Alright, so here I am again.

I am picking this blog back up after many years and many life changes. I originally started this blog under the name of "Making Over the Soul" during a particularly turbulent and ever changing time in my life.  It was intended to be a way of expressing myself, emptying my head, and keeping myself level with all the changes that were happening in my life.  I found after a time that it was really to much for me keep up with on top of what was going on with me personally.  So to say I was sporadic with my posts would be an understatement and really I dropped it altogether only after a few posts.  

So I guess the question to next be answered is why am I picking it up again?  Originally I was inspired by a witty and well written blog by a user called Monty.  His blog was humorous and inspiring to me as he made major changes in his life and blogged what seemed to be every detail of his life changes and where life was leading him.  It seemed to me a mirror of what I wanted to do while I was at a cross roads in my own life.  Now that I am a decade older and have a lot more life experience behind me I find that I have a lot to say and a lot of opinions that I never felt quite comfortable expressing before.  I find now that I am more comfortable in life and with myself that again I feel the need to empty my head of random thoughts and opinions.  If there is one thing I have learned over the years is that feelings and thoughts not expressed lead to missed understanding of oneself and missed life opportunities.  I know now that was the perspective and the lesson that I overlooked from Monty's blog.  Monty if you are still out there I hope you are doing well and still finding the humor in life.  

So now I am reintroducing this blog and myself to the world wide web.  I still intend this blog to be a place where I can sift through my thoughts and feelings and grow as a person.  Only now I am trying to understand my soul and truly randomly sharing the contents of my head to make sense of life, love and the random crap that always seems to creep in making life interesting.  Sometimes it will be ranting, sometimes amusing, and sometimes just weird but it will be a journey that will hopefully lead me to a good place and maybe just maybe provide some reading enjoyment to others who dare to ride this crazy wave with me.  Here's to what hopefully is a scary yet thrilling and satisfying trip down the warped path that is my own unique life journey.  

Update...

Well, I finally made it back.  I am here at work (did not even think I could do this here.  It will be helpful.)  So to get the quick updates out of the way.  To date I have now lost close to 50 pounds!  Still a lot more to go.  I have now realized that even after I reach my weight goal, I will need to spend a lot more time firming up.  On the spiritual front I have started yoga and meditation.  The yoga part is OK but I have to admit that meditation is a struggle as it seems almost impossible to completely clear and quiet my mind.  I guess I will need a lot more practice. 
    Now that is done let me get on my soap box.  I have been dating as you know.  Not a lot but a few.  I have joined some online social sites and have gotten a new iPhone and downloaded some gay singles apps and joined those as well.  Since then I have chatted with a plethora of guys both near and far.  Let me tell you it has been a eye opener.  I have chatted with so many guys that have put so many limits on themselves that its a wonder that they meet anyone at all.  For example most guys here in Texas are obsessed with the distinction between what is considered masculine and what does not.  I personally don't think in those terms.  I just know that I am attracted to a broad range of guys some who are very masculine and some who are what I guess some would consider femme.  I actually chatted with one guy who said that if he saw one thing that said gay about a guy he would no longer be interested.  I mean really!!  He then admits that he has trouble meeting guys.  I wonder why!!(I said sarcastically).  I chatted with another guy who only wants to be with guys who are bi-sexual.  He gets off on knowing that they are with women and then drop them to be with him.  He says it makes him feel special.  Later in our conversations he stated that he was ultra lonely and could not understand why he could not keep a long term relationship.  Could it be that he cannot keep a relationship because he only picks guys who can't commit to anything?  Now to my experience lately I have chatted and exchanged pictures with guys where they have come back and said things like:  Your are to gay, to butch, to big, not big enough, to average,  to old (this one coming from a guy who was three years older than me), and the best one yet to normal looking.  Yes to normal looking.  What does that really mean.  I guess the moral of this is that most of these guys have put such limitations on themselves and then wonder why they are alone.  It seems obvious to me that they have cut themselves off from anything meaningful by putting impossible limitations on the people they want.  By those standards no one will ever match up.  Now I realize that some of this is just stuff said to let me down.  Those that I have included I still talk to and have become buddies with. To me this is just crazy.  Have you guys experienced this kind of thing when you were dating? 

Now I am casually dating two guys that are more like me just average Joe's.  We shall see where this goes. 

OK..it sucks to be me.

Alright so I suck at blogging. Monty and Nik the Greek make it look so easy.  Finding the time is frankly very hard.  Well apologies.  Anyway so much has happened since the last blog that I hardly know where to begin.  On the fitness front I have now lost 40lbs (yeah.. my feet are very appreciative).   On the spiritual front I have been studying some ancient texts and philosophies so I am a much more enlightened person (be it one thats now better read but much more confused).  So I guess the make over is going well.  Other things that have happened?  Well I did have a little health scare.  I found I had a small tumor in my arm that turned out to be cancerous but very slow growing and totally treatable (still caused a bit of heavy drinking though...like I needed an excuse..I'm just saying).  I also got a promotion at work (well deserved as I toot my own horn).  I would elaborate more but I am a business analyst so there really is no way to make that interesting.  OOH OOH I have to tell.  I had a date.  An HONEST TO GOODNESS DATE.  It was very cool.  I was kind of skeptical when he asked because didn't actual dating go out of favor with the gay tribe in the 80's?  Anyway I had fun and even though we are probably just going to be friends I saw that as a positive sign of things to come.  I have also been a busy bee planning my vacations for the year.  Thanks to my promotion I actually get three weeks now.  Yes I said three weeks (I am so happy I barely know what to do with myself).  Well so far I am going to go home to my home town in Alabama and party with the family on July 4th.  That should be cool but it will also be a test as all mu southern relatives cook like Paula Deen and that is what got me in trouble in the first place but I will pray that I have the strength to stick to my new found healthy habits.  I will also take some during the holidays so that I can spend some time with my nieces and nephews who I love dearly. Now what will I do with the other time?  I know that I want to take a major trip this year but I am having trouble deciding.  Anybody have a suggestion?   Europe was my first inclination but the dollar is not so hot against the Euro so the maybe out of the budget and I have been there before.  I will have to think on it some more.  Well that is it for now.  Hopefully I will find more time to be more of a responsible blogger (if I can call myself that).  Oh and good for you Ricky Martin.  I just knew he was to sexy to be straight.

Its been some time...

OK.  I know it has been some time since I last posted.  A lot has happened.  First I have been working out very diligently with my new trainer and I am happy to report that I have lost 20 pounds!!!!  I also completed my week off with a bang.  I worked out everyday and was very faithful to my diet plan ( a feat unto itself believe me).  I am well on my way.  It has been a long time since I have felt this positive, it feels good..  I also caught up on my movies.  I am an avid movie buff and like to keep on top of things.  I went to go see: Avatar, When in Rome, Its Complicated, & Leap Year.  They are all good movies.  Avatar was totally awesome!!  The next best was "Its Complicated" which was very well done.  The others all tie for third.  I get so inspired by movies, so I left these thinking that if they can make it through to real love then so can I (although I will wait until I achieve a better fitness state).   More to come....

What now...

Right!  First entry down now to the meat and potatoes.  What will this "makeover" consist of ? I will be making over my whole being.  Physical as well as spiritual. 
     The physical part of the makeover is easy enough to define. Now I am rapidly approaching 40.  I am not in the best shape of my life (or anybody else's either apparently) and my social life is non-existent.  Lets face it the boys are skin deep when it come to attraction.  Most gay men have deathly terror of any age over 30 so they tend to only value the perfection of the young.  So over the age of 30 and not a Greek god among men leaves me with a very empty social calendar.  So if I want to be healthy physically and be able to at least date another gay man, a major change is in order.  I however have taken the first step on this front.  I have hired a personal trainer.  We will from here on out refer to him as "D" (the sadist...just kidding I think).  This is my last weekend as a free man.  Monday afternoon is my first workout and my introduction to my new eating plan.  Hopefully I will rise to the occasion and perform like a trooper, but lets face it I will be a disaster.  I do have resolve and with my friends help and I am sure much money spent on spa treatments I will at least get to my goals.  I will document my progress here.
     The spiritual?  This is much harder to define.  I think its time for a little history.  You see I have never really expected to find true love.  Maybe that is my internalized homophobia but its true that is how I truly felt maybe still feel.  To be quite truthful I am not a very adventurous person.  I never make the first move and when it comes to men I am very shy.  My friends laugh at this as I am a very extroverted person in every other aspect of my life.  I never expected to be like those characters in a movie and boom struck with uncontrollable love.  I always thought I would find a guy who liked me enough to want to stick around and share my life, no great passion, no thunderbolt of true love, but a nice contented existence.  In my 20's I clung to this belief and just partied along with the rest of the tribe (my word for all my gay brothers and sisters).  I had many chances with some great guys.  Some which I was too timid to act fully upon and some that I did manage to have a nice time with.  Needless to say you could have knocked me over with a feather when I met, we shall call him "X".  He was totally hot and seemingly into me.  For the first time in my life I threw caution to the wind and became a right forward player.  We went on a couple of dates in the 2 weeks that followed and we were not separated much after that.  We dated almost a year before we moved in together.  A couple of years and re-locations before we bought ourselves a house and settled down.  Unfortunately we weathered some pretty rough times at first.  He saw me through one of the worst times in anybodies life,  a time when I lost a parent.  I returned the favor when at the end of our first year when I helped him resolve some legal issues.  All and all we were very happy for about 5 1/2 years.  Then on the day after my favorite holiday after we had started what was supposed to be a fun filled mini vacation he told me that he was not in love with me anymore and had found somebody that intrigued him much more.  I was devastated.  He told me that he had not acted on anything but needed time to think.  All the time we were on the vacation he kept telling me over and over that he loved me.  I guess I knew that things were definitely over.  When we got home all things came to light.  It turns out that he lied and had been seeing this other man for close to 6 months and that he had talked many other people about what he could not say to me.  He even talked to our friends, told them and even went to functions our friends gave with the other man.  He even lied to me when we met.  He said that he had not been seeing anybody for a long time when in fact he was seeing me while still in a relationship with his ex of 8 years.  I was inadvertently a cheater too.  So after I found out all of this he simply walked out of my life literally, I have yet to speak to him about any of it to this day.  There are of course many are other sordid details but this is hard enough to write these.  I have probably over shared but somehow if feels therapeutic to write this.  Anyway that is the moment I stopped being an active player in my life.  For the next 2 years all I did was just exist and let everything else slip away.  About a year ago it was like I woke up.  I ditched the job I hated and relocated to a new place.  I desperately wanted a new start.  This new start did not quite happen like I thought so here I am. 
     So spiritual?  I am not sure how to attack this part of my makeover, so I am going to experiment.  I am going to take my last vacation of the year and spend it working on me.  I will be taking daily sessions with my new personal trainer and then I will be going to some day classes and seminars to see if I can spark some new hobbies and interests.  This should, I hope, energize me to make new friends and get me off my duff and get into life.  Wish me luck. 


I will post as to my progress so until next time...

My first post...

Alright here goes.  This is officially my first blog entry (I know, I know I'm all excited too!)   I am sure that by the time anybody reads this I will have re-written it about a 100,000 times.  Not a perfectionist but sometimes I just prattle on, so I am sure there will be many sessions of editing.  I am not quite sure how to make it all sound cool.  Really I am not sure what's cool and what's not.  That is why I rely on my teenage nephews to point it out. So maybe I will let them read this and critique... on second thought maybe not.  I think I have given them enough blackmail material to totally pay for their colleges and weddings already.
    OK so back to this inaugural post.  If anybody reads this they might ask why "Making over the Soul?"  Great question (I am so glad someone asked).  Well here I am closing in on the final years of my 30's and I find myself at a crossroads.  Not a mid-life crisis, I think, but a place now where I cannot see to far down the road.  I know what your thinking "OMG--not another sob story about someone who needs to overcome some life threatening, insurmountable, Oprah cause."  No, quite the contrary.  I am very blessed.  I have a job I actually like, working with people I actually like.  I have very good friends, a loving family (a tad dysfunctional, but I guess that's actually normal), and an overall secure life.   The problem is that with all these blessings I am just content, not happy.  I found that over the last year all I have done is ask the question is this all I can expect?  After careful examination and much blog reading I found some truths about myself.  About a year ago I starting reading a blog called "Much ado about Monty."  In this blog a young man was embarking on some very extensive changes in his life and embracing whatever that meant for him.  I found this blog to be very inspirational.  He was coming out somewhat late in life and was endeavoring to navigate the new course, that meant, his life would take.  He went through a veritable roller coaster of changes and was very candid about how he was feeling and how his psyche (Yippee got that word of the month in so check another off the list) was changing.  Now I may be making more of it than what was intended but it made me look at myself.  I am roughly the same age as he but am way more stagnate.  During the time that I was reading this blog I was always thinking what do I need to change to make me happier.  I never could figure out just what was amiss in my life.  Then suddenly one day I realized it wasn't the things in my life that were  wrong like my job, my house, my family, my friends,  it was me.  I did not like me very much.  Then things just kind of fell into place.  You see just about 2 years ago I weathered one of the most traumatizing moments of my life.   Things would never be the same again.  I say I weathered it but really I just sidelined it and myself.  I realized that for all the time since then I have been a bystander just watching my life happen and not really participating.  Now that I understand that, I think I know how to proceed.  I have spent the last few months preparing and now is the time. I am putting myself back into the game!  So first up the blog.  I am hoping that by writing this blog I have a way of holding myself accountable, to follow through with what I hope to accomplish, a healthier and happier me.  One I hope to learn to like and maybe love. 


Now commencing the soul makeover....