For a Pessimist, I’m Pretty Optimistic

That title may be a bit on-the-nose... But it’s never stopped me before, so on I go.

Dedicated readers (all three of ya) might notice that this is now the only post on my blog. I decided to revert them all back to drafts; I didn’t want to completely delete them, but I don’t want them to be available for anyone to compare and contrast with the new direction I’m trying to forge. I started this blog when I started college, and I planned on it housing both general updates for the sake of family and friends, and any life lessons I may have learned along the way. There are a couple of reasons why that didn’t pan out the way I’d hoped.

For one thing, I’ve always been terrible at deciding what’s worth sharing. If something good or interesting just happens and I don’t have anything to say about it besides "This happened", then it doesn’t feel worth dedicating even a sentence of a blog post to it. For another, my dad was right: college (and all of the adult world, I assume) teaches you an unthinkable number of things that change you in ways that you can’t even describe. There are stories that could be told, to be sure, but they can never do justice to actually experiencing the events with your own personality, background, and filters, which brings me to point number three. The best way I can think to describe it is that my first two years of college were spent trying to be a part of other peoples’ lives--lives in which it didn’t seem like they cared whether or not I was involved--without actually trying to have a life of my own. That’s not to say that we weren’t or aren’t genuine friends, but at the time, I felt like I was peripheral to them when I considered them a focal point of my college experience. Because of this, I felt as if every story and every lesson were really other peoples’ stories that I had no right to share, and that went a long way toward killing every ounce of writer’s motivation I may have had. But now that I’m at a massively different place in my life (due in no small part to the fact that I now have something that actually resembles a life), I thought I might finally feel capable of writing something about it.

Now, on to explaining some of the details of this blog. Another difference to it is the addition of the description: "Some guy’s uphill battle with realism." All through my life, I’ve had people tell me that I give off the vibe of a pessimist. This always stings a little, for two reasons: 1) it’s usually casual friends or near-strangers who say that, and I don’t understand why they feel comfortable with saying it, and 2) I don’t consider myself a pessimist. To me, "Do you see the glass as..." has always seemed like a loaded question. In my opinion, there are three additional and completely rational ways to answer that question: first, it depends on what’s in the glass; second, it matters whether someone was filling the glass and stopped halfway, or if the glass had been full and someone dumped out half; third, it’s technically always full. I find that I generally fall into the first and second categories, but they all fit nicely under the umbrella of "realism". "Expect the worst, hope for the best" is a good way to describe my worldview; I’m not paralyzed by the fear of every endeavor going catastrophically wrong, but to go through life assuming that everything will go off without a single hitch is just bad planning. Even so, I suppose that I could stand to curb the *ahem* negativity in pleasant company and learn to acknowledge the good things in life more often.

And now, the question that I’m sure is on everybody’s mind: what in the blue blazes does "Mountains Beyond Molehills" mean? Well, it’s a combination of two phrases; the first is "making a mountain out of a molehill", which means making a small problem seem bigger than it really is. The second phrase is one that I actually got from two sources: it’s the title of a book, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, and part of a song title from Arcade Fire’s album The Suburbs ("Sprawl II: Mountains Beyond Mountains"). I discovered both of them around the same time, and the coincidence was too interesting to ignore, so I looked up the meaning. According to Kidder, its most common meanings are that there are more opportunities behind every opportunity, and that there are more challenges behind every challenge. Being the lover of wordplay that I am, I couldn’t resist the chance to blend these two phrases into something wholly unique, mildly amusing, and immensely appropriate.

Finally, for those who don’t know, I’ve been in Guatemala all semester. I still have the whole month of November to go, and I might not have Internet access from next Sunday to the end, so there probably won’t be any more posts until December at the earliest.