misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

As the boredom of the workday was threatening to consume me, I decided to spend this afternoon reading some of my archived blogs. First off, I owe each and every one of you a sincere apology. Not even I could read that crap, and I authored them. I was Mr. Sappy M. Fucker. Unreal. Have I always been the emotional equivalent of a twelve-year old girl from the Sweet Valley High books? Jesus. I wrote about sunsets, love, art, baby blankets. I always fancied myself to be a bitter, unemotional, unassailable pillar of strength. Instead I am more like a pillar of goat cheese quiches and vanilla candles. My writings from Europe were reminiscent of a college sophomore writing letters home to his ailing grandma, who'd then read them aloud to her toothless nursing home friends after Jell-O Wednesdays. Christ. I'm sickened.

Another interesting element of reading your own past writings is the sensation you are looking over someone else's writing altogether. Reading the blogs I wrote from Europe made me feel I was peering into the thoughts of some twenty-two-year-old kid from Wichita named Tom Lambard. In other words, someone I've never met before. Someone I wasn't even related to. That trip happened about seven years ago, which is enough time to have wholly changed as a person. As you get older, you don't feel like you change as much as when you were younger, which had many more physical markers (i.e. growing seven inches in two years or having an entirely different voice from one month to another somehow stood as clear evidence of your progression). Today, we're all radically different than we were, we just don't look it (except for the 1700 lbs and gray hair i've developed since high school). Although there's fewer ceremonies to mark growth (like graduations) the change is still as substantial as it was in high school. I hope the string theory hopes to prove true one day and I'll get to meet incarnations of me from the past. It'd be great to give myself speeches about how dumb I was, am, and will be. If I even recognized former versions of myself.

I wrote a lot more about my day-to-day life back then. I've closed that part of the blog down, as my honesty has offended enough co-workers and friends to learn a mild lesson. I've tried political rants, topical rants, drunk rants ... Really, the only piece I have left is the area I've always perceived as being the weakest in my blog writing (besides the lack of anything interesting to say), which is the power of description. When I read magazine articles, I am awed by their sense of word choice and ability to create a sense of perspective. My writings from Asia and Europe were woefully inadedquate in that respect (as was that choice of the cliche woefully inadequate). I wrote about cobblestone streets, hostels, and mashed potatoes, without giving any real description of anything. There's a difference between mashed potatoes, and garlic wasabi mashed potatoes whipped to the consistency of frozen clouds. Those few words make all the difference. So expect to see more of that in the coming weeks, as this blog hopefully transforms as much as I have.