Sometimes this boy gets too big for his britches, but I think a lot of people do. I’m the type of person who lives in my head and I’m consciously doing my best to live in the moment more before things get too stuffy up there. I’ve often had big ideas about living all over the world and how the people and places all over this planet seemed much more interesting and hospitable than where I’m from. Probably a naturally immature perspective, however I actually acted on it back in September and packed my shit to move cross country for what would become my dream job.

All due warning would be true about Wisconsin being this cold ass place, which a far different culture than what I was used to. While I consider myself highly adaptable, the pure ambition and idealistic image I had for a job doesn’t levitate on it’s own against the backdrop of a city in the southern part of a pretty white, rural and stereotypically midwestern state.

Whatever… nothing’s permanent. Jobs, location, lots of things… they come and go, right?

Well, what if this wanderlust inside me never goes away? Do you have a wanderlust? Do you have nomadic tendencies? Did your cave men ancestors look at the agriculturist fragments of your tribe like they were fucking nuts for deciding to grow beans and goats?

Yeah, well I think that wanderlust is a big part of me. I fulfilled it to a point. Moving to Wisconsin was and has been one hell of an adventure to satiate the my desire to be shaken and stirred.

However, the part where your family calls and tells you someone’s sick or dying or that someone’s having a baby or that someone’s having a really hard go at it and could use you around to talk to.

When you place a big part of your self worth into being there for the people you care about and making new friends scares and exhausts you, does it make sense to keep moving? I mean, sometimes I sit and look the situations I put myself in and at the type of person I am for face value and I think “well James, I’m completely certain you are either a masochist or brain damaged.”

But what if my character isn’t fatally flawed in the Shakespearean sense? There is an ebb and flow associated with pretty much all aspects of life. Happiness, sadness, death, birth, success and failure…

The tendency for me to push this and other envelopes as far as I know to push them and then continue on until I find great success or get burnt out seems applicable to finding happiness continually through life. I’m not actually unhappy right now either, I just worry too much. I dwell on the past sometimes and how I could have done things differently so that I can learn my mistakes and make them better. Then once I’m content with understanding how I screwed up in the past and learned, I dwell on the future and harass it until it reveals some tangible thing for me to chase around like a cat after a moth.

I find my strength from within and outside of myself and that’s really something that I continually surprise myself with. Even at times when I feel like I’m in an echo chamber where nobody understands me, not even myself, the right thing pops into my mind and it’s like that life line that I need to grab onto once more to pull myself along.

Where do you find your strength and inner will to push on when you constantly find yourself outside of your comfort zone? This is a question to the relocators, the job changers, the people looking to find love again and the people who break rules and take toys apart just to see what they’re really made of.

**This post is super personal, confessional and somewhat of an “oh shit, I probably shouldn’t share this” entry. So please read on with care. I’m still working out this being-me-and-living-life thing…**

As I talk a mean game about the things I want from life and from myself there are serious short comings in the approach I’ve taken time and time again. By putting myself through the ringer with hard work and rewarding myself with things that hurt me, I become utterly frustrated with my lack of respect for  myself and in turn, the lack of respect I’m showing towards those I care through my actions.

This repressed frustration has been simmering for some time now, but came to an uncomfortable head very recently.

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I got a call from my uncle while I was finishing up work yesterday. I missed his call and I checked my voicemail shortly before I went out to happy hour with a friend from work. The message he left wasn’t normal. He just said that he wanted to talk to me and that I needed to call him back. My phone wasn’t working well in the office so I figured I’d call him later.

When I was out having a drink and appetizers at the bar, my mom called. She said my uncle went to the doctors and found out he had a large tumor on his esophagus and that he was really scarred and wanted to talk to me. My stomach dropped and I felt myself getting upset. We decided to leave the bar and head back to my coworker’s apartment and then go out to get food and drinks with some other friends. I decided to call my uncle on the drive to the apartment but couldn’t get a hold of him.

So, we went out and had more drinks before dinner and while we were waiting for a table my uncle called and I stepped outside to take the call. He told me about what the doctor said and how if he hadn’t quit his last job for a new gig and needed a physical before starting that he would probably not have found out about the tumor until he starting having symptoms and it would have been too late. I asked him to keep me up to date with the surgery and how he was feeling.

He asked me how I was doing I told him about some of the frustrations I’ve been having lately and how regardless of it all, I’ve still never once regretted making the biggest career and geographic move of my life. As always, he reminded me and re-assured me that I was doing the right thing and that moving forward I would continue to do the right things as long as I stayed true to myself.

After hanging up the phone I took a deep breath and went back inside to have dinner. We stayed out for a bit having a few more drinks and then I went home around 1AM.

On the way home, I picked up a pack of cigarettes. When I go out drinking I have always liked to have cigarettes because it always feels soothing to smoke and feel buzzed. Plus the social aspect of stepping outside to smoke with people has always been something I didn’t have to think about. I just did it.

I’ve battled with a lot of demons in myself since I was a young person. I think I had my first cigarette when I was around 13. I probably had my first drink around that time too. I make excuses to why I’ve drank and smoked pretty much my entire adult life and even as an adolescent and the fact of the matter is that I haven’t ever been able to respect myself fully for doing these things.

I’ve gone months or even years without having a cigarette or alcohol and lost a whole bunch of weight and gotten healthy in the process. I’ve worked my ass off physically and mentally to get to certain points and suddenly when I feel like I accomplished something, I reward myself with the things have hurt me and always have hurt me. It’s a ridiculously vicious cycle and I hate it. I truly hate it and sometimes I even hate myself for falling into it repeatedly.

I get frustrated with myself and the people I surround myself with because I think back to the days when I was at my best, or what I considered my best and I was more or less a self-motivated person going to the gym, eating healthy and withdrawing myself from the social circles that I continuously found myself battling to escape.

The lack of mental and physical balance and the persistent extremes that I put myself through are what I feel continuously make me veer of course further and further. When I completely remove myself from my friends and the situations that influence my poor behavior, I’m sealing myself off from a lot of the good things that sustain me as well.

I feel like my family and friends won’t expect much out of me at any point unless I throw up a façade of extreme changes that don’t really seem sustainable in any reasonable regard. I guess I don’t expect much out of myself either. I don’t understand the lines between where I go so wrong and where my best intentions are.

I read somewhere once that when you’re trying to break bad habits, the key is consistency. Whenever you commit to something and give up on changing your ways, you’re essentially lying to yourself and letting yourself down and in essence entrenching yourself in your bad ways even more.

I want to quit drinking, quit smoking and I want to become healthy, forever. I’ve used alcohol, cigarettes and food to comfort and reward myself for the hard work I’ve put in elsewhere in my life and they essentially decrease my ability to be my best self for myself and the people I love. When I decide to punish myself and withdraw as I crumple up a pack of cigarettes, pour the remainder of a bottle of wine down the sink and throw out junk food laying around my house, I become this broody bastard and resentful of all the external forces that I feel like are trying to sabotage me from enjoying my life. My friends call and want to go out and I resent them for trying to put me in a position where I’ll be tempted to drink, smoke, eat shitty food and spend money that I should be saving.

The difference that I’m feeling now compared to the other times I’ve tried to kick my habits is the sense of obligation to honor the people I love and the things that I love about myself. My uncle is very sick right now and he took a big part in raising me when I was young when my father wasn’t around. He’s always been better to me than he needed to be and the sobering (no pun intended) encounter with his mortality has made me suddenly too aware of my own.

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I’ve heard around the way that you shouldn’t ever publish a blog post unless it makes you a little bit scared before you hit “publish.” Well, I am scared right now. I’m very scared of losing my uncle, I’m very scared that the positive things I do in life will be outweighed by the negative and I’m scared of how hard the future is going to be. However, I’m not scared of being judged. No one reading this could judge me as hard as I’m judging myself and nobody can make me change the way I’m living better than I can.

So with that said, I’m dedicating this blog post to my Uncle and everyone who has ever held higher standards and hopes for me than I have for myself. Thank you and I love you.

I’m back in Wisconsin after spending 2 weeks in Massachusetts for the holidays. I spent a bit of time in Worcester seeing friends and making new ones. Hosted an excellent Brazen Careerist Meetup in Harvard Square, met some awesome folks and tried to re-energize and reflect on the strange, at-times painful yet incredibly successful year that 2009 was and what’s going to go down in 2010 if I have any say about it.

Being home with family is nice. I got to spend a lot of time with some of the people that mean a ton to me and I definitely wish I could have spent more time with others. All I know is that I’m really grateful for all the people back home including both family and friends who have my back. I’m not sure if they know how much they fortify my will to succeed and make them proud.

I’m starting to like Madison more, but I don’t love it, yet, you know? Really, how could I love it? It’s too soon. I’ve got some pretty good friends here so far, thankfully. I’m also very satisfied with my job and how things are going with my role in the company.

I’m looking forward to making more friends, traveling a lot and continuing to make connections with others and within myself in the new year. Self-discipline is going to be a main ingredient I predict. That’s okay, a spoon full of sugar helps the pride go down.

Time to get back to work now. Cheer folks!

I’m home in Massachusetts now staying at my mom’s apartment in Worcester. The flights home were pretty horrible, but I’m glad I didn’t have to spend the night in the airport or spend dough on a hotel.

I got home at 2AM and was greeted by my grandmother who recently had a heart attack. She lives downstairs from my mother. Her and my grandfather own the building and it’s where I grew up. Some pretty unsavory people have come into and out of my life with this apartment building being the backdrop for most of my pre-adult and some of my adult memories.

I guess I sort of left this place in a hurry when I went to college, then got a job in Boston and then eventually got hired at Brazen Careerist. I never meant to be an escapist, but my desires and aspirations seem to lead me away from here, so I don’t try to fight it too much.

What I do try to fight is the tendency to distance myself from family and friends. When I get wrapped up in my busy work life, I forget to call, I don’t come home much and I can be generally neglectful to everyone including myself. It’s funny, I start working out again and suddenly the other things that I should be doing start happening again. The law of attraction is pretty useful at times.

So when I saw my grandmother, I was really happy. I got a little choked up but didn’t want to cry my first time seeing her in 3 months. I told my sister on the ride home from the airport that when my mom called me the morning my grandmother had her heart attack, my entire life flashed before my eyes. I was convinced she was going to die. I was absolutely certain she wasn’t going to make it through surgery. I actually went into work and tried to stay busy until I got an update from my mother or sister saying what the results of her stint procedure were.

She made it out of surgery and I was relieved. I was also cursing myself for becoming distant and resentful of my familial craziness put any distance between my beloved grandparents and myself. Right before her surgery, I got my gramma on the phone because my mom told me to. She sounded bad and weak and I just wanted to tell her I loved her no matter what while I still had the chance. She said she loved me too and that she was going to be fine because she always survives these kinds of things. Then said she was going to let me go because the doctors were coming in. As she hung up the phone I was in the middle of saying I love you one more time and I crumbled into heavy sobs alone in my apartment. I was convinced that would be the last time I ever talked to my grandmother again.

I got a text from my sister later that afternoon saying my grandmother did well in surgery and that she was probably going to be okay. I took a deep breath and sent a ‘thank you’ above to whomever or whatever was listening.

Later that day when I got out of some meetings I talked to my mom and was asking lots of questions about what happened and what was going to happen moving forward. I was anxious and my mom was being vague. I started to get upset because I wanted to be mentally prepared (as much as I could be) for what was next. She just kept telling me “I know you feel bad for not being here. I know you feel bad for leaving home. Don’t. Just, don’t”

She was right. I’ve never totally coped with my own desires to move on and do big things wherever I please and the ever-present feeling that I’m abandoning the people who raised me, my mom and grandparents.

I’m home for two weeks in the belly of the beast where all the madness and incredible loved I’ve shared with my family has transpired over a really interesting 25 years. I got to sit up with my grandmother who’s doing SO much better now healthwise, I got to go out food shopping with my grandfather (who’s one of the smartest and funniest people who never graduated high school that I ever met) all morning  I am so grateful for that. My family is vast, rough around the edges, unrefined and bat shit crazy, which explains why I am too… and I love it.

I hope you are all enjoying your family and friends this holiday. We all have reasons to be grateful whether it’s from big gains or big losses. Don’t let the imperfections of the diamonds in your life take away from the fact that they are indeed diamonds and are some of the greatest gifts we could ever ask for.

Thank you all for reading and I wish everyone nothing but the best!

I’ve been driving back to Worcester quite a bit lately. My grandmother is laid up after breaking her pelvis and I’m trying to get in as often as possible. I’ve been tossing around the idea of buying a house or apartment in Worcester through the Buy Worcester Now program. The idea of being close to my family is appealing and scary at the same time. I’d like to travel, see the country and hold different jobs, but as of now I know I don’t have that kind of money and won’t be able to get ahead simply paying people rent money that could be going towards owning something. The girlfriend is going to be living about an hour away for at least a year and so that’s something else to deal with.

Heavy stuff indeed. Treading water just doesn’t appeal to me on the long term and the “big breaks” I’ve been waiting for haven’t come my way yet and I have a feeling that taking what I want out of life is how it’s going to have to be. The pacifist in me isn’t financially savvy. I need to get on that.