Yes, this topic is coming around and around, over and over.  It’s May and change is in the air!

Yes… CHANGE, and the ever present question, “What do I do with my life?”

I can hear my Mom lamenting, “I just have to get used to these changes!”  Whether I’m leaving to school, coming home from school, leaving on a mission, starting a new job, moving to a new city, or getting married, Mom always says the same thing – “just so many changes to get used to…”

It’s not just my Mom, either.  TLS recently went through some drastic changes with where they lived and what their life was like.  She also hesitantly welcomed those changes, even when they were supposed to deliver her from the most nasty neighbor relationship in the world.

Most of us prefer to take shelter from change in the supposed comforts of the familiar, but too often we find that what we thought was a stable part of our life, those supposed comforts, also vacillate.  Yes friends, change is all around us, and change is the only constant in our lives.

Which leads me to my platitude for the day… There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can cope with change, and the mentally unwell.

I have never really feared changes in my life, especially those that were planned and looked forward to my whole life.  I’ve always had at least a moderately adventurous spirit.  I’ve never been afraid of new people, new places, and changes in my routine.

I wish.

While that’s what I want everyone to think about me, the truth is that I have struggled just like everyone else.  There have been times when I just didn’t want to move, I was so petrified.  Surprised?  You should be.  Most of those moments were very private moments which occurred right before I went out “on stage” and knocked their socks off.  Only those closest to me (probably just my Mom) has seen them up close.  Over my life I have experienced anxiety and fear over life’s changes and difficulties just like everyone else, but the key was that Mom never let me (and as it turns out I now never let myself) give up and go home.  Rarely was I able to just cop out, give up, run to cover, and back to safety.  I would force myself out into the unknown, did what I could do, and for the most part was amply rewarded for it.

I inevitably discovered the same thing each time: “this isn’t as bad as I thought it would be”, and oftentimes I even would be rewarded beyond my wildest dreams for taking a small step into the unknown.

Most demonstrably, this happened when I moved to Texas.

After graduation from college, I returned to work for a theater company in my hometown.  It would be my third season with them in administration, and I was starting to really get good at my job.  We had an incredibly successful season that year, and I felt like I was on my way to the big time.

In the back of my mind, I was working on some pretty heavy issues, though.  I was excited at the prospect of working at a plethora of different jobs and getting to know a hundred different people, but there were aspects of the business I didn’t like – most notably the fact that every 3-6 months, I would be unemployed again.  How was I to ever establish a home base, achieve financial stability, or feel any sense of personal stability in such a flexible industry?

These were background issues, though, and in the foreground I was excited for the adventures that lied ahead in my life.  After all, I’m young, single, unfettered, and ready to attack life at the jugular!

Two weeks after my contract had ended, while I was enjoying collecting unemployment and looking for my next gig, the phone rang and I had very unlikely and unforeseen proposition — move to Texas and do some graphic design contract work for a few months.  The catch?  I would work in the fabric covered containers… the dreaded cubicle!

I hemmed and hawed.  Should I do it?  It’s not what I wanted to be doing.  It’s not the future I had prescribed for myself, and it was certainly not the work environment I had envisioned.  But then, I realized: it gets me 1/2 way to the east coast, puts some sweet coin into my pocket, and after all – it’s only temporary!  It will be over in four months, and I will be back on track.

Well, the rest (as they say) is history.  I came to Dallas, loved the city, loved the job, and loved my coworkers.  A temp contract turned into a real job, and everything worked out in the end!

Will I be here forever?  Who knows!

Was it what I thought I would be doing?  Heck no.

Could I have planned all this in my wildest dreams?  No.

Ironically, the wild adventure I thought I’d have by pursuing my Bohemian career in the entertainment business led to an even less expected and more adventurous life!  It started when I got on the ‘expect-the-unexpected’ roller coaster and took a short ride to this typical, ‘boring’, suburban life – which I currently wouldn’t change for anything.

So I say: hold on for dear life, enjoy the adventure, expect the unexpected, and party on!  The reigns of life are less for directing it then for just giving you something to hold on to while it tries to buck you off.

A day of feelings, in the life of WhiteEyebrows:

• I woke up and felt tired and congested.
• Then I felt stinky… so I took a shower… where I felt refreshed.

Then I went to work and I felt the following:

• Overworked… I have way too much on my plate.
• Overwhelmed… How am I going to get it all done?
• Creative… when I actually dug into my work.
• Hungry… time for LUNCH!
• Frustrated… when I made no balls in while I played pool.
• Angry… when a conference call was stupid.
• Confused… when I couldn’t figure out a schedule for a product I have to deliver.
• Saudades (that’s a Brazilian feeling of missing someone or something)
• Tired… a few days of no sleep really started catching up.
• Proud… I kicked a project’s butt and enjoyed some accolades.
• Expectant… can’t wait until after work
• Happy… work ended!

Then I went to a show and felt:

• Stuffed… from dinner beforehand.
• Interested… I remembered most of the show.
• Reflective… on the first time I saw the show as the only white man in a sea of beautiful, proud, black women in New York.
• Embarrassed… at some of the inappropriate content.
• Pity… for Celie and others who only know abusive men their whole life.
• Redemption… for some of the characters who changed their ways.
• Sadness… that some people take a lifetime to figure out some basic principles.
• Overkill… when they took FOREVER between bows at the curtain call.
• Anticipation… that my car had been towed since I parked in an unmarked spot.

As I returned home and considering my day, my life, and all the great things going on, I felt one more thing… ALIVE!

Until recently, a peeping tom was someone who would skulk around in the shadows and peer into open windows. Today, we have a new breed of peeping toms (and tom-ettes), those who just poke into everyone else’s business via the ‘open window’ of their social network.

Today, however, I don’t want to blog about online privacy (did that already), but I wanted to offer that as a background to a more basic human problem – that of observing life so much that you stop participating in it.

I recently watched a Stephen Sondheim musical called “Company”, a show about a 35 year old single man named Robert and the zany married friends he is surrounded with. During the show, he stays on stage for the whole production while all of the people and elements of the production swarm around him. The dialog of the show is very disjointed and disconnected. Lines are often incomplete sentences that don’t always build on the thought before it. We often catch people and situations in mid phrase, and we never feel like we’re getting a full picture of anything.

Near the end of the show, Bobby has an epiphany (brought on by being propositioned by his much older and very married lady friend) in which he realizes that he needs to stop being an observer of others lives and start participating in his own. In this moment he figures out that all of the excuses he had used were really just a mask for the very real anxieties he felt about taking a chance on living his own life.

When he begins this song he is considering all those reasons why he didn’t want to get married, but watch for the shift that occurs halfway through when he realizes that all those excuses now become the very substance of life that he realizes he is missing out on:

If there’s one thing the blogging phenomenon has done, it’s got people thinking about their own lives more by constant pontificating and expounding upon them. At the end of the day, though, a person’s blog and social networks are simply outward expressions of the way they’d like the world to view them. Some just post photos of their family, others engage in diarrhea of the mouth and just write everything they ever think or feel, while yet others are limited and calculated.

So what happens in the gap between how we represent ourselves to others and who we really are as people? I think we lose a little bit of ourselves in that gap, especially when we almost inevitably start becoming that person we are working so hard to paint publicly. We’re running the risk of actually become more concerned with the representation of ourselves than we are with our actual souls themselves.

…And thus we die a little every day.

(wow… that was kind of depressing for a last line of the blog, but really that’s just an allusion to another great Sondheim song “Every Day a Little Death”)

————

This weekend I spent some time exploring College Station, TX – home of the Texas A&M Aggies. I always knew this place was legendary for it’s traditions and awesome sporting events, but I never fully understood the full might and power until this weekend.

First, Yell Practice.

Before each home game, the students all gather in the stadium in the middle of the night to have a yell practice. Don’t call them cheers unless you have a death wish. No, these are yells meant to inspire fear and terror into the opponents. These yells are serious business. They are led by 5 “yell leaders” who are elected by the student body, much like a class president would be, except this is so much more important!

So, here’s how it goes. Everyone gathers in the stands, there are some speeches and such, then the yells start. Each yell has a hand signal that the yell leaders give to the crowd, which the crowd acknowledges by giving the signal back (this is most hilarious when the ‘flip the bird’ signal is given). Then everyone crouches down with their hands on their knees (supposedly, this helps project your yell more), and they all to the yell in perfect unison, keying off of the elaborate hand gestures of the yell leaders.

These yells are so loud that they can be heard from miles away, and when you’re having yell practice, you can hear the echo back from the other side of the stadium. It’s pretty heinous.

When they sing their fight song, they don’t just sing. In one particularly important section (“saw varsity’s horns off”) everyone locks arms and sways back and forth. No one is exempt, no matter how bad they stink or how much of a stranger they are. Not too hard, right? There’s more. They actually pass the word up the stands in a matter of seconds so that each row goes in opposite directions from each other.

Amazing.

Second, “Howdy”

Everyone says “howdy” on campus, and you have to say “howdy” back. It doesn’t matter how stupid you think the word “howdy” is. You are in east Texas, in the middle of freaking nowhere, and you say howdy! (When in Rome… oh, and yeah, these guys have guns.)

Third, Trains

When we went to the baseball game to employ all of this incredible cheering yelling/fanboy stuff that I had learned, I was surprised at one silly little thing – the guessing of the number of train engines. Let me explain… A&M’s baseball field sits right next to a busy railroad track, where trains pass all night long blowing their whistles. Every time you heard a train coming, you were to hold up your hand with a guess at the number of engines that the train had on it.

Yeah, I know, what a stupid little game. No winner is announced. No grand prize is drawn, but everyone does it.

So what does it mean?

I could go on and on with these little “sprinkles” on the cake of my visit to College Station – but I won’t bore you more than I already have. I’ll just cut to the point: this reminded me of the power of the shared experience.

Audience dynamics is a topic I’ve been interested in for a long time. I would have written my master’s thesis on this, if I continued in school. Our society is massively shifting away from the audience mentality and shared experiences – we are rapidly becoming more like “islands” in the sea of humanity.

These days, we get everything we want on demand. Everything is 24/7; food, entertainment, work. We watch movies on our time schedule. We time-shift our TV programming. We work weird hours; gone are the days of “quitting time” when the whistle blows and everyone goes home.

This shift is massively fragmenting our society, causing us to drift further apart as human beings because we have absolutely no commonality to our individual stories.

…But not these Aggies.

They are, perhaps, one of the last outposts of not only the “shared experience”, but above that, a “UNISON experience.” They don’t attend the athletic event. They don’t sit in the stands. They engage in the game. They understand that they are not there as voyeurs, but as participants; even to the point of guessing the number of engines on the passing train. They participate in every aspect of the world around them – they are full-fledged, actively engaged, instigating participants!

You can call it synergy, call it unison, call it the “12 man” on the field, whatever you call it, it is a force to be reckoned with.

At the end of the day I was ready to admit, “if I hadn’t have been a Cougar, I would have wanted to be an Aggie.”