Breaking Up With Yellow

     I'm not much for sentimentality.  I don't have a problem letting go of inanimate objects just because they're attached to a particular memory or feeling.  I'm a pack rat in reverse.  I throw things away I might desperately need at a later date.  Thinking that I might need something two years from now is simply not enough reason for me to retain it.

     I like clean lines, clutter-free, knick knack free countertops and tables.  My home is not a retail oddity shop.  You cannot come to my house and peruse an eclectic mix of bizarre items from around the country.  Functional items often cross the boundary into decorative, and this might be okay to some people, but I'm not trying to inflict my own personality onto the items I own.  I don't buy things because they're "cute."  I buy things that I need.

     Maybe it's a function of testosterone, maybe it's a function of a fear of personal attachment, but for the most part, I can throw almost anything away.  I think people, as a general rule, don't consider themselves enough.  People don't often sit down, have some quiet time, and consider who they really are.  We're on the go.  We have things to do.  We lose our sense of self awareness in our daily grind.  Our personalities are there, buried in us.  The fight to get out, though, has been lost.  We stand by original convictions as if we still feel the same way.  Case in point:  when I was very young, I decided that yellow was my favorite color.  Many years have passed, now, and when someone asks me what my favorite color is, I blankly, and without much thought, tell them it's yellow.  I have never revisited this stance and I am comfortable with the color choice of my six year old self.  I'm so comfortable with it, that I have a hard time revisiting my original conviction and I'm not really open to change it.  It's been yellow for so long, I feel that I might lose a little piece of who I am if I just up and abandon poor yellow.  And then where would yellow be?  Out on the streets, tossed aside like a used diaper in the trash!  We've been through a lot together, me and yellow.  How could I ever abandon you?  This may be an extreme explanation, but it illustrates the attachments we feel towards things.  And that's not even a physical thing, it's a concept.  Sorry, yellow, it's time for you to get evaluated.  People change.  It's not you, it's me.  

     I'm not saying that I hold absolutely zero sentimentality.  I like to look at old pictures, I feel connections to things I've had for long periods of time, and I have certain books that I just can't simply give away or throw out.  What I'm saying is in those rare times when we make a decision to like something, when we evaluate how we feel about something and respond according to that decision, we very rarely look back and reevaluate.  Once the decision is made, we take for granted that we will always feel the same.  We take comfort in never having to analyze that feeling again and years pass as we blindly assume that once we like something, we'll always like it.

     Sometimes, I make a snap judgement to throw something away that I don't think I want to throw away.  And it's hard.  But once it's in the trash, I move on and rarely ever think of it again.  Just recently, I was cleaning out my garage.  In there, I found an old beat up lamp, with no shade, in the shap of a koala.  The koala on the base of the lamp was a stuffed animal sort of thing, fluffy, hair matted down.  The lamp was not mine, it was my wife's and she had had it for as long as I can remember, probably before we had even known each other.  But I was cleaning out the garage.  I couldn't remember the last time we even attempted to plug it in.  Into the trash!  I continued cleaning out the garage, but luckily (and as an act of sheer self preservation), I got into that rare mindset of reevaluating my initial feelings.  Who am I, I thought, to inflict my personal feelings about keeping sentimental things onto my wife?  I thought about it for a while before I pulled it back out of the trash can.  Who knows what kind of memories this item holds for her?  Who knows what memories she would forever lose because this lamp was not here to remind her of them?  It was not my place, and I overstepped the boundary of respect for her belongings, assuming that she could have the same sense of disconnect that I have.  

     All of this begs the question:  Are we the sum of our belongings?  In a way, the answer is yes.  We acquire things and we project memories onto them.  We see an item and are reminded of a certain time and place, a situation, a smell, a feeling.  If not for the item, the memory inspired by the item, while not completely lost, will dull with the inactivity of thought.  These items bring it back, remind us of the memory, and repetition always equals retention.  

     So what, exactly, am I advocating here?  It seems as though I'm contradicting myself.  Throw it away, keep it for the memory it reminds you of...

     I'm saying that we are human beings, with thoughts and feelings and personalities.  We are unique and diverse.  I'm saying use the power of thought.  Don't blindly accept something just because it always was.  Reevaluate.  Hold yourself to a higher standard of thought and self awareness.  Try to understand how and why you feel a certain way.  It's easy to forget it in the mundane course of everyday life, but one day you'll wake up, and years will have passed.  It is the difference between letting things happen to you and making things happen for you.

     And come back yellow, I miss you already!

     

   Check out by book here!

     

Airport Shenanigans (part one)

People are amazing.  Recently, I flew to Atlanta on a work related expedition for product training.  

JIA is a humble airport, with a spattering of terminals, resting serenely, almost with an air of nonchalance, as a nearly insignificant blip on an otherwise uneventful swath of land inside the rim of Jacksonville's northern extremity.  I suppose what I'm trying to convey here, is that Jacksonville has a wishful airport, big boy pants for a waist that's just too small...it's trying, though, and one day, maybe soon, the waistline will fit the pants.

With ticket in hand and bags checked, I confidently made my way toward my designated terminal.  I wouldn't, by any remote stretch of the imagination, call myself a frequent flyer, but over the last four or five years, I've flown to Atlanta twice, Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, and Richmond, Virginia.  While I I'm not a Lord of the Rings level traveler, I would at least consider myself comfortable with and accustomed to the act of flying--in a plane, in case you thought I had acquired the next level of human evolution or come up with an aviatory solution not otherwise already considered.  Because of my past experiences with this sort of thing, I elected to bring a Tom Robbins novel with me in an attempt to quell the boredom of the inevitable wait.  I already knew that waiting in a security checkpoint line, on the plane before takeoff and after landing, and then on the tram to the hotel, was imminent.  Plus, the book is wildly entertaining.

Everything was textbook as I boarded the plane; everything was standard airport monotony.  I can find entertainment almost anywhere and people-watching at an airport could be the Super Bowl of a lifetime of people-watching training.  There's much to digest, if observing people is your bag.  

A little off-topic, and as a simple example (I like supporting evidence), I hadn't been inside of JIA for ten minutes before I witnessed the first of many soon to come novelties a simple airport has to offer.  I was standing on an escalator, heading down.  The escalator to my left was on the upward rotation, creating a technological letter "X" in the form of metal steps.  I mind my own business for the most part, I don't seek out strangers to talk to, don't give them a reason to talk to me.  In fact, in public places, where there is an abundance of people, my goal is to be invisible.  I slither through the crowd, not making eye contact, not making a scene in any sense of anything.  I'm not sure if my ninja skills were honed just so precisely on this occasion, or if the woman on the up escalator just didn't care that I was there, because she suddenly turned to two men about twenty feet back on the escalator behind her and asked loudly, affronted, if they were talking about her, and that she could hear everything they had said.  I, as previously stated, was on the opposite escalator, moving in the opposite direction and so was not privy what the two men had said.  One of them looked at her square in the eyes and told her, yes, they were talking about her.  Then she released the Kracken on them and began to unleash some words in the English language that I had only heard tales about.  

The voice trailed off the deeper I rode the escalator down, as my thoughts moved from how homeland security could possibly have executed her right then and there for causing such a stir in the airport.  They would have been within the limits of proportionate reactions because the woman had lost a grip on her sanity and quite literally had become a threat.  I never got to hear the end of that argument, but it would end up being just a simple skirmish in the war of my day.  

So, my thoughts moved back to finding my terminal, which I did, and fast forwarding, I ended up on an aisle seat, sitting there, invisibility cloak wrapped tightly around me, Tom Robbins book in hand.  The book had been a gift, and I had just started reading it after I had situated myself in my seat.  I was on page one.

The seats were five across, with an aisle in the middle.  I was on the two seat side, close to the aisle.  I only describe this arrangement to facilitate the understanding that the window seat was currently open, the plane not fully boarded, but really it illustrates that when my aisle-mate would arrive, we'd be in intimate quarters, just the two of us with no third wheel buffer.  A third wheel buffer always keeps the invisibility cloak in tact.  Head down in a book keeps it in tact too, mostly, because most people just don't feel comfortable interrupting a person reading.  My aisle-mate arrived and I stood up to let him get to his window seat.  A break in my reading, and a break in keeping my head down not to have to converse with anyone occurred because of this movement.  Obviously, I had not properly planned this out.

We were forced to exchange cordialities.  He was in his mid to late fifties, a little overweight, gray hair, but still held on to a youthful vigor only discovered after he began talking.  

"What are you reading there?"  Dammit.  Here we go.

"Oh," I muster a deceptively fake air of outgoing charm.  "It's a book by Tom Robbins."

"Not very far into it, are ya?"  Dick. 

I rally.  "I just got it.  Brought it to read on the flight."  There.  Short, to the point.  Stated my intentions. Leave me alone.  He gets it.  And he really did seem to.  I continue reading.

The plane begins to take off in the late afternoon, early evening.  The sunlight is waning, but there's still enough that I can comfortable see the words on the pages.  The airline had taken measures to ensure a convenient experience.  I like to believe that the meeting went like this:

"Look, we can give them more leg space, bigger seats for comfort, or we can give them overhead lighting.  We can't give them both.  Cut backs causing strategic use of our funds dictates this.  We have some tough decisions to make, boys."  He probably slammed his fist down on the table for emphasis.  The members sitting at the boardroom table probably jumped a little at the unexpected punctuation.

"Lights."  They all agreed.  Except Smith, who always went against the grain.

"Fuck you, Smith, it's gonna be lights."

So there I am, legs curled up to my chin, thinking about how Smith needs to grow some balls and stand up for his convictions.  I reach up to turn on my overhead book light, since my side of the plane is angled away from the sun.  I push the button....and nothing happens.  Wow.  I lose.  I accept it quickly, and go back to reading in the dying light.  There's still enough to easily make out the words on the page.

"Ya have to hold the button in for a few seconds to turn it on."  My best friend next to me suddenly exclaims.  Apparently, my dilemma has not gone unnoticed.  I graciously say thank you and hold the button in.  I hold it in a little longer than what I deem necessary, but it's just so my helpful buddy sees and knows that I gave it a shot according to his directions.  No light.

"The flight is only 53 minutes.  How long are ya gonna hold it in?"  Holy shit man.  This guy just directed me to hold the button in and now he's ridiculing me for doing as instructed.  This guy!  I don't respond directly.

"Oh well." I say.  "No big deal."  Still using as little words as possible, no longer so I don't have to interact anymore, but because I've already decided that I don't like him.

He turns his light on and directs it toward me.  "Thanks," I manage.  Maybe he's okay after all.  I would never find out.  The plane touches down in Atlanta and I'm off the hook with him.  "Good luck in your travels," I tell him, and he, none the wiser that homeland security could very well have wrestled me to the ground if they had but known my thoughts as I exited the plane.  

There's more to the story, but my time to write is winding down.  Perhaps soon I'll revisit it and explain the rest.  Maybe, when its rainy outside, or the kids are at school and I'm alone in the house and with no idea what to write about, I'll create the second part.  Enjoy!