lowquality.net

I haven’t writ­ten any­thing since before the elec­tion results. I think the things that are on my mind today coin­cide greatly with the elec­tion but this post is not polit­i­cally motivated.

Kim and I have been doing really well with the weight loss. I think she is around 127 and I am just about to cross over into the 220’s. I can’t even believe how close I am to my goal. It’s really insane to me how fast and rel­a­tively pain­less this process has been, but I doubt it could have hap­pened for me at another time. This is the only time in my life that I had all of the tools required to accom­plish this goal.

When you have things rel­a­tively good, change seems impos­si­ble. Even if you know in your heart that the change is nec­es­sary and essen­tial for your own well-being. Change is com­pletely ter­ri­fy­ing to peo­ple, even the one’s who claim to want it so badly. Sev­eral of my friends, in dif­fer­ent fields, are not happy with their cur­rent state of employ­ment, they have dreams, aspi­ra­tions, and hopes beyond the world that they have worked in for years. More impor­tantly, they have a deep-seated dis­gust for the job they cur­rently hold, but the thought of get­ting a new job, of par­tic­i­pat­ing in that unknown ele­ment of change is even more ter­ri­fy­ing. Sure, they hate their jobs but they know what to expect. They know, every morn­ing when they wake up, what they can expect from one day to the next. It’s mis­er­able but its com­fort­ing. There’s no surprises.

Dur­ing a short polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion amongst Kim’s aunts and uncles one evening, one of Kim’s eldest aunts looked me in the face and said “Barack Obama wants to change things, but change is bad.”

Her argu­ment wasn’t based on Obama’s pro­posed poli­cies or any per­ceived weak­ness in his cam­paign. It was, pure and sim­ple, “Change is bad.” That was her point. This is a woman who came to a for­eign coun­try when she was young to seek out a bet­ter life than the one she had in the Philip­pines. She mar­ried an Amer­i­can doc­tor and still lives a very pros­per­ous life despite his pass­ing. She is the Amer­i­can dream and change brought that about.

I some­times think about Kim’s par­ents and how unbe­liev­ably gutsy it was for them to come to the US, espe­cially her father who’s fam­ily was extremely poor. He took a gam­ble and left every­thing he knew to come to this coun­try, and now he looks back on it and says to me that if he hadn’t done it he’d prob­a­bly “be in a grave somewhere.”

In the first few years of my life, my mother raised me in a con­di­tion that was was mim­ic­k­ing the unrest and chaos of her own child­hood. Rather than live with an alco­holic hus­band like her mother did, and let me grow up in that envi­ron­ment as she did, she packed up– not even every­thing we owned, we left a lot behind– and we started over in Vir­ginia. My mother’s dia­betes was a wreck in those days, she’d be in a grave too if we hadn’t left.

My weight loss is insignif­i­cant to these things but there is a lot in my life I would change if I could. Los­ing 30 pounds has proved to be an enabling feat. Many other changes are occur­ring around me that I have very lit­tle con­trol over, (you have to be cryp­tic when you talk about these kinds of mat­ters), but bad, work-related things are going on around me and for some rea­son they seem even more insignif­i­cant to me than they might have 6 months ago. Like so many Amer­i­cans, I may lose my job in the next year, but the only fear I have is fis­cally related. I am prepar­ing for the worst, but I am not sure I am even hop­ing for the best if hop­ing for the best means that noth­ing changes and I con­tinue to feel help­less about the future.

Change some­times feels like a fate worse than politely dying but often its the only thing we have that will keep us from doing so.

I don’t believe peo­ple voted in record num­bers in the last elec­tion because of their race or their age or their buy­ing into some kind of per­ceived sense of Hope. I think they voted because they were scared to death that another decade of feel­ing jaded about Amer­i­can pol­i­tics was about to hap­pen and they just couldn’t bear the thought of it. To be a lit­tle skep­ti­cal and still vote for Hope is so much bet­ter than to just hide in the base­ment some­where. I can’t say with cer­tainty that the new admin­is­tra­tion will deliver pros­per­ity but I believe that ram­pant apa­thy would have surely destroyed this country.

I, for one, am tired of being scared of change. I wel­come it as it comes. For bet­ter or worse. I am 7 pounds away from los­ing 40 pounds. I can do anything.