On one of my many bike rides along the Fox River, I nearly leapt off my seat at the sight of a Baltimore Oriole (the bird). Since a prerequisite for nostalgia is a fondness for the past, there are very few things that elicit such feelings within me. Baltimore Orioles, I found out at this very moment, are among those few things.
On the first day of my first year of competitive baseball, I met a kid who would eventually become my classmate, bandmate, roommate, shoulder-devil, and de facto / pro bono psychologist. We were the two shrimpiest kids on the team — the Orioles. Few (if any) have made as profound an impact on my life as this friend. As a result, apparently, I now associate Orioles (the bird) with a pleasant childhood memory.
After my bike ride, I researched orioles and found that they are mostly encountered high in trees in semi-wooded wetlands and along rivers. Upon learning this, my brain went into full-on nerd mode, researching birds at a furious pace to discover what other birds I could expect to see on my rides. My biggest take away was this: birds are fantastic. So I drove to the bookstore intent on buying a book on birds of the Great Lakes Region, but as I weighed my options, it dawned on me that I was dangerously close to becoming a birder.
[I acknowledge that I might have just alienated some of my audience, so I would like to state in no uncertain terms that I do not believe there is a single thing wrong with bird-watching. I genuinely get the appeal.]
As a single guy in his early thirties, who already followed Phish, obsessively watched Star Trek, and would prefer to read than socialize most of the time, I was already quirky enough (and that doesn’t even factor in my sense of humor, minimalist lifestyle, or ludicrous car). I could not in good conscience add bird-watching to that list. I felt it would tip me over the edge from “idiosyncratic” into “The Realm of The Completely Undateable.” Also, I don’t think any single guy should own a pair of binoculars.
How can I convince you it’s me I don’t like?
Wilco (Reservations)
By this point, I had already made a commitment to changing my life dramatically. Still, the only real changes I had made were related to losing weight, which was not my only goal. I did not like who I was. I wanted to be a completely different person. If I was Ziggy Stardust before Labor Day of 2018, I wanted to be Halloween Jack by the summer of 2019.¹
Some things were easy to change. As I donated bag after bag of XXL shirts and 38″ waist pants to Goodwill, I had to replace those items with clothes that fit. This allowed me to change my wardrobe completely (twice over). Tee shirts with Calvin and Hobbes or Saru, the gangly alien from Star Trek, were replaced by collared shirts or single-color tees.
I also ditched my beard. Honestly, the beard was not a great look. It grows patchy on my cheeks, so I have to style it like Toby Ziegler from The West Wing, and it doesn’t know what color it wants to be. The dominant color is “Cheetos dust orange,” but there are enough brown and white hairs to make it resemble a mosaic of a Cleveland Browns game. It was more utilitarian than anything, being used to hide my chins.
I even switched to contacts², which was difficult because, as anybody who wears glasses knows, glasses are more of a lifestyle than a fashion choice. This caused my personality to decrease by 20%.
On top of changing my appearance, I changed the appearance of my apartment by taking down my more cartoonish concert prints and boxing up my fleet of miniature starships. I bought a box spring and a nightstand and a first aid kit. A lava lamp was donated. Before making these changes, I was a string of Christmas lights away from living in a dorm room.
I was no longer satisfied with the rut that I had fallen into regarding music. My tastes had not evolved since college, so I challenged myself to listen to and appreciate music written in the last decade. As a result, Vampire Weekend’s “Father of the Bride” became the soundtrack to my 2019.
When my Xbox died, I did not repair nor replace it —I simply donated my games to Goodwill (not that I was much of a gamer before; this was more of a symbolic gesture). I canceled all my streaming subscriptions (excluding Spotify) and reallocated the time that I would usually spend watching TV to other things like running, riding my bike, or cooking healthy meals.
The only things that I didn’t change during this time were my friends, job, name, and literary tastes. Everything else was on the table.
Change is scary. If a person is comfortable, even a small change represents a threat to that comfort. This is “If it ain’t’ broke, don’t fix it” mentality. At the same time, if a person is not comfortable, there are no guarantees that change will not make matters worse.
It is even scarier when we are told that we have to make a change because that forces us to acknowledge something that we might not want to — something is wrong.
For me, it was evident that something was wrong. No one had to tell me what I already knew. So I made one change; I stopped eating fast food. From there, I started exercising a few times a week, then every day but Sunday. I tried yoga, boxing, CrossFit, and tennis, and all of this was catalyzed by one small change.
The amazing thing was that after each change, the next became easier and more ambitious. What started out as a seemingly ineffectual ripple became a tsunami.
Seeing each change affect me for the better, allayed any fear of change I had, and I became adaptable. Adaptability was a trait that I sorely lacked. My inability to adapt led to anxiety and occasionally anger towards my friends and family who would alter plans with or without notice.
Change is scary if you aren’t used to it, and the status quo is comfortable until it isn’t. The thing is, we do not have to wait until a situation becomes untenable for us to make changes. One little change can lead to amazing things, and you might find, as I did, the more frequently you leave your comfort zone, the less you desire to return.
¹ David Bowie performed as a character named Ziggy Stardust from 1971 to 1973. When he felt like this character was bleeding into his actual personality, he retired it. In 1974 he performed as a character called Halloween Jack.
² I have temporarily switched back to glasses because I don’t want to touch my eyes due to Coronavirus.
One Man Wrecking Machine 