Tag: blogging

May Rambles

Nothing is ever final, I suppose. A few weeks ago I had made a swift post declaring I was done blogging. In hindsight, it was probably melodramatic. But it was my raw feeling at the time.

There was a lot going on when I rushed into that THE END post. My headspace was in the dark. I’d just found out career-shattering news that really upset me. It was news that will definitely change my teaching job moving forward in both good and challenging ways. My career will begin a new chapter in the fall, but the reason behind it is still frustrating.

Beyond that, I’ve been trying to navigate feelings of isolation and turbulent friendship issues. You see writing is a form of therapy for me. I helps me to think through things, analyze things, and sometimes heal. My raw emotions will go out into the cyber-world because that’s part of who I am. Sadly, a person I know had access to my blog and felt the need to take what I thought of as a safe space and broadcast it to multiple people. They cast judgements on my content, made assumptions, and took it to others. It crossed so many boundaries and caused irrevocable damage with one of my relationships. Yes, I know they are probably reading this right now. And I’m denying them the power of taking away my safe space where I channel my thoughts and feelings. And I hope, if they are reading this, they stay out of my business and they refrain from bringing my personal life and blog to others that simply doesn’t concern them. It was invasive and ethically wrong on their part and their meddling caused permanent damage. It’s unforgivable. I write this simply to show that it’s okay to take power back for yourself and to speak out against people who would try to make it theirs.

So, I’m back. Navigating. Trying to figure things out. I’m sorry if my absence scared anybody. I did get a message from somebody. I’m going to continue writing.

I figured today was a good day to get back into the swing of things because this month tends to be a heavy-hitter for me. Today is Mother’s Day and I’ve been trying to stay off social media because, while I’m glad people are lifting up their moms, it’s tough for me because I don’t speak to mine. It’s a pain that will always haunt me on this capitalist-fueled holiday. I can’t help but think back to the time where I drove all the way from PA to Michigan to surprise my mom for Mother’s Day four or five years ago. I still have the video where I showed up and she bawled her eyes out with joy. It was a fond memory. I don’t think she knew I was gay at that time. I wonder how that would’ve changed things now that I look back on it. Obviously, it’s made its impact now.

Beyond that, May is also my mother’s birthday, my own birthday, and my brother’s birthday. Layers on layers of triggers, if you ask me. This birthday is going to be especially challenging for me given all that’s been happening since I jumpstarted my blogging journey a few months ago. I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m fairly introverted and don’t like making a big deal of my birthday at all. I have enjoyed the past seven years spending it with some people who were important to me. But this year I’m unsure if I”ll be able to do that. I’m hoping, but, as I said, somebody caused some severe damage in their meddling. I do, however, look forward to buying a single slice of cake wherein I douse the cake in milk and eat it. It’s my birthday dessert tradition that I’ve been doing the past few years.

Maybe that’s the theme of May: the firsts of doing things alone.

I saw the new Dr. Strange movie a few nights ago. It was the first time I’ve seen a Marvel movie on opening night by myself. I sat between two strangers, huddled with my popcorn and drink. I was excited to see Wanda Maximoff AKA The Scarlet Witch unleash. For that, I was not disappointed. It was epic. Brutal. I was actively cheering her one, despite her villain status. I was urging her to burn it all to the ground, no matter the cost. There were moments I wish I had people with me to react alongside of. After all, this movie had some insane moments that still keep playing in my head. But I enjoyed the movie, regardless. And it made me like and relate to Wanda even more than I already had.

It’s probably a good thing I don’t have her powers because I would probably embrace my inner villain.

Who knows what this month will hold as I move forward. Maybe some unexpected things will occur. Maybe I’ll continue to grow into my lone wolf status, just me and my dog against the world. Maybe I’ll eat a whole cake this year.

Regardless of what this month holds, I’ll be here exploring my thoughts in wordy ramblings because this space is mine to do that with.

As Wanda says, “I have what I want and nobody will ever take it from me again.”

That One Friend

Lately, a friend of mine has been heavy on my mind. I don’t know why that is. I haven’t talked to this friend in awhile or seen him or anything of the sort. About a decade ago, he took his own life. I’ll never forget that, the pain of losing somebody to suicide.

Just to respect his privacy, let’s simply call him Ben. That’s not his real name, but I don’t want to cause any problems by using his real name. I was honored to have known his real name. You see, Ben was the guy in high school who had it all: the ladies, the popularity, the good looks. Ben wasn’t a jock, no. He was able to get along with most people and, on the side, he had his dealings with some drugs and alcohol. But what can I say? His charisma was alluring and, to be fair, my closeted ass may have had a crush on him.

I remember we talked a little during high school, but we really developed a friendship a year out of high school. I ran into him at a video store, an ancient place where one would rent their movies. We connected, exchanged numbers, and we would talk on the phone about life and all it had to offer. I remember he asked me to go with him to a AA meeting and I agreed.

I was stood up while listening to the All American Rejects hit song “Move Along.” After waiting for Ben for a half hour, I decided to do just that–move along. Though, we connected later. He wanted to hang out and considering my need to forgive people and, well, move along, I agreed. He came over to watch movies and we had sleepover because that was still fairly acceptable. Because I only had one bed, we ended up sleeping in the same bed together. Nothing scandalous happened, but we did give each other back massages at his insistence.

What? I wasn’t going to say no. It was his idea!

Our friendship developed from there. We would chat on instant messenger, he’d come over a few more times, and then there was the last time we would hang out. He asked me to pick him up and for me to take him downtown so he could drop something off to his cousin. Being a good friend, I agreed. I remember he had me park on the side of the street in some unfamiliar neighborhood. He said he’d be back, got out of my car, and climbed into a tinted vehicle. He was there for a solid ten or so minutes before he came back.

Yes, in hindsight I realize I was too innocent to realize that he had asked me to drive him to a drug deal. It must’ve been successful for him; he was pretty happy.

Anyway, we went back to my place and watched some movies. Then it was time for bed because at that time he had agreed to go to church with me the next day. Brace yourself for the irony about to follow.

We slept in the same bed, but we didn’t sleep. It was massage time again but this time while he was laying on his stomach, he asked me to massage his butt and proceeded to pull down his pants. I was too stunned to decline and my closeted gay ass was not about to complain. We proceeded to have conversation while this went on. I remember thinking it was probably not typical for a heterosexual guy to be okay with another guy massaging his bare butt. It almost became something else but he was tired and we went to sleep. After all, we had church in the morning.

Months would go by after that. Within that time, Ben would lose his father. I remember we chatted online about how much he missed his dad. He was broken. I told him I’d always be there for him, he just needed to call. Sadly, at that time I didn’t realize that the cult I was in at the local church would discipline me for admitting to a church friend I watched porn. (Joke is on them! I wasn’t watching straight porn!) However, my punishment via the cult I was in was for them to take away my phone. It was messed up, I know. Even more messed up is that I agreed to this lunacy.

Months later, Ben took a shotgun to his head. I found out about it while I was at a church service, and I was devastated. Absolutely broken.

And I couldn’t help but wonder if in his last moments he had tried to reach out to me, to ask for help, but couldn’t get ahold of me because some cultists thought it necessary to keep my cell phone because I’d looked at porn.

To top it off, I had to ask permission to attend Ben’s funeral because the cult program I was in said I couldn’t be trusted to go anywhere alone. Luckily, another friend of mine in the church knew Ben and went with me. Trust me. I now look back and wish I could tell the fools at that church how messed up they were to make me ask permission to go to a funeral of a friend of mine. I have lots of messed up church/cult stories. But that’s not the focus here.

I miss Ben.

Deeply.

I think about him every so often, wondering where he would be today. Successful? Family? Wife? Or maybe it would be a husband? I feel like he was curious, so maybe he was bisexual. Maybe he was gay. Maybe he wasn’t either of those things. We’ll never know, but I wonder if he was a prisoner of his own mind in that realm. Afraid to be his true self. I know he was in pain. He felt alone and was hurting. His circle of friends, to him, was shrinking (though a lot attended his funeral). I often wonder if he and I still would still be friends? Or would we have a fallout?

I don’t know. I like to think that there is a universe out there in the great multiverse where Ben is still alive and well, where he never pulled that trigger.

You may ask, “Josh, why is Ben on your mind so heavily lately?”

I really don’t know. It’s been intense. Last night, I couldn’t fall asleep because I could only think of Ben which made me thing of the younger version of myself. And I wish I could go back in time. While I was hiding my sexuality from everybody, I feel like some of those moments where easier than the ones I find myself in now. And in some ways, not.

I’d like to think Ben and I would still be friends today.

I wish I could have an hour to talk to him one last time. To ask him why he did it and how he made the decision and whether or not he tired to reach out for help. I wish I could reverse it so it never happened.

Again, I don’t know why he’s on my mind so much. Maybe it’s because I feel alone and hurt with some of my current situations and it’s causing me to long for nostalgia because then I don’t have to worry about the here-and-now. Instead, I can romanticize a life prior to all this current shit. A time with less complications and a dash of more innocence.

And no, don’t panic. I’m not taking a Ben route. That’s not what my blog posts indicate. I’m just finding it helpful to write down what I’m feeling and everything, to throw it out into the cyber-world and see what happens. I’m shouting into an echo chamber, I’m sure. This blog is just a way for me to understand and cope an try to make sense of what doesn’t make sense now. It’s a way for me to write down my pain and explore it. And for some reason my pain is time-traveling.

The pain of Ben’s death is gnawing away inside my chest as I type.

I wish I could go back.

I wish Ben were still here.

I wish things were better.

2016 vs. 2017: Battling for Identity

Sometimes I just need to write my thoughts, my ideas, my intentions. Other times I like to say I’ll write them down, but I never do.

For example, I last blogged on February 14th, 2016 with every intention of blogging regularly.

I failed. Obviously.

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And in many ways I think that’s pretty much what 2016 was for me. A bunch of strange failures. Now, don’t read that and say, “What a pessimist! Don’t be so hard on yourself! Stop it!”  But being hard on myself is kind of something I do. That being said, I don’t think it was a terrible year. However, it wasn’t a majorly successful year, either. It’s one I look back on and think, “Meh.”

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Pretty much how 2016 has treated me

Looking back, 2016 has given me a drive to change a lot of things in 2017; things I’m growing passionate about more and more each day. I’m dividing this blog into two halves. The first half I’ll discuss what didn’t work for 2016. The second? You guessed it! I’ll discuss my plans for 2017. If you find my boring rambling entertaining, then buckle up. If you think I’m a moron and dry, then please continue reading to reaffirm your opinion of me. Either way, it’s a win-win. Right? Plus, I have an addiction to GIFS. Be prepared.

2016: The Year of Stunted Growth

Writing:

You know I finished my first book I was proud of late 2015. I mean it was a grueling yet passionate process that yielded my first complete and ready to publish manuscript.

It’s the first of a dark and gloomy trilogy called The Aedonu Trilogy #1: Shadows in the Darkness. It’s pretty much about the end of the world, kicking off with a worldwide earthquake that deeply impacts the lives of three different characters. Each character struggles with their identity while the whole world turns into a depiction of absolute hell. They struggle with being heroes, having faith in a Creator, death, acceptance, and believing in the impossible–becoming the impossible. You know, totally normal everyday things. Just…in an impossible situation.

It’s a story that means a lot to me and I almost got it published back in February. I had a request from a publisher for a full manuscript. Crazy awesome, right?!

Ultimately, however, they decided not to pick it up to publish it. Not so awesome.

I would be lying if I were to say that experience didn’t both build up my confidence and, yet, dash it into a thousand pieces. I was left scrambling with so many questions: What do I do to change it? Can I change it? How can I tweak the story to make it more presentable? Can I even handle this anymore? Is the story worth it?

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Deep questions for a writer. Throttling questions. So I did what any logical person would do, especially after the growing list of rejection letters from other publisher.

I dropped the project.

I abandoned it, heartbroken in many ways, and fled even though I still believed believe greatly in its potential. You see, that story is super complex. It made me do some soul searching in a time where I had no time to search my writing soul. Therefore, I turned to writing a middle school realistic story about a kid who believes his English teacher is a superhero (wishful thinking, perhaps?). It’s a story that is a whole heck of a lot less complicated. It’s another story I believe in, but it’s also one that I haven’t “connected” with 100% which means it hasn’t been wholly productive.

All that to say….2016 stunted the writer within me. Maybe almost destroyed him. Perhaps obliterated him.

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Fitness:

I began a health journey back in 2012. I went from 225 lbs. to 165 lbs. in a matter of seven months! It was amazing, hard, and so rewarding. Since then I’ve been much more careful about what I eat and more conscious of staying active to avoid becoming 225 again. After an intense seven months, I actually had a lean body with a few abs showing! It was awesome.

Then I fell madly in love with pizza and milkshakes over the years once more.

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Those items and I have an abusive relationship. During 2016 I’ve had some good workouts and runs. I started around 198 lbs and worked down to 178. And now I’ve worked back up to 198 (I just weighed myself..and in my sadness I’m eating a cookie).

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Look, I’m an emotional eater. Don’t judge me.

I actually joined a gym back in November after a good friend of mine convinced me to.

It hasn’t been entirely fruitful. I’ve been binging on pizza, cookies, pop/soda, and chips vehemently the past few weeks. Also? Candy. Maybe some eggnog too. Oh, did I mention cookies? Maybe some wine as well. Yeah. You see the problem? I also make a lot of excuses to not work out.

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Plus, what if I went and looked like this?

So…with all that combined…..2016 has pretty much threatened my health.

Finances:

Look. I’m never going to be a millionaire. Ever. It’s a nice dream, but I’m a teacher with over $100,000 in student loans. I wish I was kidding about that amount of student debt. I’m not. And I absolutely love my job as a teacher. I’m never abandoning it, so I accept I’ll never be rich.

But that means I need to be smart with my money. This year I haven’t been that smart.

  • I’ve been collecting Funko POPS! like crazy. (Awesome collectables, but can get pricey)
  • I’ve been eating out. A lot. (See above category on fitness).
  • I went through a comic book purchasing phase from June-August. It turns out buying comics gets pricey when you read a lot. (Like $50-$60 a week in comics!)

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There goes my money…

I tried two months of Dave Ramsey’s plan to budget where you put cash into envelopes and spend only that money on things. It worked well for those two months. Then I got lazy and stopped withdrawing cash from the ATM because, well, it required me to drive to the bank. And we can’t have that, can we? No. It’s a lot of work!

So, naturally, I stopped budgeting and my eating out habits increased until last week when my car pretty much broke down and I needed a new battery. I went to spend the $100 for it and was informed my account had insufficient funds.

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Awkward. Pizza clearly betrayed me because, well, pizza on a night to night basis adds up.

Thank you, 2016, for turning me into a financially unstable man. (Disclaimer: finances and stability don’t work well together for  me.)

Current Standings

2016: 500

Me: 0

YAY!

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So, what’s next?

2017: The Year of Growth

First, let me acknowledge that I’ve strayed from making New Years Resolutions because I usually break them by the end of the day on January 3rd in some way, shape, or form. Why create them when they will simply be destroyed? It makes me feel awful. Plus, resolutions are simply begging to be broken. It’s like the fine print within the word resolution.

So, these are not necessarily resolutions as much as they are new life goals. In my mind, it always helps me to start something at the beginning of the month. It just so happens that the beginning of the next month is 2017. Therefore, I have some goals I’m going to fight to complete.

  • Writing:
    • Rework, tweak, refocus, and publish The Aedonu Trilogy.
    • Write at least once or twice a week
    • Saturday mornings = designated writing time
    • No excuses–I’m not hiding from my story.
    • Goal #1: Get published and/or finish writing The Aedonu Trilogy #2: Flames in the Darkness
    • Goal #2: Try to write at a minimum one blog post a month. However, I’d love to make it weekly. Start small, though, right?

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  • Reading:
    • Make time to read.
    • Read every night right before bed–even if it’s just for ten minutes.
    • Goal: Finish at least one book a month. Minimum of reading 12 books in 2017 (which should be attainable easy enough).

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  • Fitness:
    • Workout five times a week–which means going to the gym I’m paying for
    • Only one cheat meal permitted a week, mainly in the form of pizza.
    • Only eat out once a week, mainly in the form of pizza.
    • Goal: Regain my lean form and have some semblance of abs by March

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  • Finances:
    • Hardcore budget my money every month, which means withdrawing cash and putting into envelopes
    • No cash? No pizza treat once a week.
    • Stop impulse buying–I struggle there.
    • Goal: Have enough money at the end of the year for a new car

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Okay, so they aren’t resolutions, but they are goals. Goals are a destination to be reached vs. an absolute to keep in check from day one. You can stumble in your goals, but still achieve them. I feel like once you break a resolution, it’s easy to give it up for the rest of the year. Having distinct goals may help me stay on track in these four areas of my life.

Focusing more on writing will impact my reading a lot more and vice versa. In the same sense, if I’m more self-disciplined in staying fit, I know that I’ll be more self-disciplined in my finances. Those always seem to highlight one another.

2017 should be a wild ride, but I hope it’s one that’ll show 2016 it didn’t knock me out.

While 2016 revealed my weak areas in various ways, 2017 should be a year that empowers me in so many more ways.

Let’s do this, 2017. It’s morphin’ time!

darce-montgomery-in-power-rangers

 

The Great Return…

Blogging.

A simple eight letter word of the 21st century.

For the past few weeks, “blogging” has been weaving its way through my cinematic daydreams, whispering into my ears , and compelling me to sit down and actually pay attention to it. Time has battled this word, as I am a pretty busy man. However, considering the fact that you’re reading this right now, it would seem this urge to blog has won. I am a prisoner to it now.

But that’s not a bad thing.

In many ways, I think I need a place to uncoil my rampant thoughts. A realm to tap into whatever my mind is wrestling with and express it to the world. Maybe I’ll be talking to myself on here, or maybe you’ll find that you’re invested in the strange events of my life. DUSTY VINTAGE KEYBOARD

By day I’m a middle school English teacher, which ensures that I never endure a dull moment. By night I am a conglomarete being that inhales Netflix like it’s a drug, reads books for sustenance, and pours out my very soul in the stories that I dare to write. Passionate stories. Dark stories. Magical stories.

I suppose that’s why I have returned to the blogging realm. In the past, I’ve tried to manage blogs solely centered on movie reviews. That never worked.

But now?

Now, I am creating a space where I can write about whatever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want. Words are not meant to be limited. I intend to express myself in this space. Maybe I’ll tell wild stories about my adventures as a middle school teacher–stories I simply can’t make up. Perhaps I’ll write entries where I rant about the fact that there is literally no local coffee shops near me to write my logic-defying fiction. (Honestly, it’s a real problem!) Or maybe I’ll just talk to you, to myself, to whoever is listening, to anybody who needs it. Sometimes I may even be silent, taking in this chaotic force we call everyday life.

Regardless, my presence will linger here. This is my place. This is your place. This is the battlefield where that eight-letter word “blogging” won. 

Stick around if you dare, leave if you must. If you stay, we will sort through the world together. If you leave, I’ll wave and wish you well. After all, we are on different paths, right? Sometimes, though, it’s just nice to enjoy the ride together…

Welcome to my world…