I’ve struggled to find a niche all my life. I’ve always seemed to be a square peg in a round hole, never quite fitting into any scenario in which I have found myself.
I’m interested in the world and what makes it tick but I’ve never wanted to push myself, to become someone who bends fortune to his own ends. Never wanted to be a high flyer in the corporate or public sphere. My character seems calibrated to a different purpose.
I suppose I am a bit of a contradiction and I confuse myself at times. Wanting to remain anonymous but putting myself “out there” so to speak, publishing myself on the world wide web. I can’t figure myself out, how can others?
Maybe I am reading too much into it. Maybe I’m an easy study and just don’t know it. We all judge ourselves and see our personalities through our own rose coloured glasses but the person we really are is a stranger to us. It is up to others to adjudicate on value of our personality although we frequently evaluate those with whom we interact according to our own prejudice. To quote Ricky Nelson, “You can’t please everyone, so you gotta please yourself.”
I look at those with whom I work who aspire to higher honours and I wonder why they do it. There are no laurels or bouquets to be won supervising staff who care little for your authority and snigger and laugh at you behind your back, accusing you of being a lackey, discriminatory or worse. Sure, money is a factor but aspiration must be part of it too. Good luck to them but struggling to make people work harder while being a target for those who’s authority is greater than your own is no lure for me. My shield fending off brickbats is far too thin for me to hold such power.
And so I look for other pleasures in life and regard the eight hours of labour I endure five days a week as nothing more than a laborious necessity.
But it gets no easier for me as I forage through the real world outside the gilded gates of my place of employment. I’ve always struggled socially, the right words never coming at the appropriate moment and it has always been an eternal struggle to stay relevant in a conversation, borne by a timidity which has made friends hard to come by.
It’s been easier for me to retreat to my own little world away from the judgement of others who wouldn’t take the time to understand my quirks and forgive my flaws. Unfortunately advancing years has not made my personality any bolder.
I listen to acquaintances talk about their lives, their work and it’s an alien world to me and I shrink in my chair as they speak and flail in the quicksand of my professional world and wonder where the wherewithal to break the chains of confinement will come from and will courage to change ever burst forth from the tangled underbrush of my social phobic persona. I grasp at the hope that the worm will turn of it’s own accord but of course it never does.
So I cling to the one dedicated pursuit which I tackle in my life and enjoy. My blog.
I have always had a predisposition for writing and I can remember serving a detention at high school for not doing an assignment, a regular crime committed, and writing two pages of a required short short story in the forty minutes allotted to us teenage evil doers. I handed it in and my english teacher who later waxed lyrical about the wonderfulness of my efforts, the value of the finished product something which was completely oblivious to me, gave me 99% for my efforts but bemoaned the fact I would receive no official mark because it was nine days late! At the end of the year she claimed she wanted to hit me with an axe because I was lazy. And so it has always been I fear.
And so it goes that as I reached my middling years I decided to write about myself and join the new craze of blogging and self publishing, to tap into that strange double sided personality which I possess, the quiet, non-obtrusive social phobic and the flip side, the person who wants to be somebody and be a published writer, and see what I can produce.
Unfortunately as I read other blogs which inhabit the web I realize that I am a less than imaginative soul and my writing ability is diminished when comparing myself to others who self-aggrandize themselves on internet pages. Any hope I had of making my fortune writing appears to be but a fantasy of my own creation. No matter.
I will continue to plod away for anyone interested in finding out what I am about or what I am up to as I traipse the bland corridors of my life. All feedback, constructive criticism included, is welcome and I hope anyone sneaking a look at what I have written will enjoy it and take it for what it is. A few minutes for a quiet soul to wax lyrical about unimportant things and enjoy himself.
Have a nice day.
I’m interested in the world and what makes it tick but I’ve never wanted to push myself, to become someone who bends fortune to his own ends. Never wanted to be a high flyer in the corporate or public sphere. My character seems calibrated to a different purpose.
I suppose I am a bit of a contradiction and I confuse myself at times. Wanting to remain anonymous but putting myself “out there” so to speak, publishing myself on the world wide web. I can’t figure myself out, how can others?
Maybe I am reading too much into it. Maybe I’m an easy study and just don’t know it. We all judge ourselves and see our personalities through our own rose coloured glasses but the person we really are is a stranger to us. It is up to others to adjudicate on value of our personality although we frequently evaluate those with whom we interact according to our own prejudice. To quote Ricky Nelson, “You can’t please everyone, so you gotta please yourself.”
I look at those with whom I work who aspire to higher honours and I wonder why they do it. There are no laurels or bouquets to be won supervising staff who care little for your authority and snigger and laugh at you behind your back, accusing you of being a lackey, discriminatory or worse. Sure, money is a factor but aspiration must be part of it too. Good luck to them but struggling to make people work harder while being a target for those who’s authority is greater than your own is no lure for me. My shield fending off brickbats is far too thin for me to hold such power.
And so I look for other pleasures in life and regard the eight hours of labour I endure five days a week as nothing more than a laborious necessity.
But it gets no easier for me as I forage through the real world outside the gilded gates of my place of employment. I’ve always struggled socially, the right words never coming at the appropriate moment and it has always been an eternal struggle to stay relevant in a conversation, borne by a timidity which has made friends hard to come by.
It’s been easier for me to retreat to my own little world away from the judgement of others who wouldn’t take the time to understand my quirks and forgive my flaws. Unfortunately advancing years has not made my personality any bolder.
I listen to acquaintances talk about their lives, their work and it’s an alien world to me and I shrink in my chair as they speak and flail in the quicksand of my professional world and wonder where the wherewithal to break the chains of confinement will come from and will courage to change ever burst forth from the tangled underbrush of my social phobic persona. I grasp at the hope that the worm will turn of it’s own accord but of course it never does.
So I cling to the one dedicated pursuit which I tackle in my life and enjoy. My blog.
I have always had a predisposition for writing and I can remember serving a detention at high school for not doing an assignment, a regular crime committed, and writing two pages of a required short short story in the forty minutes allotted to us teenage evil doers. I handed it in and my english teacher who later waxed lyrical about the wonderfulness of my efforts, the value of the finished product something which was completely oblivious to me, gave me 99% for my efforts but bemoaned the fact I would receive no official mark because it was nine days late! At the end of the year she claimed she wanted to hit me with an axe because I was lazy. And so it has always been I fear.
And so it goes that as I reached my middling years I decided to write about myself and join the new craze of blogging and self publishing, to tap into that strange double sided personality which I possess, the quiet, non-obtrusive social phobic and the flip side, the person who wants to be somebody and be a published writer, and see what I can produce.
Unfortunately as I read other blogs which inhabit the web I realize that I am a less than imaginative soul and my writing ability is diminished when comparing myself to others who self-aggrandize themselves on internet pages. Any hope I had of making my fortune writing appears to be but a fantasy of my own creation. No matter.
I will continue to plod away for anyone interested in finding out what I am about or what I am up to as I traipse the bland corridors of my life. All feedback, constructive criticism included, is welcome and I hope anyone sneaking a look at what I have written will enjoy it and take it for what it is. A few minutes for a quiet soul to wax lyrical about unimportant things and enjoy himself.
Have a nice day.
Strange Notations From a Laborious Life 