My Look Back at 2013

 I said (on Friday) that my post for Sunday would be a surprise. This was partly because I wasn’t sure what to write at the time (thus, a surprise to myself as well). But I decided to do a top ten list (last one for the year) on the top lessons learned and events of 2013. This is more of a personal nature, but given that this started as a personal blog for me to discuss problems with people (which never came to fruition) I felt it was the best way to close the year. It was either that or put together a massive orgy… but that would require more cleaning up than I’d like.

Rather than go for a traditional list format, I’m going to make this more of a narrative/essay style piece. If you want organization on how I’m summing up my personal shenanigans of 2013, I suppose skip to the end and they’ll be a simplified list there or a picture of a dog in a hat.

2013 was a strange year in a lot of ways for me. A lot of new things happened, a mixture of things I was both prepared and unprepared for all at once. It was the year I learned a lot about myself, the world around me, the people I share bonds with, and, most importantly, myself… repeated for emphasis and comedic effect. On top of that, this year started out incredibly rocky and unstable, which is what pushed me into making this online column to share my thoughts and feelings with people on a wide variety of topics… usually narrowed down to games and film while occasionally stepping out of that comfortable shell to unintentionally offend some new group of people on a weekly basis. And now it’s ending with many wonderful things happening all at once. I’m not sure where to begin. 

Let’s start with something that has always been a large factor of my life, school. I don’t like school. I don’t like the structure. I don’t like the low quality of education you get from most institutions (thanks, No Child Left Behind… and Obama for other things). I don’t like the expense put into big universities that may provide you with the necessary tools needed to move into a professional career. And I don’t like that because after five years of college, I don’t feel like I really gained anything from it.

Sure, I have a diploma which looks good for a job, but that’s really it. I didn’t learn anything to advance my career in any meaningful way. I didn’t enrich myself with better knowledge or skills in areas I need or want. There might have been a handful classes in the THOUSANDS of dollars spent on my education that were actually worth something, but most of it was useless rubbish I either forgot because it wasn’t actually relevant or never actually bothered to learn because it wasn’t interesting or (again) relevant. Looking back on my college career, there are many different choices I would have made to make my college experience more beneficial, but there’s nothing that can really be done now unless I want to dig a deeper hole of debt with more loans. 

The lesson, which parents will likely argue with, is that college ISN’T worth it. At least not the big universities unless you get a scholarship or it’s on someone else’s dime (without interest of course). If you have a specific career in mind, go to a technical school for it. If there isn’t one, go to a community college for general education and then take classes on subjects YOU actually have an interest in and maybe those will benefit you in ways no big budget university could possible hope to. And college isn’t for everybody. If you really have no interest in bettering yourself and just want to work, go for it. But don’t feed big colleges money simply because its name will improve your resume or offer you a better network or because you want to party. There are cheaper and more efficient alternatives for your education.

Moving on to another facet of how my life is changing, my job. For years I’ve been in [insert Midwestern grocery chain here] for damn near SEVEN years. That’s almost a third of my life. For years, unless I asked off for family events or the birthdays of close friends, I worked every weekend. I got up at ridiculously early hours at times for the sake of shoveling greasy food into the gullets of old and/or fat people on an average of four days a week. While not the worst job, it depresses the fuck out of me that I spent as much time there as I did when it is not related to any of my passions in the slightest. 

This was the year we stopped working on our YouTube channel for a variety of reasons and it was something I was hoping to transition into a job or at least an alternative source of income to either cyclically fund that hobby I enjoy OR (if I was lucky) to cover expenses in other areas. I never expected it to be something I could do full time, but something fun to do to earn a little extra spending money. I want to try that again in 2014. I have people willing to start up again. We have bold new ideas going into 2014 and I think it’d be worth the effort.

On top of that, I’m finally getting my first new job since joining [Midwestern grocery chain] all those years ago at a place called TransAmerica. I know fuck all about it or what I’m going to do beyond that it has to do with insurance and my positions is a “Claims Coordinator.” It’s not what I ultimately want to do. I want to write. I want to entertain. I want to produce creative content for people to enjoy. But it’s a step away from a dead end job that was, ultimately, unsatisfying and towards (hopefully) better opportunities. It’s not RoosterTeeth, but it’s a start. And that’s enough to at least keep me going for the time being. 

Speaking of RoosterTeeth, this was also the first year at a big convention. I got to meet people I look up to as celebrities and people I aspire to be like because of all the good they do for gaming, the internet, and for millions of people around the world. I got to go on a trip with close friends to places I’ve never been and I haven’t been on a vacation like that in years because of school, work, and a lack of funds to really do it. It was refreshing and I loved every minute of it (even those agonizingly long hours of waiting in line). I don’t care how I’ll do it or who I can get to go with me, but I WILL be going to 2014’s RTX because I want to try and go every year. They (especially Red Vs. Blue) have been a big part of my life, as you’ll see near the end, and the work they do really means a lot to me, even if I’m not yet involved in any of it myself. But it’s my goal and dream to be a part of what they do (even in a small capacity) because that’s how much they mean to me.

This brings me to my family and here is a place where I don’t know where to begin. I could start with the deteriorating health of several people in the family. My grandfather who lost his toes to diabetes. My other grandfather who has a slew of health issues from similar causes and more. My uncle who suffered multiple strokes, barely survived pneumonia, and lives with an idiot of a wife who (from my observation) treats him like shit and a son who barely registers his existence. I’ll leave names off so as not to embarrass or humiliate anyone they know who they are and how they got into the situations they’re in. 

I’m not trying to publicly shame them, but to point out how much of an eye opener this has all been to me. I might be only 23, but my waistline has expanded quite a bit since high school and seeing people so closely related to me (with health problems I’ve likely inherited too) it’s a sign I need to start putting my own personal health as a higher priority (or at least make a better effort of it). If not for making sure I can do my job or enjoy my hobbies without interruption, to be able to spend as much time with the people I love and care about most. I’d hate to leave those people at an early age because I didn’t heed such warnings.

This brings me to my brother, Ian Waseskuk. I’ve publically shamed him for his recent actions. I’ve warned everyone about not involving themselves in his misdoings. And I shall, once more, call him out now for the coward he is. He ran away from the hard work and effort it takes to clean himself up, stay on a straight path to being a functioning member of society, and being with people who genuinely care about him. He gave into fear and ran away like the spineless coward he is to people who only claim to care about him, when all they do is make his life worse by giving him the means to feed his brain-altering addictions and putting him into more trouble that will only increase his jail time the longer he evades the law. 

If you’re listening, Ian, turn yourself in now and you can make this easier on yourself. Don’t be the fool you believe yourself to be and be the adult you should be striving to be. The people you’re with now… Did they visit you in the hospital when you nearly died from that accident from the drugs they gave you? Did they attend meetings at SAFE to see you or at least know what you’re going through? Did they cart you around to probation hearings? Did they clean out your house? Did they do ANYTHING for you beyond give you drugs and a place to hide from the cops? How are they truly your friends when they aren’t putting any work into that friendship and only use you and manipulate you? I ask, one last time, stop being an idiot and a coward. Leave them, turn yourself in, and end this childish behavior once and for all. The family is waiting for you to come to your senses and be with us again, but we’re done coming to your aid. Because we have better things to do than to follow an idiot who will end up in an early grave because of the horrid company he chooses to keep instead.

I guess this leaves me with one more facet of my life I have yet to cover before I wrap up, and that’s the love life (God, 2013 was rough in a lot of ways). I won’t bother using fake names here like I’ve done in the past because what’s past is past. Plus I don’t want to try and remember all the names I’ve made up and who they belong to.

Coming off of 2012 was a disappointment as 2012 was ended with a failed attempted at a relationship that looked like it would be good when the attempting first started. It left me in a vulnerable, pathetic, and possibly even desperate state going into 2013. I’m not proud of that in the slightest, but I feel I’ve come a long way since then and I’m willing to talk about it (to some capacity). It’s no longer an issue and I harbor no ill feelings towards anyone about that failed attempt. 

But the New Year was brought in, in the most insane way possible (in both a good and bad sense). Enter Kaylen. This relationship was certainly not my worst (in some regards) but certainly not my best. Physically, let’s just be polite and say I gained more experience here than in any other relationship prior, which I suppose you could say is good, but I’d argue that’s all I got and that’s not so good. Because mentally I think it fucked me up a bit for a while. After all, she left me for someone else and then went back and forth between us for a while and it certainly damaged by ability to trust people for a while. 

But I don’t want to make everything I say negative because I feel like every experience, even the most shit experiences imaginable, are something to learn from and use for bettering one’s self. And, on top of that, I’m also the kind of person who doesn’t like to hold grudges unless we’re talking about someone murdering a hypothetical child of mine or erasing all my Pokemon save games because they wanted to make me suffer. And it’s not like she did everything to go out of her way to make me feel like shit. Like me, she wasn’t sure what she wanted. I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

This then led straight into the event we’ll just call the “Return of Kat” in which I reached out to an ex of mine in hopes of reconnecting as friends and having someone to talk to and I picked her because I remember how easy it was to talk to her and how comfortable I felt being around her. My only issue is I don’t know if it is that my memory is so fuzzy that it could make Hitler look like Ned Flanders or if she changed so much that it’s like she had a personality swap. 

When we tried to get back together, it started off fine, but she would get angry or annoyed over the slightest thing. There was no pleasing her, no matter what I did. And it didn’t help that I wasn’t mentally all there after what had happened with Kaylen. In short, this was a series of mistakes that didn’t need to have happened. As a result, I lost a potentially great friend because of a LOT of miscommunication and I wish that didn’t have to happen. It was at this point I listened to the song Calamity by Miracle of Sound and rewatched the latest season of Red Vs. Blue (10 at that point) and took their messages to heart about moving on from the past and going on to something new. As Church said, I spent so much time chasing ghosts and missing out on the world around me. And that’s basically what happened. 

Fast-forward a few months and that brings us to May (or June… I don’t remember, but all I remember is that it was hot out). After several exchanges of messages and the desire to try again after such horrible failures, I meet Erin. I don’t want to spend too much time here because the last thing I want to do is embarrass her with too much praise or inadvertently say something stupid. But deciding to move on and to use those failures as things to teach me where to go instead of fixating on them and refusing to let go was the best decision I’ve ever made. It’s because of her (any many other things listed above… and some things I didn’t really get time to mention) that 2013 is ending on the highest note possible. I haven’t been as happy as I’ve been right now. 

2013, overall, was a year of change for me. It’s not all good change, of course. But between the end of school, the changing of careers, the fact I won’t be alone going into 2014 certainly helps show that I’ve come a long way in only a year’s time. Here’s to a great year and to bringing in 2014 the best way possible. I hope you guys are having a good year as well. See ya next time.