Photo: Flickr User – FngKestrel // Article By: Shane Peltzer Hello and welcome to an ad free edition of the XanderGC Blog! Yes, ad free as in this particular post won’t contain any ads. I am not that guy who sells ads on his blog to make money, not today anyways. I just want to touch on that one for a bit first. We all need to make money, it’s a necessary evil that we cannot help yet, maybe one day in the future, but not now. So I am writing ads for a variety of different companies, to help them put the word out there and for me to make a little bit of extra dough on my downtime. Just thought I’d say that. Now on to our regularly scheduled programming. As I lay away at night, flashing over random events in my life and where I was then and where I am now, I can say with quite a bit of certainty that I am pleased with where I am now in my life. Sure I may still be the neurotic, paranoid introvert I always was, but that part of me is toned down. Sure I may still live at home like I did when I was attending high school / college, but I still contribute to the household, so I’m not like a leech on my family and their generous nature [ you know who you are. ] I broke out of my previous “career” of a plate-setter / prep cook / dishwasher and became a blackjack dealer, which didn’t last long at all, then I was unemployed for a while and eventually found my way to a little place called “Wal-Mart” It was there that I really had no choice but to break out of my shell, a shell which was comfortable and completely necessary to my survival. While I may not have completely broken out of my shell, I did become more social, which suffice it to say was much more scarier than I had anticipated, but I pressed onward. However my friends, readers and interweb passerby’s, all that glimmers is not golden. Flash forward to now and I am embarking [ I love that word ] on a brand new career, one that I had once given up completely on, I have a new temporary job to help me make some money while I pursue my goal and in many ways I have turned back the clock to a point in my life where I felt I missed out on. My teenage years. As a teenager, I was what many would consider a loser. I was a geek, I loved video games, I didn’t play sports and social events were the last thing on my mind. Technically none of that has really changed, but something that has changed is that I am taking more time for myself these days. Back then and pretty much last year, I was putting my wants and needs [ lol Sims joke ] on the back burner while I put everyone else’s ahead of my own. Friends, new friends, family, relationship and work, all came before anything I needed or wanted to do for myself. Suffice it to say I burnt out and kinda snapped my cookie, because a cookie that becomes hard and stale just snaps so easily. Nowadays, I still care about others and work, but not at the expense of my own happiness and well being. Life is far too short to let the little things wear you down, something which I haven’t completely changed about myself I’ll admit, but something that is a goal to achieve. Getting back to the whole “Regression, Progression” point of the whole post, is that essentially I’ve become just like a slacker teenager. I sleep in when I can, I don’t keep my room in pristine condition anymore, I let my clean, folded clothes stay out where ever they are left and let the clutter accumulate. I stay up late, I blare my music whenever I can, I play video games, I watch movies and I do go out with my friends and just hang out. It’s kinda funny that before if I was listening to a song that had questionable content in it, I would censor it so that my parents wouldn’t hear it [ did I mention that I still live at home? ] my god, I don’t know what I was thinking? They were the adults, they know these words and these situations, they should be able to deal with it. Whether I am regressing back to a life as a teenager or I am merely enjoying life as a young adult remains to be determined, all I know is that all work and no play makes Shane a dull, broken, stressed out boy. My point is simply this: enjoy what you can out of life, if that involves sleeping in late, drinking coffee to 3 in the afternoon, finishing a game, designing a web site, going out partying with the guys, staying up late, staying at home watching TV/Movies, etc. It’s your life, as long as you aren’t actually going out and intentionally hurting people and doing more harm than good, why should anyone tell you how to live your life? Be all that you can be and be happy with who you are while doing it, you can thank me later.
