Growing

Stubbornness comes with age. Getting older for me, means not settling anymore. Below are two exhibits to showcase this point.

Exhibit A
Not settling is the reason I feel the need to go back to school. I refuse the let myself slide "backwards". I spent the better part of a quarter century expanding my mind through education. Through non-use, that knowledge is slipping away. My job challenges me with problems that take experience rather than book smarts to solve. While I recognize the value of this, I still crave to use that intellectual side. This is my endless fight to avoid entering into the daily grind of work/family that envelops people. Grinding is for garbage disposals, not THE Tiller.

Going back to school means more than fighting off the slow process of my brain matter shrinking due to the aging process. It means finally becoming highly knowledgeable (a master if you will) in one subject. Mechanical engineering is a broad subject, and so is the required knowledge based to do any worth while engineering job in the current civilized setting. However, that feeling of knowing something throughly is what I'm after. Simply put, I feel that I don't know anything yet.

Exhibit B
Over the last three years I have lost between thirty and forty pounds. Most people tend to gain weight with age, but that is not a trend I intend to follow. I wasn't physically active for three to fours years in college, and I wasn't the most energetic teenage either. I turned things around in 2007 and haven't looked back. People don't recognize me and usually surprised that I am "thin". Of course growing my hair out like a hippie helped as well. Gone is that pudgy face bald kid people barely knew in high school. Now I'm, the slightly thinner guy that people barely know now.

My life has become quite ironic over the last couple of years. I have discovered how passionate I am about food. Maybe these strong feelings were simply buried for years by the mounds of delicious home cooked meals and desserts from my mother. Then only discovered when taken away in the name of health (see above). At any rate, trying new restaurants, cooking good hardy meals, and the never ending quest for the perfect pizza are important parts of my life. So naturally, the people that I've met since becoming "thin" are amazed when I go off about wrapping steak with bacon and deep frying gravy (patent pending). When they ask me how I stay so "thin"? I give them the answer, moderation. Of course running helps too.

In summary, I always do things at my own pace, and aging is no different.