★ A Short Post on How I’m Doing…

I’m doing awesome. In fact, the past 3 months have been phenomenal and I’ve been blessed with some terrific lessons and wonderful teachers. The past few days have not been so sunny but it’s a culmination of the holidays, being alone and feeling slightly disappointed about my accomplishments in 2009. Naturally, I’m over it now and I’m going to go back to how I felt and was living before. Each day something creeps up that inspires me to simply walk away from social networks, walk away from the web and become a sous chef or an auto-mechanic or go back to farm work like I did when i was a young kid. I love what I do but I have my doubts that this is contributing adversely to our future and that I’m “building the matrix” but, a decision to give up on something I’ve been doing for 10 years doesn’t come easily.

More than ever, I’m being more honest with myself and realizing the true problems with being so open online. You might be thinking about how much you hate people of a certain color or how you don’t respect people in the fast food industry but when I tweet it, suddenly I’m the bad guy and I get the fingers pointed at me. For a long time, my openness has helped me get to where I am. The adventures and lessons I’ve learned would have been drastically different had I not embraced this medium of sharing whatever was on my mind. I’m happy with what has opened up for me simply by being honest. At the same time, the misunderstanding into what kind of person I am and what truly inspires me has caused me to feel virtual communication and messaging has a long way to go before it replaces human to human contact.

A friend today told me how people think of me and what those people think about my lifestyle and what their analysis is of me simply based off my tweets.

• Attention Seeker
• Shut-In
• Workaholic
• Psychopath
• Fucked up childhood
• Loaner
• Confused

Interestingly enough, I agree with these speculations because, based on my tweets and blogs, it’s pretty much in line with the “persona” that I project. The thing is, I’m not any of these things and I had a great childhood. If you, the reader, were as honest and open as I was on your blog or Twitter account, people would say the same thing about you simply because it’s hard to be “open” and not sound a little crazy. So what’s the solution? I’m not going to change and I’m not going to change who I am because I’m happy with who I am and i have a wonderful family and wonderful friends. The misunderstanding and speculation of who I am based on what I tweet is getting old but I’m the only person to blame because I fuel the fire each day.

New plan: I’m just going to chill out a bit. I’m not going to leave Twitter (after I return on the 1st of January for my holiday break) but I will be tweeting differently. My goal is to share more links, tweet more of my “philosophical” thoughts and be there for friends, both virtually and in real life. Along the way, I should be able to reclaim a bit of my sanity and earn the respect of those who follow me and the only way to do this is to share less. Share more and it gives more things to attack me on and assume about me.

If I am unable to do this, I’ll still be tweeting for companies in my daily job but I’ll simply be absent from Twitter on a personal level. I’m much too happy and much too content with literally every aspect of my life to be so misunderstood but 5 thousand people who have never met me and don’t truly know me.

Two people truly know me. My Father who has spent hundreds of hours learning what makes me tick at home, on vacations and in the dojo where I was forced to survive or get my ass kicked. He knows more about me than anyone else and he’s the first person to set me straight when I’m really screwing  up. Just last week, after reading my latest posts and talking to me for a few hours, he said, “I’m proud of you, son.” Thanks Dad.

The other person is Laura. No other person in my life has known more about me on a personal, spiritual, mental or intimate level than Laura knows about me. She’s the first person outside of my family that I’ve ever “let in” to my world. Her undying support and love for me over the past 4 years gave me faith in humanity and showed me that my job, passions and love of all people wasn’t for nothing and there is something to live for. She is owed my forever gratitude to opening my eyes and teaching me  how to love someone more than they love you. Thank you, Laura.

It would be my honor to meet and fall in love with everyone who reads this blog. I want to meet all of you and share with you what helps me sleep easy at night. I want to learn about you as well and be your best friend and through Twitter, that simply isn’t possible. I’m tired of speed dating and it’s time to get to the root of this. As always, I appreciate you taking the time to read this post.

Have a happy holiday season and a joyful New Years. Me, well I’ve already talked about what I’ll be doing for the New Years but for Christmas, I’m going to be taking photos from now (Wednesday) to when I go back to work (on Tuesday). I have a new camera and you can check the photos I’m taking over at FLICKR. I don’t have anyone to hang out with so I guess I’ll just be alone this holiday. It’s fine and it’s not the first time I’ve spent days upon days all by myself.