Here I Go Again

I just finished posting my missing entries from February of 2003.

As I'm going through them, I was originally tempted to modify them.  Nothing major, correct the occasional spelling error, update the tags to reflect my current way of tagging entries. Little things like that.

I ended up posting them as-is with the exception of the titles. I re-titled the entries, as I've been doing for all of the years that I have been shuffling these things around from one place to another, but that was it.

The reasoning behind it is fairly simple and straightforward, at least to me.  As I was reading them, I was trying to get back into the mindset that I was in twenty-three years ago.  I realize that I'm not eighteen anymore. I am living in a completely different world than I was then. But I can remember.  I can still write in the same silly, vaguely nonsensical way that I did at that time, but my current situation doesn't exactly lend itself to care free, silly prose anymore. And it was care free and silly, there are no two ways about it.  Even the stuff where I was not being exactly positive about whatever.

The things that I viewed as soul-crushing or depressing at eighteen are, at forty-two, just another day. Part of that is growing up and realizing that there is more to the world than working at a fast food restaurant (referred to in those days primarily as either Arby's or the beef repository) and what my friends thought about life, the universe and everything.

I spent a few of the intervening years living with someone that I realized I couldn't stand.  We had some interesting times together, but I really wasn't a fan of her. It took a long time to get out of that one, and I had to get really creative.  Which I regret. Not ending it, but ending it the way I did. I see now that the situation I got myself into in 2014 (and am still in), is even worse. It is also much harder to get out of.

I also left Arby's and ended up working for some people who were pretty toxic. That was, again, a snap decision based on a couple of bad days at work. While making that decision did, eventually, get me where I am today, I regret the middle part. The part where I worked there for fourteen years and most of the time I was not allowed to do the job I was hired to do was frustrating.

After I left there, I ended up where I am now. Which is both good and bad, I guess. I have met some interesting and wonderful people that I would have never intersected with, but at the same time, It's kind of dramatic.  

Granted, there are days in 2026 that I feel like the only outlet I have available is to, as they say, bitch about it in my LiveJournal.

Except I'm not. Largely in part because I feel like I need to keep this hidden from some of the people in my life. Which, in and of itself is weird. I feel like I need to hide this from people in my life, but I'm legit putting it on the internet for the entire world to see.