So I'm trying to be more social in life and make new friends and stuff since I'm going through a midlife crisis and really bored of sitting around thinking up creative activities to do by myself in the evenings/weekends. I need new hobbies and new friends and new passions.
I finally am giving meetup.com a shot. I joined about 20 groups and have fleshed out the next two weeks of my schedule as having some social club event going on every day starting Friday. And they're all with different groups. I also joined a few book clubs including the one at my local library and picked up and started reading the books involved in my free time. I'm mainly doing book clubs, movie clubs, hiking clubs, coffee clubs, things I enjoy in life. I'll see how it goes.
I also applied to community college because I decided I want to go back to college and hone my creative skills. I will try to get into some good night classes in the fall semester to do on the side of work. Will be interesting going back to college 10 years later, kind of nervous about being the OLD MAN, but I don't think it's a big deal. I really want to take some intro acting/theatre classes because I always wanted to try my hand at acting but instead I just took boring classes in college and then law classes in law school.
When I think back about college I feel like a fucking idiot for not appreciating all the COOL SHIT YOU CAN LEARN while there. Instead I was just focused on taking the requirements studying studying studying, spitting it back out on tests, and passing all the classes with good grades to get them done and move on to the next part of education. I feel like I had my eyes closed on what a rich experience learning can be and now my eyes are wide open, so I'm really excited to go back to school.
Also going to try to take some cooking classes/wine tasting classes over the summer just in community education stuff.
I also joined a support group for social anxiety which I think could really help since even though I'm pretty comfortable with who I am at this age, I still get deathly afraid of live communication with strangers and sit in the corner and say nothing at parties or just talk to one person that I know 1 on 1. I'm 30 years old and I've still never walked up to a girl I think is cute and started a conversation. I don't even know if I have SA or I'm just really shy, but hanging out with people who have SA and are doing activities to get over it sounds like it could be the best thing ever for me. I also signed up for one of those toastmasters public speaking classes to help with the same thing.
Basically I'm going to continue with my job full-time and continue to see my small group of close friends when I do, and continue to use the internet and post and reading books, watch movies, play occasional games (although I've been getting really bored of gaming lately and have almost completely abandoned it and anime); but with all the free time I have I'm going to put it towards DOING THINGS with my life because I want to enjoy more things and live more.
Oh and I also started playing the guitar and writing songs again last weekend for the first time in like 15 years. I can play like 4 chords + power chords lol. So I got the number of a guitar teacher from a guy who lives on a boat and I think I'm going to start taking lessons again. Like acting, another thing I have never tried and have no idea if I could be any good at is singing, so I want to write some songs and sing them.
Anyhow, I blame this all on a combination of just having broken up with a girl still recently, sort of crushing on someone else that failed horribly, and watching Before Sunrise/Before Sunset which really made me question what I'm doing with my life. Was time for a change. I'm almost 31!
