Purpose.com and other Nonsense
“I just can’t believe how clean it is!”
Lizzy and I were taking my new (old) Prius for a spin. It’s a 2005, but compared to the old CRV, it feels like a 2050. Touch screen, headlights that actually illuminate the road, a horn that doesn’t sound like a dying duck.
I feel like she can hear me smiling, the car drives so quietly. I know my old car operated like an asthmatic rhinoceros with casts on each foot clunking over every bump, but the car just whispers as it moves. I’ve always thought Priuses sounded like some sort of high-tech dishwasher, quietly whirring away, unclear whether it’s washing, drying, or both. Now I feel like it sounds like Luke’s X-Wing powering up.
“What will your friends think?”
Immediately I think of my friends from high school, who derisively questioned my gender by even owning a Subaru. A Prius to would mean the final castration in their eyes.
“We should take a photo of you next to it. Like, wearing a suit or something. Caption: ‘I own both these things– a clean suit, and a clean new car.”
That’s when I knew she was talking about my college friends.
“Dear Mr. King, I don’t know if you are into looking at Facebook’s memories section, but I’m here to tell you that our banter circa Spring 2011 was pure gold. Anyway, hope all is well with you!”
I smiled when I saw this. This individual drunkenly introduced me to the phrasing “vom dot com,” and a bunch of other ridiculous ways to say pretty mundane things, and I remember most of the discourse throughout our friendship being some variation of “totes awkward pants” and “that was awesome sauce town city,” or some similar nonsense.
I clicked on “See Friendship,” and scrolled through most of our exchanges, which, as expected, was a lot of that.
Then I got to one post, where I drunkenly described my evening, tried to insult Cam's crotchal region, and managed to hit on/creep out her roommates even 10,000 miles away.
I like to think that Australia was a special case. That aside from that 6-month period, I never blacked out, or got naked, or yelled belligerently at friends… But unfortunately, I know that’s not the case, and I only wish there weren’t as many nights when they happened all at once.
I like to think that, even if it wasn’t just in Australia, it was at least limited to college. That aside from my first time visiting vom.com as a 20 year old, through 2.5 years later to graduation, I have been a pretty healthy person. But, it didn’t end after graduation, and it wasn’t limited to SLU. Accounts of me blackmailing the 11-year old sibling of one of my friends during a summer break (for whom I had served as a substitute teacher at the Elementary School just a month or so earlier) who saw me drunk, still haunt me to this day. As do blurry memories of my bike veering across an empty road with a backpack full of wine bottles, suddenly tumbling over the sidewalk, and waking up in my bed, bloody, sore, and smelling like I slept in a barrel of vinegar.
Unfortunately, as that bike ride proved, the Mess That Was Derek at SLU, became Derek the Buffalo Barfly, and there are dozens of voicemails to prove it.
“Bro. How are you doing?”
Matt came to Buffalo for Med School, but even though we live only a mile from one another, I see him less than his friends who live two hours from here near his family. I guess Med School is hard. Who would have thought?
Still, he’s one of the friends who saw the good sides of The Mess That Was Derek. Overcaffeinated, unable to study any longer, Messy SLU Derek had some of the greatest bouts of creative energy I’ve ever experienced. Sure, sometimes those were funneled into futile (and creepy) endeavors to woo a woman here and there, but mostly they were spent contemplating a human’s role, and worth, in and to society.
Matt, like most of my best college friends, was easily distracted, and would spend hours with me discussing the philosophy of “purpose,” not just personally, but metaphysically and societally. We made charts documenting the overlapping inner and outer forces that pushed us in certain directions, wrote lists of important biological and cultural tides that pulled us away from predestined outcomes. Those chats with Matt were some of the high points of a senior year where I felt directionless, moving from assignment to test to party to sloppy make out and back to assignment and barely sleeping at all in between.
Tonight, we sat at the aptly named “Goodbar,” and had a couple of drinks, some tater tots, and some fried pepperoni. I had just gotten back from a trip to Rochester, still in my suit and tie, and was telling him about the presentation I made earlier to a town supervisor and community association, how it went well, and best of all, 200+ miles of driving had drained less than half a tank of gas.
He asked some probing questions about Lizzy, questions I’ve only recently started thinking about myself, but that ultimately make me happy to think about, so I guess that’s a good thing. I told him as much.
“Bro, that makes me so happy to hear.” Matt and I started calling each other “bro” as a joke nearly 6 years ago, and I’m not sure when it stopped being said ironically. “Literally, I’m so happy to hear that.” He paused again. “Do you know how many voicemails from you I have saved? Literally, my inbox is always full because I don’t want to delete them. Most of them are from when you first moved to Buffalo, and nearly all involve you singing about what you are or were just recently doing… But some of them were not so great.”
(I remember talking to Matt the day after my bike accident. He called while I was at work. “Bro! Are you ok?”
“Yeah, why?” I wasn’t. My body hurt, and my head felt like someone was hitting me in the face with a two-by-four. I’d realize two days later that I was probably concussed.
“Bro, you called me at like 2am last night, and just were yelling incoherently about some sort of bike problem and kind of…well, crying a lot.”
“Oh. Yeah. I’m not ok. Well, I’m really hung over. Let’s talk later.”)
I laughed and told him that he wasn’t the only one who had told me that. Some friends have threatened to save them just to play them at my wedding, or worse, my funeral (and while they won’t admit it, I bet some assumed the latter would happen first).
He said he was glad to see I was doing better. I said the same: it was good to be chatting with him at a bar, and instead of, as it had been two years prior during his first med-school stint, him depressingly describing his favorite spot as the 13th floor bathroom at Boston University…. All the while talking as his classmates defecated in the background.
“Seriously Bro, you went from being one of those "worst case” examples of what can happen to someone right out of school, to owning a house, owning a business… Wearing suits to bars.“ Not going to lie, I do like wearing suits. "It just is good to see man.”
I’m so glad Lizzy and I started dating when we did.
She and I technically met my first day in Buffalo. I had just fully inflated the air mattress that would be my bed the next three months, and she walked in the door with her boyfriend (Eric. Weird, I know.) to visit Jordan.
We hung out again on her Spring Break the following March. She was home student teaching, and some of her friends were visiting, so they had gone out on Elmwood and wanted to hang out with some cool cats (i.e. Jordan).
In that time I had literally exhausted the number of ways I could drunkenly embarrass and endanger myself. Some of my decisions during those 9 months still impact me today, which most people find hilarious, but I’m more and more ashamed of each day.
Our first “date,” we went and watched the St. Patrick’s Day parade together and wandered around downtown Buffalo. I had just recently decided to pull my life out of the tailspin it was in, mostly due to the fact that I was buying ¼th of the company I worked at.
It’s funny, looking back, I can point to that moment in early February when my, to-then-boss said, “guys, I might have to close the company. I have to focus on my law practice. If you don’t want to shut the doors, I’ll sell you the company, but it won’t be easy," as the moment when I finally got my shit together and stopped thinking about Boston, or grad school, or any other distractions I used to keep from focusing on my current life and how crummy I was doing.
I remember thinking at the time, “I’ll give it 2 years, and if things haven’t gotten better, I’ll have to find something else.”
Within 18 months, we had tripled our salaries, and were on pace to increase our gross revenue by over 50%.
Last year we more than doubled it, and added three employees.
At the time I went out with Lizzy, however, that wasn’t really that clear. It seemed like a pipe dream, actually. Here I was, dozens of thousands of dollars in debt, voluntarily taking a pay cut which would result in me earning only $7,000 during the last two-thirds of 2013.
Yet, it was the first time in years, since maybe my Sophomore year of College, where my advisor asked me “Why the FUCK would you major in economics? To get a JOB? You’ll GET a job. Study what you LIKE, and you’ll GET a job you like.” To be honest, that, and how I feel now, are probably the only times in my life when I feel or felt like I’ve had any sort of control over my future, some sort of direction.
I told Matt how lucky I felt to have discovered that direction prior to that first date with Lizzy. We went as friends, really, and wouldn’t hang out again until June. We wouldn’t go on a “real” date until July, and weren’t “official,” until August.
By that point though, I barely recognized who I was a year before. Not because of Lizzy, though she was and continues to be a bout of happy disgusting sunshine or similarly gushy nauseating similes, but because for the first time in years (and one of the few times ever) I felt like I had a direction. A purpose.
One of my former roommates once walked in on me having the “purpose” chat with another friend and yelled, “Purpose?? You’re talking about purpose?? Purpose??!”
He was an over the top character, and he took “over-reaction” to new levels of slapstick, throwing a loaf of bread, and tearing at his beard and hair as we laughed till our stomachs hurt, already sitting on the floor with some long empty beer glasses between us.
At the time, I was thinking about purpose in the cosmic sense, the type of purpose Matt and I used to talk about. The type of purpose where you found a spiritually, physically, socially, and biologically satisfying role in the world and in yourself.
I realize now that I imagined some sort of enlightenment would accompany that. Like, it was tied to some monumental decision, “Eat Pray Love” style, that would shake you to your core and reveal your future to you, the path, and your enriched life, rolling out in front of you.
Now I realize that feeling, of satisfaction in all those areas, doesn’t come from one large decision, but many small decisions, tied to work, to play, to the people you surround yourself with, and more importantly, that you dedicate yourself to. Purpose doesn’t come from finding the one thing you were meant to do, but from finding the several things, a dozen, hundreds of things, that give meaning to what you do in the first place.
As Matt and I finished our drinks, I felt the same thing I felt after a great meeting about a new project, or after riding around in my new car with Lizzy for an hour, or from taking 90 minutes to write a rambly blog post.
Satisfaction. The feeling that whatever direction I’m heading is the right way to go, but more importantly where I am now is where I am meant to be.
After everything I experienced the last few years, I’m happy to be here too.