No More Dew Boy

This isn’t my stack. Mine would’ve been way bigger!

I enjoy a can of Mountain Dew about once or twice a month. Not bad huh? Well, for years I had gulped this nectar of the gods at a rate of 5 or 6 cans a day. In fact, it was so bad that the friendly clerk at my neighborhood convenience store knew me only as ‘Dew boy’. Any of my friends could go into the convenience store and tell the clerk that Dew boy needed cigarettes and the clerk would hand them my cigarettes (another bad habit that I plan on quitting). Oh, and it had to be cans. Mountain Dew in plastic bottles doesn’t taste the same… I swear!

I knew that drinking soda to that excess couldn’t be good for my long-term survival, but the sugar and caffeine gave me boosts throughout the day that were phenomenal. The first thing I’d do upon awakening (in the late forenoons) was grab a cold can of the good stuff. Was I addicted to it? Maybe, but if I was, that addiction was nothing like my addiction to nicotine. Most likely, I was just habituated to the taste and the sugar rush.

The final push that got me to quit was one of my Facebook friends. I had never met the guy, but we had inhabited few a similar email groups over the years. He is one of those new-Agey, conspiracy-theorist, health nuts, but his posts bashing the ‘Man’, which included soda companies, gave me the final push to quit. I had always wanted to quit, and everybody around me told me that I would get fat and diabetic because of it. It didn’t help that my body requires little maintenance–I can work out for a month and enjoy ripped abs for the next several years during which time I do nothing but sit at my computer. The effect of excessive soda consumption was just not making itself seen in my body. Still, every 200th can or so brought along with it a foreboding sense of impending doom, and I wanted to quit… I really did. I decided that 2013 would be the perfect year to quit given the ongoing reinvention of myself.

So here I am–essentially Mountain Dew free. Quitting wasn’t as hard as I imagined it would be. I simply stopped buying the stuff. Probably the biggest help in quitting was an ever-present glass of water on my desk. Every time I got the urge, I drank some water. I also upped my coffee intake from one to three or four cups a day. Looking back, it wasn’t nearly as difficult to quit as I had imagined it would be. I’m glad I did it. Now it’s on to the quitting of more difficult things.

Image credit: Stack of Mountain Dew image copyright (c) 2005 Dan Carter and made available under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

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Stage 3… Separation, Course Adjustment, and Acceleration

Stage three has separated… Commencing acceleration to orbit!

The reason I started this blog… yes, I’m finally posting the first post. Bear with me, we’ll get to the reasons, but first I’ll force you to suffer through my life history.

Stage 1

“Look it’s a little Amish baby, complete with wide-brimmed black hat, long white beard, and filled to the hat brim with dogma,” said my mother. Well, maybe she didn’t say that when I was born, but that’s how I imagine it–my placenta-encrusted hat a sharp contrast to the immaculate hospital room. Okay, that’s just gross.

As you may have gathered by now, I was born to Amish parents (whom I love dearly, by the way). We were Old Order Amish–no computers, no electricity, no cars,… the whole bag of enchiladas. As a child, I feared people with cameras. It was almost as if their verboten technology could drain the soul right out of a person. That’s basically what we thought of technology. But I have escaped, and I am safe now. Just kidding. There was no “escaping”. It’s not like I was being held against my will.

Growing up as an Amish boy is what I now consider to have been the first stage of my life.

Stage 2

The second stage of my life began when I left the Amish. That took courage, if I say so myself. I was eighteen years old and somewhat ignorant of the world that you know. Besides, from an early age, it had been drilled into us that people who leave the Amish, will probably burn in hell for all eternity. My parents weren’t quite that bad, but they’re still holding onto the hope that I’ll repent and return someday.

When I left the Amish, I moved into a mobile home with my two best friends. They were also ex-Amish. We had a big television set in no time, and in short order we learned how to pirate satellite television (by the way, what’s the statute of limitations on that?). It didn’t take long for me to buy a laptop and a truck. For several years I partied and fished and browsed the internet.

After two years, I moved to Florida. It was a completely different world for me. I was used to deciduous and coniferous forests. Palm trees were so exotic. I had no formal education, but I got lucky (job-wise). Over the next several years, I held white collar jobs (internet marketing and that sort of thing) until the economy made me poor and jobless again. Then a former colleague and I started a niche internet retail site. It is a moderately successful business, and I am still heavily involved in it, but it’s not my dream career.

In the years since I’ve left the Amish, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I believe, what I want, and when I would ever get around to doing something worthwhile with my life. Well, I’ve cast off a lot of dogma, figured out that I want to be a scientist (or at least an engineer), and that the time is now. That brings us to…

Stage 3

Stage 3 began early this spring. There were seven of us ex-Amish youngsters living in a 5-bedroom, two-story house. Living together gave us a sense of family (sometimes), but most importantly, it kept the rent down to a reasonable level. However, as is inevitable when large egos meet immovable minds, friction developed. We ended up disbanding.

In retrospect, that was just the catalyst I needed to reinvent myself. Moving away from some of the people that I had lived with for years, was a big change. I decided that now would be the time to make other changes. I re-organized my priorities, improved my time management, changed some of my health habits–I basically began an overall self-reinvention.

It was around this time that a new acquaintance strongly encouraged that I enroll in a community college. I had always planned on enrolling eventually, but I thought I just had to wait until I saved up enough money to live comfortably and without loans while in college. Besides, I had been pouring a lot of energy and hope into various entrepreneurial pursuits in the hope that I would strike gold with one of them. It didn’t happen. I mean, I found some dust and a nugget or two–but no veins. Enrolling in college would mean exchanging those hopes for the potentially risky pursuit of more meaningful dreams.

After several weeks of metaphorically tearing my hair out, I decided to take the risk. And here I am with this blog set to chronicle the third stage of my life. Join me on this grand adventure, why don’t you? Don’t just follow along vicariously, reinvent yourself!

Image credit: NASA