Almost 30. Life has changed dramatically over the past 5 years... or 10 years or 20 years... I can remember each of those points fairly vividly; the smells of a little-league ball park (or simply a park with white lines spray-painted in the grass) and my father standing at the chain-link fence praying I get on base, screaming instructions in his most loving tone. He never missed a game. Perhaps I'm 17 again, seeking a young girls warmth between basketball practices, wondering if she's the one, knowing she isn't all the same, but exploring the possibility with all the heart I knew how to muster at that age. Finishing college, angry at the world that is so much dumber than I am. Arrogance and alcohol cloud judgment and ignore wisdom, youthful vigor clamors to be considered part of the world yet has no knowledge of it's true place.
No, instead I am almost 30. Neither young and foolish nor wise and weathered. Perhaps still arrogant. Excited. Engulfed in the world God has built around me, so far from the one I probably would have built for myself. My wife is so beautiful, strong, and was clearly intended just for me. Our little "family" of Chihuahuas so distant from our families we were born into, thousands of miles away we have become our own island of hopes, desires, dreams. We find our entertainment and place in the world around us. Perhaps I have found my place.
A man in his twenties is at a carnival. Life behind you seems dull and gray, the streets you've walked down tell stories, but the lights in front of you, the screams and songs and smells of cotton candy, are enticing. The carnival is expensive. The women have beards. The games are all rigged. The rides appear outstanding the repetition of it all catches up with you. And just like a casino, the odds are on the house, or they wouldn't waste the time setting everything up. The hot dogs are ten bucks! You leave poorer, you smell of hay and horse manure, and still behind you you hear the screams, see the lights, and smell the cotton candy.
I've never been grateful for having gone to a carnival, but I always go. I always force the laughter, and inevitably I have a good time.
In life, as I've left the carnival and headed back into the real world, I don't feel like I actually learned anything from the experiences. They were just experiences. Opportunities to help me choose what I enjoy, what I don't, but actually "learning" anything? I don't know about that...
I do know that I love my family, the one that raised me, the one I am building now. I enjoy a great number of different hobbies, and I suppose that is why I start my blog. My father always told me, choose something and stick with it. He spent almost 60 years in the same industry and now in his mid 80's still reminisces about it. It is OK that that is not me.
I simply wish to share my love of many things. I'd rather be a renaissance man than an expert at any one thing. Perhaps the one thing I did learn from my twenties is that those experiences may not shape who you are as a person, but they shape who you want to be, and what you want your time to be spent doing.
This will be my testament to those experiences.
