My favorite business card

I hope that when I'm a parent I'm as awesome as their parents must have been.

Putting down roots?

Every summer for the past 6 years I've packed up everything I owned and moved. I found that a yearly move pretty much shaped my mindset on materialistic possessions in two ways. First, everything I owned had to fit into the back of a car. Second, I couldn't ever become attached to anything. Everything I owned was temporary and I only owned what I needed.

This is the first summer since I was 17 that I won't be moving. It's a strange feeling knowing that I can purchase furniture and expect to still own it in 5 or 10 years. In my parents house they still have furniture that my dad owned when he was in college. It's a little bizarre thinking that some of my possessions could follow me that long.

I think that at a certain point people become so bogged down by what they have that they can never escape. It's more than just furniture and shit on the walls. When people stop moving and settle into a house, a job, and relationships they eventually become bound by the same things that make their lives comfortable. Item by item, paycheck by paycheck, date by date they slip into the routine.

What scares me is that I can see myself slowly falling into this settled down life and it scares me. Yesterday I bought an ice cream scoop. I don't even have any ice cream in my house. It just makes me think of a scene from the wire where Dennis "Cutty" Wise goes to The Deacon. He sits down and says "I've had this feeling for a long time and it's like I'm standing outside myself watching me do things I don't want to do." Now he was probably talking about murdering people and whatnot. But I see my life falling in this rut where 20 years from now I'm sitting in the same office, driving down the same roads home and wondering how despite all having everything I want, why I still feel like my life was a little too predictable.

Before Cutty says that line above he starts out the conversation by saying "The truth is I don't know what I want. I know I'm looking for something but I can't even tell you what it is." In a certain way that's how I feel. I have a good job, lots of nice things and a pretty awesome girlfriend. So it bothers me that I feel like I'm not living this life to the fullest. Last weekend when Dave was here he told me that I'm going through a quarter life crisis. I don't know about that but I think I need to keep mixing it up before it's too late.