#when I haven't even bought the vocation yet.

[vounoura]

the maister system and the new 'find vocations out in the world' system is...ok, but I prefer the old colour system

[ravelengths]

28

Life is weird.

I always find myself coming back to this blog at strange times, moments of nostalgic melancholy, periods of reflection. It is freshly a new year, so I suppose it's an appropriate time to reflect like this. There's just something odd about me coming here this time. I guess I just wanted to add another chapter to this saga. I suppose I want to share to myself what I've learned, express my thoughts as of late.

So here I am, a boy in a man's body. A boy who has navigated a great deal of confusion and pain in my time on Earth. A boy who has grown significantly, and has learned a lot, but still just feels like.. a boy. It's funny to see that I ended the last entry saying that "I have finally entered adulthood". Its funny to think that, for the first time, younger me was right about something. I pretty much hit the nail on the head.

In the time since my last entry, I have continued to work my same job, in which I have attained some pretty noteworthy credentials. I pushed myself to learn something new, pass some difficult exams, and gain some notoriety within my company. The kind of stuff I would have never imagined 5 years ago. I transferred to a location closer to home, and even got promoted to a leadership role, which pays me a wage that most people without college degrees or vocational school dream of earning. I'm so proud of myself for getting to where I am.

I'm still in the same relationship, going on 7 years now. And things couldn't be better. We bought a house together, another thing that I couldn't have dreamed of doing even a few years ago. Hell, it's still hard to believe that we were able to do it. And it's been almost a year now. And to complete the picture, we found a kitten in the car lot behind our house a few months after moving in. I was nervous to have a pet at first, but after a week we decided to get him a little brother. :) Some friends of ours found a full litter of kittens right after we found our little guy, and we wanted him to have a buddy to play with to expel all the energy he had. It's been amazing. I never knew the kind of joy simply having an animal to care for could bring. It has tremendously helped my mental health.

Along with all this, I've been a lot more active with my hobbies, at least when I'm not working (which is quite a lot). I've become a decent mechanic, I make music a lot more, and I've been getting into circuit bending and live visual art. It's been a helpful deterrent from drinking and such, as I find that I am much more focused and driven if I haven't drank in a week or more. But I'm not perfect. I've gone about a year now without smoking weed, but drinking a couple times a week is still my crutch it seems. It's much easier to go without for periods of time now, but I just can't seem to give it up completely. God knew I'd be too powerful if I wasn't an addict.

I guess I really am an adult. I work full time for the city, have a big house with my beautiful girlfriend with 4 cars in the driveway, and two sweet but demonic young cats waiting for me when I get home every day. I really have more than I could have ever wished for. Yet, I still just feel like, a kid. Maybe that's a good thing. Obviously I've made it pretty damn far in life, especially for not even being 30 years old yet. What is it that makes me feel this way? Why do I feel so weird about it? I'm doing okay, I'm not as irresponsible as I used to be, I have more than I could've dreamt of. Is it because I still have hope, and drive? I haven't just folded and accepted my fate as a boring adult? That's a good thing the way I see it. I don't know.

I guess it's just that I yearn for a time when I actually was young. For a time when I could call up my friends out of the blue and we could meet up and get into whatever shenanigans. Without the worry of having to get up early to go to work or worry about being hungover the next day. In a way I do still have friends like that, we toss aside our reasonable judgement from time to time to work on our projects together and drink and bullshit with each other. I love that. I hang onto that for dear life. I guess there are just other friends that I miss dearly.

Music is my greatest passion in life. It's always music that gets me feeling this way. It's what brought me back to this blog tonight. Specifically, the song "Zodiac Shit" by Flying Lotus came on after I put my music library on shuffle. It always brings me back to being like 16 years old, taking psychedelics with my friends, going on random adventures, doing whatever felt right at whatever given moment. I frequently long for this time of my life. Being truly free to explore life and my identity. I was definitely a troubled kid, but I lived in a beautiful delusion. It was wonderful. No matter how naïve I actually was, I really did have it all figured out. But that definitely couldn't last. And that's okay. It's not meant to last. I think the thing that sucks about adulthood, especially after the life I've lived thus far, is that things stop feeling new. It's hard to imagine having an experience that I haven't already traversed. I've lived in the underground nightlife, worked in the criminal underworld, traveled to other continents and gotten completely lost with no cell service, toured around the country in a bus with no seats to play music to hundreds or thousands of people. I've lived both as dirt poor and spoiled rotten. I've tasted all the luxuries and amenities of the elite, as an underdog degenerate kid. I've done hard, dirty laborious work with people of all colors and backgrounds. I've sipped champagne and done drugs with extremely rich people in VIP booths at clubs. I've chauffeured legendary musicians more times than I can count at this point. Even now, at what feels like the most stable and boring time of my existence, most people would still argue that I live a very interesting life. And they are right. I get to do some really fucking cool shit. Even in my professional work life, I get to do and see things that average people couldn't imagine. But why do I still look back on who I was over a decade ago with such awe?

I guess it comes down to freedom. While I am arguably at my happiest now, living an honest and modest life, I do look back fondly on the time where my body felt invincible. Where consequences weren't something that I gave much thought to. I never worried about sleep, never worried about getting in trouble, never worried about my finances. I suppose its easy to romanticize about the time when I didn't truly value my life. A time when I had no future, when I only cared for the present.

For the first time in my life, I have everything to lose. I have love, I have support, I have a home of my own, I have little kitties that depend on me. That's a beautiful thing. I am so grateful for it all. At the end of the day, I couldn't have all this if it wasn't for my past self. That dumb ass kid somehow navigated me to this exact moment. And I can't thank him enough. I'm so proud of him. I'm doing everything I can to take care of him today. I'm so glad that I've kept that child alive, instead of letting him die in the race to finding a stable life like many of the adults I've met in my life.

Maybe being a man-child isn't such a bad thing. Maybe I've still got it all figured out. I know that I am still learning every day, learning how to be a good man, a good member of society, a good friend, a good relative, a good partner. But shit, I'm doing that pretty well.

I'm doing alright.

[mcrmadness]

Ähhhhhhhh kinda frustrating to hear on your first school day that only 3 days later (which will be tomorrow already, since my school started on Monday), you'll be needing a proper laptop with at least 16Gb of RAM. School won't provide us laptops but we need to have our own.

Well, I do have a laptop but it's very old and barely can even manage itself. It's still very dear to me, because it's been functioning so well all these years, even tho I haven't used it much because I mainly use my PC. But I have used it at each vocational school I have been to, and it even traveled to Berlin and back with me. Despite sometimes freezing for minutes on end, it still served well with Netflix if left to ponder things for some time.

But it in no way will work with anything we are going to do tomorrow. It has 4Gb RAM, but if I'm lucky enough, it will work just the bare minimum so that I can at least do something in class. It's still the very basics of Photoshop and photoshopping in general, and I'm not exactly a n00b with that anymore. So I might skip the beginner classes anyway and join the lessons once we get to the more advanced stuff.

Anyhow, I kinda suspected I might need to get myself a new laptop eventually. The current one is not only old, but also very heavy and, well, it's a laptop from 2009. Maybe I'll keep it as my gaming laptop for old games - altho, so far almost everything has worked just fine with Windows 7 so maybe I'll survive.

I also just heard that this laptop cannot be upgraded anymore, so that means I do have to get myself a new laptop, and the sooner the better. But laptops that can be used for photo and video editing are expensive as fuck. Money does not grow on trees, I don't have hundreds of euros of extra just to buy myself a laptop to edit videos with??? I'm also trying to look into whether it would take to buy components and build one myself, maybe I could get a good one for cheaper than what it'd be if I boguht a brand new laptop. I could buy a used laptop and then new components unless I find working, used components too. But this is where the problems start: I am so ridiculously tired because of school, that I cannot think a single thing and I can't get my mind to focus on this now. I don't know where to start. I mean, obviously from the motherboards, but I don't know where to see when a motherboard fits a laptop. I have built my own PC, but it's always different. I haven't really done much with laptops cos I'm more of a PC person, and currently everything is just too overwhelming...

Also the components, too, cost. I don't think I'll be able to build a laptop for these purposes with less than maybe, idk... 300-400€. I'm really not sure but already my PC has 8Gb of RAM (which has been enough for photo and video editing and gaming too???) and I have been meaning to add there another 8Gb eventually, but I haven't bought more yet because it all costs so much.