Author: Matthew Groff

  • No Headphones and Other Thoughts

    I didn’t think I left this morning in a hurry, but clearly, I did. I left so fast that I forgot my headphones. I was forced to not listen to music, but read the news off my phone. I felt defenseless and vulnerable. On my subway ride to work, I had to hope that someone wouldn’t discover my state, and then think that I was a person who was willing to engage in a conversation, or worse share a glance of recognition.

    My headphones allow me to be and not be present at the same time; open for business but the door is locked. I cannot deal with human contact that early in the morning, and I am an expert of being on a crowed train and not touching another person. I live in the most densely packed city in America, existing in tight spaces, but nothing is worse than accidently touching a stranger on public transit.

    This is me is the great paradox of living in NYC; actual contact with other people. The fact that I choose to live here to me is a statement that I like people and I accept diversity, but at the same time, if I don’t know you, don’t touch or bother me. I wouldn’t be the first person to write about living in this City, and there are still times that I feel like that no one has touched on the modern elements of living here. It’s not the same City that I moved into 11 years ago, but somehow still the same.

    Bottom line; don’t forget your headphones.

  • Mid Life Contemplation

    This is not a crisis, but I clearly am at mid-life, and I have been finding myself wondering very often if I am truly doing what I want to do with my life. I have been speaking to my wife about it as well, and she feels in the same boat. Our life is not bad, like all people, it could be better. We are not in some sort of melt down, and I do not feel the urge to buy a sports car. Are there still challenges that we want to accomplish?

    I had drinks with a friend the other day, and we both talked about starting new career paths, and the fear we both had of doing that. That fear of starting over from the bottom, and that we are too old to do that. That is not true, and the fear is not real. If it’s important you find a way, right? You make the sacrifices to make it happen, right?

    I do feel a bit handicapped by being in NYC. In one respect, I feel that all the options are before me, but in the other respect, living in the City is a tight rope walk, and if that income suffers, it throws everything off. (Having written that, I now realize that you could say that about any place.) I moved the NYC to take part in the creative fields, and I can say that over the past 11 years, I have done that. Maybe it’s the work/life balance is out of whack… Too much work and not enough life with the wife and kid.

  • Starts and Stops

    (Ideas that never panned out…)

    I have a semi-normal tradition, which is that I start growing a beard at Thanksgiving. Actually, when my Thanksgiving vacation starts. I keep the beard through New Year’s, when on New Year’s Day, I shave it down to a moustache. That all sounds fun, but my beard is so patchy, that I just have starts and spurts of hair on my face. It’s been like that since the first time I tried to grow a beard, during my Freshman year of college. I kept thinking that as I grew older, it would fill out. Nope, I even remember a show I was in, and two male cast members even had a conversation in the dressing room, about how even time they grow a beard it comes in fuller each time. Yeah… not for me… I’m 40 and I still hope that one day I will my face will grow up into a real man’s face. Like when was 15 and shaving for the first time.

  • Working

    I have never moved beyond that feeling of dread of going to school when it comes to going to work as an adult. I can honestly say that I have been working at my career for the past ten years, and I still have that feeling of dread. That sinking feeling on Sunday night also has never gone away. I’m pretty sure I am not alone on this. Speaking to my mother after she retired, and she also described that feeling of not going to work, even though she worked in the field she loved as a nurse.

    I think it has to do with the transactional status of employment; the work equaling money, that sucks out the desire to be there. I enjoy what I do now, but I have a boss, who is a good boss, and work for an organization, which at the end of the day has my fate in their hands. I show up, do my job, enjoy my coworkers, no real complaints… But I would rather sleep in.

    This also makes me wonder that if I was able to finance my life style through all my creative endeavors, would I begin to feel that dread about having to get up and do it? I do believe that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.

  • Politics

    It does make me feel a little better that Dems, Progressives, and the Resistance all showed up at the polls on Tuesday. A small bright point in the past year of Trump darkness. (I have a feeling that I’m not so much preaching to the choir, but more like preaching to other preachers.) It was a good showing, and hopefully it will encourage the rest of the country to turn out in 2018.

    That to me is the thing. What will the turnout be in a year? Like I mentioned before, a college classmate of mine is running for the House as a Democrat in Texas. With the showing in Virginia, especially in the suburbs and ex-urbs in Northern Virginia, middle class college educated people came out to vote against Trump. The person I know who is running is smack dab in the middle of a suburb district, and if the same momentum can be gained then that classmate might have a chance of winning in deep red Texas.

    I do have to remind myself that living in New York City does put me in a bubble. People in small towns and rural areas do see the world differently from me. But when I hear a statement like that, and even after I just wrote that, there is part of me that wants to believe that there are a set of core values that we all hold to. Such as the bonds of the social contract that we all enter into with each other to have a civil society. That those are the core values we all agree on and must be appealed to.