January 2024 – a simple man

Uncharted Waters

My friend Abby recently shared this thought on her social media:

“Some people are late bloomers because they didn’t think they were going to be here. How can someone plan for a future they never saw? Give yourself and others grace. Release the guilt of not having it all together yet. A lot of people are living life for the first time.”
-unknown

That is totally me.

I never thought I would live beyond twenty-five. I literally couldn’t imagine it in the time before.

I am going to be thirty-seven in a month and twelve days. An unfathomable age for me. I battle depression and other mental difficulties every day, even today. But back then I lived in a black world of rage, despair, suicidal thoughts, and loneliness. I wanted to die, not because I didn’t want to live, but because I didn’t want to live like that. It took a lot of work, medication, therapy, and staying alive to realize a better way and to walk a different road.

Going into February 2024 (the future: we are living in it!), I have dreams and aspirations for the first time in my life. I am thinking about my eldest niece, who is going to be seventeen soon, and my youngest niece who will be four. I want to see them both grow into the amazing women they will be, and illuminate the world with their love and grace and the sheer wonder of them. I want to see them achieve success and family and joy, whatever that looks like for them. I want to be alive for all of it.

That would mean staying alive well into as long as I can possibly live. I don’t want to die, because that will mean an end of being here for my nieces, for my sister, my wife…for myself. I realize I am living *my* life for the first and only time ever, and I want to be here for that as well. I am making plans for my future (grad school? a forever home? achievements? I don’t know!) as much as I want to make plans to see all six of my superb nieces come into their own. Plans I never made before because I didn’t see myself here at all.

I am electric with possibilities. What will the next thirty-seven years of my life look like? Where will I live, what will I do, who will I become? I don’t know, can’t know, and that is exciting to me! I do know I want to impact my family and the world I inhabit with as much love and positivity as I can muster. I have desires, of course, that I wish to fulfill. I have bookcases full of books I want to read. I have sights I want to see, and places to go, and people to re-meet. There are old friends I wish to hang out with once more, and loves to rekindle. I want to smell the salt air again of my home, and soon.

This isn’t my birthday post, this is my celebration-of-life post. In the Star Wars universe they have Life Day, a galactic holiday in which creatures great and small celebrate family and life. This is my Life Day. I am finally celebrating being alive, and reveling in that glorious purpose, whatever that actually ends up being today, tomorrow, or ten years hence.

I am releasing the guilt of not having it together for thirty-six years and forty-one days to come. (Spoiler: I won’t have it together on my birthday either.) I am living my life for the first time. I want to continue living my life all the way until my days are spent. I actually feel like, perhaps the first time, that this is even possible. It is strange and mysterious and incredible. I feel I could jump up and punch the moon for the fantastic joy of life and exuberance itself!

Oh, perhaps that is enough hyperbole, but I don’t care. No more holding back for me. Life is meant to be lived boundless and free. If that means a few slight exaggerations? So be it!

The Success of Failure

I am a fan of Adam Savage. Folks my age will know him as the erstwhile Mythbuster, a man who egregiously blew sh*t up and rigorously tested urban legends, myths, historical fables, and internet viral videos (among other things) on the Discovery Channel. Today he runs a YouTube channel called Tested. Adam is a strong proponent of the Maker Movement. What is making? In his words: “making is any time you reach out with your point of view and make something from nothing” and it could be computer code, a blog post, a deck chair, an omelet, a crochet cactus – anything!

Another Adam-ism is that “failure is always an option!” One must fail many times on journey of success. Note: I didn’t say road, because making is rarely that straightforward, that well-trodden, that…obvious. Making is more of a journey, in that the trip is more important (sometimes) than the destination, or the end result. I have come to believe that what I learn while making is more valuable to me than the object I end up with as a result of my making.

My most recent foray into making was in customizing a Star Wars action figure. This action figure is a stock re-creation of a character from one of Lucasfilm’s TV shows. I wanted to make it a similar character, but not the one everyone knows. I began with a simple paint job. A little acrylic paint here and there to change the tone and color of the figure. I then added some Rub’N’Buff, a wax product that lends a metallic sheen to things. Finally I wanted to “weather” the figure, that is, add a patina of dirt and grime to make the figure seem like it came from a lived-in universe and not fresh from a factory somewhere. And there is where I failed.

I failed by not sealing my paint job. I should have, but I don’t quite know how as that isn’t knowledge I have yet added to my mental memory banks. Usually, it isn’t a problem (I hadn’t learned how much of a problem it could be until this episode!). This Failure led to a succession of failures. First, the medium I use for weathering is a pigmented water-based wash meant for miniature figures, such as for gaming or other uses. It is a little sticky, though, and there-in lay the trouble. With an unprotected paint job, the wash first stuck to my plastic gloves, and then to the paint. I started, as I merely handled the figure in between wash coats, to pull off bits of the paint I had so carefully laid down in the first place. Then, this pulled up paint, now stuck to my gloves and re-wetted ever so slightly, started to be re-applied to places it shouldn’t have been whenever I touched the figure. I figured this out too late.

After that, I tried to cover my mistakes with more Rub’N’Buff, but that led to patches of metallic silver or black which didn’t approximate the look I was going for: subtle glints of metallic color. Finally, the wash didn’t really show up anyway as much as I wanted it to due to the darker color of the figure, so it ended up not adding much variation. The end result is a patchy, muddy, overly-dark re-colored figure. I failed to achieve my goal!

Overall, this is one more step in the journey towards a great looking custom Star Wars action figure. I may have failed this iteration, but I have gained a lot by the exercise. First, I need to find a way to seal my figures once painted. Second, I need to adjust my levels of Rub’N’Buff. A little really does go a long way. Third, I may need a new weathering media, or maybe if sealed, the washes I have will work fine. I don’t know yet. I need to take a few more steps, and learn thereby.

Adam, I believe, would applaud my efforts. He is fond of saying that workshops should adhere all the iterative failures to the wall, not to shame, but to show the long, slow progression of progress from beginning to intermediate to master of the craft; to show that each failure is a step in the right direction; to spur on the maker towards more making. I don’t quite have the wall or shelf space, but I’ve rarely thrown a mistake away. I have a bin of almost-there figures that I take out once in a while and marvel at how far I’ve come. Maybe someday I will take what I have learned and improve on them and make them something more than they are, or maybe I will display them someday when I do have room and see where I’ve come from.

Tested has a merch store. Part of their offerings for sale that they created and made available some time ago are “de-merit” badges. These are patterned off the scout badges one can earn as a girl or boy scout, but instead of showing things achieved as a merit badge, these celebrate the wrong turns, the failures, the mistakes made along the way. There is one for touching wet paint, for letting out the mysterious blue smoke that powers electronics, for plugging too many things into one outlet, for measuring once resulting in cutting twice, and many more. For one thing, failures along the journey are as plentiful as they are varied, but for another, they are mile-markers, sign posts to show just how far a maker has come.

Adam and Tested occasionally give gifts to their YouTube Patrons, a little “thank you for the support” and in December they sent out three random de-merit badges. I received mine. I hadn’t yet made a purchase of them for myself, and was curious to see how I felt by having some in my possession. I surprised myself by delighting in them! These three were de-merit badges I had already earned: Cut Oneself, Accidentally Glued Fingers Together, and Lost Screw. I knew immediately that I had to add a few more badges I had also earned. (I ordered six more, and they should be arriving soon. I have been hard at work failing!) Now I need a way to proudly display them. Still working on that.

I am ever so thankful to Adam Savage for his guidance. I tend towards perfectionism, and push myself hard to get it right on the first go around. That is almost never possible! So with a little patience and self-love and grace, I can learn to succeed at failing and eventually reach a destination of making what I set out to make, though I don’t think I will ever stop losing screws, or accidentally gluing my fingers together, or other epic fails along the way!

Do Something New?

In my mind, one year is pretty much an extension of the next, and only an accident of human calendar keeping lets us know when one has changed into the next. Otherwise, we would probably delineate things according to seasons or like some cultures, measure time by the moon. In any case, 2024 so far doesn’t feel much different than 2023, at least, not yet. It is still winter, and as such is in the middle of a season. I think a full moon was a little bit ago, but I tend not to notice such things except for “Hey! A full moon. Would ya look at that?”

I’ve been working on a theory about New Year’s weight loss resolutions and why they never seem to make it out of February. My hypothesis? Most people aren’t terribly out of shape. They eat more from Thanksgiving through New Years and feel bad about it because our image-obsessed culture tells them they should. So they work out, get back to where they were at the beginning of November, and move on with their regularly scheduled lives. I dunno, I could be wrong about that, but if someone needs to actually make a life style change (which is what weight loss should be anyway) that tends to happen when needed and not usually at January-the-First-of-Whatever-Year.

This leads me to gate-keeping. Gate-keeping is that insidious and evil process by which self-appointed wardens keep watch at the gates of anything and tell newcomers they aren’t welcome to enter for Enter-Reason-Here. Take Star Wars for example. It used to be that we had three Star Wars movies and they were great and everyone pretty much agreed about that because, well, there were only three. Except Return of the Jedi, aka, the One with the Space Bears, which wasn’t as good as the other two. And thus Star Wars gatekeeping was born. If you didn’t agree, you weren’t a TRUE Star Wars fan. Well, fuck that. I love Star Wars, including the One with the Space Bears. In fact, if you love any Star Wars you are ok in my book, even if it is Rise of Skywalker or Book of Boba Fett or whatever the modern (when you are reading this anyway: when I was younger, it was less Jedi and more Phantom Menace) equivalent is.

What do gate-keeping and New Year’s resolutions have to do with each other? I think many people in Western or American culture gate-keep when it comes to making or keeping New Year’s resolutions, which is why there is such a premium on the resolutions in the first place. People don’t feel that they belong, or are allowed to exist, as they are, so they acquiesce when others force them out of certain categories and don’t even try to enter. Then, only when a New Year comes along, do the gate-keepers open their doors a crack to allow anyone else in, because, after all, they resolved to enter this community, so they will actually stick with it this time and therefore are allowed. Like I said: fuck that. One: it isn’t anyone else’s business what you do or when, so start doing something cool because you want to regardless of what anyone else thinks (or what the calendar says). Two: this business of resolving is for the birds. Either you do something or you don’t, and whether you do it habitually is a much more complex thing than ordinary folks imagine, psychologically and physiologically speaking, anyway. My rambling point is: you are allowed at any moment to do anything you wish (within reason and decency), and you don’t need to resolve to do it habitually, either.

Don’t gate-keep yourself, either. Don’t exclude yourself from things you want to try or to do because of anything internal. I’ll never keep up with it is a horrible reason to self gate-keep. You either do something or you don’t. Some have trouble with personal hygiene routines, either due to depression or some other reason. But the secret to success at teeth brushing or writing the next great American novel is to simply do it when you think about it. If it is something you want to do, I guarantee it will be in your thoughts, so you’ll get a chance to do it again when you think of it again. Brushing teeth is a thing best done fairly often, but not exhaustively, and so is writing. Along the way, your mouth will thank you and you just might turn up at your desk to find a novel where before there was only a handful of papers with furious scribbling on them. Or you might find that you need to buy new running shoes because you’ve worn out a pair, or need to buy new barbells because the ones you’ve been lifting seem too light. Whatever your thing is, you might just find it becomes enough of an obsession that the resolution has taken care of itself naturally. And by not standing in your own way or waiting for Jan 1 on some calendar, you’ve made a lifestyle change all by yourself with no one else’s permission.

Which, by and by, is why you shouldn’t listen to gate-keepers ever about anything. It is never too late, or too early (usually) to start a new obsession. Overwhelmed with Star Wars, but heard enough about it that you want to jump in to the galaxy? Pick a show or film and start watching. From there, everything else is sequel or prequel to what you started with, so discover it organically. Don’t like a particular show or character or storyline? Don’t sweat it, there is plenty to like out there. Don’t like Star Wars at all? Try some other Star: Gate, Trek, Dancing with the, whatever. Find your thing and go for it! And never let someone tell you that because you don’t know all the minutia about The Thing you are getting in to, you don’t belong there. Everyone starts as a total newcomer, and learns along the way. No one is born knowing all the Trivial Pursuit answers about X Y and Z.

That might just be the longest pre-amble to saying that I am not resolved to do anything in 2024 that I was not already doing in 2023. Unless I learn a thing or start to become obsessed with something new while the calendar happens to say 2024, in which case, I will start doing it or enjoying it regardless of the season or phase of the moon. Truth is, I have enough hobbies and jobs and obsessions right now as it is, I can’t keep up anyway. I’ll continue brushing my teeth, writing, watching Star Wars, and living however I want because I don’t brook with gate-keepers, and I am trying ever so hard to not gate-keep myself.

To whit: I had a few goals for the holiday break (which is sadly almost over) and I accomplished a few of them, didn’t accomplish others, and only halfway made it on the rest. Yay! Go me! That is called living. We will all die with to-do lists, unread books, unwashed clothes, and with life unfinished. As we didn’t control or get to choose our beginning, we will not choose our ending. So make a list, and get to it, or keep doing it and enjoy the ride. I will keep reading the Lord of the Rings (halfway through Two Towers), I got my hobby room reorganized, and straight didn’t work on any action figures or dioramas. Shrug. Time enough in 2024 for all those things and more! I can’t wait to do all the stuff I want to do.

Happy New Year to you, whatever you choose to do!