Confessions Of An Almost Ordinary Man

Three years later I am sitting in a place I never expected to be, living again where I never expected to live, doing what I had thought I had given up.

Is it coincidence or circumstance that has The Winner Takes It All playing on iTunes now or something in between.

I go back to Lessons Of The Blog Fathers and stare at the Dallas skyline and think about Superbowl Sunday 2013 and remember how I spent that day.

Instead of attending the traditional Superbowl party with family and friends I sat in my hotel room in Fort Worth and tried to plan out the next day and part of the next week.

That is because I had just spent three days driving through five states with two suitcases, a laptop, some pots, pans and a weight set so that I could start a new job.

I had two days to find a better hotel to stay at while I looked for an apartment and didn’t know a single person I could ask for help.

Confessions Of An Almost Ordinary Man

A few moments have passed between when I started writing this post and Abba has moved on to SOS.

In between then and now I came up with Confessions Of An Almost Ordinary Man as both headline and subhead.

Played around with trying to focus on something that would generate more clicks and more interest but settled on this one because my gut likes the feel of it.

Made a lot of decisions to or not do things in life based upon that gut and have come to accept it as being a decent measure of what I should or should not do.

But have also come to accept that sometimes fear clouded my judgment and I passed upon some things that I should not have passed upon.

Ask me to share my regrets and almost all of them are tied into something that fear made me pass up, but fortunately there really aren’t too many of those.

Unfortunately the few regrets I do have are pretty damn big.

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Sometimes I think about the whole ordinary man thing and wonder where I really want to hang my hat because I never want to settle for being just one of the many and yet sometimes that is exactly what I want or see.

I guess what that means is that if you ask me to describe myself I’ll usually say I am just an ordinary guy who has had the fortune to live through some extraordinary times and moments.

Better to be humble, or so I try to be but the reality is I know that is not entirely how I see myself and sometimes that ego pushes up hard enough for me to say I am an idiot to try and describe myself as being just another guy.

Because if you want certain things you have to market yourself as being more than the plain wrap version of a person.

More Comments & More Shares

Sometimes I think about it in context of trying to get more comments and more shares from you, whomever you are, ya know the readers of these posts.

Sometimes I think about it and say if I push a bit harder for those things and ask for more help in marketing myself and this joint I’ll get more opportunities.

*****

That is when I realize I am back in the do as I say not as I do phase that I sometimes fall into.

Steiner the minor is painfully shy and hates being the center of attention. That kid almost always knows the answer to any question the school teachers ask but will never raise his hand because he would prefer never to be called upon.

I push him to step outside of his comfort zone and tell him there are some benefits and opportunities he is missing out upon because of his refusal to do so and he tells me he is ok with that.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that even though I have never been afraid to be the center of attention or to speak in public his refusal isn’t really that different from some of the things I have refused to do.

He is me and I am him…except when we are not.

That is one of my favorite quotes and so is this one.

Why?

Because I have taken an active role in living my dreams and not dreaming my life.

Some people have described me as being single-minded of purpose and I would agree with them.

There are dreams I have chased after with purpose and intent. I have taken action because the only way to move from losing time thinking about what could be is to do something about it.

Dad Must Act

Three years ago I sat in that Marriott and mapped out my Monday.

Since Tuesday was going to be my first day at the new job I figured it made sense to drive into downtown Fort Worth and figure out where my office would be.

Didn’t care that I had a GPS in the car and one of my phone because sometimes technology fails and I wanted to make sure I knew where I was going so that I would be on time.

What I hadn’t accounted for was how much more traffic I had to contend with in LA so I breezed into downtown Fort Worth almost an hour faster than I had planned on.

Almost nothing was like I had planned, but in so many ways it worked out better than I could have imagined.

Dad had to act, had to shake things up and do things differently because what I had been doing before wasn’t working anymore.

*****

Three years later I am back in LA, trying to figure out if I took three steps forward and one step back.

Three years later I am uncertain about some of the choices I made because some things are dramatically better and others feel like I have done nothing but rejoined a treadmill I had jumped off of.