I am glad to work with so many great people.

Work really has kept me alive.

I’ve learned a lot about myself this year. I had always said that life was one’s greatest teacher; this adage proved to be extremely truthful and hurtful recently.

Life really is never easy. Sure, it would be nice if it could be predictable and everything you wished to happen did.  But it’s naive to think it could ever be simple.

Life is all about learning. Life tends not to hold anything back. You get the full force and impact of its “lessons” without any option to mute, censor, or fast-forward like you’re watching a DVD or a show saved on your DVR.

Thus, I have come up with a resolution for next year that will also serve as a personal motto and mission.

Rebranding. Rebuilding. Renewal.

This is what 2011 will be about for me.

Rebranding: I need to change myself.  While I would like to think I improved in some areas of my life, I also learned that there were other aspects of myself I neglected to improve (though in some cases, I was unaware there was anything to improve).  At times, I have felt like someone trying to canoe upstream and it was only my stubbornness that barely kept me from falling backward.

I understand I have to change my outlook on life and how I go about things in life.  The only obstacle to change is myself.

Rebuilding: My self-esteem and overall character took a significant hit.  As much as I try to tell myself things will be okay, I often regress into a puddle of self-pity where I lash out at myself for not doing things the right way, or things in a way that would grant me happiness.

I am my own worst critic and this has left me feeling less than satisfied with the high effort I put into things like my job.  Rebuilding probably goes hand-in-hand with Rebranding—both involve a recognition of changes that need to be made.  I need to restructure myself from the ground-up.  I need to stop beating myself up over things I have done in the past.

What happened in the past already happened.  There is no undo.  All I can do is look forward and not make the same mistakes.

Renewal: If you were to look at the “motto” as a progression of things, this would be the ultimate goal.  I want to feel as if I have fully, legitimately changed.  I want to feel as if I’ve been given a second chance, even if circumstances in life have made it impossible to get second chances and “do-overs.”  I just want to feel rejuvenated and almost born again, free from the guilt and unhappiness from past experiences where things ultimately went awry.

I ultimately want to feel better off than I did the year before.  It would feel just as good as a do-over.

All I have to do is take that first step.

It’s all about the individual joy.

It’s the mood it gives you.  It’s how it makes you feel when you connect a song, a verse, a piece of the instrumental track to an event in your life, whether it be important or mundane.

You can pretty much do whatever you want with whatever song you listen to.

Not everyone will see eye to eye (or hear ear to ear?) with you but music is ultimately what you make of it.

Put that song on repeat, enjoy every track of that album, and happily spend those two hours and 12 minutes listening to a playlist from top to bottom…and have no remorse doing it all over again.

Just do you.

Album cover to RE:COLLECTIONS, a two-disc compilation whose second disc has been my music of choice for the week. It's been soothing for my arduous morning commute and for hellish periods of work where I needed something to maintain my sanity.

Work has been taking a toll on me.  The daily grind leaves me feeling like I need 15 hrs of sleep.

Of course there are always those moments I want to beat myself up for wasting my childhood achieving the wrong goals.  There are times I wish I could chastise myself for being my own obstacle.

After another brutal loss with my company’s softball team, I sat alone on the subway ride home and reflected.  Despite a handful of good things happening in the game, we still lost by a tremendous margin and I had some really bad at-bats.

Don’t you ever wish there were times you could achieve so much more?  How you want to be the object of praise but you can’t because you just aren’t good enough to live up to what your colleagues, acquaintances, friends expect?

I wish I had better stuff to share but I don’t.

That’s right.  MAN UP!

OMG, Brian, how could you say such a thing?!  Don’t you want to have 1000 friends?

NO!

I’m just going to say this now: you are beyond delusional if you think you have an obligation to befriend everyone you meet.  It’s like how you can’t get two mismatching pieces on a jigsaw puzzle to fit together, you can’t make the square block fit into the circle hole, you can’t get 7 when you try to add 1 and 1 together…you cannot expect to become friends with everyone.

“I love you long time” just won’t work on everyone.  There are those who are outgoing and extroverted and there are those who aren’t.  Don’t try to force the introvert to do things or take part in situations to make him or her uncomfortable.  You have to respect his or her comfort zone; if she doesn’t want to go to Janet Reno’s Dance Party, don’t try to force her to!  No means no and any coercive measures might mean a rape charge is coming your way.  Good luck explaining to that community populated with women ages 18-24 why you are a registered sex-offender…

If a guy (or anyone) wants to be kept alone, respect that.  I am happy with the friends I have now and I really don’t need to know EVERYONE you hang out with, especially if they turn out to be losers and lames.

It’s all about quality over quantity right?  I’d rather be alone with just two or three people I really care about than be in the company of 40 people that a) I don’t care about and b)I know would not care about me.

Why race each other to see who can make the most friends?  What you all should do is make an inventory of your friends.

• Take note of the ones you talk to daily.
• Take note of the ones you are cool with.
• Take note of the ones who give you headaches.  Those who give more headaches will guarantee they move further down into oblivion.
• Take note of those who have not spoken to you in months.  Or even years.

You can, with minimal effort, figure out who are your primary, secondary, and tertiary friends.  You will impress no one if you literally make spreadsheets in Excel containing all this info.  But once you know which people in your life really matter, you can finally devote the time to those who matter, and care less about those who need to be cared less.

Yes, lonely males, that might mean you should stop sending messages on facebook to that girl who doesn’t talk to you anymore but you still think about while you molest yourself.

Don’t be offended if I don’t want to hang out with you—chances are I legitimately don’t want to be in your presence.

Anyone interested can ask me…and I guess we can figure it out from there.

How are we to live?

We often encounter people we dislike in our lives—and we are expected to grin and bear it.

We do something nice and the favor isn’t returned—and that is something we are supposed to accept.

I think you can see where I am going with this.

You cannot believe how many times I’ve just wanted to really reprimand friends of mine for doing things or saying things that really bothered me but I could not because the “rules” of society say you can’t do that.

It just seems society punishes those who do not want to adhere to social norms—as if those who think outside of the box are to be thrown inside a cage.

But I guess you can still live your life…but only in the ways everyone else wants you to.

Naturally, I was unhappy about all this and even more unhappy to find out this nonsense is popular among those in high school or college but who have the mental capacity of kids in a day-care center.

Time to tell you why I’m mad.

People give us glances and stares in every day life all the time—does that mean we want to know their names, friends, family, job, location, and everything between next of kin and who they last slept with?  And by people, I mean just general strangers—the ones who sit across from you on the bus or subway one morning and you never see them again.  This has nothing to do with creepy stalkers.

On facebook, people will see your profile pic and will just give the Internet’s equivalent to a passing glance.  Various people may check out our profiles at any time; do I want to know more about them?  Absolutely not.

But yet since it’s on facebook, there is a demand to know everything about this person?  Why do we have a bigger impetus to care on facebook yet have little to no interest if it happens in the outside world?  Yes, an actual world exists outside the Internet, where you interact with people face to face and conversations are not confined to rooms that feature lowercase letters of the English alphabet.

So why is there a need to want to know EVERYTHING about people who visit other facebook profiles?  Do we want to gain satisfaction that some hot girl looked at your page?  Newsflash: it doesn’t increase the chances she will jump into your pants.

Go ahead, pre-teens: keep making facebook into fecesbook.

Cliffs:

While I was terminating friendships with some people, I wondered when we decide to end friendships.

Naturally, some friendships deteriorate over time.  It makes sense, though—you defer maintenance on something, that something will fall apart, resulting in potentially disastrous consequences.  That decision to put off checking your brakes is the difference between you and your friends waking up the next day and you and your friends going face first into some car with “KAGAMIKU” on the license plate.

Or, if you are too squeamish to think of something so morbid, think of it as some glue drying up over time.  We all know what glue does, so I hope I don’t  have to use an example.  But over time, the adhesion becomes weaker and weaker until separation happens.

But what compels a person to re-apply that glue so that the bond is restored?  Likewise, what compels a person not to do anything and to let the friendship deteriorate even further?

I guess you can take the time to think about your friends.  Do they have any value to you?  Are you happy associating with them?

Do they embody people of good character, or are they just characters?

You don’t win an award for having over 9000 friends (those awards you might win on Facebook cannot be exchanged for money in real life).