Well. Another year trickled by. Plenty has happend in the past 365 days, plenty of things that I can’t remember, recall or reflect on. But through half-assed data tracking, I’ve become surprised at one thing in particular over the past year: my exercise.

Last year for my birthday, I broke down and called off my pride. I asked my parents to get me a heart rate monitor (and adapter for the Concept2). I hate metrics, especially when it comes to body-stuff. Scales are dumb and following them is even more moronic. But the more time and energy I invested in my workouts, the less I could rely on my body to “tell the difference” from the previous workout. I needed hard data.

Enter the Polar heart rate monitor. Though not quite a year since I unwrapped it, awkwardly figuring out how it worked, the data is close enough to examine…since July 15, 2004:

• I’ve spent over 70 hours consciously exercising.
• I’ve rowed 415,924 meters on the Concept2.
• I’ve run 164.2 miles (since November).
• I’ve lost 34 pounds.
• I’ve lost 5 inches on my waist.

…and all of that including three injury-induced recovery periods for my lower back and knee totaling over 3 months of rest.

When the passing hours of the days blend together, the weeks fading into one another, it’s hard to quantify just what you spend your life doing. I often pay little attention to the monotony of my life, of my routines that I have recently been thinking/writing about. But trying to reflect on this data, trying to remember what it is that I’ve spent the past year doing while my mind has been turned off…it’s both sad and envigorating to look at. I’m happy that I’ve dedicated time to being healthy, to self-discipline and habituating myself to things that I naturally avoid. But think of the other volunteer opportunities, service projects or acts of kindness that I could have participated in instead. Yes my health is markedly improved, but what about the world outside my own little bubble?

Perhaps the next year should be dedicated to improving that part of my life, as it is something that I dearly miss from my high school days.

Thankfully, there won’t be any data to ponder over, to quantify and reduce onto a spreadsheet. For everything truly looks much more bleak in Excel.

They say guys don’t stop to ask for directions. I’m not sure if it’s because of my gender, but I think I’m lost.

For the first time in my life, I’m questioning just how the hell I got to where I am. It’s as if I woke up one day and everything changed. It’s surreal.

Everyone has seen one of those nauseating Hollywood movies that contain the scene where the protaganist wakes up, hits a metaphorical wall, steps back and muses out loud, “How did I end up here?” With a cinematic montage resembling a near-death experience, a visual summation in fast forward of childhood through adulthood memories, complete with a soft-photo effect. Problem is, as cheesy and modeled as it seems, that’s what is going on with me right now.

The past day or so I have felt like an alien. Outside the comfortable boundaries of established routines, far from feeling “planted” or even having anything resembling traction in my life, I’m off balance. I wake up in the middle of the night disoriented and not knowing where I am. I sit in my new office, on someone else’s computer with someone else’s boss down the hall. My days are spent in a complete fog, disconnected from everything (including emotions). It’s as if I’m acting a part, living someone else’s life. None of this belongs to me.

With every other aspect of my life being so planned and logical, it seems reasonable that this life change could very well be the first time that I’ve really questioned what I’ve done. To be honest, every other life change I’ve passed through (going to high school, going to college, first job) was almost pre-planned. They all seemed natural. It’s not as if I wouldn’t go to high school. Everyone at my high school goes to college. Even finding my first job was almost a joke because it was at the same school I graduated from…nothing unfamiliar or scary in the slightest.

But with my decision to leave, my decision to quit my job and move to another state all together…this was perhaps the first time I’ve directly dictated the direction of my future. And frankly, that scares me. Not because I’m not sure if I made the correct choice, but rather that I’ve accepted every other fork in the road with such passivity and blaisé nonchalance. Have my eyes been asleep in childlike blind acceptance for 24 straight years? Why does it feel as if I’ve been completely blind to every other major decision up until this point in my life? I pride myself on the conscious act of choosing, respecting choice as one of the most powerful tools we’re given as humans. What the hell is going on?

Perhaps this change is merely masquerading itself as something larger, something more significant, because of the convergance with other changes in my life (marriage?). I’m not sure. But this simple act of quitting, moving and finding a new job has poked a red-hot iron into my psyche that I never expected.

I think the final reduction of all of this, again, is simply that I do not deal well with change.

Here’s a list of things that I’ve learned in the past two weeks of living in a new city:

• Why is it that each person that I meet pronounces “Louisville” differently than the next? How do you expect me to say it correctly if you all can’t get it straight?
• Car insurance rates vary greatly by state. Kentucky not only punches you in the face with higher rates, they then kick you in the nuts by taxing the insurance as well. Can you say $530 higher? God…
• Apparently it is completely normal to drive 55 mph inside a parking garage, taking turns on only two wheels. No one informed me of this prior to now. Everyone that parks in a garage is a Nascar driver by night.
• Contrary to whomever’s intial thought, putting a smiling sun-face on a license plate does not please the aesthetic sensibilities of everyone. Nor does it add much to soothing bubbling road rage, as being locked in rush hour traffic and seeing the same damn happy solar object staring back at you for hours on end is indeed a cruel joke.
• The name “The Kelvinator” is quite possibly the best f’ing brand moniker for a refrigerator I’ve ever seen. I am lucky to have one in my new office, yes I am.
• I think the term “no duh” should be brought back with a vengence. No reason why. Just because I miss it from gradeschool days.
• Handicapped stalls are fine in a bathroom…as long as there is another option. It’s not funny to those who aren’t handicapped and have to have their feet dangling, like a child in an adult world, to have no other stalls. Not cool.
• Apparently there is no other sport than basketball. Anywhere. Ever in the existence of sports. Who knew?
• Apparently no one informed everyone that lives in Louisville that they are indeed part of the state of Kentucky. Don’t play dumb, people. The rest of the country gets it.
• Finally, why do horses have to be on everything? I get it, you have the Derby once a year. But serious, move on with life…

It is clear that the world is passing me by.

As I’ve climbed into a hole, digging my nest and matting down the sticks and branches that will soon form a semblance of my new home, I’ve lost touch with everything. Friends. Old co-workers. Life in general. I feel unplugged, off-center and unfocused. My routines are disturbed, and life as I’ve come to know it over the past three years is no longer as predictable as my next breath.

And I’m still trying to regain balance.

Apparently, I’m someone that thrives on balance, and all aspects of my daily life maintaining some sort of cosmic equality. Perhaps it is the control-freak in me, but I like my ducks to be in a row. I enjoy getting up at the same time, eating the same food, working out on the same schedule, etc. Predictable and timed. I’ve become so measured over the past three years that I’ve worn tired grooves into my own psyche…to the point that now, being upset by recent changes, that this new life has yet to sink in.

I still feel like I’m on vacation. Something temporary and finite. So when do I go home to Cincinnati?

Perhaps in all of this I should learn to be less routine. I should throw caution to the wind, now that the boat has been rocked completely already, and stop living my life in a filmloop stuck on repeat. Though I’ve never been a spontaneous person, perhaps this is as good a time as any to be a bit more free, and a little less rigid.

Good Lord, when did I become such a square?

Long time no, err, speak? Write? Whatever.

So I’m officially 75% done with my move to Louisville. The last leg comes tomorrow, in the form of a Uhaul trailer and lots of stairs. Always saving the worst part for last…

As I was laying in bed last night, in a bedroom both unfamiliar and yet known, I began to think. I was reflecting yet again on how much I fear change, how the loose stones beneath my feet make me a weary traveler who would much rather stick close to home than venture out farther. It’s not a new revelation in the slightest. But as I tossed and turned, unable to fall asleep, I realized that this is the purpose of my journal. A reminder that I sorely needed.

When I started denyingphoenix, I had just begun my life out of college. All of my friends, my girlfriend, etc had moved away. I was alone in a very intimidating adult world. And as I always have, I turned to my writing to save my sanity and carve out even the slightest peace of mind. It is my way of talking to myself to keep company with this oversensitive chump.

As I started writing, things began to change, and I decided to publish everything in the format you see today. But the purpose never wavered: I wanted to document my innate resistance to change. As the about page describes, I’ve always been enthralled with the concept of the Phoenix allegory. The theme of self-immolation for a greater purpose runs universal through my life and my art…yet it is the one thing that I fear above all else. I find change deplorable and unbearable. Thus my struggle with such is documented in these virtual pages.

My life for the past three years, since I started the project, has become relatively and increasingly less clouded by the destructive smoke of upheaval. I transitioned into the working force, into living (essentially) alone, into having no friends within 100 miles. I’ve also begun and mostly finished a physical transformation. Yet on numerous occasions, I’ve thought of abandoning this because of a perceived failure to stick to the original goal. I was convinced that my little world was not changing as much as I was convincing myself it was, thus rendering the concept moot. All the while, though, I failed to realize the bottom line: change is inevitable, and indeed happening consistently through my life.

So as I lay restlessly in bed last night, praying for the sweet embrace of sleep to relieve my worrying mind…I thought yet again of my neglectful writing and the possibility of abandoning this project.

Silly me. It’s times like this in my life that are the exact, expressed purpose of the initial goal of documenting change in life, and my resistance to it.

I have no idea what the next few months have in store for me in a new job, in a new city. Hell, I don’t even know what tomorrow brings. But I do know that I won’t abandon this project, because *that* would be the ultimate failure.

Though my life seems to be in constant fast-forward, the rest of me is slowing down. Unplugged at home from all conveniences has left me in a retreat-like state: free of music, internet, TV and other distractions. And what has come of it all? I forgot how much I value silence.

Really, though, it’s more than just silence that I’ve been missing. I think it’s the ability to watch things as they pass by. With everything else in my life operating at a break-neck pace, I have become so spun around with it all that I haven’t stopped to notice the little things. And damnit, that’s where it counts most.

One thing that has come to the surface the past few weeks is just how much I value someone who listens. I mean really listens. I have found myself, for many years now, changing how I talk…from person to person…based purely on the fact that I know they aren’t listening. I’ve changed the speed of my speaking to become more rapidfire and to seemingly not waste the other person’s time. I’ve changed the length of sentences and paragraphs. I speak often in soundbites, easily digestible for that’s what I know people are looking for: the PowerPoint presentations in spoken format…bulleted lists. Get to the bottom of it. Cut the fat.

Bullshit.

Why do I do this? Well, firstly I guess it’s because I want to be heard for what I have to say. And in order for my friends, my co-workers, etc to not tune me out after a few words, I have to get it all in before their ears close. I don’t think of myself as verbose. In fact I highly value brevity (especially in humor). But what causes us to do this?

The more I think about it all, the more I worry about the analytical skills of my future children. Sure, it’s a stretch, but with everything set up the way it is now, I think I have reason to worry, even if slightly.

In a society where there is true information overload, infinite data thrown at us daily, I can’t help but expect us to have to hunt and peck for what we are going to listen to, to trust, to digest. I know if I read every email, every banner ad, every web page, every spam message, listened to every commercial (print, radio and TV), read every billboard on my way home…I would go insanse. I would explode from it all. But nonetheless, we can’t escape it.

Fast, cut-scene style commericals/TV/videos have been en vogue for years, demanding either scruitinizing attention to catch every nuance, or else a zombie-state to half-digest it as a whole and not parts.

A Cliffnote culture who’s books (at least modern, that I’ve read) are more casual, colloquial in style. Long gone are the days of sweeping paragraphs, illustratively describing the most minuet visual details.

Even music has taken cues recently, with plenty of modern music being easily condensed into shorter pop formats. No grandiose guitar solos. No extended bridges. Three and a half minutes or less. Bam. Instant hit. Anything more is laborious to listen to.

And perhaps I’m wrong, but I think they even removed portions of the SATs that deal with analytical thinking and reading comprehension. That, to me, is utterly assinine.

In a world where everything is spelled out for us, where we don’t have to read between the dreaded lines or work at all to get to the bottom of it, it is by all means understandable that we’ve all grown increasingly less patient in our listening skills. Our time is precious enough, right? Well, I for one want to do my part to fight any encroaching natural tendency to do this.

All in all, I truly value someone who patiently listens to your points, without rushing you through what you have to say. They trust you to be succinct, yet thorough, and thusly do not tune you out if you go over a 20-second unspoken limit. They will never talk over you, and in fact will pause a few seconds before their own response. Speaking clearly and slowly, all the while secretly throwing the metaphorical finger to that board-room MTV style of dialogue.

Where’s my rocking chair and sweet tea? Lord I’m getting old…