This morning’s bus ride thoughts were about maturing, Mom. While I’m no fan of destiny, and at this moment I think only those with fear of uncertainty are, I wonder how much of life is maturing as opposed to figuring out who you’ve always been.

I was thinking about the “traumatic moments” of my childhood on the bus and the only thing that makes me believe they were is the impression that they were supposed to be. A passage I read in High Fidelity last night speaks of how much of an “average” person the main character is. I can’t find it online in short notice to quote it, but I found this and found this quote interesting:

High Fidelity has been talked about as portraying the romantic existence of the “average guy”, but in all honesty, if Rob truly was an “average guy”, I’d feel pretty sad for the human race. There is something to be said for being a jerk, a bit of a loser, and still managing to attract a lot of people, and that is anything but “average” (and this ignores his passion for pop music, which most people do not possess).

I’ll come back to the music part, but some of you who have seen the movie will remember the early scene where he talks about being average. The passage in the book is longer and goes on to describe how he believes his greatest trait is that he’s average all the way around. While no part of him is particularly above the high water mark, none lies in the wastes beneath either.

I’ve always considered my childhood as average. Certainly in 8th grade when I went to “the warm and fuzzy school” and the vast majority of my classmates came from “broken” (separated or divorced) households, such things were average. I don’t know if my generation was the generation where having divorced parents saw a sudden influx, nor to I really care to look it up to know, but it certainly seemed like people were a little surprised at it becoming the norm. Enough that I’ve grown up to expect it.

It reminds me of a conversation with an ex-girlfriend where she was worried about our relationship “going to fast” and I questioned where it was going to go any faster, as neither of us appeared anxious to get married or move in together any time soon. Maybe that was a false assumption in retrospect, but that’s another volume, perhaps to never be opened.

I’m not saying I feel pessimistic about marriage. Maybe to some I appear that way as “average” for me is this way. I wouldn’t even say cautious, although I’m probably the oldest of all my cousins that’s unmarried. As both my mother and Julie have coined recently, it’s oft labeled as being the “black sheep”, which simply amounts to not really being like your peers, whoever they may be at that moment of consideration, on face value.

I had meant this post to be a couple sentences as I have some work to get done this morning, part of going to bed early and coming in early, but it appears to be a train of thought on the move. Looking back I’ve always considered life as not having started until I dropped out of high school. That it hasn’t been ten years yet is somewhat amazing. I’ll probably feel differently twenty years from now, but life since high school feels like an eternity looking back. Everything has changed, even without using switching coasts as a yard stick.

Did “trauma” of my childhood act as a catalyst for being “born again” upon dropping out? I have no idea. That’s subject for psychological debates, and I’ve always believed such things were subjective. Perhaps my soul would see better days if I took to another belief and enrolled myself in hypnotherapy to relive those days but I’ve never had any desire to go down such a path. I would not say I hold my past more or less responsible for who I am today, nor do I hold myself a martyr for having survived it. It just was, and on a daily basis I find myself only concerned about where I am now rather than what life was like twenty years ago.

Spinning down here on the ranting and warming up for work, so I’ll leave you, wizard people, dear reader, with this quote:

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

[synergy was failing me copying that quote from linux to windows, opening up the page on the windows machine to copy it to the clipboard crashed firefox, which failed to save the form data. thank wordpress for having saved the draft. ramen.]