Blogging to kill time

As I sit here at work wondering when I am going to be assigned any work to do, and wondering what exactly my boss thinks I'm working on all day every day when I plainly told him in yesterday's department meeting that I don't have anything to work on this week, I decided I could kill time by blogging. I've been working on the Week in Review post in the background, but that's a little boring to write, and it won't be posted until Thursday morning. This post will address a few miscellaneous thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head over the past couple of days.

About Me - Curler?

First, some good news: I will be curling again this year! I could easily do an entire About Me post on "Curler," but I haven't considered myself to be a curler for a few years. I balked at the cost of being a full-time curler in 2005--it is a surprisingly costly sport!--and have only been occasionally sparing since then. This year, I will be curling half-time, so approximately every second week, or whenever the person I am sharing the position with can't make it. This is definitely a step up from last year's one game. Now that I'm getting back into it, it is only a matter of time before I add "Curler" to my About Me list and write a long post about my curling career (nearly 20 years!). That one will be interesting.

Ugh, here I go...

The other big news from yesterday is that I finally posted my profile on a couple of very different online dating sites, Lavalife and Match.com. There are numerous other sites out there, and it's amazing how little overlap in available single people there is between sites, so I will probably tackle a few more as this week wears on.

If you've never visited an online dating site, you may be picturing something like classified ads right now. "SWM seeking SWF for NSA fun." It's a little more robust than that. My profile alone is over 400 words long, and along with the profile you can include pictures of yourself (non-nude, unless you visit those sites) and answers to miscellaneous questions that the site asks you. Not everyone puts that much effort into their profile, but I always believe that if you are going to do something, you should put the effort in to do it right.

At this stage in my moving on, I'm not quite getting actively involved in the search for the next One. I'm sitting back and waiting to see if anyone is interested in me based on my rather unusually detailed profile. Every online dating site has a free notification process (a "smile" on Lavalife, for example) where you can indicate that you are interested in a person without having to subscribe to the service (a subscription generally costs $15 to $20 a month). To actually contact the person with an email requires the subscription. My online dating procedure has always been to wait for someone interesting to express interest in me and then I will subscribe for only one month to get the email conversation started. This is how I met my ex-wife, so I think it's a pretty good procedure. During that month of being subscribed, I can also email anyone else that I am interested in getting to know, if it doesn't actually work out with the person I subscribed for (which may have happened one or two or ten times in the past...).

I have browsed many of the available profiles, but have not been inspired to initiate contact with anyone yet. Frankly, browsing these profiles usually just makes me sick to my stomach. There's only so many times you can read "I like to have fun" or "I want someone who likes to have fun" without getting incredibly frustrated with the inanity of most people. What does that mean? Everybody likes to have fun; I'm pretty sure of that fact. But "fun" is also different for each person. So, by saying you like to have fun, you are saying nothing at all. And by saying you want to meet someone that likes to have fun, I can reply and say, "I like to have fun!--I watch science fiction television shows all the time!"

Why am I doing this to myself? I hate dating so much. But, if I can meet the right person for me, all the tough slogging through the wrong people pays off in a big way. But I don't want to just fixate on that ideal future; I need to try to enjoy the moment, which brings me to...

When did I become so damn future-focused?

I was having a good conversation with my ex-wife yesterday--yes, we still have good conversations!--and I started thinking about how through much of our marriage I was ridiculously future-focused. I was always looking ahead to that day when we'd be debt-free and be able to start traveling the world. When I could buy flowers for no reason without worrying about that $20. When I could splurge on some jewelry without worrying about where that would fit in the budget. Yeah, all of these examples are about money, because I was obsessed about getting out of debt--and still am!--but the key point is that I was so future-focused, I wasn't aware of bigger problems in the present.

What's somewhat amusing about all of this is that I got into this debt situation by being too present-focused. I was living in the moment, spending more money than I was making. Once I was struggling to make minimum payments on credit cards, I was forced to reevaluate my focus. And, in typical me fashion, I took it too far to the opposite extreme. I'm proud of what we accomplished when we buckled down in 2006 and 2007 and got rid of enough debt that the bank would give me a mortgage to buy our new house, but at the same time, we sacrificed a lot of things that should never have been sacrificed. This has always been, and will probably always be, my biggest regret.

And when we moved in to the new house, we again spent way too much money getting set up. Once again, I was back to the opposite extreme for a short time--the "got to have it now!" mentality. Those 2-year financing plans for furniture sure sound good when you have this delusional belief that you will easily have that money to pay it off in 2 years. Once the debt started piling up again, I flipped the switch and was back to future-focused. I've been stuck there now for a good two years, almost completely oblivious to the far more important present.

So, what's the moral here? It's pretty obvious, but I think the following terms make it pretty clear: middle ground, happy medium, and balance. I need to find that. And that is fucking hard.