Paradigm Shift

What happened to me? Recently I've been taking a good look at the progression of my life, and it's stranger than you might think. Those of you who only know me from this blog, or not so well in real life, might think of me as a pretty serious or straight-foward guy, possibly funny at times, somewhat eccentric and obsessive about his "work." That is me, now. But who did I used to be? The longer time stretches on the harder it is to remember. Although that person will always be a part of me, it's just that, a part. Nothing more than a percentile. A widget on a pie graph. I won't go into details about it, but I used to be a slacker, an unmotivated sack of crud in my school days. It took serious changes in the world around me to shake my foundations: sweet, sweet liberation from 10 years of anti-epileptic, concentration-destroying seizure medication, and the death in the family. These things converged violently around the time I broke up with my last serious girlfriend and started studying Japanese. Weird, right? And that was, somehow, only a littler more than 3 years ago. It feels like I've stepped into a different life, and that was some distant thing in the past. The ancient past. The Gettysburg address and 1492 past. It's almost like I have to remind myself that some of the bad things ever happened. That I was ever so numb to the world, or isolated from my peers. It's weird, strange, and too personal to go into any real details about. At the moment. Maybe some day, but probably not in blog form.

So the world spins on, and my learning has also shifted. Depending on the subject matter, I can sometimes survive reading several consecutive pages of Japanese comics without using a dictionary. Many things that would have passed me by a year ago are being reeled in by Ben's Brain - V2.0. It seems to me that we teach our brains to filter out various sounds the world makes, and a lot of this meaningless noise has gradually acquired meaning to me. I can feel the shift, slowly, but certain, and if I keep pushing until the blisters break I feel like life could be one hell of a ride.

"Keep diggin, pail, dirt, hands calloused for what it's worth." - Rick Whispers

My Lucky Hat

Lately, I've been wearing my Buffalo Bills hat almost all the time when I've been out doing things. I've called it my "lucky hat" on occasion, but those words seem to be ringing true now more than ever. It becomes an inadvertent conversational piece at bars, sparking conversations about sports fandom which I have never fully understood; Then again, a lot of people might find my passion for music or language equally hard to grasp. Regardless, I wear the hat for two reasons: I'm going bald and have been slacking on keeping my hair short, even though I was shaving it regularly for almost a year. Also, it's my brother's old hat, one of the surplus of Bills hats he owned, and may or may never have even worn when he was still alive. I'm really not sure. My brother and his death are a series of unfortunate circumstances, which I will elaborate on in another post, on another day....night....morning? What is 3am, really? What is it when you are up at this hour on a regular basis? What if you work night shifts, when you eat lunch at 2am and go to bet at 7am, is it really "good night" at all anymore?

But I digress. There may in fact be a third reason I wear my Bills hat proudly, but it is a culmination of the first two: It instills me with confidence. This is partially because the hair on the top of my head is jumping ship faster than a 3rd class immigrant on the Titanic, but also because I feel a sort of bond ethereal bond between the over-priced official sportsgear and my brother. Do I believe in the spirit, the soul, or the ability of treasured physical things to retain some essence or trace of the spirit? Metaphysics are another example of topics that are all too thick and absurd to fit into this entry. But what I can attest to is what I feel, and that is that wherever I go and whatever I do, I want to keep wearing my lucky hat, avidly support the losing side. After all, what is more appealing to the human spirit than an underdog?