Changing My Mind, Also, Bossness

I can never really make a commitment to a certain tone with this blog. Sometimes I want to be lighthearted, other times I'm very serious. Just as much, I waver between vagueness and openness, and I have arguably made the wrong choice at least a few times.

It's the lack of audience and the reason for that lack of audience that makes these decisions difficult. If I don't draw attention to this blog, I don't have readers, and by that logic I muster the gumption to post those most serious and personal things that you find. But every once in a while, I get concerned about the slim chance that someone will come across this blog, intent on learning about my life, so I'll edit some of the less flattering details from my posts. I did say in an earlier post that I would treat this blog as a journal, but now that seems like a bad idea.

I am a marketing major, but even before I declared that major I was told that the most important thing I would ever market is myself. This blog in its entirety does a lot in the way of potentially damaging my personal brand. The optimal marketing decision would be to delete all previous posts and commit myself to positivity, but I feel like that would be unethical. I do think that now is the time for me to build a positive image, and this blog should be a part of it, but I also think that the old stuff should be fair game to anyone who is concerned. I did write those blogs. I did chose to publish them publicly. To delete them is to deny that truth, and I try not to make too much of a liar of myself.

I could make some grandiose claim about how this blog will be "from now on," but without checking, I can remember doing that at least two times before, and being wrong. However, I will venture so much as to say at some point this blog should include some documentation of three musical projects I want to get done within the next two years. I would like to record an acoustic EP and two band EPs. The acoustic EP is self-explanatory, just me playing The Lady, Gail, and recording it with my USB mic. One band EP I want to do is of me as a one-man band called "Original.Alter.Other" playing songs spanning a few genres. The second band EP I want to record would be of the band I want to name "Bossness", which would involve my drummer friend and a yet-to-be-discovered bassist.

So, when any of those aforementioned projects gets off the ground, or I run into some more personal stuff I feel is worth an embarrassing blog post, I'll be back.

You can have 50 points for reading this. +100 if you don't care that I've done this before. +1000 if you're going to be part of or support my projects.

JOSH, THE SHERM.

"Do You Regret It?"

She keeps asking me if I regret it, if I regret that night this past summer when we got a little more intimate than we should have, considering how little we know each other. I always tell her no, I don't regret it, and I enjoyed the experience. That's a lie, or at least part of it is. I do regret it, but not in entirety. I regret being in that situation. I regret forgetting to establish boundaries. I regret my own lack of steadfastness in morality, but I feel like she is most concerned that my regret will be focused on her, that it is being with her that I will regret. This is why I lie. It is easier to lie to her, to have her believe I fully enjoyed it than to try to explain and separate the experience from the person I had it with. In a way, those things are inseparable, and because of that, admitting to any regret will lead to her feeling inadequate. Even though I still consider her practically a stranger, I love her enough to never want her to feel like she is "less-than" because of something I say or do.

But even as I say that I have to point out that the "love" is speak of isn't the love she's looking for. Just I consider her a stranger, I love her the way you love a stranger, demonstrated through respect and general good will. But I am not in love with her, not even infatuated. I do not see my future with her, I do not want to do things for her simply because she asks, and (except for some deductions I've made) everything I know about her is only surface deep. I do seem to have an inexplicable lust for her which, strangely enough, was present before and may have even been the catalyst for the events of that summer night. But that's not love, and it's still not what she's seeking. Honestly, I don't know what she's after, but for some reason, I think it is beyond me. I feel like I a tool she is using to get an unknown something that she wants, or lower still, a cheap substitute until she can get the real thing.

All of this is why whatever time I spend with her today will be a mistake. Whatever does or doesn't happen, whatever irreversible act I commit, it will be a mistake because at some point she will realize I am not what she wants, and I already know she is ultimately not what I want. But today, we will have each other, whatever that may entail.

Usual +50 for reading. I know it reads like an excerpt from a novel, but it's reality. So +100 for those of you who do things you know will turn out to be a mistake.

Today is Nov. 16, 2013. It is important that the date is in the text, as posting dates can get wonky with edits on blogger. But you need to know when "today" actually is, in case the post fucks up.

JOSH, THE SHERM

Summary of Summer 2013

This should have been done in August, I didn't start writing it until September, and now its November and I'm just getting around to posting it. I previously wrote about things that I felt were wrong, but this past summer was filled with so much right, the bad stuff is overshadowed. It all does have an undertow of alcoholism and fiscal irresponsibility, but I lived the shit out of summer this year and I'm proud of it. Dare I say, this has been the best summer of my life!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words; mine are worth 10x that, and as many photos as I have, they still don't tell the whole story. Me and God are the only ones with the whole thing, but glean what you can from these:

I was going to caption all of them, but theres too many. It's a photo dump. An awesome photo dump tha doesn't even get half of the awesomeness that was my summer.

Have 400 points. Because I'm feeling good after looking at these again. +500 if your summer was as good as mine was.

JOSH, THE SHERM

It's All About Me

I have to tell my sisters to watch videos I post online. I share my videos on Facebook (we're friends). I share my videos on Twitter (we follow each other). And to top it off, I personally got on their YouTube accounts and subscribed them to my channel. All that, and I STILL have to tell them when I post things, and even that doesn't guarantee they'll see it. This is what I have to do to get attention from family, the people who I previously assumed were most likely to be my best supporters.

I have one person who will, without any additional prompting, watch what I post. I'm pretty sure I have to call him my best friend now (he's earned it, just on that meritt). But besides him, I have no fan base and that kills me a little bit. I have a thing that I do, and only one person gives an entire fuck when I do it. This is some of the most discouraging shit I've been through.

So, I figure for the sake of my mental/emotional health, I should stop counting on anyone else to give a rats ass about any of my videos or recordings and just do it for me. Because clearly, that's the only person I can guarantee will ever know about it. I'll just keep trying to impress myself, which is actually pretty easy to do. I sang. I sang and played guitar at the same time. I sang and played guitar at the same time and recorded myself doing it. I sang and played my guitar at the same time, recorded myself doing it, and posted it on the internet. In my book, that was some bold shit, considering how self-conscious I am of my playing and how sure I was that I was a bad singer. And look at me. Twice now, I've sang and played and put it where the world can consume it. Fuck them if they don't.

50 points for reading. +1000 if you listen to my stuff, because all I want is an audience. You don't even have to like it, just fucking listen.

JOSH, THE SHERM

Title goes here.

So, I've realized that my version of alcoholism has an off switch, in the form of simply not buying alcohol. This works so long as no one offers it to me for free, and even that would be a limited supply. These facts would be more reassuring if I didn't have vodka and whiskey in the house right now.

I've also realized that my little "horny" problem has a specific trigger, which unfortunately isn't going away anytime soon. I'm stuck on her. She irritates me and it's clear that I've been used, but until someone else comes along, I'm stuck.

I'm a lifeguard now. That should be documented here, this blog being for posterity and all. The week of training was brutal. At one point I was more focused on trying not to cry than learning about CPR. It wasn't the training itself that was so hard, it was the fact that it was four hours of training after an 8 hour work day and I hadn't had a day off in a week. Fatigue is a bitch. But I survived that, got my uniform and signed my license.

That's all the important stuff for now.

50 points for reading. No extras.

JOSH, THE SHERM

The Problem

So, I'm thinking I might be an alcoholic. Not the kind that has to drink every day and is a regular at the bar, but the kind who cannot drink responsibly. If there is drink, I'm getting drunk. Period. The thing is, I've known this for a while and rarely try to stop myself. It doesn't control me, yet, but I'm hoping I can avoid getting to that point.

I don't know whether or not to seek counseling. On the one hand, I have identified and admitted to my problem, but on the other hand, it hasn't been a huge hinderance. Some drunk calls/texts/tweets, and one time a little friskiness, but never anything too serious. Yet.

I don't think I'll be invited to the next party. That's a good thing. I probably shouldn't go. I pretty much know what's going to happen. Just drunk enough to not be able to get home on my own. I'm a problem for someone else. I'm a problem for myself. I need sleep.

50 for reading. 100 for 100 proof, and I love you.

JOSH, THE SHERM

Second Puberty

I swear, I thought this was over in high school; maybe freshman year of college at worst. But puberty-type stuff is happening to me again. Mostly just two things though-- my voice is cracking again and I'm having to hide boners like squirrels hide acorns.

The voice cracking, I can't explain, but I'm more equipped to deal with. Just clear my throat and repeat what I said, this time without the squeak. But this horniness is crazy. I feel like I impregnate every woman on a small island nation, then do it again. And I think I know what caused it (that story is not and likely will not be on the internet, but if you're someone far in the future trying to learn about my past, it's typed up on my laptop). What kind of black magic is this? I understand I'm easy, but am I hooked, too? I've tried the usual old jerk'n'tug, but now that I've experienced something besides left or right, I'm starting to feel the urge to explore and see what else I can get. I just want to go back to a time when I wasn't constantly trying to recall the quadratic equation or the degrees of a unit circle (apparently, math kills boners).

What makes this even more difficult to deal with is the fact that I cannot discuss this with anyone outright. Most people won't want to hear it, and those willing to listen will not have valuable advice. So I'm stuck by myself with a stiff dick. This is not ok.

Regular 50 points for reading. An extra 100 because, even though I don't want to be, I'm DTF.

JOSH, THE SHERM

Apparently, I'm a great person.

It is very likely that you are attractive and people like to be around you. You are desirable. I can tell you that a million and one times and if you're anything like me, you'll still have a hard time believing it. I have been learning, both vicariously and through personal experience, that it is more difficult to convince yourself of your desirability than it is to convince everyone else.

It is difficult for me to hear people say good things about me. I always feel like I don't deserve it. They say I'm polite, but I know how rude I can be. They say I'm good looking, and I admit, I agree some days, but most days I fail to see it. The one that hits me hardest is when people say I'm a good friend. That one gets me, because more times than I can count, I have decidedly been a bad friend. I've been a horrible friend on purpose, and those people still think I'm a good friend. All this really makes me wonder, what the hell can everyone else see that I can't? It must be magical.

Should I bother with the points? Does it matter anymore? Take 50, you wonderfully beautiful person. You deserve them, even you don't understand why.

JOSH, THE SHERM

So, What Happens Now?

As of that last post (and after seeing it's disappointing statistics), I feel safe to assume that everyone will leave my blog well enough alone as long as I don't post links to it on other sites. That's good. So now I can look at this as more of a journal type of thing. I can go ahead and put the personal stuff up all the time with no filter, because I am the only one that will bother to read it.

It may seem weird that I even put it on the internet at all. I neither have an audience, nor do I want one, so clearly it would be a much better deal to keep this somewhere a little more private, like on actual paper, or at worst, in a file on my computer. But that's not what I want. I want this to be immediately available to as many people as possible, so when something epic happens (good or bad) and my name is in headlines (or in very small print in the obituary section) they can do a simple Google search and get some of the backstory.

Of course, my internet presence does not flatter me, and is not necessarily an accurate depiction of how I live my life in the real world, but if anyone is finding this for the aforementioned reasons, it doesn't matter. They don't need to know the real me, just a mental image of the "real" me, based on what they can gather with what few (though, powerful) resources they have.

From now on, this is no longer a show. I'm am not putting on for an audience. This is for me and for posterity, and for the 7 oddballs that stumble upon this a decade from now via their wi-fi enabled brains and see it on a retina screen, which in their time will involve the actual retina.

Just for the sake of continuity and the small chance the a real, living person actually reads my blogs even when I don't share them on social networks, you can still have the 50 points for reading this. I'm not necessarily sure who you are, but I love you.

JOSH, THE SHERM

Why do I do this?

I have to ask, and I guess I have to ask myself, because only I'll be able to answer. What's the point of these blog posts? Why write them? What benefit do they provide? Clearly, no one is reading them. Do you realize there are empty and abandoned blogs that get more reads than yours?

I guess I figured somewhere down the line the people I shared it with would not only enjoy reading them, but eventually get around to waiting on my next one. It does temporarily satisfy my need to write in lieu of an English class. I do need to write. It makes me happy to arrange words into sentences and paragraphs that I place tentatively on a page (both physical and digital), and even happier when people read them, and happier still when they understand.

So, when I know I'm being ignored it eats me up (which is why I sat on this particular post for over a month, and held back others longer, and still have one that I have titled but am yet to write). I actually spent a couple hours, once, exploring the capabilities of the blogger platform, even taking some time to clean up and snazz up what I already had. All to no avail, apparently. I did manage to get more traffic but mostly from bots and automatic crawlers.

In my last blog, I pretty much laid it out there. It wasn't just my opinion, it was me letting the audience in on real things that were going on in my life. I included a call to action. I asked people to put me in my place. I opened up and made myself vulnerable. You know how many reads that "vulnerability" earned me? Ten. Just ten. And of those ten I can only confirm that one person actually read it. I know this because it contains the only link to an unlisted video on my YouTube channel, which has gone up by 1 view since I posted the blog. I have an idea who it may have been, but whoever it actually was, that person didn't even watch the whole video.

It is what it is. Thanks for reading if you bothered. I really do appreciate it. I would have appreciated it more if you had given me some feedback and played along with my "Existence Points" system, but I digress. I have reason to believe that this will be the last post on this particular blog, unless something epic happens. Though this is clearly a more appropriate format, there are places where I can fling my opinions up and people will not only notice what I've flung, they are more prone to fling theirs up with it (though I must admit that I am beginning to be universally ignored in every internet community I am a part of).

So here's to something, which is more than nothing. It was fun while the optimism lasted.

Usual 50 for reading. +3,000,000 for good measure. I'll give a dollar to anyone I know who can prove that they have legitimately acquired more that 3,000,800 existence points.

JOSH, THE SHERM

We Need to Talk...

I wrote this about a month ago, but found myself in a situation that was (by no coincidence) similar to what was going on last year. As of today, that's a done deal, and I survived it, so I feel like now is an appropriate time to release this blog.

When you hear the phrase "we need to talk" you instantly prepare yourself for bad news. This isn't necessarily bad news, but it isn't necessarily good, either.

Concept of Perfection

For this one, I need you to think. Do what you have to do to prepare for that.

You ready?

OK. Think about the last time you had or heard a conversation about perfection. Try to remember what you said; try to remember what others said. I'm sure you can remember the basic point everyone was trying to make. Now, take that and dig a little deeper. Try to remember the flow of the conversation, remember the actual diction of the people who were talking. Meditate on that thought for a minute. In this conversation, there's an idea I'm almost certain came up, because it has come up in every conversation I've had or been witness to on the topic of perfection. 

The idea is monotony, a lack of excitement, boring. Somehow in all of these conversations, the concept of perfection puts people on a train of thought leading them to believe that to be perfect is uninteresting, therefore undesirable, and ultimately, unattainable. I think that's where our concept of perfection disconnects from whatever real perfection may be. We try to get these finite minds around an infinite concept, and we fail. We equate a lack of flaws to a lack of variance; a lack of adversity to a lack of purpose; a lack of failure to a lack of success. 

We are used to living a life where value and contentment is derived from dichotomy (can't appreciate sunshine without rain type of thing), and we struggle to imagine a world that functions without those. A world of perfection would require us to do exactly that, find our joy without having despair to compare it to. Almost without fail, in conversations about perfection, you will hear the phrase, "I just can't imagine a world like that," followed by a list of all the imperfect qualities that would be missing in a world turned perfect. My reaction to that -to your inability to imagine- is to welcome you to the limits of your finite mind. You're gonna hate it here.

50 points for reading. It's short, but I actually managed to make my point and I don't want to ruin that by overdoing it. Extra 100 to celebrate. And 202 more for an imperfect world.

JOSH, THE SHERM

Ballpoint Pens and Life Lessons

I don't know exactly how many it took. I know there were 11 at the start, but I didn't write with all of them. At least 3 of them went MIA, all of which I searched for, for what were surely unreasonable amounts of time. Even this one managed to get ghost a few times. I do know that I set this goal about two years ago. It took much longer than I anticipated, but after months of class notes, creative writing, and various lists (all covered in ridiculous amounts of doodles) I finally came to the end of a pen. Mission accomplished.

I know it doesn't seem like much to get excited about, and I shouldn't make it more than it really is, but the process of writing a pen to it's death spoke volumes about perseverance. Oh, how many times did I want to buy new pens because the looked so awesome. And how many times I almost didn't look for a lost pen because I thought I would never find it. It also gave me some insight into the "journey vs. destination" discussion. I'll take the "journey" side of the argument, but that doesn't make the destination any less awesome. Life lessons learned from a ballpoint pen that's worth about $0.12. Ain't that something?

Doodles with notes

Doodles

Geometric doodle.

More doodles.

Even more doodles.

At this point, just lines on a page to use up ink.

The Bic Cristal with an empty barrel. Success!

The final strokes while I was working on a poem.

The pictures above show only a fraction of a fraction of all the writing and drawing that pen went through. I must say, I am very proud of myself. I've already started on the next pen. This time I intend to kill it off with more words than doodles.

50 points for reading, even though it's short and I usually don't give points for short blogs. Have an extra 100 if you've emptied a pen, another 30 if it was a Bic Cristal, and 500 if you have pictures.

JOSH, THE SHERM