Long Overdue

Well, here goes nothing!

This is my, long time overdue, first blog post. When I first logged in to my blogger account, I realized just how long it was. I created this page way back in July 2008. Why? Who knows? Maybe I felt opinionated enough to share my views with the rest of the world, or maybe I just had nothing better to do with my time. Even now, I don't have the answer to that question. A better question would be, why I did not do this before. The answer to that question, I know perfectly well. Just like with every single one of my daily undertakings, I have a hard time finishing what I start. Hell, with all the ideas I've had since I was an arrogant teenager who thought he knew everything, I could've probably been a millionaire if only 1 percent of them were executed. Yet I never started and if ever I did, I abandoned at the first sight of difficulty.

So, why today? Why did I choose today to finally do something I desired to do for such a long time? Something clicked in my head. Just like everybody else, thirteen, fourteen years ago, when I was a teenager, I had big dreams and tons of ambition. I knew I was smart enough to do something great, something wonderful, something I would be able to tell my kids about without boring them out of their minds and in turn they would be able to look up to me and be as proud of me as I am of them.

But just like so many of us, I fell into a routine where getting a regular paycheck every 2 weeks, with good benefits, allowed me to enjoy, to an extent, some of the things I desired to obtain. I realized just how good I was when I joined the ranks of a big corporation and figured I would step up the ladder and reach my ultimate goal. After all, if I am really that smart, I figured, I would attain success by climbing the corporate ladder and in no time become the person I wanted to be.

Yet with years of work living practically paycheck to paycheck, with no money management skills whatsoever, with most of my purchases made on credit and most of all no sense of accomplishment regardless of what I had achieved (I did become a manager after all and won quite a few corporate awards in the process) I finally realized I was looking for a way out, not up.

So back to today. Throughout the years, I have met some wonderful people from all paths of life with different views, goals, ambitions and personalities. One of them, a person I like to see as a friend although I do not see much of him ever since we parted ways professionally, yet a person who I make it a point to talk to on Facebook and would definitely not mind having a few drinks with every week if we lived closer by, is a photographer. Although he worked, same as me, his 40 hours a week, he never lost sight of his goal to become a photographer. Not a part time photographer, who does an odd job on the week end, but actually running his own business and living off the fruits of his honest labor. Same as me, he is also someone I consider to have exceptional intellect, who I can have an interesting conversation with ranging from politics, to cinema, to the hardships of every day life and who same as myself, has rent and a plethora of other invoices to pay. This, however, is where the similarities stop.

Contrary to me, my buddy, never lost sight of what he wanted to accomplish and refused to fall into the safety of intellectual prostitution for a national corporation. So today when we had yet another discussion of how we were both doing, I realized I was exactly where I was a year ago while he was at a point of diversifying his revenue through additional sources while at the same time doing what he loves on a daily basis. At the end of my conversation with him, I felt it was now time for a change. Time to change my state of mind, my environment, my bad habits but most of all, change my acceptance of mediocrity. And well, for once, to continue with something I initiated.

This blog is a step for me, not something as major as sending a man into space or walking on the moon, but an important one nonetheless. As for the first time in my life, I decided to bring something to fruition.