It’s time to RE-IN….

vigorate, vent,vest.

Those are the words I’m telling myself. It’s time to RE- invigorate (my passions), invent (myself), and invest (in my life).

Tis been a long time since my last post and I’ve spent the better part of those months going through a lot of changes in my life. At the time of my last post, I was unsure of my direction in life both personally and professionally. Since then, I’ve experienced living on my own for the first time ever in my life, found a new job at a wonderful company in an industry I’ve always been curious about, and learned more about myself that I probably have in the last few years.

All that was not a walk in the park. Though some of those things sound wonderful and dandy, it hasn’t come without it’s set backs. With out having to going into detail, I was presented with several issues that I hadn’t dealt with before. I was forced to deal with some interesting health issues. I had to deal with a new unconventional work place that also inherently showed me the brunt end of the stick to the notion that I’m not as smart as I think it am. And I had take a step back and take a look at my life from a different perspective that I have never thought about before. In a sense the paradigm that I had of my life got it’s world rocked a little.

I don’t know where I heard it first, but I’ve taken a lot of thought to Einstein’s quote:

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Melodramatically speaking, I feel like I was slowly driving myself insane. I’m a powerful creature of habit sometimes, and I think that I have been so set in some of my ways for so long. Unfortunately, we evolve, grow older and the world around us changes, and I think I never always adapted to the world around me. So here I am, doing the same thing I’ve been doing for the few years I’ve been in Seattle and I think it all caught up to me. The appraisal of my life and what I was doing, where I was going, how I was doing lead me just to think that I was simply in a sense in a “holding pattern” without much direction. And at times this realization made me miserable. Not always literally, but in so many metaphoric ways. So if I did indeed intend to drive my self insane as I had been doing, I needed to just keep allowing myself to keep my stubborn habits.

So time for some change. Hence the words at the beginning of this post. The self-evaluation I gave of myself led me to understand myself better and to have a better grasp of what I need to get out of this funk and to start being a happier person. Which lead me to those three words.

Re-invigorate: My passions in life and rediscover the loves of my life. I’ve always told friends struggling with life or issues to find the place or do what makes them happiest. Find your comfort zone. I myself, was for a while, not even doing that.

Music has always been an outlet to me, and sometimes I forget that I AM a musician and have a deeper knowledge both academically and emotionally that most people do. From Beethoven’s 9th Symphony to the Warbler’s rendition of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” music inspires me more than anything else on this world. For a long time, I think I forgot that.

Ironically to me, the most comfortable place for me right now is when I’m on the soccer field. There were a number of years where I turned my back against the beautiful game I had grown up around for most of my life. In high school I had been handed a hypothetical slap to the face from a figure I had once looked up to for most of my young playing days. So I turned away from the game of soccer personally, only to come back after a few years later after my wounds had healed.  Now that I’m playing again, at a level I’m content with for now, and have the local Sounders to root for, my love for the world’s game has been renewed and I’m pretty sure this time it is here to stay.

Re-invent: Everybody has that laundry/bucket/wish list of things to do accomplish. Ultimately most of us never achieve those things citing some sort of excuse or reason. I’ll be the first to admit that one of the worst personality flaws I have is the lack of follow through. I say I want to do something but never follow through, this blog is case in point. I think sometimes we have everything in one giant list and never compartmentalize said “to do” items into rational, attainable desires. We lose sight of some of the smaller victories, because we spend too much time dreaming about the bigger, loftier dreams that we may never check off our list.

I’ve pledged to make 2011 a year of change and to reinvent myself to accomplish those things I know I can achieve. In doing so I’ve put my personal laundry list of things to accomplish into an organized list of what I call Y-M-H.

Yep – things that I should be able to attain at some point in my life: become fluent in French and Vietnamese, get in shape, become a better, more stereotypical “millenial”, or embed myself more into the Seattle Arts scene.

Maybe - things that I can probably accomplish but need to invest a little effort in: receive a black belt in some form of martial art, record and release some sort of musical album, visit some of the most famous soccer stadiums in the world.

Haha – these things are those lofty goals I talk about that would be awesome to achieve, but might be a little out of my reach: Become legitimate friends with a famous professional athlete, become a millionaire, marry one of the following (not in any particular order of preference), Ingrid Michaelson, Olivia Munn, Katy Perry (apparently she and Russell are having marital probs ), or Lea Michele.

Re-invest: by focusing on achieving some the previously mentioned and the other things on the lists, I’m re-investing in myself as a person, which in turn will better myself and those around me. A long-time friend once told me that I needed to lighten up in life a little and quit riding my cynical broomstick. He took a piece of paper and wrote three words on it and handed it to me. He said, don’t scoff at this, keep this and look at it several times a day, just do it.

The three words were: Happy, Healthy, Confident.

Well at the time, scoff is exactly what I did. But now, several months later, I may have thrown that piece of paper away, but those words have resonated with me and I try to think about them as much as I can.

It’s time for me to RE-IN myself and I’m excited to see where it takes me. If you’ve made it this far, you’re part of this journey and I thank you. I promise to keep this blog up date with more light-hearted, less philosophical posts and will make this little part of the Internet what I’ve always envisioned it to be.

Re-invigorate, re-invent, re-invest. Happy, Healthy, Confident.

GO!

Staying put…

Well it’s been a long arduous and soul-searching process, but I’ve made a decision to give me a little more direction in my life. I had to endure some tough situations, most of which were probably self-imposed, but I think the journey was needed for me to come to my conclusion. Most of you know the decision I speak of, but it was always my hope to post about it so I could express myself and share my thought process.

I’ve made the decision to stay in Seattle and continue to find work here rather than explore options outside of the Pacific Northwest.

From some, it doesn’t always seem like the biggest deal, but for me, it was a big decision to make. Around April, I wasn’t in the most positive mindset and was convinced that I had exhausted my job searching options in Seattle and was starting to explore the markets elsewhere. As much as I enjoyed the glitz that was sometimes the smoke in the mirrors of working contract at Amazon.com, it was obvious that I was probably going to have to find work elsewhere.

Over the next couple of months I would take interviews from recruiters and explore options in Seattle, San Francisco and Sacramento. I was contacted by a recruiter about a job with a small ad agency in Sacramento, which started the conversation. It would have been a great career move for me to take the job to further my experience and work in the advertising industry, and that’s what I kept telling myself. I was flown down, interviewed, had a great time. I then made my way to San Francisco to interview with a few agencies down there and to see family. With all these options, it looked more and more like I was going to make a move to the Bay Area. It is something I’ve felt like I’ve always wanted, but there was this nagging feeling in me that wanted to hold on to Seattle. I just didn’t make sense to me.

In the end, it was what transpired over the course of the week after my return that pushed me over the edge. I came back to Seattle with little rest so I could prepare to work as a Gate Supervisor for the Folklife Festival for the Memorial Day weekend. Over the course of the weekend, I worked and interacted with a group of people who had a passion and fervor for promoting and experiencing the arts like I did. I was refreshing, I felt comfortable and in my element interacting with people and walking the festival grounds. I had a great crew of team members that reminded why I do work with festivals in Seattle twice a year. It’s not about seeing the shows and performances; it’s about appreciating the arts and music, and helping promote them in a well established forum to those less connected to the industry.

After a great weekend, I returned to Corporate America to a less personal and emotional setting where business and work is driven by numbers and statistics and less about performances and experiences. The first person to speak to me early that morning didn’t acknowledge that I had been gone for a week or even stop to ask how my trip went, they simply asked me to start preparing a report for them. I was needless to say, a little miffed. The stark contrast from the cordial personable atmosphere of working a festival with a lot of like minded people against the numbers driven, impersonal corporate setting had never been so clear to me. It also just made me a little sad that so many people’s lives are driven by their notion to have to be all work all the time. I mean I hadn’t even checked my email yet! I understand and know that there is a need to work hard and sometimes long hours, but c’mon, If someone I worked with was gone for an entire week, I’d be curious about what they did and wouldn’t have the first thing I said to them be a request for a report. Maybe I’m just too warm and fuzzy of a person, but that’s how I do.

Either way, I knew that I was going to have to make a decision on my future soon, because there was a good chance I was going to get a job offer from Sacramento. With that situation imminent I started freaking out. Should I move for a career job in a career I don’t feel completely comfortable with, or do I stay put to stay in a city where I feel quite established in? My first job out of College was in the Advertising industry, and it’s what I know best, so when looking for work this past year and a half, I kept looking for work in the ad biz, like I couldn’t do anything else. I kept saying that taking a job in advertising in a different city would be a good career move. I’m single, young, no kids, no mortgage, not a lot of material assets to my name. It was an ideal time to make a career move.

On the flip side, I’ve always been conscious of trying to have a balance between work and play, and I’ve worked pretty hard in the last 3 years in Seattle to create a nice balance for myself. Aside from a stable job, I’ve felt that I’m decently established in my life in terms of most things outside of work. I’m making music a couple times a week, playing soccer a couple times a week, getting out to awesome places to eat, experiencing and volunteering with the arts and maintaining a decent circle of friends. Really aside from work, I felt pretty comfortable with my life in Seattle. Unfortunately, work is a big part of someone’s livelihood.

Well, I was offered the job in Sacramento, so then came crunch time. Eventually it was three things that boiled down to me making my decision.

First was working the Folklife Festival. Realizing that I took the direction of majoring in and volunteering in the arts during college for a reason: I loved it and it became a passion for me. Expression through the arts is a very emotional experience that lends well to the type of person I am. I’ve shown myself that I can exist in a corporate setting having worked for the ad agency and at Amazon.com, but I found myself happiest not when I was crunching numbers, but out and about going to a concert or seeing a really cool play.

Second was a conversation I had with a friend in the middle of the week, where I had a revelation that I’m surprised that I hadn’t had before. I came to the realization during this chat, that all the reasons I was using to justify moving away from Seattle for a job in the ad biz were reasons I could and ultimately should be using to take life by the horns and go find work that I really wanted to do in industries that I really wanted to work in. Being single, young, no kids, no mortgage, not a lot of material assets to my name are good reasons to make a career move, but they are also good reasons to quit playing safe and (as cliché as it sounds) go for your dreams. I wanted to work in the arts, entertainment and/or video games industries, and I shouldn’t let anything stop me at this point in my life. Consequences of any missteps would be minimal. So why was I hiding behind the comfort of trying to find jobs in comfortable fields of work that I knew I could survive in, but didn’t particularly have a passion for?

Lastly, I had a lot of conversations with a lot of people very close to me in dealing with this situation, but it was a conversation with my brother that I think pushed me over the edge. My brother has done pretty well for himself in life and has a decent life in San Francisco aside from the fact that he’s had like a gazillion different jobs during his time down there. Ok, not a gazillion, but a handful. Each time he’s landed on his feet, being able to keep his salary or even make more than he previously did. To me, it was a decent model for me to try to emulate. Financial stability has always been a bit of a priority for me, but less for myself and more for my future life when I start a family. So when my brother asked me if I felt “obliged” to take job offers I got because of the various factors, I responded “yes.” He then went on to tell me what he’s been telling me all along this process. Just do what you want, make a decision about what you want to do and don’t feel pressured or obliged to take any offers that come your way.

He expressed in his own words how he admits he’s been quite lucky with this work life in that he’s been very fortunate to have opportunities and always land on his feet. I took that to heart and realized that yes, I should go find some work that I want. Now is the time to do it. Corporate America isn’t going anywhere fast. It’ll be around if I decide to come back.

Ultimately, and obviously, I turned down the job in Sacramento. The company was great, and I wish them the best in the future, but I needed to stay in Seattle. What a better time in life than now, for me to try and find work in either the Arts, Entertainment, or Video Game industries? For me to do so, I’m much better connected to do so in the Northwest. I’ve got a lot of friends and acquaintances in a lot of random places. So that is that. For me it was a load off of my shoulders. Yes I still needed to find a new job, but I could keep working contract if I need be. Yes, I’m still unsure of my future. But I made a commitment to Seattle and that’s a lot for me to say in this process.

Well the follow up to this is that my decision and patience has seemed to pay off. More on that next week…

Sounders 2009 Top 10: 1 – Where else but the start

First Inaugural game vs. New Red Bulls – 32,500+ crazy fans, most of them clad in rave green, the world’s beautiful game, a clear and fresh early spring Seattle night with the air of history. Nothing beats that. In probably one of the most exciting moments in a very troubled year of sports for the city of Seattle. Watching the Sounders take the field in the inaugural game, in their inaugural MLS season, was nothing short of brilliant and spectacular. Being there in the moment was breathtaking, no joke. To take the loudest stadium in the NFL and pack it with passionate soccer fans to cheer on their team to an amazing 3-0 victory in their first game, is nothing short of extraordinary.

I know and have come to terms with the fact that it might take a lot more years for the game of soccer to be recognized and appreciated as widely as is in the rest of the world. But that night, which set the tone for the rest of the amazing season to come, put a big smile on my face. Sort of like when I saw hundreds of supporters lining the sidelines of my high school soccer field as my team marched their way to our second appearance in the State tournament in as many years. It was at that point where I knew people were in full support of us and had left their time and allegiance from out fledgling football team to cheer us on.

Seeing the Sounders in action for the first time was electric. Growing up and playing club soccer, I knew that the state of Washington had a strong support and affinity for the sport. But I never would have thought that the city of Seattle would embrace and be the home of some of the most passionate and smart fans that I’ve ever seen.

The game also marked a dream I’ve had in being able to watch one of my favorite players in US soccer history take the field on his home turf. I had hoped but never believed that I would be able actually see Kasey Keller in action in my lifetime. Being one of the first Americans to make a name for themselves in the European soccer scene, I have always had a huge respect for the Sounders team Captain. I mean c’mon, the dude lived in his own 1,000 yr old CASTLE while playing in Germany!

That night set the tone for a record-breaking season that would be one hell of a roller-coaster ride that Wes (who if you didn’t know, I bought season tickets with) would enjoy every minute of. Thanks Sounders for filling the void our lost Sonics.

Getting back into the game

I know I know, it’s been a long time since I first started this blasted thing and haven’t updated in FOREVER. Mind you I do have things in store for your reading pleasure. I know keep a note in my phone entitled “Blog post ideas” and trust me it’s been filling up.

I just struggle to find time sit down and dedicate myself to writing my thoughts down. So my promise to you is to put some time aside during the week to write so it doesn’t have to be months before I open my loud mouth.

In order to get me into the habit and culture of updating this blog I decided to jump start things with a series of posts.

As many of you probably don’t know, the Seattle Sounders FC’s 2010 is slowly approaching. As much as I have more respect for European soccer, I can’t help but get giddy at the prospect of seeing how the Sounders will respond to their outstanding inaugural season.

One of my first posts way back when was intended to be a Sounders Top 10 of the season. Well it got to the point where I wrote so damn much for each moment I’ve decided to divide moments into a series of events counting down to my #1 moment/experience of the past season, leading up to the start of the new season on the 25th of March.

Starting later today I’ll post my top 10 moments/experiences from the Sounders first season in Major League Soccer (MLS). Now I know the top 10 list is a concept that wears out it’s welcome quicky. but I hope to be able to make things a little more personal and offer the perspective of an informed but passionate fan with my own little Van flair.

Hopefully this will open the flood gate for me to get this blog off the ground. Happy reading!

And now it starts…

Well this has been a long time come and in the works. I’ve finally decided to bite the bullet and start my own blog. We’ll see how this goes, but I hope you enjoy the ride. I’m sure I will.

I think a lot, probably entirely too much, and there have been too many times where I feel like it would be great if I could just sit and talk or write about what’s on my mind. It’s sort of like the scene in Jerry Mcguire where Tom Cruise’s character decides to write a manifest about being a sports agent and then distributes copies of it to everybody he knows. Not that I want all of my thoughts to be broadly proliferated, or think that I’m always going to post something that will be mind-blowing and life changing. But, I do think that sometimes what I have to say might hold some significance and interesting points.

The name is just a kitschy little thing that I thought I’d run with rather than be boring and name this blog, “Van’s Blog.” I probably do some of my best work and thinking at night. I’m a total night owl and really find myself developing these thoughts at night, but never take the time to fully express my ideas and/or just don’t have the time to because I need sleep.

I think the evolution of this project will be interesting because I don’t know which direction I want to go with said blog. Again this has been a project that has been in the works in my head for months. Parts of me wants to take this project seriously and devote some time to post thoughtful drawn out musings that I develop over the course of time. Other parts of me also just wants this to be a place where I can share cool, fun, interesting, random things I find on the net. So who knows. So comments and suggestions are always welcome.

I hope you enjoy what I have to say and let’s see where this process leads me. Come back often as I hope to try and post significant post/essays at least twice a month and random findings as frequently as I can find time to post.

Cheers!

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