Lost in Paradise

A year ago today I was on a plane flight crossing the Pacific and embarking on a new path. I was excited, nervous, and suffering from a mild case of delusions of grandeur. As they say, the grass is always greener. Instead, the first few months went completely against my expectations. My arrival in North Carolina led to more confusion than comfort. My plans to relocate to DC and work in some capacity in public policy and my relation with the girl I was seeing at the time who also happened to live in DC both disintegrated within a couple months. By mid-February I was back working in a restaurant and at the same point in life as when I had left for Hawaii, minus the surf and sun. I kept asking myself 'Did I really leave Hawaii to move back home and work at another, albeit crappier, restaurant?'. I had taken one step forward and two steps back.

Since then I have had ample time to refocus and get my life and priorities straightened. The past is the past and life is what it is. This hasn't resulted in apathy towards life but rather rejuvenated my spirits and focused my efforts on doing the things that I am capable of doing. Life presents too many external variables that it would be a waste to let them bother me. I don't plan on life "giving me a break". The universe is indifferent to my cares and concerns. It doesn't care if I get a job or find the girl of my dreams, and it shouldn't. At the crux of it all I am responsible for my own welfare and happiness; not my friends, family or even God.

Most importantly, appreciate what life has to offer. Bruce Hornsby puts it as succinctly as possible, "You don't know what you got till you lose it all".

Surfers are transients always in search. The quintessential surf movie "The Endless Summer" epitomizes this belief. Surfing is as much an art form as a physical activity. As such surfers are flung in different parts of the globe looking for a variety of canvases to make their impression. Each wave is unlike any other. The transience is also important when one considers the average duration of a ride which lasts not much more than 3 -5 seconds, yet a surfer will be out in the water for hours at a time and catch only a few good waves. It seems like the surfing input results in a less than fulfilling output yet those fleeting moments of standing on a wave make up for more than all the time lost while waiting.

My life has been one built upon transience as well which has built into an attachment to surfing. A lot of this has to do with growing up in Greensboro, North Carolina. It may be questionable how someone living no closer than 3 hours from the beach and never actually laid on a surfboard till he was 19 ever be drawn to surfing but let me explain.

Despite the presence of my mom and dad raising me in Greensboro along with both sets of grandparents, we all were foreigners to Greensboro and even more so to the south. Greensboro has never felt like home to me. My mom raised in Ohio and my Dad in New York both grew up in Quaker settings. The liberal pacifist Quaker ideologies are in stark contrast with the more conservative Baptists and Methodists of the area. I had friends but always felt different to the population as a whole.

I remember graduating from 8th grade when many of my classmates were crying about leaving middle school. This confused me because they all would be going to the same high school just down the road. I, on the other hand, was not. I was going to boarding school in Pennsylvania and was relieved the day I left Guilford County Public Schools. If I had been crying, they would have been tears of joy.

Since leaving Greensboro I have spent four years in southeastern Pennsylvania, two years in Orlando, Florida, two years in Chapel Hill, NC, two years in Richmond, VA, and one year in Maui, HI. I am a transient. I have no home.

I don't believe my rationale for living in all these different places has been because I have some fear of settling down. One place has naturally led to another. It's just that I haven't quite found what I am looking for (thanks U2). Each place I have lived has made me more aware of who I am. It has given me a chance to throw away whatever has plagued me and past transgressions and a chance to become someone new.

Surfing is similar. When in the water I lose track of time and all other 'out of the water' concerns. It's nearly impossible to get into the water distracted because each time you enter, especially on a day with swell, you are taking your life into your own hands. You have to focus on the break of the wave, the currents, other surfers etc. There is too much information to process to think about anything else. Likewise, when living in a new place you have to learn where things are i.e. the grocery store, the bank, etc., make new friends, and understand that place's culture and lifestyle. In a sense you have teach yourself all over again how to survive in this new environment.

I'm back in Greensboro and stuck 3 hours away from the beach. I'm not having to relearn how to live but I still find new people and new things to experience. I am and always will be in search. I am a surfer.

My blog has been on hiatus for about half a year now. I left Maui and returned home to North Carolina. Maui had been great but I was becoming bored with my situation. Working in a restaurant and surfing is an appealing lifestyle in small doses but I want bigger goals than that. In addition to being bored I met a girl who didn't live on Maui. For better or worse I moved back home to be closer to her (she lives in DC and we are presently dating). That tends to be a flaw of mine. I get caught up in feelings of love and lust which tends to lead to impulsive poorly informed decisions. I don't regret coming back to North Carolina because of this girl even if our relation doesn't work out but I should accept that she was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Everyone wants to be loved but due to gender roles or evolution men sometimes cannot appropriately express this desire. Something always compels women to mate with an aggressive confident seemingly emotionless male. Hence, the cliche nice guys finish last arises. If a guy shows too much emotion it is a sign of weakness. I'm not implying that all guys be assholes but they need to act with a balance of confidence/swagger and emotion. Too much of one makes the guy a dick and the other makes him a pussy. Furthermore, there is no element of challenge when a guy heeds to every beck and call. At their most basic elements relationships, whether they be nascent or well-established, are a game.

I don't know if I have pre-conceived notions of what love is but when I start dating a girl I would do anything to make her happy. Ironically enough, I tend to date women who don't need my attention but rather tough/independent. In turn, it may be a good thing that I don't date a needy girl otherwise I would give up my whole life for her and end up making myself miserable by not looking at the welfare of my own situation.

Up to this point in the relation I have gone through a variety of emotions and feelings. At times I'm not sure what I'm doing dating a girl who lives five hours away and has been a bit obstinate to move closer. I know that I really like her. Besides being the hottest girl I have ever dated she is a down to earth, sweet girl. She really likes me but is concerned about making any large investment into the relation to protect herself from getting hurt. Serious relations are always high risk / high reward.

Edited to add: Two days after writing this blog my girlfriend and I broke up. This was the right decision seeing as how the relation had no clear direction.

I have been single for about two years now. I have had a couple "flings" with a select few women but none of them have garnered much interest. As much as I would like to believe I am 100% over my most recent ex, I'm not. We haven't communicated in about 2 months; the last act being through brief and odd facebook messages and before that we chatted about once a month. We did go through a substantial amount of time not communicating till one fateful day she resumed contact with me after she learned I was moving to Hawaii a little more than a year ago.

I don't pine for her much but whenever I think about her it always brings up mixed emotions. Some days I am comfortable with us going separate ways and on others my bitterness envelops me and I curse every single moment I spent with her. I rarely ever bring her up in conversations with friends and even when I do it's not of the "I miss her so much" variety. Yet, she is always on my mind. I have devoted countless entries in my personal journal to her existence, both good and bad.

One reason for my inability to completely move on is related to my stubbornness. I don't like being told I can't do something, especially when it is something I want. I like to do things on my own terms and obviously the break up was not my idea. I felt slighted when she dumped me. This wasn't the first time I had been dumped, however. This happened to me once before with a girl I dated before her (and lasted the same amount of time), but within 6 months of our breakup it became dust in the wind. I realized how mistreated I was in that previous relation. I can't come to the same understanding or any understanding in this most recent relation. The grieving process cycles over and over again.

I also have a slight inferiority complex in regards to her. Part of me feels like she was much better than me in every sense and I resent that. She was pretty, sweet, very intelligent, a volunteer in the community, wants to be a doctor, and I didn't live up to anything as great as her. She wasn't unabashed about it either which makes the humility of it all hurt more. I knew what I had and she knew what she had (someone that she could do better than). I had a job in investment banking at the time which has a certain sexiness to it but the reality of that job was much different. I know it's unhealthy to put someone up on a pedestal, especially your ex, but I can't lie about these impressions.

It also probably didn't help that she was two years younger than me and still in college while we dated. She is also politically a lot more conservative than me and was more religious than me. Those differences didn't daunt me. Regardless, we still had a lot in common and got a long well as friends. And that is what I want in a life partner. The sex and the pure physical attraction isn't going to exist 30 - 40 years into a marriage. I want to be with someone that I can share my life with. I felt like the religious and political differences were entirely superficial, and at the root of our beliefs and values we still wanted the same thing. (Ok I'll stop trying to justify the relationship, sounds a bit too whiny)

I thought moving out to Hawaii would clean the slate for me but it hasn't. Her presence follows me; lingering in the recesses of my mind. If by some earth shattering event she wanted to get back together with me, I don't know what I would say. I don't even know why I contemplate the notion, it just illustrates that I am not over her, and it sucks.

People like to use the cliche that everything happens for a reason and I hate hearing that. Since January 2007 I have been looking for a silver lining and still find the conclusions opaque. If I were to look at the bright side of all this it would be that I have found what I want in relation. But being of a single status now it only intensifies my displeasure.

I have heard that good things come to those wait, but do good things come to those who dream? Since 2002 I have lived in a variety of places; Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, a summer in South Carolina, Virginia and currently Hawaii. Maybe it has become a habit of mine to keep moving from place to place. I can't seem to find myself settling down anywhere, but I want to. Each place has its own flaws. The first 22 years of my life were already written for me by my parents and the culture I was raised in. Now what? The past three years have been me searching for the next best thing.

I am not good at doing anything without a lot of practice and I need a lot more practice at being an independent adult. Maybe the twenty something years are just growing pains. I'll eventually get used to being an adult. I don't feel like an adult or know what that truly means. Adult to me is equal to responsibility. I don't have any real responsibilities other than paying bills. That isn't too hard, so I must not be an adult. Marriage, having kids, a house, and a career all sound more adult like.

For now, I want to stop dreaming. I want to give up and let life flow.