sixth iteration

Once again I sit down to write a blog and find just a smidgen of time longer than anticipated has gone by.  I'm used to it at this point, so I shrug and continue onward.  I was scrolling through my Timehop this morning and realized with a startle what today is.  The time tends to fly as the years go on, and I can't believe I almost forgot about one of my favorite anniversaries.

What a silly boy I am to nearly ignore what today marks...

THE FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY FOR

MUSINGS OF A FORMERLY

SELF-PROCLAIMED AUTHOR

Now, I know you just clutched your pearls or respective jewelry at the announcement but yes indeed: my blog is now five years old.  An age that means it is ready to really start talking back to me and screaming "You're not my real dad, Jeff!" despite me not being a dad.  Or my name not being Jeff.  I digress.

Last year when I sat down to write the fifth iteration, my view was very different.  I was sitting on a dock in Austin, TX, looking out over the Colorado River and enjoying (somewhat) the 80 degree weather.  This year not so much.  Right now I am sitting at the patio table in my backyard, listening to the cool breeze blowing through the tree canopy above me.  I can hear squirrels chattering, a bird of some sort making little "beep" sounds down the block, and dried leaves blowing across the concrete.  The lawn is freshly mowed and the hostas have been cut back to nubs, signs that show winter is on the way and we'll be better for it.

I am better for it.  I'm better now than I have been in a long time, and it's amazing how much of that has to do with location.

Iteration blogs tend to become lists of things I either liked or hated in the year preceding, how they occurred or didn't, and then what I have to look forward to in a year's time.  I think I've demonstrated fairly deftly all of the things that can occur in a year, but seeing as it's my blog and not yours I get to rehash some of that right now, albeit briefly.

I'd like to think my face is thinner. It's probably just the angle /c:

You start something new in life and you want to start everything fresh too.  New city, new house, new job... new hair?  A year ago today I buzzed my hair off for the last time, ridding it of the last bits of color and dye that I had put it through over the course of two and a half years.  Doesn't get much more fresh than that!  It may have also had to do with the slow slip into madness I was enduring, a steady stream of depression flowing through me in those first four months and not really going away for another seven.  I've written about it before and still have no shame in admitting it now, because it was the road I travelled.

All I wanted from the blog this last year was to upgrade the web service I used to create it.  I said goodbye to Blogger and created seansparker.com.  In hindsight I do miss Blogger and the simplicity it offered, but in the same respect the site was a pain in the ass because it had to habit of sometimes deleting my work.  You know well enough by now that I don't write as frequently as I once did, so to write something and then have it vanish was just about the worst thing.

So I did what I set out to do and la-dee-da, here we are.  I've been admittedly lazy with this site and what it could be, but there's no point in crying about it.

I really like that quote.  It about sums up the last twelve months.  Sometimes I wish I had never moved and stayed put right where I was.  In the same respect I know that wasn't an option for me.  Have you ever had your star charts read?  I did, in Austin, a couple weeks before we moved to Minneapolis.  Some people like to make fun of others for putting faith into things as silly as the zodiac and astral readings, and I don't blame them.  It isn't for everyone.  But when you have your cards read several times over and they apply directly to your life, you do tend to believe in it.

My star chart had a little area where it showed... I don't know, let's call them "astral lines" over maps of the world.  The lines are different colors and mean different things, and there are hundreds of them.  So many that you have to select a country and then look at it with the "key" they have to identify what you're looking at.  Keeping in mind you don't put any information in about where you're from or where you're going, this logic is all based on where you were born, what day, and what time.  Then through what I'm assuming is a combination of Jesus and black magic, they show you all this stuff about your life and who you are predisposed to being as an individual.

There was a black line running directly through Austin, and I asked what it meant.  I was told by my reader "you moved here to fix something, but you're not meant to stay here."  I thought about it and felt that I had moved down to Texas to fix my relationship with my brother.  Not that it was broken, of course.  Josh and I never really had much time around each other as adults and I guess in a lot of ways I wanted to see what that relationship was like, a sentiment I later shared with him.

It was a positive relationship, as I felt it would be, but it was neat to look at it in that different light.  I was able to run my thoughts over him on that before moving away, both of us knowing it was for the best.

There was a green line going through Minneapolis, and this meant "financial prosperity," amongst other positive things.  Moving to this city would mean great things on a career level, both in making more money and ultimately approaching something akin to a dream job.  This logic was confirmed this past weekend by a friend of mine back in Wisconsin, who read the cards for me after I'd gone home and saw this same information (without me telling her so).  My dream job isn't necessarily with the company I am at right now, not to say I'm unhappy, and also not to say I even know what my dream job is.  I suppose I'll know when it hits me between the eyes?

When I asked about the brown line running through my old home in Wisconsin, I was met with her response of "moving back isn't necessary... if you go back you'll be fine, but you won't grow.  You'll be stagnant."

I know this all sounds like hocus pocus and stuff and that's fine, even Derek kinda rolled his eyes at it.  But to me it was great information.  For a person that spent the better part of a year with no direction, feeling lost and alone, wondering where the next step would lead and if the next step was even a wise one... it was golden.  It's never a bad thing to get a pat on the back if you're making the right decision, whether that pat on the back comes from clandestine events or not.  I had already announced the move to Minneapolis when I had the reading, so finding out it was one of the better choices I could make in life?  That was amazing, and so far, it has been.

So where do I want to see the blog go as we enter the sixth iteration?

I want "Musings of a Formerly Self-Proclaimed Author" to revert to what it used to be.  Let's start my losing "Formerly" because it just doesn't flow.  I started this thing before I'd ever published and a large part of me doesn't even feel like a real author anyway.  I don't say that to be a poop, it's just the truth.  Maybe when the royalty payments that get direct deposited into my bank account are in the hundreds (re: thousands), I'll change my tune.  I'd even think twice if they were in the twenties to be honest, harrumph.

In getting back to my roots I want to start writing freely again. Bring back the "Random Truths," maybe have a guest writer.  Maybe conduct some interviews with friends of mine who run their own businesses and see what I come up with?  Format isn't something I'm nailed down on and I'd be happy to continue exploring it.  Bottom line is that I need to start writing again.  I need to make it a part of my daily routine and get stuff out, exploring my thoughts like I used to and feeling a certain amount of zen in doing so.

It's like Lucius sings below: "we'll all be okay."  Ciao for now, gang.  Look for my return to form soon (c;