PRELUDE

This is my 5th day at Wrigley Hostel in Chicago. The city has been excellent, the people I’ve met have been fantastic, with some friends I know I’ll be in touch with for a long, long time.

It still feels hollow.

This whole summer for me has been about taking care of my human side. My focus on academics paid off with a great job at Google out of college. Maybe it’s a dream come true for some people, but for me I don’t really get any gratification out of it. It’s a talking point, a little bullet point that I guess people can use to characterize me as being smart or making a good living or something. But, as much as it is an accomplishment I guess, I know I could have done so much more. I’ve thrown away so many opportunities just to be contrarian, because I was that asshole who always thought he knew best, and what was best was whatever everyone wasn’t thinking.

Viewed back now, in my unexpected depressed state of mind nearing the end of a fantastic couple of weeks, even after having made friends, having been outgoing like I wanted to be from teh start of the trip, I see that my life has thus far been a Theme and Variations.

THEME

I think I know what must be done. I’m a flake, I’m lazy most of the time and tend to have good ideas but am too embarassed to put myself out on the line to implement them. I can usually make a good show of making everyone think I am a hard worker and super intelligent and generally doing well at a lot of the things others think they struggle with, but I always say I’d rather be natural at being a human being and work at being an intelligent one.

VARIATION 1

You know, for how well I pick things up, with a job at aprestigious software compant, you’d think I’d be a good student, but the last time I ever got straight A’s was 4th grade. For the rest of my academic career I coasted, kind of getting my work done, using my good rapport with my teachers to get away with things I shouldn’t have been able to get away with. Yet despite being a flake about it academics was what I really cared about because it was less risky. I was told to do well in academics so I didn’t think of other things first. I wanted to be social but everyone else assumed I only liked books, so I got only into books and kept to my small circle of friends. Because that’s what I was supposed to do.

VARIATION 2

I started playing in the high school drumline in 8th grade. We were good, very good. I had a natural talent at drumming, but wasn’t great at practicing. I played well for two years in the bass line where being a part ofa larger whole is more important than individual talent. I got moved to the snare line with high hopes but never really pushed myself to improve that much over the year. I used a foot injury which should have been an opportunity to focus on playing over marching as an excuse to work on neither. That injury moved me to the pit on marimba with high hopes. I coasted along as clearly the best player of what, looking back, was a mediocre group of keyboard players compared to the groups before us. Despite my clear lack of ability to focus musically, I decided I knew better than to follow the advice of going to the Ivy League schools recruiting me, the Johns Hopkins enginieering department which gave me scholarships, and entered music school, because the only person pushing me was my drum instructor, and so… it’s what I was good at, it was less risky, it kept me from having to brand myself as some sort of Ivy Leaguer apart from everyone else. It was the right thing to do.

VARIATION 3

I got to music school, and, the all-knowing asshole that I am, assumed everyone would have sticks up their asses over classical music and I would be the guy to come save them. I did well enough in my classes but avoided making connections, unable to fund a social footing in a world of creative people, and used any opportunity I could to blame my school’s politics or lack of funding or wahtever for why I felt I was not becoming the musician I wanted to be. I gravitated back towards math classes because I was still good at them, and technical degrees are less risky, I’ll be able (with a sidenote of with less effort) to put something together and keep music as a hobby. It was the intelligent thing to do.

VARIATION 4

I graduate from school with a few honors here and there, but I was never really challenged along the way. I pushed myself only hard enough to say I pushed myself and get people to believe me. Looking back I realized all of the social things I missed out on while I was too busy being lazy and calling it “focusing on my work”. I was in a relationship which was safe, but never as fulfilling as it should have been. But I felt unable to connect with other, never having shared experiences except maybe with other socially awkward types who also couldn’t hold a conversation. I tried a bit, but without much effort, to get out more, find social groups, but it normally ended up being just vaguely contributing to something here and there on the Internet. I found TagPro and solidified myself in the (nonexistent before me, for the most part) streaming scene, and did enough work to where I could get by afterwards with as little work as possible on my efforts, just enough to be recognized for it. I thought I would be able to make friends here, but I’m just a name people know. But I kept streaming, because it was a nice creative outlet now that the music thing wasn’t really there and it was the fun thing to do.

VARIATION 5

Having been unfulfilled still socially, and remaining a super contrarian asshole in disguise as a soft spoken nice, if awkward, sort of guy, I tried to emulate those who I thought were having the fun I wasn’t. At this point I had come to terms that I had been overly lazy my whole life and needed to actually be able to finish something I started, goddammit! I started exercising, and do to this day, but largely as a proxy for working on the more difficult social muscle that still laid weak and largely unused inside my brain. I had few friends in Pittsburgh and was largely depressed, and my relationship was clearly going downhill from unfulfilling to monotonous, yet was still safe. No need to put myself on the line. I finally stopped being contrary for once and applied to Birthright where I whought I would somehow magically become super charismatic and popular and whatever tropes from high school I still held in my head because I hadn’t matured socially enough to think any different. While I made some friends, I always felt for the most part as a follower in a large pack, never reached out to a fair few of the people in my trip and realized, as I was still trying to get through the social maturity hoops of younger people than me, that I had been dumbing myself down, not allowing myself to have any character at all, and, unsurprisingly, been playing the safe, intelligent, corect, middle ground of not being a “nice guy” but just being someone afraid to step on someone else’s toes in the slightest. I decided to identify my inhibitions and blast through them, becoming more outgoing and somehow a charismatic tour de force by using the dedication to practice I should have had while still a full time musician. It was the human thing to do.

VARIATION 6?

And here is where I lay now, in a bed on the top floor of a hostel half a block from Wrigley Stadium. What drew me specifically to this point of realization that I have been swinging from one extreme “life change” to the next trying to find my way to being some gaseous, fleeting “ideal” but really just hopping from supposed shortcut to supposed shortcut?

I met a real person.

She’s the person I would have been had I let myself have a character from a young age. Had I had the ability to shut off social pressures I couldn’t comprehend and follow my passion in music, school, and the at that point untapped passion in life. If I ever post this to Facebook and she takes the time to read this, she’ll know who she is immediately. She is an unbelievably talented and driven artist, a supremely confident person, attractive both physically and even moreso as a person. The things she loves, she goes after with gusto. She isn’t afraid like I was to actually work on her craft instead of seeing friends from time to time, but knows how to maintain herself as a highly social and charismatic person. She personifies the ideal that I have been too afraid to work for my whole life. I knew she lived far from me and it wasn’t going to turn into anything (I told myself not wanting to believe it), but I went after her. I felt flimsy shambles of fake personalities I had hstily erected time and time again crumbling around me. I mean I had some playful banter, I enjoyed hanging out with her and some friends, and I told myself it was going well, but didn’t really have any reason to say so other than that we had a few things in common and had a good time with others at the Tast of Chicago festival. By the time I went to see her again with another girl from the hostel and some of her friends at the Ravinia Festival north of the city, it was too late. Again, I enjoyed myself with her and she seemed to enjoy herself with me through the evening, but there were those small moments of me making an awkward movement (my lagging social maturity and drawn out last relationship again leaving me with only the ability to get in selfies with girls I like, but not actually be myself around them), a fearful attempt at “contact” like I was back in middle school, and the awkward fidgeting response from her. Somehow a picture got on Facebook that made it look like we were getting on awesomely, not sure how that one happened, but I once again pulled the blinders over everyone I knew.

And this morning I realized, my relationship with her wasn’t that of a friend. I’m a fan. She is such the real person I always strived to be and never could, looking back on our interactions, it was her giving and her leading and me just telling her how awesome she is. I don’t even have a real relationship with her. As huge of a part of my trip to Chicago she has been, I will never be more than some guy who works at Google she met at a hostel who really likes Sypmhonie Fantastique. But I know myself, and I know she’s back on Tuesday, and even though she’s going to be busy I’m going to find an excuse to myself to ignore everyone else in teh hostel and try to make some amount of hang out time with her happen. I guess it’s the Jon thing to do.

THEME

I fear that once again I’m just going to swing into another variation. Pulled back to my musical roots, I see myself already looking for ways to magically slide out of the office life I haven’t even started yet and become a successful musician, trying to cram in the work of 10,000 hours into a year or two like I could in school because I was just intelligent enough to kind of pull it off.

The variations are swinging faster now. My baby face has let me pull off being socially behind my age for a little bit of time, but it will only go so far. I’m not old at 25, not by a long shot, but I’m starting to get to that age where I’m not really in full “youth figuring themself out” mode anymore. Yet I still feel constantly behind, constantly lagging, being lazy, always settling. I dread all the time that I won’t get to where I want to be, held back only by myself, and now haunted by the real person from the hostel in Chicago.