Innocence vs Ignorance

And this is the answer to the question.

It’s innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn’t.

Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Noteboo

TED Talks:: East v West.

Don’t be like those judgmental assholes in the comments.

Fighting dreamers!

More than anything, this entire week has been a melee of midterms and essays and trying to cope with my deepest darkest demons, not that those are any indication that I am mentally unstable and unfit to function in this already dysfunctional world, but it’s certainly indication for so much more self reflection and self-improvement, right?

Not to sound completely corny, sometimes I feel like we already know how to live the good life, that we feel we know how to live—I mean, how could you not with all those Hallmark cards reminding you every now and then?—but at the same time, but sometimes we need a little reminder in our lives to jog our memory.  Sometimes we get so caught up in school and academics and our careers, that we forget that the people we past by everyday, the people we interact and talk to, are human beings, too.

My friend told me how in his chem lab, the competition was so fierce that this girl refused to help him with his experiment, to which he threatened to pour acid on her face.

So a little reminder to myself, and maybe to you, because I know I certainly need it.  Really, I don’t ever want to grow up into a person I’d dread becoming, those scrouges stuck in a tiny office space sucking up the fun in life.  Don’t forget compassion, don’t forget to treat other people like they’re actually people instead of bitches who’ll ruin the curve.

“When you go to college, remember to be more compassionate.  You don’t ever want to be less.  So if you ever think that you’re getting too caught up in things, do something crazy.  Party, drink.  I know I’m not suppose to tell you this, but do something to break that cycle; don’t forget to be a person.”

Arms bent over a wooden table and watching my friend across the table stuff his face with a chicken burrito, I was reminded of something I felt like I forgot in a very long time: Don’t forget to be a person.

You aren’t suppose to contain life in soundbites, but I think you can make an exception for this one.  Sometimes the greatest thing you can have is faith, not faith in God or Jesus or a political ideal, but in humanity.  Sometimes you just have to have faith that people can be something more.  And with that, have compassion.

Because…seriously.  Being an evil, twisted, and fucking nasty loser does fucking suck.

OGMFREUDIANSEXSHIT

Psyche midterm tomorrow.  I don’t know if I can handle cramming another symptom for anxiety disorders or depression or somatoform or FUCK THIS SHIT. D:

I spent the last half of my study session reading on why I have penis envy and can’t move past the phallic stage, because Freud says I wanna sex my dad.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

So yeah.

On an interesting note, my psyche teacher said that natural drugs aren’t so bad for you, and that marijuana > tobacco if you take miniscule amounts occasionally.

But NEVER do cocaine or heroine.

How I shower

Darting my eyes back and forth, I drew a quick breath and closed the door.  Lips murmuring, breath quickening, and heart racing, I impatiently double clicked on the song I wanted. Yes! This is it.

While the music filled the room with the soothing amalgamation of guitars, drums and voices, I unbuttoned my pants and pulled the zipper down, hips unknowingly swaying to the beat of the song.  My jeans fell in a heap onto the floor, and I kicked them to the corner.  I held my hands over my head, closed my eyes, and danced slowly to the sound of his urgent voice.  My heart pounded against my chest, and I gradually unbuttoned my shirt, one button at a time.  As my hands hovered over the last button, a sound outside drew my attention; I forgot why I was there in the first place.  After walking to the bathroom sink, just as I poured a capful of Listerine in my mouth…

BAM.  The door swung opened.

“PILLOW FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!!!!”

By now, the Listerine in my mouth ended up in my stomach and on the mirror.

My brother and cousin tumbled on each other, trying to smash the other’s faces in with over-sized purple pillows.

“WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU DOING?!” I cried out.  I sprinted to the closet, trying to put on some pants.

“LET’S HIT HER.  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”

They noticed. “WHY AREN’T YOU WEARING CLOTHES?”

My dad walks by and tells them to use different pillows if they wanted to maul each other to death.

Well, there’s my story.  So much for a shower.  I just love my family.

There’s nothing wrong with me

I haven’t failed a test…yet.

I haven’t cried.

I haven’t experienced anything remarkably life-changing and challenging.

Yet I feel an incessant and subtle sadness; underneath this undulating layer of sedimented joy and anger and attitude, a thin foundation wavers and suffocates under the unbearable weight of all this active aggression.

I have all these questions that I know, that if it were anyone else, I’d scoff at if he would ever ask.

There’s not a specific, particularly defining moment that I’ve come to this confusing, morbid, and distressingly blank point in my life; throughout this entire week, when I’m alone and not talking to anyone, when I’m thinking about what ever fleetingly passes through my mind, when I’m entertaining other people’s thoughts, and most of all when I peruse “the meaning of life” and all that good shit in books and talks and chats…I’m left with this deafening silence.

What the FUCK am I doing?

Some things aren’t as satisfying as I allow myself to think them to be.  Some things don’t make me as happy.  Some things are utterly pointless.  Go ahead.  Laugh.  It’s quite laughable, actually, when you think about the very clear-cut reasons why you do things, why you get into things, why you dedicate yourself to things, and why you toil and sweat for something…when you don’t even really know what it is you’re working for, or why the fuck you’re doing it.  Think about it.  Think very deeply and profoundly for a moment, no matter how ludicrous this seems.  Why are you doing the things you’re doing? Why do you keep going at it?

As I sit here with my feet turning an ugly purple color [why are dorms so cheap with heating?], I’ve found myself at two distinct crossroads.  Is there some truth, some profound depth to my life, to my relationships I’ve carved in these few years, in all the books I read and platitudes I desperately try to live by?  Or is this some sick and twisted quasi-Matrix type shit where I, very happily and blissfully, pretend that I am happy, that my life is meaningful, that what I do is actually meaningful?

There are two theories to personality—psychodynamism and humanist theory.  The former supposes that all our conscious thoughts are manifestations of our unconscious thoughts, whether we repress them or not, or try to defend ourselves against them; either way, the conscious lies and tries—so earnestly—to live by the superego, to live by ideals, and to live by standards imposed on it by a larger society; it is only through actions, behaviors, and obviously how we try to irrationally rationalize our way out of everything, that the unconscious is expressed. The humanist is a lot more light-hearted; it says that “becoming who we are” depends on our own ability to consciously think about concepts and ideas.  I wonder which one is correct?

I swear, by the end of …some time…I’ll read this again and metaphorically slap myself in the face for thinking about something so useless and depressing. “Don’t give me that emo shit!” it sneers.

Of course, all this “emo shit” I’m liberally sprouting out on could be underlying a deeper cause my consciousness tries to expel.

Fuck, I don’t know.  Maybe cramming for my psyche class, in which the professor so enthusiastically focuses on mental disorders and things that fuck us over, isn’t doing my mind a huge favor after all.

God, please give me an inflatable dummy so I can talk to it and abuse however much the fuck I want…and it still can’t say anything.  Some things are just too dangerous and evil to say, and I don’t want to come off as a bitch.

Damn, I’ve realized that I’ve cursed the most in this rambling post, not the angry-try-to-squeeze-all-curse-words-out type of cursing but the legit I-feel-whacked-out-and-this-is-my-natural-speech type of cursing.

And this was such a magnificent week, too.

Intense motivation.

Read.

In case the first one didn’t work.

But in any case…

READ THAT MOTHER FUCKING BOOK.

Man,

I sound like a man.

My voice goes baritone and I sound like…the Godfather.

Off to do homework.  What a fantastic way to celebrate Veteran’s Day.

Is it really clarity?

Debating whether or not to dump my midterm studying for another pseudo-insightful post to add to my collection, procrastination finally conquered what meager determination I had ever salvaged.  Sadly, it’s all true; it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks.

As much as I would love this to be another rant on why procrastination ass fucked me over, I’ve decided to write about what has been incessantly and persistantly tagging along with me: Christianity.  And on another almost unrelated note, do you ever find it awkward to talk about God?  My roommate asserts this regardless, but I just find it awkward when I’m actually talking to, well, a Christian.

So we were learning about Jesus Christ, and how he says that he’s God, how he can forgive us for our sins, how he’s like, this totally amazing, compassionate, kickass, charming Terminator type of guy.  And you know, God’s love is s obeautiful and all encompassing and all.  It’s so obvious that he works in our lives, and everything eventually turns out for the best.  And you know, there was this story about how this woman got molar cancer, but then a couple months later, she’s pragnant again!  Gosh, I can just tear up at that—God really works miracles in our lives…if we don’t focus on the negatives.

But it’s hard to do that in this day and age, isn’t it?  Sure, society’s emphasis on success and happiness, and a floundered moral obligation to fulfill our happiness and achieve world peace makes it difficult to not focus on all the ugliness already in the world.

Putting that snarkology on rewind, while I was talking to my Christian teachers, I could, if only for a moment, see why Christianity was so appealing to people.  If only for a moment, it seemed ver yclear to me, why anyone would want absolute acceptance, absolute safety, absolute morality, and an everlasting life.  It’s all very enticing, this idea of someone who accepts you for who you are, who exacts justice and mercy, whose laws ultimately prevail, but most importantly, whose love for you exceeds all other kinds of love.  His love is eternal, everlasting, and sacrificial.  My God, that story about the baby.  God must exist.  He works miracles in our lives.  With that, I just looked at my teacher’s teary faces and became enthralled.  Could I get this kind of security, this kind of unconditional love, this kind of hope, too?  For most of the night I wondered over this, marveled over this.

This seemed so real, so true, so achievable—this happiness.

Was this a moment of clarity, or was a moment of temptation?  I hesitate to name it either.

If it was a moment of clarity, as in I truly believed in Christ and this moment was suppose to be my Archimedes jumping out of the shower naked and shouting “Eureka!”, then it has long since passed.  Whatever it was, I can’t help but wonder, who is God to forgive everyone of their sins?  If he has never been raped, been murdered, been forced to be witness to such terrible things, then how can he forgive those who have perpetrated these crimes?  Even if we were to assume that we are his children and that he feels things more keenly than us, is that to say this his forgiveness diminishes our own?  If the killer, rapist, or terrorist suddenly fell to his knees and repented in the name of the Lord, my sister still won’t be healed from rape, my family won’t come back from the dead, and those who were tortured or endured deliberated anguish won’t be alleviated of their suffering.  What kind of comfort is that?

And somewhere along that tense conversation segway’d into “The Problem of Evil.”  That shit deserves whole fucking encyclopedias.  I think, more than anything else, that this is the crux of the problem with Christianity.  If God was so benevolent, so loving, so compassionate, why is there such massive amounts of evil in this world?  There’s no denying it; the world as we know it today, is so full of suck.  And I’m not even looking at the negatives.  Sure, people say that you need a bad thing to feel the true extent of the good thing, but do you really need a massacre, or unjustifiable murder, or cancer, or AIDs, or holocaust, or whatever evil comes our way?  Can’t God make a world where the worst evil wasn’t as bas as the lowest evil right now?  Maybe his standards are kind of low considering we suck so much. D:

But then again, if there should be a God, I kind of want it to be someone you can sit on a park bench and just have an epistemological chat with.

Taylor Swift

Normally I’d hate her, and by hate meaning a biased and unfairly judgemental hatred that only stems from her being so naturally tall, blonde, beautiful, and a grudgingly decent singer.  Despite this deep-seated hatred against women who think they can sing but can’t, I have to admit, driving down Silver Creek and San Felipe with the windows rolled down and Taylor Swift deafeningly blasting out of the stereo system while singing—rather amazingly I might add—with a bunch of assuredly masculine guys…is definitely one of the most memorable parts of my day.

I can almost sense the hostility from wangters and old people glaring at us through their tinted windows. Don’t be jealous I have just great friends.

Well, I came home yesterday, and didn’t much except talk to people via webcam.

I always look forward to Saturday.  Always.  And today was no exception.  After the usual of lunch and eating or whatever, we went to watch A Christmas Carol, by Walk Disney.  Here’s another one of those movies by Disney where you wouldn’t want to take your kids.  Do you want a movie experience similar to Christmas Carol?  Take them to watch Paranormal Activity instead.  I’m sure there won’t be as much shit to clean from their pants.  The demon has nothing on Father Christmas growing old and laughing hysterically on the ground dying…with two crazy anthropomorphized human fallacies trying to kill/rape.  I got scared…while watching an animated children’s movie.  How sad is that?

On that note, I REALLY WANT TO WATCH TOYSTORY 3.  Buzz is gonna be a Spanish lover.