Attempting to Define A Life - Past

Writing a biography, auto- or otherwise, seems like an impossible task. How much of our lives are made up of intensely personal, internal thoughts and feelings that can't be defined or described to others, beyond tax brackets and age groups and culture and history? Walking down the same street, side by side, our minds are vastly different universes, each at least as complex as the physical one we live in.

But I've been thinking about my life lately, and how to express it to my loved ones. How to explain it, I guess would be more accurate. Even while another voice says I don't have to explain anything, I haven't done anything wrong; I don't have anything to say for myself.

Still, I have this feeling that my family may look at my life as something less than acceptable, and that perhaps I have done something wrong. And am continuing to do so. It's probably vanity, but I have always been happy that my life hasn't followed what seems to be the Standard Plan for Young Americans. I go where the wind takes me, and sometimes that matches the Plan and sometimes it does not.

So here we go.

I am twenty-five years old. On December 30^th I will be twenty-six. My last name means "cake" in Czechoslovakian. I'm adopted by my father, to whom I owe everything. Some people may contend that, but I've never felt any differently. I grew up in south-east Idaho on a potato and wheat farm owned and operated by my family, where I lived until I was eighteen. The town I lived in had a population barely overly a thousand.

I was an average student, horrendous at math but good in English. The latter is due to my dad. I didn't play any high school sports and was only in Drama once. I did lighting. I took Choir throughout nearly all of middle and high school. I got Biggest Flirt in the yearbook. I helped teach an HTML class. I hung out with the "stoner" kids but wasn't one. I decided I was an atheist around the 7^th grade. I didn't have any real cliques and was liked by pretty much everyone. I worried a lot. I liked girls.

Until a recruiter from the High Tech Institute of Phoenix came to my high school somewhere near the middle of my senior year I had no plans for college. I hated the pressure from my teachers and the assumption that I had to make plans for the future. Even then I didn't like making plans, especially far-reaching plans like college. I knew I wanted to get a higher education, and I knew I would go into computers, but out of some passive-aggressive spite I refused to research schools and write application letters. If the recruiter hadn't come I don't know where I would have went. The school was comparatively inexpensive, had a good program and an accelerated schedule, and Phoenix also happened to be where my high school sweetheart would be moving once she graduated, so it seemed like the best choice. It was the only place to which I applied.

I graduated with an acceptable GPA (which I can't recall now) and began working at Best Buy. While in college I did a bunch of short-term contracting jobs for companies around Phoenix. Best Buy wasn't spectacular, but it paid the bills and the discount was nice. The worst part was being forced to push warranties on the customer covering everything from USB cables to Mountain Dew. That and I hate being a salesman. The powers that be wouldn't let me off for Christmas vacation so that I could enjoy a cruise with my family and see my dad get re-married, so I quit.

After that it was GoDaddy Software which I worked at for about four years, moving from the call center floor to the network operations center, to the security operations center where I was a sub-department in charge of all user accounts for the company. I was making good money in a department made up entirely of me, which I had created as the company grew and they needed a person to take care of accounts full time. I enjoyed working there a lot, and if Phoenix hadn't stopped feeling like home to me I'd still be there now. I made some good friends there that I miss terribly.

As long as I can remember I've always picked friends (and girlfriends) who are smarter than me. In high school it was Tony Bixby. In college and throughout my time at GoDaddy is was Jeff Rodriguez, Chris Beverly, and Scott Gerlach. Jeff helped get me both of my jobs after college and even though we don't talk much I still bug him for computer crap every once in a while. A guy named Chris Hawkins and I spent a lot of time together, getting drunk and eating steak at Applebees or playing Final Fantasy and watching movies. When we were on the call center floor together we ate at Panda Express every night for at least six months straight.

Chris and Scott are the funniest and most fun mofos I've ever met. I cannot count the number times my face and sides have hurt from laughing so hard. Chris and I used to make even the hardiest of people uncomfortable with our ability to deliver the most homo-erotic banter with completely straight faces and natural, conversational tones in our voices. It's a special friendship that can engage in that kind of foolin' around, and I do miss him so. Scott is the best story teller around, and his impressions of people (his lovely wife included) during these stories are hilarious. He pulls faces that make Kasey and I laugh to this day, and I've been gone from there for almost two years. I was proud and thankful to be at his wedding in Hawaii and wish I could still pug-sit for him and Jori.

I married my high school sweetheart Heidi in Las Vegas with only our immediate families present due to a fued between her parents and my grandparents. Think Romeo and Juliet meets The Hatfields & The McCoys, but with potatoes and north-western accents instead of iambic pentameter and moonshine. Thing were good for nearly the entire eight years we were together. Growing up with each other like we did afforded us a total sense of ease around one another. Fights were rare and ended quickly, we thought the same, we helped each other out. We were best friends. We could be ourselves in a way people rarely are unless they're alone, and for a time it was good.

But I started to feel neglected and she wasn't good at handling the stress of college, of her job, of anything, and would take it out on me. I tried my best to help or let it go, but after a while I began to wear. I'm positive I wasn't always a bundle of joy and I wanted a lot from her. We hit a major bump in the road that striped away a lot of trust and innocence, and a year later after things had not improved and I saw the beginnings of bitterness and loathing in me towards my spouse, I decided to end it. I won't lie; it helped that I had someone wonderful to go to. I've never had any delusions about being good at being alone.

Somewhere in here my youngest brother Seth died in a car crash shortly before his eighteenth birthday. It was the first death of an immediate family member that I had ever experienced. I hadn't seen him for a long time, and I don't know if I'll ever be okay with that. I felt the worst for my father and my brother, who were closest to him. People have told me I changed after that, and attributed my decision to end my marriage and move away to this change, but I don't recall feeling anything different about myself. However, I do know now that nothing is all that serious, where before it was only a belief.

Despite having a job and friends I always felt were too good to be true, I had to leave Arizona. The relationship between my long-time girlfriend and short-time wife was making us both unhappy. I was becoming increasingly bitter towards the person I valued the most and I didn't want to hate her. My apartment felt like a cardboard box instead of a home, and I couldn't stand driving/living/existing in a life that had collapsed. The bulk of our friends stopped talking to me the day Heidi moved out, those mentioned above excluded. Maybe I was thinking the grass was greener on the other side of the country, but when you live in the desert that's not a hard thing to imagine.

So I moved to Virginia. After a handful of visits to the east coast I was in love, both with the area and with Kasey. She flew to Arizona and stayed with me for a few months while I tried (and failed) to talk my job into letting me work remotely and packing up all the stuff I owned to drive cross-country. I had an apartment, but no job. I knew one would come, it was just a matter of time. Of course it took longer than everyone would have liked, with my family picking up a lot of my tabs until I got on my feet (which still happens, here and there), but it gave me time to get settled and explore my new, wonderful surroundings.

Two days of driving and twenty-four hundred miles later, I was home. At the time of this writing, that was a year and a half ago.

- David

Part Two Soon!

I Challenge You to a Xiaolin Showdown!

What is up, my Internet peoples. Not too much here. At work for another two hours, making sure the new guys doesn't majorly fux anything up. So basically instead of monitoring our systems, I'm monitoring the monitor...er. It's even easier and quieter than plain old monitoring!

So one thing that always bothered me about organized religion was it's followers. Like that saying, "Dear God, protect me from your followers!" They wouldn't practice what they preached, or they would appear to but in fact they were petty and false like all the other people out there. They would advise one thing, then do quite another. Very off-putting.

I guess when I became Buddhist I unconsciously assumed every other Buddhist would be the living embodiment of the philosophy. I don't really know a lot of other Buddhists personally and don't really make it a point to seek them out. I mostly enjoy just practicing myself and making my own way, so this unconscious assumption was never challenged.

Then I started hanging out on Buddhist forums. My oh my was I wrong. Don't get me wrong, there are some wonderful Buddhists out there. Helpful, humorous, understanding, laid back, and fun. But there are some not so good ones.

For a way of life that teaches detachment some of these people are reeeeaaaaaalllly attached to their particular school of Buddhism, or just Buddhism in general. It's ironic and sad. My favorite is the type that quotes from the texts like a Christian priest would from the Bible: as the only proof you should need to be convinced. This is also ironic as the Buddha himself famously taught not to accept any teachings for any reason other than personal verification.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. After all, people are people and it is the Internet. "Confused" (read: dumb) people are to the Internet as sand is to a desert.

I guess it's because I see Buddhism as very simple and laid back. Some people seem to think it should be complex, rigid, and all "official". That was one thing I loved when I first started studying; there wasn't really an "official" way to become Buddhist. If you wanted you to have a ceremony done by a monk or nun, but it wasn't necessary. All you had to do was follow the teachings and you could consider yourself a Buddhist. You don't even have to follow them strictly or completely. But some Buddhists out there don't regard others as "real" Buddhists unless they took refuge under an ordained Buddhist and went through some kind of ceremony or other. Pretty silly if you ask me.

Buddhism isn't about rituals or titles or how many Sanskrit words you know or how many sutras you've memorized. It isn't about proving to others that you know more than them. It's isn't about all the complexity that has been heaped upon the various schools over the years. It isn't about jumping through hoops.

It's about taking a long, hard, honest look at your life and seeing that it is full of suffering. About realizing that you are the cause of your problems because you don't know how things really are and then finding a way to stop hurting yourself and others. That's it. Everything else is pretty much just reiterations of this simple teaching and even though they are intended to help, people get caught up these secondary (and tertiary, quaternary, etc) teachings and see them as ladders to be climbed and levels to be reached. This is wrong.

I think a lot of people need to get back to basics with their spiritual lives. Gain wisdom. Be still. Be mindful. Be compassionate. Be honest. Be at peace. If any of your thoughts or actions don't result in or move you towards even one of these, then of what use can it be but to cause you suffering?

What other teaching is necessary?

- BuddhaDave

Keep It Simple, Sanga!

P.S. That's not my cute image, I found it!