Late nights and low expectations

Sleeping. Fast food. Television. Girls Gone Wild commercials.
With all of the free time I have, you might think I would find something more productive. But I haven't. I've put off an oil change for my car for a week, neglected to wash more than one load of laundry since graduation and still have not unboxed any books.

The lack of motivation, Pangloss, is one of the many negative factors of our condition. When we first graduated, this was called decompression. We had earned the time off. We deserved an uninterrupted break. But I can't seem to break the cycle.

Part of it is undeniably my job. If I keep late hours, spend my mornings asleep and eat high-carbohydrate food without exercising, I'm going to be sluggish. But the job can't bear all the burden. If I wanted to do so, I could be asleep most nights by eleven thirty. Instead, I stay awake to play "Asteroids," which wasn't cool in the 1980s and isn't cool now.

I think that another part of it, though, is that I'm able to get away with it. I have such low expectations for myself that I hardly have any interest in motivating myself to exceed them.

Home Sweet Home

I once saw on a wall the following quote: "Home is not a place but where they understand you." Well, if that's the case, then I should be spending my nights sleeping at the liquor store, because only those guys know what I really, really need in life.

I thought time travel was impossible but moving back home has proved that to be a false impression. But I didn't get to go back to see Led Zeppelin in concert or to Washington crossing the Delaware. No, I got sent back to 9th grade: "Who are you talking to on the phone? Where are you going? You need to do this, this, and this."

I am eternally grateful to my parents for allowing me to live under their roof, for otherwise I would have no where else to go while down on my luck. But sometimes there's a lot of tension, and whose fault it is isn't always clear. In one of our arguments last night, I was told that I need to stop acting like a child and learn to be the adult that I claim I want to be treated as.

Now this is extremely confusing, because I think I might have acted childish in this one instance. But was that all my fault or was it at least half my parent's fault for treating me like a child in the first place? Nature or nurture, Mom and Dad? It's quite a Catch-22, because I can't act like an adult and do whatever I want without raising their ire ("There are rules you have to follow while living under my roof."). But if I do what they want, then I fundamentally regress into being what they claim they don't want me to be.

Some days, you just wake up and wish that your woman was curled up by your side, her soft head gently resting on your shoulder. And then you realize that, no, that would be embarassing, because then she'd have to see all your old high school paraphanelia every morning. But at least I don't live in the basement, Martin. That's just plain stereotype. I've graduated to the attic. Hah.