The SamuraiMarine

30 Years and aging…

On August 18, 2016

Next month, on the 10th of September, I will attend my 30th high school reunion.

Is this important? No, in the long term scheme of things, it is no more important than if you remembered to floss or flush the toilet. But to me and to the people that will be there, it is important.

To me, it is important because it will serve as a reminder of who I was in school and who I have become. It also marks a point where I can look at what I had to say about my last reunion, which I also wrote about here. in a post called “A stirring of Memories” and see what, if any, changes appear between the two experiences.

I am not sure what I expect… I know there are going to be people there that I still do not care for, and some that I may still have some feelings for. I know that I am going to be forced to do something that I am not ready for… and that is to dance.

I dance in a manner similar to a disabled zebra running from a pack of rabid hyenas. It is not well done, is not pretty and will probably go badly and poorly for all involved. So I expect to see Meme’s on Facebook for years to come shortly after the event.

There are so many reasons that people go to these things, I would have to say that my main reason for wanting to go is that I am making an effort to open up. Having lived a good portion of my life hiding from others, this is something I am hoping to use as a catalyst to start building friendships again.

In looking at it, I can see that it has already started working out for me, as I am now talking with some people that I have not seen in years and we have become very close. I in one case, there is a person I am talking to that I have known since third grade, or thereabouts.

So… While I am not holding out any undue hope, I am anxious to see if this is going to be me turning a new chapter in my life and bettering who I am.

We shall see…

And as with the last time… I will be posting pictures here of the event. Even the potentially embarrassing dance fiasco, if it happens.

A turn away from the darker me…

By Samuel Wright

On August 1, 2016

In ...In the news!, Blogging

I was told recently that some of my posts here have been a little on the darker side. That while my messages may be positive, that the lead up to the good side of the message was a little dark.

I went through and looked at it and I do have to agree. But in my defense, I have been going through a pretty dark time. Anyone that reads this blog and either knows me from work or know about what happened, will know that I have been through a pretty fucked up period as a result of something that happened there.

I cannot and will not go into the details, so do not ask me, but suffice it to say that my trust in people has been damaged irreparably.

So that being said, I am going to start going back to some of the good thing I used to post here.

Chasing that which we cannot have…

By Samuel Wright

On June 6, 2016

In I Remember..., Philosophy

Why does it seem that we seem prone to look for what we know we can never have or that which has no chance of being ours?

This is more than a rhetorical question, but something that I have been thinking about for some time, especially the last year or so. Which may also be part of the reason that I have been remiss in my duties as your host with this site.

This last year has been filled with major trials in my life. Betrayals, hurts, heartbreaks and heartaches. Some of the problems I have been dealing with are still not gone and may plague me for years to come, but the fact that I have made it through the last year without major complications stands as a testament to my being a little stronger than I thought I was.

There is a lot I wish I could undo about the last eighteen months. So many things that I wish that I had had a little more hindsight on and practiced a little more wisdom on. Things that, looking at them now, should have been so obvious to me at the time, however I failed to see the potential for problems because I was not looking at them from a point of logic, just of emotional gratification.

I was chasing something that was unattainable or unreachable… uncatchable, you might say. I was chasing a part of my youth that I had let go and was trying desperately to live it out anew by surrounding myself with younger people with whom I thought I had created friendships.

I would like to think that I am not alone in these things… that somewhere out there there are others that have been as foolhardy as I was, fellow fools that let their emotional attachments to others and to a time that they missed out on, lead them down a path that would, might and could very possibly create more problems than they had realized.

I would like to say that I have learned my lessons, that I am going out of this last period of time wiser and smarter… but who knows? Do we ever truly learn our lessons?

One might never know…

Holding on to the happiness

By Samuel Wright

On March 7, 2016

In Philosophy

One of the hardest things for me to deal with in life is that so much in life is transitory. It like often misunderstood or misinterpreted First Nobel Truth says, “Life is Suffering.” Some people read this and assume that it means that we are supposed to feel pain, sorrow and suffering in order to live. But it really means that we have to understand and accept that as part of our lives we will experience pain, loss, suffering and other things which will cause us to hurt.

This is especially true of people and occasions. We have become a people that live from moment to moment, looking for the beauty of the moment and not of the entire picture that is presented to us. We go to a party, have a great time, then feel sad when it is over and spend our time trying to find ways to relive the fun of that moment in our time. While we are doing this we are missing out on all the other moments and experienced that fill the gaps between.

In the end, we find ourselves at the end of our lives with nothing but regrets and lost moments, while the rest of the world has kept moving around us, kept growing, kept living. We find that others have created new stories and experiences, while the others are left to wallow in the mire of the past. Even if the experiences that they are reliving were fun or inspirational, they are still in the past and the events static, immovable in time. They are wonderful for reference, but to dwell on them is a waste of life and energy.

So what can we do or what should we do?

This IS the question, isn’t it? On one hand we want those memories to be a part of our lives and to occasionally walk down memory lane to revisit them, but it is another thing entirely to live there. So we need to remember that those memories are part of what made us who we are. The bad and the good, each is a catalyst that is instrumental in guiding our lives through this turbulent stream of time that is life.

We hold onto the memories that make us happy and keep that for the days when you need them, but do not try to remake them or relive them. You will almost always be disappointed by what you find when you try, because you may no longer be the same person you were at that time. So often we find that we never are, time and experiences change us, reassign priorities, correct some of the wrongs in our lives and make us different people. Rarely are we the same people now that we were ten or twenty years prior.

So we take those memories and hold onto them… make them part of who we are and move on. Every tear, every smile, laugh, hurt, loss… they all are part of the larger equation that makes up who we are and, inevitably, where we are going.

Thank you for your readership.

Traveling

By Deborah Razzner

On January 25, 2016

In ...In the news!, ...On Writing.

Since I will be moving soon, I thought I would write a piece about traveling and writing.

Just to be clear, this is Debs that will be moving, not your illustrious host, so that way you should not be sending Samuel any emails asking when he is moving.

have traveled a lot through my young life, I will not mention how many years that will be here very soon, but it has been a lot and in that time I have learned a lot about the lifestyle. It is not a lifestyle for everyone and many cannot handle it. I know that even I, raised in a military family and then a roving soul myself, have started to grow weary of not having a place to call my permanent home.

As I get ready to pick up sticks and move to Ft. Lauderdale, I am thinking that I would like for this to be my last move. I find myself with a person that I might like to settle down with and to a city, so I am told, is great for raising a family. I find myself looking back at all I have seen and all I have done and feel empty.

It is not because I do not like all that I have seen and done. I have enjoyed life and shared my tales with many through my writing. But most of the time it has been through the voices of other names. Like the one I am using now, I have never been myself when I share these tales. So you might say that I have been living other lives and other voices.

The chance I am being given will allow me to tell my stories and experiences through my own voice and with my real identity. Unfortunately I will not be sharing that name here, so do not ask. It will be a writing position where I will have a desk for the first time in my life that is not in my own house. I will have people wandering aimlessly around me with that same blank, lost expression that people tend to get when they are in a cubicle farm.

I am not belittling the new role I will have, in fact the feeling of having an office or cubicle is so rereshing to me that it is exciting. I will have a new, refreshing, level of monotony in my life, a regularity that I have not had before. I will not have to always search for something to write about, many times it will be handed to me.

I will miss writing things like this, and who knows… Maybe I will hand a story to Samuel from time to time and have him post it. We shall see.

I have two more articles in my commitment to this site and I am going to make them good for you guys. But I would like to, before I forget, thank Samuel for letting me be apart of this and best wishes to Rian, his other writer.

Aging and looking back

By Samuel Wright

On November 25, 2015

In Philosophy

As I approach the big “Five-Oh”, I find that I am more reticent to talk to others about my experiences and the things I have learned along this path that is life.

Thankfully, some of the people that I have around me that are younger than I either appear to be somewhat interested in what I have to say to them, or are very good about feigning interest and putting up with me, so as to prevent, or hope to prevent, me from doing like others do when then reach my age and started repeating the same stories.

But in talking about the past, I find it easier to deal with some of the things I feel are coming up in my future. I also find myself realizing all the mistakes I have made in the past and how, one way or another, they seem to have had an affect on my person now and who I have become.

In my lifetime I have done some truly inspirational things. Most of these did not seem that way at the time and rarely were they anything that had any benefit to me, but the fact that I did them at all helped others and impacted others lives. Likewise I know that I have done many despicable things. Some of these were done in ignorance and others as acts of malice with the sole intent of harming another person or people.

But both the good and the bad made me who I am now

, and as such I wonder if any of those things were changed… would I still be the same person I am today?

Am I a good person? People tell me I am, mostly people that I love and I assume love me. I do not look at myself and say, “Sam, you are a good person.” That has never been the type of person that I am.

I will leave it for those that come after me to decide if I was a good person or not. I think that it shows a level of conceit for a person to profess themselves to be good. I think that the true measure of how good you are is based on the hearts and lives you have touched. The memories we leave behind are the ultimate proof of how good we are in life.

Thanks for your readership.

Dealing with hatred…

By Samuel Wright

On October 21, 2015

In Health and Hygene, Philosophy

How do you deal with hatred?

I have an issue in my life where, for the past few months my hatred for what a person has done to me has consumed me. I cannot say that I hate the person, I am certain that in their mind their actions were, in some juvenile way, appropriate.

The sad part, in my book, is that this experience has set me back several years in personal development. It is not easy for me to open up and make friends, it never has been. I have always been too critical of people, always expecting them to screw me in some way, shape or form. I know this is a protective measure that has, over the years, become a neurosis and a personality flaw, it is has protected me. In a manner of thinking, there is now a little voice in my head saying, “See… we told you so…”

But hatred… that is an emotion I do not like to feel and it drains me… grates on my being… pulls me down. Hatred, for me, has always been a trigger for depression. When I feel it, it consumes me so that I end up not practicing my routines that keep me from feeling down and out. I have never really been GOOD about handling hatred.

My first response is to lash out at people, if possible the person that triggered it. That not being an option here and actually not being a logical or smart way to handle it, the next option would be to talk it out with the person in question… that, too, is not an option given the circumstances.

So what do you do when there is not outlet, no solace, no way to clear the air? (No… seriously, it’s a real question… not rhetoric.)

I know that we all hate from time to time. We all have things which we are exposed to that cause us pain, frustration, hatred, disappointment, etc… Things that make us want to lash out, to cry, to scream, to want just go sit in a dark room for a few years.

So… tell me your stories… or examples and if you have something that you would like to share that you think is a magic bullet for such things, do share.

SamuraiMarine Blog celebrates it’s 10th Anniversary.

By Samuel Wright

On September 17, 2015

In Uncategorized

The SamuraiMarine Blog is ten years old today.

Ten years ago today, I started the SamuraiMarine Blog on the Google Blogging system and hoped for the best. That was September 7th, 2005.

Letting go…

By Samuel Wright

On September 2, 2015

In Personal Notes, Philosophy

“Forgive Punish Signpost Means Forgiveness Or Punishment” by Stuart Miles @ FreeDigitalPhotos.Net

Why do we hang onto things emotionally? It would be nice to say that I am the only one that does this, so think that somehow I am the strange one and am the exception, not the rule. But I know I am not.

There is so much baggage that we carry with us through our life. Most of it is small things, like the embarrassing moments that we experience that causes us to feel stupid, or the times we lose our temper at the wrong time and make a spectacle of ourselves.

Understanding that we cannot go back through time and take it back, understanding that there is nothing we can do about it once it has been done, we should be able to take the lesson learned from whatever happened and move on, eventually accepting what what we did was dumb, embarrassing, painful, libalous, etc…

So I would like to ask, in this short piece, what do you do to get over it?

If you are one of those, like me, that does not get over it, or not easily anyway, how do you deal with the mental baggage that you collect through your life?

Thanks for reading.

An open letter to parents…

By Rian Cobb

On August 4, 2015

In Ask Rian, Education, Financial, Observations

An open ended letter from teenagers to parents.

Speaking as a teenager these are some things that I believe all teenagers want their parents to know, however they have no clue how to tell them. I, myself, am a 17 year old woman, and about to begin my senior year of high school.

That being said here some things kids my age want you to know.

1. We do think about college. And yes, we know how important it is for us to go college (and a good one).

We are scared about it. Nothing is as scary as the unpredictable future. Looking at colleges is scary, you’re going to be sent to someplace where you know maybe one person, and that’s if your lucky. We will be in a new town, maybe even an entirely different state. This is the first step to becoming an adult; maybe not legally, but mentally. Our first step to becoming independent. And you think you’re the scared?

2. When you give us advice, we actually do listen. There is a very good chance we don’t understand it and might think that you’re full of it, but we still hear what you say.

This advice is important because we will know it when we need it. So even if we roll our eyes at you, NEVER stop giving us advice. We are young and have no idea what life is going to throw at us, help us be ready to catch whatever we get pitched.

3. Senior year is going to be an emotional time for us…

Everything we do this year is the last time we will get to do it during our high school years. That is a scary thought. We have had certainty for the last 3 years and now there is this big mystery box in front of us. And we have no idea what we should do with it.

4. This is our decision. Its for us to decide please don’t push us to do something we don’t want.

This is a note for the parents who think their kid is making the wrong choice. We don’t even know what we want, but we are going to make the best choice for US. Not for you, not for my favorite aunt, not for the best English teacher in the world. For ME. You might think our choice is stupid, but it’s our choice to make, so let us make it. Even if we do mess it up it’s something we can learn from.

5. Even though we wish you could, you can’t protect us or bail us out all the time now.

There will be times when we need your help, but you can’t let us run to you every time something bad happens. You have to let us learn to do things on our own.

“Smooth seas do not good sailors make”

6. Last but not least, We love you.

We are crabby ass teenagers who have a funny way of showing you that we care but never doubt for a second that we don’t love you. We will fight in the future as we have in the past but never once doubt us. We can always count on you to give advice the best you can.

So to the parents thank you for putting up with boring high school sporting events, award ceremonies, choir and band concerts, baking crazy amount of cookies at the last minute, teacher conferences, and for the funding to go on crazy school trips. It didn’t go unnoticed like you might think. So please be easy with us this last, senior, year, cause it’s hard for us too.