Epiphanies

So I've had my iPhone for about 2 weeks now. I've been checking out a VAST ARRAY of iPhone Apps. Looking for concepts and ideas that make an App Great. I just sat down on my lunch break to breeze through some of the blogs that I follow (you should check them out on my profile... some are awesome) and I stumbled across reading my own blog. The last one in fact, about resolutions.

I thought of the things I want to "create" and it hit me.

I saw the perfect way to lay out a new app. A project I've been working on (kinda) for the last couple years, but I always seemed to find a marital reason to make it die or go away. My poor client was so patient, he never actually gave up, but I told him I would be temporarily inconvenienced and unavailable for working on his project until I got my life sorted out.

Well, I just saw his project as an iPhone app.
I think I could put together all aspects of this quite nicely...
I'm all of a sudden WAY too excited (chuckle). SO, that's one more reason to be happy this 2nd day of my new year.

I had a perfect New Years Day, I spent some time with (of all people) my ex-wife. We hashed out some serious issues we have had and I feel that much closer to figuring out where we are now. I feel freedom from being responsible for her (obviously), and I don't possess her (in that way I felt as a husband), and we were able to be friends. Nicely. We watched a movie and chatted and all in all... I'm happy.

That's all that matters isn't it...?
Well, I think so.

All of my problems didn't solve themselves tho. I think I've figured out which house I want to buy, however, my Real Estate Agent just showed me one in Sand Springs that's bigger, has more bedrooms, one more car garage and is almost $20k cheaper?! I don't know what to do about that. Cause I REALLY don't wanna live in Sand Springs, but that's quite a deal.

No, who am I kidding. Security, Comfort and Cost. Those are what you look for in a home. I don't trust Sand Springs, I wouldn't be comfortable there, altho the Cost is insane. Especially for the pictures that are listed.

So, it looks like I'll start making those grown up and adult movements towards the house that has my fancy. I have to talk the owners down almost $5k AND get them to cough up 6% of the closing costs. OR I would go down $2k also with 6% closing costs and that would be just as well. Either way, that makes the house payments in a range I am happy with.

But if I get this? We are talking a 3 bedroom house. 1 car garage. Central heating and air. All appliances. Shed in the backyard. Red bricked patio. It's very nice. Granted, I would have to enlarge the bathroom into one of the other bedrooms for the bath of my dreams, and merge two of the bedrooms into a single wonderfully sized Master Bedroom that would be larger than the living room. Hell, I'm considering making it a studio apartment. Blow out both bedrooms into one huge room.

Who knows. Still taking it all in.
Trying to find out who I am.
What I want.
How I get it.

I saw most of "The Secret" last night with my ex. It's a documentary on a meta-physical concept for Positive Thinking. It was neat how alot of their concepts were a part of who I am already and I have accounted to those aspects much of why I am where I am now. But it gave me a desire to try to expand what I accomplish and gain 10-fold. I've lived with a fairly meager expectance out of life.

I'm adding on to my resolutions a little I think.

I want to make $10 million dollars.
A year.

Not to be rich, but so I don't ever have to worry about money again.
So if you've seen the secret, you know what I am doing to get there.

I don't really have a dream car.
I don't really have a dream house.
I want to live near the ocean.
I want to draw and paint and make music of some kind...
I would be interested in sculpting...
I would absolutely love to write (and be published).
I want to be in shape and healthy.
Other than that, my life's goals are formed and discarded on a daily basis.

Where will I be in one years time?
I'm looking forward to finding out.

It's 12:30pm at work.
I'm making goals, planning, reinventing who I am.
I don't even want to stop.

Who will I be tomorrow?

9" Nails

I'm getting ready for bed at 8:47pm. I'm trying to offset a 4:00am bedtime last night. If I get to bed now, I can get 8 hours of sleep in time for tomorrow. And that's what I'm shooting for. I have a week to look forward to.

This week I am making my rebirth event.
I'm turning Thursday into a day I will celebrate, and NOT because my brother was born on that day either... sorry Jesse.

Thursday is a new year.
My divorce may not be finalized by that day via the courts? But it's finished as far as my mind and body recognize it, so I am making Thursday my day. I'm recognizing the importance of reinventing myself, I'm grabbing ahold of what I want and making it real this year. Hell, by Thursday, I will have moved even further towards my new home, I might have my new computer and have re-started several key projects, and more.

It's time.

Meanwhile, I was stumbling around in some of my old posts, and I ran across this post on Richard Dawkins forum... from someone whom I admire for their wit.

Click Here To Get To Original Post

---

Look... you believe that a cosmic Jewish zombie, who is his own father, can make you live forever if you submit to a magical soul-douching ceremony (complete with magical water, incantations and waving of hands), symbolically eat his flesh (in the form of a cracker) and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was tricked by a malevolent entity (disguised a talking snake... with legs) into eating a piece of magical fruit from an enchanted tree... (etc.)... and that there is something horribly wrong with people who ARE NOT so stupid and gullible that they can be made to believe such outrageously ridiculous codswallop.

Ahhhhh... I love it when people sum up some things so beautifully.
Thank you DuckPhup...

Well, it's 9:20pm. My day was nice and relaxing. I feel so much better than I have in years. I'm starting to get used to these swings too. I will feel completely depressed for awhile, then I start to rediscover things I enjoy, then I start to have hope. Well, I'm at the hope phase right now and I will enjoy it. If I start to swing down, at least I can recognize it and it doesn't take control of me. It helps me to focus on what is wrong, and present solutions to fix it.

I'm shutting my soon-to-be-replaced system down... turning up the volume on my tunage... climbing under the covers... and finding nirvanna...

Tomorrow is a full day...
May yours be better than you ever thought it could be.

The Zombie Perspective

So it's been a couple days.
I've had time to ponder over the events of the last few days of my life, last few months, and even (lo and behold) the last few years...

I have said, and now believe, that I have been given another chance to do my life right. I fought this divorce so hard. It's against who I am to allow a relationship to die without fighting for it. But it takes two to make it a fight... so here I am...

I felt like a failure when this thing fell over. But a very good (and completely imaginary) friend of mine said, that once you know the truth of the matter... why someone does something (or in my case did something) you can understand their motives, you know WHY they would make decisions that you weren't compelled to make, which allows you to forgive real (or even perceived) wrong doings on their part.

I understand...
I get it...
Finally...

Now I have to fight the apathy towards them. It's no longer a hatred, or anger, or fierce emotions... it's the uncaring sensation that says they made themselves obsolete in my circle of friends. But should I fight it? Should I try to be friends with someone who... it doesn't matter. It will all work itself out.

I am free...
So weird, so odd... these wings of freedom are finally mine... luckily, because I trusted they would come and so I jumped off the precipice before I ever received them. Now they can protect me from the looming ground of death, and the merciless pull of the gravity of time and emotion. I'm free to be me. And all the wonder and oddness that entails.

I'm really ready to start writing about memetics and memes again tho, to tell you the truth. I'm tired of being wrapped up in this little pain ball called divorce. Ready to be free, single, mine...

Who knows what tomorrow brings?
No one...
But I know that 7:45pm tonight holds a Zombie flick called Quarantine for ME!

Daily Grind

So it's Tuesday night.
I got halfway through the movie The Matrix.

My soon-to-be-ex-wife returned my call half-way through and now I am not in the mood to finish it. Argh.

How am I supposed to feel when my s.t.b.e.w. (see above) calls and has to end the call because she is starting to get sad and feels like she's going to cry? Especially when she is the one who wants the divorce in the first place?! I don't even have a clue how to feel.

I'm so ready to get back to life.
I feel like my life is on hold STILL... however, to be honest. I do feel like I can almost sense those bonds slipping away slowly. 8 years of marriage is alot of baggage to unload. And technically it's only been a little over a month and a half. (right?)

I don't know.

I DO (however) know that I haven't had a chance to work on ANY of my other blogs. I mean my ability to process and deal with these emotions is "sometimes" (meaning most of the time) more than I can handle. I've been trying to do the social thing (it IS the Holidays) and hang out with family. But I feel naked without my wife.

I went to my younger brothers house where he was throwing a shin-dig, and I actually found myself wandering around looking for my s.t.b.e.w., I had something funny to tell her. I almost lost it. I ended up slipping downstairs to his basement / game room to just vegg after that. I couldn't think, couldn't process.

I'm THAT guy. I spent most of my damn pre-adult life learning about women, I watched so many women (through all the damnable churches my parents ran us through) complain about men not understanding. I made that decision to KNOW what it took to make a woman happy.

What a waste. Cause all women are different.

I'm done with looking for Mrs. Right. I'm so done. Not interested in any relationship deeper than really good friends. I don't have time, I don't have the energy, and I don't have enough scraps of my heart left for another run like this one. Just don't. I have NO desire to ever even give another woman a chance to do what has been done. No desire.

And it's ok.
No it's not.
But it is what it is.

There isn't a god to cry to, oh sure, I could make one up. But it would do just as much good as pissing in the wind, without wearing my urine tho... I mean that's just gross. Nasty. sigh.

Contempt. This is an advanced emotion according to Plutchik.

I've come to the conclusion that you can't deal with your emotions properly without knowing what emotion you are feeling. I am dealing with Contempt, which is made up of Disgust and Anger. Which sounds harsh looking at it in bold text (ok, I didn't bold it, but I should) but it's what I feel. For those who know me and my s.t.b.e.w., just understand something. You didn't know us. You may have known her before we were married, you may even have known me. But you didn't know either of us while we were married because we were MASTERS at Mask's, we were who we wanted you to see.

Hell, I don't even know myself lately.

Needless to say, I'm feeling Contempt. Anger, that's a basic emotion, and Sadness.

It started out as a GREAT evening, now I'm just in a bad mood. Ah hell, it's 9:30pm, I'm still fighting this damnable cold, and it's FREEZING outside. I'm going to bed.

Night.

Trance Music, XMas, December, My Life

So it's December 11th.
Thursday.
7:56am

I'm zoning to some Trance music, loving it. The "La La La Girls" by Paffendorf is playing in my ears right now.

XMas is roughly 14 days from today, and I am dreading the experience... it's too close to this whole divorce thing. I'm planning of losing December 2008 from my life. No holidays, no new years, but January 1st... the rebirth.

I'm exactly where I am supposed to. Not that there is a planner who got things right, not that I hoped to be here, but this is where the events of my life have led me to. I don't plan on ignoring that.

This is as good as it gets for Brian Scott O'keefe. Right now. But it's not a ceiling to my capabilities by any means.

I'm learning that I have to reinvent myself daily. If I want something to stick, it has to remain important to me everyday, otherwise it CAN fade to black. So I'm reevaluating 'again' and keeping my forward momentum. It feels good, I feel good, I'm just a little anxious, impatient. I'm ready to be doing rather than planning. But... this is where I am. So this is what I'm doing.

I'm obviously not enjoying this holiday. But that's my problem. I plan on making next year be amazingly opposite.

I guess we can all wait and see.

The Healing Power Of Blogging

So I'm finding that I read back through my blog quite abit. More than I thought I would. I spoke with a friend late into the night last night, and it caused me to think about my wife.

My biggest problem, I am coming to grasp, is the understanding.

I'm one of those guys who would have stayed married despite an affair even. We didn't have anything like that. It was a letting go of emotions. We stopped loving each other in so many ways. But to ME, that means you renew. A marriage isn't about the LOVEY DOVEY feelings?! A marriage is about, I want to share this life with you... if we get side-tracked along the way, we pick ourselves up, shake off the dust, help each other, and re-orient.

You have to get down to working at it when the emotions aren't there. I know we had a messed up relationship. I was a live-in nurse and housecleaner at best. Sure there was some intimacy, but it was always half-lived, stunted, it wasn't clean. I get that that can really take a chunk of your soul. But you don't just give up. You remember who you fell in love with. You work together to rekindle. You don't... just... give... up.

And that's what I felt happened.

That's what I don't understand.

But I've learned (obviously) that I don't have to understand something for it to hit me square in the face.

And that's where I am.

Oh I KNOW that I will get over this. I KNOW that I will move on and remember how to function as a single man. I've got friends, and the social ability to make more. I know that I'm a valuable person on many levels. I'm proud of who I am on so many levels. I've made some REALLY dumb mistakes that have hurt some people very close to me in my life. But it isn't a part of who I am, it was an aberration, a mistake.

I generally care for my friends, family, loved ones, whatever. I'm loyal, loving, tender, giving, the works...

My future isn't done. Hell, I'm just starting. But I really have to deal with this divorce properly, deal with the emotions as they come, properly, understand, grasp, process, and pass them. I seriously thought I would be past this already. Because in my past I have turned OFF emotions before, dealt with my first divorce like that. I hurt for about 2 days, then no more. Granted, that marriage last 10 months. And this one lasted almost 10 years. But I thought I would lock this off and move on.

The difference is, I want to be as complete as I can be now, and I have a good idea what all that entails. I want to live up to my fullest potential. I can't do that if I stunt myself emotionally. So I have to dredge through these feelings until I can leave them behind. Well, it FEELS like dredging through them. Mainly because I would have shut them down years ago and thought I was being healthy or strong.

Reading back through my blogs is providing me with alot of insight. I can see when I grasp something firmly and am able to move forward, past it. And I can see when I am stumbling around a concept and grasping at straws for most of it.

I've started down a path of philosophy lately. Something I would NEVER have dreamed I could even grasp. much less feel so entangled in. Struggling to find out why I am here, why humanity is here, what I can do about it... it's a long and arduous road with lots of pain and confusion. But I feel better for the journey.

Where will I be in 10 years?

Healthier...
Happier...
Alone... most likely.
( and living in a Smarthome for sure! )

I have to remember to remain true to me.
To allow myself no lies to myself.
Honesty only.
I believe this is the only path to true self-worth.

Skipped Day

Well, yesterday was a great freaking day. I'm slowly getting into the hang of being single again. I didn't have ANYTHING to do. I started out my day with a multiple hour long bath, I read a book that my brother has gotten me addicted to, I organized some things on the computer, I cleaned, I went for a drive, I talked with a friend for an hour, I went to a friends house and hung out and played cards (my favorite game! Netrunner), and talked shop with my brothers.

Today has been kinda the same. I'm kinda blown away how stress-free life can be on my own. Don't get me wrong, I've got like 30 pans I'm prepping for throwing in the fire once this divorce finalizes, but I don't think those things are going to stress me. They are things I will enjoy working on, I'm planning them out much better than anything I've planned out before, and I think I should be rich and/or smarter within a good 3 years.

I'm very tired right now, but I am ending my day today with a bath. I made alot happen today as well, despite spending alot of time reading for fun too. So it was another quite nice day.

These are things I never allowed myself fully when I was married... I was a moron too. But, you do what you know... and that was all I could wrap my head around. Figuring out balance in life is my next BIG goal.

BALANCE.

---

I feel so lost when it comes to interacting with new people in a healthy manner. I have this instinct to either lock completely up or open completely up. I don't do well with being balanced. But it's something I am aware of, and something I am working on. I don't know if I will ever WANT to get married again. But if I do? I can't ever do what I did this last decade. It almost killed me.

sigh

I'm hitting the bath now.
Peace, Love and Harmony

Always Look Forward

Have you ever had one of those moments when life seems to stop completely and allow you that one look at everything you've been needing? It's like everything is frozen and you can glance over ALL the details of everything you've put into motion, and everything you've chosen to interact with. I feel that right now.

It was a brief moment, a glimpse, but it felt like hours. I could see forward and I realized that my problems are from looking back. You should never forget the past, or you risk making the same mistakes. But to brood on the past? To only involve yourself in the past? This is a path towards frustration, anger, dark emotions. Because when you involve your world in a time frame where you cannot adjust anything... you can only experience the most powerful parts of that moment.

1. If I look at the past, I can see the bad and the good, but I can't change either.


2. If I look at the present, I can adjust now to avoid the bad, and make the good.


3. If I look at the present, I can plan for the good and bad, but only the present provides me with a means of making them so.

It's like a weird melding of Now and Soon.
I have to learn from the past, plan for the future, but live in the present.

I feel this weird relief. Completely washed over me. Took away the bad, the anxiety, the negativity... my future has always been mine. My present has been sacrificed to a past I didn't know how to change. My past is my past. I can be who I need and want to be, I just have to be willing to make the moments between now and soon into that path.

Peace is flowing through me... I see where I'm going and I am happy for it.
I am making steps towards that goal daily.
When I am not on a step, that moment is free for whatever I may need.

cool.