It Begins.

LiveJournal is ancient and abandoned. Thoughts.com is awkwardly formatted. Facebook notes are too intrusive. So here I am on Blogger, trying once again.

Because none of the above was a place for me to consistently state ramblings, rants and observations. Which this will be.

Everyday, in the hours before retiring for the night, I'll spend at least 20 minutes, hopefully more, immortalizing what's on my mind.

Undefinable Pursuits.

Friends

In the last few weeks, probably since about when I moved back to Madison and the company of everyone I know here; I've been finding myself genuinely appreciating friendships both old and brand new far more than I think I ever had previously. It's becoming very apparent to me that all of the people I surround myself with and interact with at this point in my life are the main elements of my life. At the age of 21, I am now building a family outside my family and looking to my friends for support more so than anyone else. Because they're the people I'll live with, support, and experience love and pain with for years to come. They're the new (or in some cases, not so new) building blocks of my life.

Previously, the pursuit of love and the perfect girl had completely trumped friendship, career, self, etc... It's still the most important thing to me. If you asked me to list the above, love would always go, undisputed at the top. After all, I still introduce myself, "Hi, My name is Andy, and I'm a hopeless romantic." But where before, those other elements wouldn't even be visible from where my hopeless pursuits of romance stood, today, they are more than visible, and actually not far behind.

It's been about a year now that I've been finding happiness in ways that didn't mean torturing myself. My intended career path is one I don't hate. And I'm placing trust in people who are not me.

It's just not worth it to live life awkwardly feeling like a loner/loser who people wouldn't want to talk to anyway. And so... I entertain.
I'm sure the surfacing of my crazy and lighthearted personality threw a good number of my friends and acquaintances for a loop. It's been slowly entering the social scene for a couple years now rather than hiding amongst my very most trusted of allies. And these days one can find me throwing out a witty comment to an entire class of peers or being the one to break an awkward silence between me and the stranger walking next to me.

I'm getting away from my point. Also, I feel like this writing isn't nearly personalized or interesting enough at the moment. And chances are a good number of the people who came here expecting this cool blog have already left, disappointed.
I feel like anecdotes would be good. But also like anecdotes would require me to get specific and start mentioning specific people and events. And I don't know if that's what I want to represent in this blog.

Yes it is. Or it's just a bunch of vague, general overviews of life. That's no good.
This is a kind of tough subject to start naming people off amidst though. Because what if you're reading this and I leave you out of my entry about friends?! Devastating......

So instead of presenting things in a fashion where people could feel left out, let's do the opposite and just super-highlight a very small superteam of my oldest friends.

...
No. Not even gonna do that. You know who you are if you're my friend. And if you don't know ---
if you find me at all entertaining, funny, comfortable to be around, to be a good listener, to have a good smile, interesting, or even just not-alienating ---> then that means that I feel at least one of the same things toward you, that you are my friend, and that I appreciate you.

I guess that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm your friend though. For example, if I don't find you alienating and you don't find me alienating, we might not know eachother well enough to be friends. But really, if our opinions of each other are so impersonal, why have you read this much of my blog? Oh, another "but really" though: If you've read this much of my blog you now know enough about me and therefore I appreciate you enough for us not to have such impersonal dispositions. (Is that the correct use of disposition?)

ANYWAY

I should also touch on how much more two-sided the conversations I have with people have become in the past year or two. Way back when, a conversation with Andy would include you talking a lot at me while I listened intently (on unintently) and then stated that I had neither





opinion nor feelings because I was Andy Brown, Neutral Guy --->





WHEREAS these days I can even be known to have an opinion or and emotion or two. Occasionally... ---------------------->









In short - I've come to realize that my friends are my life now. And it's an excellent life.


As a post-script, there should be something fun at the end of my blogs. Like a song you should listen to because I said so. Or actually, what sounds more fun and more fitting with what I know, perhaps a cool/funny/epic/sad/interesting/alienating/disgusting/boring/insane clip/screenshot from film and media in general.

Let's try that...