Post 2289
- 8 years and 179 days since I started this blog -
Daily Comment
I skipped 3rd and 8th grades, meaning I was twelve years old when I entered high school and sixteen when I graduated. My classmates were always at least a year older than me, and usually two years older than me.
While I believe that the choice to allow me to skip grades was made with the best intentions (by my parents and myself: I wanted to skip grades at least as much as they did), the reality of the situation was that skipping grades has had no positive effect on my life that I'm aware of, and several negative ones.
One of which was an attachment in my teens and twenties to being hip and cool. I embraced new ideas and sought to stay current, even out in front of cultural happenings. No problem there, but there was also a large element of trying to create a persona for myself and earn the approval of my peers.
I was, for a time, fairly successful at that.
Over time, though, being on top of the latest music, food/diet and lifestyle trends stopped working for me, and/or became less important (chicken-egg discussion on that).
For one thing, moving out of New York City meant living among people who had other (different) ideas about what it meant to be hip and cool. To me, the bar to hipness was lowered to the point where things I'd never considered cool looked cool.
Another aspect was that my friends who hadn't left the City seemed to be effortlessly cooler than me - I was losing the competition to stay on top of things. I also found myself relying more on having been cool when I was in New York to prop up my image.
Moving to North Carolina in my mid-thirties sealed the deal. For one thing, I was now a middle-aged family guy, working a corporate job and living in an 'uncool' part of the US - the South. My worries and attention were on family matters, career matters.
For another, there was a new generation of music that was introduced to the world mostly in an audio-visual format. I never adapted to MTv, and was listening to everything but current music from about 1980 on. As close as I could come to cool was having a good, expensive stereo (so, not). And for another, I wasn't playing music, hanging out with cool people. Or young people.
By the time I even attempted something cool again, I had skipped an entire generation of musical tastes. I never caught up. And I never had any desire to. Occasionally something new in pop culture, usually music, would cross my way, but my tastes remained fixed where they were, back when I was hip. Or thought I was.
Then, I discovered some things in Buddhism that helped me realize my previous attachment to cool- and hip-ness as misbegotten, unimportant, and futile. Fashion, in anything, is arbitrary and very fleeting. Fashion and beauty aren't the same thing. Fashion and value certainly aren't the same thing. And I'm talking about fashion in every aspect of living and culture.
The doctrine of impermanence (everything without exception, changes) and the idea that your attachment to impermanent things (including ideas) as you understand them (i.e., unchanging), as you attempt to keep them as they are, is the cause of unhappiness.
Being hip, cool, in-the-know, in fact, being up-to-date, just stopped being important enough to me to make the effort involved.
I've replaced all that with a newly-found personal sense of style that ignores current fashion.
I am still the same narcissistic wannabe cool guy, I've just gone all internal with that, no longer taking clues from the edge of pop culture. I'm a dinosaur, I'm irrelevant, and it's working for me nearly effortlessly, for which, I'm very grateful.
Food and Diet
While I believe that the choice to allow me to skip grades was made with the best intentions (by my parents and myself: I wanted to skip grades at least as much as they did), the reality of the situation was that skipping grades has had no positive effect on my life that I'm aware of, and several negative ones.
One of which was an attachment in my teens and twenties to being hip and cool. I embraced new ideas and sought to stay current, even out in front of cultural happenings. No problem there, but there was also a large element of trying to create a persona for myself and earn the approval of my peers.
I was, for a time, fairly successful at that.
Over time, though, being on top of the latest music, food/diet and lifestyle trends stopped working for me, and/or became less important (chicken-egg discussion on that).
For one thing, moving out of New York City meant living among people who had other (different) ideas about what it meant to be hip and cool. To me, the bar to hipness was lowered to the point where things I'd never considered cool looked cool.
Another aspect was that my friends who hadn't left the City seemed to be effortlessly cooler than me - I was losing the competition to stay on top of things. I also found myself relying more on having been cool when I was in New York to prop up my image.
Moving to North Carolina in my mid-thirties sealed the deal. For one thing, I was now a middle-aged family guy, working a corporate job and living in an 'uncool' part of the US - the South. My worries and attention were on family matters, career matters.
For another, there was a new generation of music that was introduced to the world mostly in an audio-visual format. I never adapted to MTv, and was listening to everything but current music from about 1980 on. As close as I could come to cool was having a good, expensive stereo (so, not). And for another, I wasn't playing music, hanging out with cool people. Or young people.
By the time I even attempted something cool again, I had skipped an entire generation of musical tastes. I never caught up. And I never had any desire to. Occasionally something new in pop culture, usually music, would cross my way, but my tastes remained fixed where they were, back when I was hip. Or thought I was.
Then, I discovered some things in Buddhism that helped me realize my previous attachment to cool- and hip-ness as misbegotten, unimportant, and futile. Fashion, in anything, is arbitrary and very fleeting. Fashion and beauty aren't the same thing. Fashion and value certainly aren't the same thing. And I'm talking about fashion in every aspect of living and culture.
The doctrine of impermanence (everything without exception, changes) and the idea that your attachment to impermanent things (including ideas) as you understand them (i.e., unchanging), as you attempt to keep them as they are, is the cause of unhappiness.
Being hip, cool, in-the-know, in fact, being up-to-date, just stopped being important enough to me to make the effort involved.
I've replaced all that with a newly-found personal sense of style that ignores current fashion.
I am still the same narcissistic wannabe cool guy, I've just gone all internal with that, no longer taking clues from the edge of pop culture. I'm a dinosaur, I'm irrelevant, and it's working for me nearly effortlessly, for which, I'm very grateful.
Today's Weight: 199.2 lbs.
Previous Weight (6/27/19): 198.8 lbs.
Net Loss/Gain: + 0.4 lbs.
Diet Comment
Food Log
Breakfast
6:35pm:
Lunch
11:10pm, at Funk-n-Waffles: A Falafel Waffle (topped with Israeli salad and tahini).
Dinner
1:15am: Toasted Ezekiel 4:9 Flax sprouted grain bread with guacamole and two Quest bars.
Liquid Intake
6:35pm:
 |
| A LEO (lox, eggs and onions). Not shown: Green salad (arugula, kale, chard, spinach, and balsamic vinaigrette). |
11:10pm, at Funk-n-Waffles: A Falafel Waffle (topped with Israeli salad and tahini).
Dinner
1:15am: Toasted Ezekiel 4:9 Flax sprouted grain bread with guacamole and two Quest bars.
Liquid Intake
Espressos: 1; Coffee: 0 oz.; Water: 84+ oz.;
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