  It’s very rewarding.  I have been trying to re-introduce romance into my life slowly but every time I try I find myself picking them apart and fearing repeating a pattern that I have so many times before.  I am trying to be slow and let it happen more organically this time without letting it get in the way of what I am trying to accomplish professionally.  It’s hard.  Sometimes the whole thought of it just makes me want to be alone forever honestly.

I am sitting here right now thinking about how I got to this very seat, both at this company and where I am in a more general sense of existence. It’s interesting. One year ago I had made it to the halfway mark on rebuilding a life completely from flames of the wreckage of what I once had. I had a life most would dream of and then in an instant it was gone.  I had to start completely over at the bottom again. Minimum wage, no home, and barely enough to afford gas to get to the job that paid for it.  Then through shear drive I clawed my way back up each step of the ladder, never taking “no” for an answer. Ever.  One year ago this week I packed up my car and headed back to LA; my third trip down.  This one was the first without a plan. I was homeless, jobless, and had about $700 in my bank when I left.  When I arrived in town and went to see an old friend and he took me in and rented me a room.  That was the sign that I needed to let me know I made the right choice and gave me the fire and motivation to start my search to refill that dream I once had had and achieve it again. And you know what? In less than 30 days I found the path.  And here I am almost one year later stoked on it! I am actually proud of myself and proved that people can achieve literally anything they set their minds too. I no longer will ever accept the words “I can’t” to be spoken around me because anyone actually can.  Well maybe a cripple couldn’t walk, but you get what I am saying…

I had a conversation with Steff a couple months ago when she was here and she asked if I ever miss a certain ex and it got me thinking that I do. Not in the” I-wish-shed-come-back” way but in the way that I enjoyed the good times and the companionship that came with having the stability in my life as well as that insane connection that existed with some of them.  As I think even deeper into that thought I realize that I only really miss a couple of them.  The others were just filler, like a crappy album that only contains a couple of hits but has to have 10-12 songs to make the whole thing a product to sell. I don’t want to run into anything with haste anymore. I want to write the perfect song and have it take off as a single; the only song I will ever need to write.  But at the same time I can’t stop playing because I’ll never write it.  I just don’t want to record anything until I am sure it is the perfect score.  Ok that music analogy got a little involved. Ha!

I watch all of you getting married and settling down’ as most do with time, and I find myself longing for that same comfort and consistency sometimes.  However, I always enjoy my freedom. I have been in a relationship before that had the perfect balance of both.   I’d like to find that again. I guess since I have one area of my life figured out and I knew how to get there I should exercise that same formula in this area too.  I have to hold on to the optimistic side of my personality through this down time and not let the negativity eat me alive. It’s the only way to find true bliss across all areas of my existence.

If you can read this, thank a writer, well actually…

Posted on by Jordan

This morning I checked out the local paper from my hometown, who is starting a “pay a subscription for online news” push and I saw this interesting article that was syndicated from Debra J. Saunders (dsaunders@sfchronicle.com) at the San Francisco Chronicle. I felt compelled to write a response in the comments but I went over my limit. So I emailed it to her and the local paper it was also published in and now I am posting it here for anyone else who stumbles upon it. It deals with how newspapers are trying to find ways to make money in a changing digital landscape where they just don’t seem to get it yet. Read her article here:

 

 ”If you can read this, thank a writer:

We who work for newspapers have a love/hate relationship with the Internet. On the one hand, more people than ever — millions every week — are reading our product. On the other hand, many people don’t pay for it.

Search engines, such as Google, make it easier to look up information, but they’re pirates that make money off print content without paying for it. Facebook and Twitter get our names in front of new noses for free, which is good, but those sites require constant care and feeding.

Well-meaning people now chime in and suggest that newspapers could make more money by dispensing with print. They don’t understand that pop-up ads generally don’t produce the revenue needed to bankroll a room full of editors and reporters.

With e-books, there’s an advance that bridges the two worlds. Paperless need not mean payless anymore.

I bought my parents a Kindle two years ago, and I’ve had my Nook for about as long. The Wall Street Journal reports that there are 40 million e-readers and 65 million tablets — iPads and other devices. In the first quarter of this year, e-books generated more revenue than paper books.

Newspapers, including the Statesman Journal, now boast smartphone and tablet apps and e-editions, which allow readers to browse an on-screen version of the print edition.

Political writers have seized the opportunity to produce the sort of books on the presidential campaign trail that used to appear postelection but now run in installments as the election plays out. Already, writers at Politico and RealClearPolitics have released two books each on the 2012 presidential race.

The walls at the home of South Dakota author Joseph Bottum are lined with beautiful books carefully collected over a lifetime of loving literature. “I like the physical object of a book,” Bottum told me. “It’s a technology that I was trained very young to use.”

Nick Dunne, the protagonist in Gillian Flynn’s new novel, “Gone Girl,” was a New York magazine writer before magazines began “shuttering, succumbing to a sudden infection brought on by the busted economy.” He was on the top of the world — actually getting paid to write — when suddenly, he laments, writers “were like women’s hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers.”

I read those words on an e-book. And I wonder whether technology and innovation finally have come to the rescue.”

 

Here is my response, first to the local paper about their site and second to the issues Debra posed in her article:

 

 

“I read this and I am not going to thank the writer. Sorry. I have had pieces published in the commentary section of this paper including a “Guest Opinion” spot several years ago with a great picture of me and all! I grew up in Salem, I then moved away. I occasionally come over to the website to see what is going on in the town that I came from. Catch up on small town life if you will. However, recently your parent company, Gannett, took over how your site is laid out and made the content much harder to actually digest. The multi-media aspect is great for people who just want to look at a bunch of pictures but the site feels empty as far as content goes with actual… well news. Links are buried and often stay around for several days. I know there is new news to report but I guess I will just have to search around to find it online. I was up in Salem a couple weeks ago and was SHOCKED that there was a ton in the physical printed paper. Awesome that it winds up somewhere I guess. Gannett should take a page out of the LA Times site and their blog-like constant feed of “local” news in the LA Now section. I know that I can hop on there and click the link and see everything that is happening at any time during the day.

That all being said; I know the trend with pay-for-online-content that’s been happening, LA Times does it too. I know the world is a scary place for old timey companies that are used to generating revenue a certain way and then suddenly, in almost an instant, the whole game changes (Look at what happened to the music industry in the 2000s) but there are ways. Yes we have services like iTunes and Amazon where you still pay for it, but piracy still exists, probably even more now than before but, that industry is thriving again. Even streaming services like Pandora and Spotify offer it up free of charge, with ads of course, but even those are not as intrusive as the ones on TV or Radio. It’s all about adapting, and print media’s new quick fix is to try and lock people who aren’t actual daily paper subscribers into some sort of quickly thought up weekly pay scheme. It’s scary when revenues decline that rapidly, I get it. But in short, you just aren’t at a viable fix to it yet. Your bandaid approach to solving YOUR issue was at the expense of a lot of your readership that honestly, you probably didn’t even factor in when you made the decision.

One of the main points you attempted to make in your article is that pop-up adds don’t generate the revenue to pay for all the things a classic newspaper company needs to run (journalist, editors, etc) in the traditional sense. Lump that in with the addition to the new digital realm (people hired solely to focus on web content) and I can see how you might think that something has gone wrong with the internet world and people just not paying for news anymore. I get where you’re coming from, I really do, and I even have the answer for you! How do you pay for it all? You don’t. Journalist and the editors they have are not as necessary as they once were. Sorry, they’re just not. As you mentioned we are in a world full of smart phones and those smartphone owners are often bloggers reporting mini-news to their Facebook pages and snapping pictures of things like accidents they just saw and the names of those involved. We still need some journalist and editors, just not as many. Live people now send you stories directly to your digital inbox as they happen. You don’t have to hop in the white van anymore and drive around all day searching for news. It comes to you in real time, on-demand. All you have to do is pop it into a modern editor (a word processor with a decent spell check) make a phone call to someone nearby to check some facts on your phone, the same one you just read the email about the story to begin with on, and BAM! News story is ready to go. The days of bullpens full of reporters is done. Gone. Finished. You now only need a handful of people sifting through the flood of info that comes to you now. And proper, well placed and negotiated advertising on your site, in the videos, and ads on the phone applications should be designed with the budgets of the staff in mind to keep the costs where they should be and even possibly profitable. You have the opportunity to run an efficient and fast machine that can deliver real content to consumers extremely fast at a fraction of the cost. You just need to figure out that the old days are gone and start making the changes now, before you fold up and fade away like yesterday’s newspaper.”

Let’s Rebuild!

Posted on by Jordan

Knowledge is power. It’s what really separates an ordinary individual from an extraordinary one.  You don’t have to cure cancer or invent a Shamwow to be extraordinary; you just have to be different from the rest. Since GI Joe said it best and “knowing is half the battle” I guess knowing exactly what I want now is going to be hard to stick to, but I must!  Things in life really couldn’t be going any better as far as big picture goes.  Still, sometimes I find myself thinking back to the past and where I was from 2006-2009 and how life was so much different back then.  I thought I had it all figured out. To a point I guess I did.  Everything was on track and I was accomplishing every little thing that I had wanted all my life.   For some reason in my youth, I guess, I got restless and always thought there was more I should have or deserved. Looking back a couple years, I wrote something on this topic about this character flaw I have and now I think I might have overcome it. When things got stable I used to let my mind wander around and let me think that there could be more.  Now I don’t. I now realize that I want my life to be more like the way it was back then.  Stable.  No worries. I was content. I let my mind trick me into thinking I was bored and unhappy.  Now I don’t really know what else to blame except my own naivety.

Now I am a few years older, and a few years wiser, and I feel like I have come to grips with the reality of what I really want. Now I simply must find it. I am not going to let little things slide anymore. I have very clear goals for my career and personal life and I am tracking ahead of schedule to achieve those.  I just need one last piece of this puzzle to fit in to it. This time I will require it to fit in perfectly with no jamming or forcing. If it doesn’t fit perfectly I will simply try and find a better fitting piece. No more games and no more half settling, I am only reaching for the stars now! I know I have said it before but this time I mean it, as evidenced by my actions the last couple of months.  I am working on building the best me possible and slowly introducing others back into my life and it’s working out great. Much like how they are rebuilding ground zero in New York; I am rebuilding my life after it stood proudly in all its glory many years ago. And it will again. It’s going to be an interesting ride. I am excited to see where I wind up!

Let’s do this!

Holy 99% Titanic!

Posted on by Jordan

You know I’m pretty much over this whole 99% being mad at the 1% crap.  It’s actually pretty fucking stupid.  For example the guy building the Titanic replica; who the FUCK cares about how he spends the money he made for himself. Now the “99%” people have their panties all in bunch over it and lighting up the internets. Well maybe the fact that you’re a fat fucking lazy arm chair internet crusader who can barely get off the couch long enough to take a shit is the reason for your economic despair? Ya’ think?  This fucker created a mining company from nothing!  Bet you couldn’t even stay focused long enough to dig a hole in the back yard. Even if you could you’d bitch about it the whole time because you think you’re better than the work.

YOU’RE THE PROBLEM! Why haven’t you seen that yet??? Just because you can’t make that kind of wealth for yourself doesn’t mean the ones who can should give you some of theirs for being smart enough to figure out how to make it and driven enough to actually obtain it!

“Oh he didn’t pay enough in taxes…” Bet the fucker created a ton of those job things you haven’t heard about.  Bet he’s gonna make a lot more of them too with people building his toy boat and staff making it work.  Fuck come to think of it maybe you should all be paying him.  I’m starting to think he might be Jesus.

 

You bet your fucking ass I found a picture of Jesus with the Titanic!