An Introduction...

So… Welcome to my Permanent Mid-Life Crisis. Not really sure how I should be starting this, but I don’t want to get to the title just yet – that really needs the context of an understanding of who I am, what I am, what I do, what I don’t and so on. But it’ll make sense (beyond the obvious) within a few paragraphs.

So I’ll start with a broad definition of myself. I like very big words, and the construction of pointlessly over-complex sentences from them. I thirst for new knowledge. I’m British, love tea, beer, bangers and mash, fish and chips, curry and all other such clichés. I’m 38 (for now), I work in IT (until I can get out of it), I used to be a chef in the American Midwest. I was a DJ for several years. I study law in my spare time, write music in my other spare time, read books in my other, other spare time (I’m a BIG fan of Sir Terry Pratchett – particularly his Discworld books, but I also have a casual but active fascination with science, so enjoy such gems as Stephen Hawking et al). In any other, other, other spare time, I’m trying to learn Brazilian Portuguese. This may seem a random addition to my list of stuff, but it makes more sense if you happen to be aware that my wife is Brazilian; and although she speaks English fluently, for me to learn her native language would both show willing and would hypothetically make communication with her family easier. At least, that’s the theory… In practice, it turns out that teaching yourself a whole language from a book is quite difficult, particularly if you’re trying to get it sorted in a spare hour here and there, in under three months.

I went to university some 20 years ago and it was GREAT. I loved nearly every minute of it. Unfortunately, I didn’t do so well in the academic stakes. In fact, I dropped out because I kept getting bad grades. This came as something of a surprise at the time, as I’d previously scored pretty good results in high school, and (without blowing my trumpet TOO loud), I’m not stupid. Maybe not a genius, but certainly capable of doing better than I did. The thing is, I was trying, although I also knew I could try harder. I also wanted to try harder, and believe it or not, tried to try harder. These may sound like excuses – and to an extent may even be so – but it’ll make a little more sense very shortly.

I also always wanted to be a musician. I have sufficient ability to achieve this (although I’d never claim to be a virtuoso – I’m just more than capable of producing some of the crap that has surfaced in the charts over the last 3 decades) – I taught myself guitar and keyboards and have been playing these for 25-30 years, I can read music, I know basic theory and sing fairly well. The thing is (and this is something that only relatively recently became apparent to me), I have significant difficulty in remembering a whole track, and also find it quite difficult to set aside the time to write music. I never knew why I wasn’t doing better here, and put it down to simply not knowing the right people or something like that. This may have been a factor, but it wasn’t the REASON why I didn’t do better.

So I spent my twenties and thirties working in IT. I HATE computers with a fiery vengeance. I’m just good at them. I adapt, absorb and learn new stuff really fast and there’s very little that I can’t work out if I get my hands on a PC. This is not arrogance – it’s just true – I’m crap at lots of other stuff, but this at least, I’m good at. The irony is that I was studying computers at university (for at least the majority of my time there – I also did Psychology). It was there that I discovered my deep dislike of IT. Which is even more ironic, as I taught myself to program a computer at 7 years old, when I wanted to play games and couldn’t afford to buy them. My parents had to ban me from the family computer for extended periods to control my obvious obsession with it. Go figure. Buggered if I know what’s really going on with me.

I have several very good friends, but I can rub many people up the wrong way (in an entirely social way) quite soon after meeting them, because I tend to talk about myself too much and fail to show interest in anyone else. However, this isn’t deliberate – I just find it very difficult to remember to ask people about themselves. I want to know, and I want to ask – I just fail to remember to. When people have known me for a while, they just get used to this side of me and (hopefully) don’t mind it too much – although it helps if they happen to be people who volunteer information easily themselves. In any event, I value the friends I have, and continue to strive to show interest in them! Note that in this blog I will be shamelessly talking about myself because that’s the whole point; in conversation, I strive (and often fail) to do so rather less.

It struck me a few years ago, as my first marriage was falling apart, that there may be a fundamental issue that has led to the many tiny problems that seem to plague my life – very few things are significant unless viewed as a whole. Admittedly, there have been a few big disasters – university, my failure to get a driving license, a continued struggle to pay bills on time (despite earning enough money and being willing to pay up), a difficulty in getting a decent job, despite a definite ability in the area, problems with communicating effectively with some people, which at least partially contributed to my divorce, and so on.

It turned out that I have an Attention Deficit Disorder. I say “AN” ADD, because there are many aspects and angles to this, and I fit some of these but not others. A telling moment was when I did an AD/HD screening test and my score was off the charts. Bizarrely, a friend of mine who I would have described as the most classically, obviously attention deficit person I knew, actually scored as perfectly normal. Evidently he’s just internally “busy” or something! However, without going into depth, ADD has contributed (and continues to contribute) to a LOT of different screw-ups and stumblings in my life.

The thing is – I’m perfectly normal. It’s not something that’s obvious, I didn’t even suspect it myself until a single particularly cutting comment, made in the heat of an argument reverberated in my head and made me wonder if there was a single problem that caused many tiny effects. The comment in question hurt, and I didn’t know why. It shouldn’t have hurt so much, but it was fundamentally wrong, and yet so obviously seemed to be the case. The comment was: “You aren’t interested in other people – you only ever think about yourself”. This was unfair, untrue, and the person who said it should have known this. But I knew they meant it and I realised that I was actually giving that impression. I just didn’t know why.

Many people say “Oh, I do that” or “Everyone is like that” about issues such as forgetfulness or an inability to multi-task, or even a failure to remember to ask someone about their day. People DO do that. But not in the impressively disastrous way that I do it always, and with everything. And yet I constantly think, analyse and discuss everything with myself. Everyone has an inner monologue, but my personal narrative is like Walter Mitty on steroids – it’s like I’m reading my own story out in my head as I do anything. In fact, it’s like someone else has taken control of my inner voice and won’t shut up.

I have no intention of dwelling much more on the ADD thing – it just is how it is. And it’s the reason for the title of my blog. A common theme in my life has been that my inability to concentrate on any one thing for long enough has led to a lot of things turning out less than perfectly. In fact, very little went quite according to plan, and basically meant that I’ve had a low-level mid-life crisis since I was 18 years old. There’s no sign that this state of affairs will be letting up anytime soon, so I might as well focus on the funny side of it. Or at least the tragically ironic stuff. Even if you, the reader, have no intention of reading further, the point is that I will, because I’ll probably need a record of some of this stuff to keep me on track (or just provide a few laughs). Also, it may be cathartic. I suspect this now I know that catharsis doesn’t involve the insertion of a small tube anywhere private or sensitive.

A more interesting upshot of my personal situation is that I have a LOT of projects and ambitions. At time of writing, I have a full-time job, I study law, I write music, I read MANY books, I’m building a guitar, I’m learning Portuguese, I’m writing two books, I cook (enthusiastically and for fun – not just to survive), I want to run a restaurant, I interpret dreams, I want to run an organic cider farm/orchard, I’d like to make cheeses, I want to get a degree in theoretical physics, I’m constantly learning new IT skills (I won’t go into depth here, but I mean big, significant things – new disciplines, not just new software), I’d like to be an archaeologist, and many, many other smaller things. In addition, I continue to plan for and add new projects to my repertoire, beyond what’s actually possible to achieve. This means that I have a stack of half-finished stuff that I feel depressed about. People also notice that I’m constantly making plans and having big ideas, and going nowhere with them. Oh look – I just started a blog. Fingers crossed…

So I’ve made a decision. Well - a couple of decisions. Well… several, interconnected decisions, really.

I want a career change. This much has been apparent to me for nearly 20 years – before my career even began, in fact. That’s a mid-life crisis in action, right there... I want a degree. I know I can get one – I’m smart enough to manage it and now I know why I had problems the first time around, I can compensate for them and hopefully be considerably more successful. To make this point, I scored 81% overall for the first year of my law degree. Rather better than the fail, followed by re-sit and grudging pass that I managed in my first year of my first attempt at higher education. I also want to gig. I want to write some decent music, play it live, maybe sell some online (or even on CD) and see how far I can go with that. What I DON’T want is to keep doing what I’m doing, in some (contradictorily, and mixed-metaphorically) stagnating downward spiral. I will actually achieve something that I want to achieve, and I’ll write about it. Maybe it’ll be interesting. Maybe it’ll provide some exposure. Maybe it’ll guide me inexorably towards my destiny. Maybe it’ll be cathartic.

Maybe I’ll stop talking about it and get on with it.

Watch this space, as I begin the second year of my degree and the first year that I SERIOUSLY try to build a musical career (albeit part-time, unless it makes a decent income), as well as the first year that I blog. I plan to talk about my personal stuff and comment on the world around me as I notice things that interest me. At least if I get distracted by some passing squirrel, it might make for interesting commentary, thus injecting some levity to ease the potential further destruction of my hopes and dreams.