The Art of Quitting

I continue to withdraw from life as I used to know it.  I just did something I thought I'd never do; I decided to stop campaigning for high-speed rail to be established in the United States.  It became apparent that, even with an Amtrak advocate like Joe Biden in the White House, the political and societal conditions that exist today make it impossible to bring bullet trains to America.  The infrastructure bill passed and signed into law will help Amtrak upgrade its service and modernize its equipment, but it will not bring our passenger rail into the twenty-first century.  We will have to be satisfied with Amtrak being upgraded to the late 1960s.  So I withdrew my high-speed rail petition from MoveOn.org after getting only 22 signatures in seven years . . . and I withdrew from MoveOn.org. 

And I quit MoveOn.org because I'm giving up on all political causes.  As far as I'm concerned, it's over.  Let the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade.  Let Louis DeJoy remain Postmaster General.  Let school boards ban books.  I don't care any more.  I got sick and tired of all these e-mails from groups asking me to sign a petition for this or writing my senator for that or asking for donations (which I never gave anyway) . . . so I unsubscribed from the e-mail lists of all of the liberal groups and online left-leaning publications that sent them to me.  Especially the snarky Daily Kos.  And after all the ridicule I got for supporting the presidential campaign of Martin O'Malley - who also got a lot of ridicule - why would I want to join another presidential campaign? (Technically, though, I never joined the O'Malley campaign because it didn't make it past Iowa.) 

And this great resignation isn't limited to politics.  I have been a book reviewer both for IndieReader.com and on this blog.  When I lost touch with my editor at IndieReader over the fall and the holidays, I kept putting off sending an e-mail to her until I suddenly realized I didn't have the desire to write book reviews anymore.  Oh, I may go back to that eventually.  But for now, I've had enough.  

I've even given up giving up.  Raised Catholic (but never confirmed), I faithfully gave up something every Lent even after I stopped going to church.  During the 2020 Lenten season, I gave up drinking hot chocolate as my sacrifice but resumed drinking it after three or four weeks because the pandemic made me give up . . . everything else.  I haven't observed Lent since.      

This quitting spree is nothing new for me.  In fact, I've thrown in the towel so many times in my life, I've made an art of it.  Particulars:

I took guitar lessons when I was a teenager. I never could master it. I quit.

I graduated from college and sought to go to graduate school because my parents wanted me to, but I had to pay my own way. After vacillating between journalism and communications, being unable to afford the journalism school of my choice and getting rejected by the communications school of my choice, I decided that I didn't want to go to graduate school any more. I never did want to, really.  I quit.  Years after that, I signed up for a graduate communications course at Fairleigh Dickinson University but withdrew before it even started.

I signed up for a journalism course at Montclair State. After one class, I was unimpressed. I quit.

I signed up for computer programming school at the Chubb Institute and lasted only three classes. I quit. And the school turned out to be a rip-off anyway.

I looked for a career-oriented job out of college even while looking into graduate school. I tried looking at jobs in publishing, broadcasting, and journalism, and I found nothing.  I quit.

I was hoping that a career-oriented job would help me strike out on my own. After a couple of years, it became apparent that that was not going to happen, so I quit.

After getting laid off from my permanent full-time medical insurance job, I tried other permanent full-time jobs that didn't work out. When I got laid off from my last permanent full-time job - after half a day of employment (long story), I stopped looking for a permanent full-time job. I quit.

I once thought I wanted a girlfriend. I never had a high school sweetheart. I never had a college sweetheart. I never found a girl or woman I asked out who wasn't already taken. I fell in love twice, and neither woman loved me back. Going to see a ladyfriend of mine, I drove my car through a flash-flooded road from a severe rainstorm that tore out the plastic undershield of my car. I quit looking for a girlfriend.

I tried writing on spec articles by specializing in profile articles on interesting women, but after getting only a few of them published, going nowhere with others, and never getting paid for them - plus a bad experience with one woman I approached - I quit.

I was a contributing writer for a local newspaper in Manhattan, but after one assignment didn't work out, I quit.

As previously noted, I made numerous attempts over twenty years to travel abroad - first with my mother, then alone - that didn't pan out. I had a chance to go to Paris to see a friend of mine there. Instead I got appendicitis, then when I looked again at the possibility of going to France, COVID hit. I held out hope during the pandemic. Now we have a pandemic plus a war. I quit.

I started seeing a woman and started going bowling again just before COVID hit. I might see this woman again soon - I might - but I have no plans or desire to go bowling again. I quit.

I wanted to say I quit Scouting, but that would be inaccurate.  I moved around a lot as a kid and missed the Bear Cub Scout and Webelos years. Boy Scout meetings were boring and I never paid attention to what was going on, but I did earn a stamp collecting merit badge - which I never received because I moved in with my father, who lived in a different state then, and he apparently couldn't be bothered to help me pick up Scouting where I left off. I never actually quit it, really. I just drifted away from it . . ..

Ahh, that's enough for one post. I quit.