Things that are making my life right now May 2, 2012

Life may be generally kind of a letdown, but I wanted to share with you today some of the things that are helping to assuage the ennui.

1.  Biking.  It’s free to do, it doesn’t hurt the environment, it’s good exercise, you get to be outside, and it’s faster than walking but slower than driving, so you can travel around and see what there is to see without speeding right past it or moving like a snail. Hooray for biking!

2.  Today is the day when ALL OF THE TREES ARE IN BLOOM.  The whole world smells like flowers and it is amazing.

3.  Being caught in a sudden downpour makes instant friends of everyone who’s out there getting drenched and reminds me of my favorite scene in Forrest Gump with Lieutenant Dan on the boat in the storm.

4.  Good books!  I think I’ve picked out my three favorites that I’ve read in the past year: The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, The Language of Trees by Ilie Ruby, and I Knew You’d Be Lovely by Alethea Black (especially “Good in a Crisis” and “Mollusk Makes a Comeback”)—two novels and a short story collection.  They’re all more female-oriented—my apologies to those who prefer manlier literature.  But they are awesome.

5.  “Our Man of Perpetual Sorrow” — a talk/story by Dan Savage on This American Life.  A couple of weeks ago I got fed up with all my music and everything on the radio (which, let’s face it, only comprises about 200 songs anyway) and started listening to NPR like a huge nerd.  So I was pulling into the Wegmans parking lot when this segment came on and Dan Savage was talking about leaving the Catholic church, and I thought, yeah, yeah, it’s going to be one of those things where people just bash religion, but I kept it on because he was an engaging speaker and I wondered if it would piss me off.  Instead it turned out to be the single most amazing thing I’ve ever heard on the radio, and I sat raptly in the parking lot for a good 20 minutes listening to him.  (Apparently this is actually a thing, called a “Driveway Moment.”  Go figure.)  I felt like it really spoke to me.

6.  Whenever the angst starts to encroach, I’ve been listening to Ryan Adams and Adam Duritz.  Duritz is the lead singer of Counting Crows, and Adams is a ridiculously prolific songwriter—I like his songs from Whiskeytown the best.  They’re both way more sad and fucked-up than I am, and they sing about it so nicely too.  (In particular, I would recommend “A Murder of One” by Counting Crows, which I have been seriously digging for the past few weeks, and “The Rescue Blues” by Ryan Adams…  I would describe those as a delicious combination of angst and hope.)  I’m thinking of making a playlist called “Songs for an Existential Crisis.”

I think those are all my recommendations for today.  Hope you enjoy!

Random Thoughts of the Day February 18, 2011

1. It’s been a while since I had one of those moments where I realize I don’t know someone nearly as well as I think I do.  The biggest instance of this that I remember is when I got an AIM account the summer I graduated from high school and discovered my classmates’ LiveJournals.  It was strange to read all of these thoughts and feelings I’d been unaware of in those around me, and it made me feel like I’d been walking around in my own little bubble the whole time.  I think I’m still in a bubble.

2. Have you ever met someone who is so amazing that the knowledge that such a person exists makes you excited to be human again?

3. I am really, really bad at writing emails.  I type it up, then reread it and tear it apart, second-guess everything I say, rephrase it all, decide it’s hopelessly inadequate, and send it anyway, hoping the person will understand what I was trying to convey.  Sometimes I can be weirdly neurotic.

4. I just re-watched Amélie and realized that I can relate to the way she gets caught up in daydreams about meeting her mystery man but is afraid to actually introduce herself, going to ridiculous levels to keep him interested but not too close.  The moment when you actually have to face the viability of your dreams is very scary.  Nothing ever goes as I envision it, but sometimes it turns out okay anyway.

5. We’re having funding problems at work, and there’s some risk of me losing my job after April.  I’m not sure how much risk, but my coworkers have been applying other places.  I’m not seriously worried because things will work out one way or another, but I’ve been entertaining myself by coming up with contingency plans:

• Go back to the call center… actually, I’d rather be broke… actually, I’d rather stick a fork in my eye.  So scratch that.
• Live off a combination of unemployment, random tutoring, crafting, and buying things at thrift stores and selling them on eBay as collectibles.
• Write my first novel.
• Go back to school for something like library science.
• Join a band.
• Become a groupie for some band or other and follow them around the country… not like I have any in mind… ahem.
• Write a letter to the News offering my services as a copy editor for their online articles, because they really need another one.
• Look into other volunteer programs.
• Open a tea shop/used book store/cafe.
• Go on a CouchSurfing tour of the country and possibly write a book about it.
• Become an amateur private investigator like the guy in Bored to Death.

I really need more sleep.

Change, Change, Change (Change, Change?) June 6, 2010

Change #1 – I’m in the market for a new apartment.  I’m looking for a one-bedroom in North Buffalo for $500 or under that includes appliances and a bathtub and has some sort of laundry facilities, to rent starting in July or August.  July would be nice because I’m eager to move out soon, but August would be nice too because I wouldn’t be eating a month’s rent because of the overlap.  I’m also now debating getting a two-bedroom and splitting it because I found out a friend is looking for a new place starting in August or September.  I’ve sort of been looking forward to living alone for the first time—how glorious it would be, to clean up a mess that I’m 100% certain is mine!—but I’m afraid it would get lonely, and I think it could be fun living with her if we could try to work out some of your typical potential roommate problems in advance.

Change #2 – As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m also looking for a new job.  I interviewed at the temp agency AppleOne about a week ago and haven’t heard from them since despite leaving a couple of messages, which is rather disappointing.  More promising is my second interview on Monday for a legal assistant position at a local non-profit.  Wish me luck!

Change #3 – One of my best friends from college just moved away to Texas on Thursday, so that is a bummer, but I hope it works out well for her.  Buffalo is an emptier place now.

Change #4 – My boyfriend and I are not going to have any more fights.  True story.  (I hope.)

Change #5 – I have 10 pages left in my current journal (one-sided), and I’m getting myself psyched up to start a new one.  I want to do a complete format overhaul.  I’ve tried this half-heartedly in past journals and just lapsed into the same old style, but I really want it to work this time.  My writing feels so stale right now, and I’m really tired of it, so I’m going to try to do something drastic to get more life into it.  I’m not even going to decorate it the same way this time.  The plan is to take a composition book and just tape things all over it—tickets and postcards and leaves and anything else from my life that can feasibly be taped to a book.  Then I want the writing to be less structured.  I want to kind of throw format out the window and write however I feel like writing that day—in pictures, in spirals, upside-down, in crazy colors, in fragments, in individual words, in foreign languages—whatever.

*   *   *

The change of seasons tends to make me nostalgic, and I find myself pulled randomly into memories of spring riding Muni to Ocean Beach in San Francisco, spring staying up til all hours hanging out at Canisius, spring hostelling it through Rome and Paris and Granada and Barcelona, spring meandering grassy hills in Oviedo, and spring in Webster nearing the end of the school year, watching ducklings waddle through courtyards and breathing AP and Regents exams.  Having experienced all these things sometimes makes me feel like I’m wasting my time and should be amounting to something more, but at other times I realize that all these experiences are still with me, still a part of me, still help compose the fabric of who I am right now.  And I realize that even though my life at the moment seems kind of dull, that doesn’t mean it will stay that way.  Everything is an adventure if you look at it the right way, and random crazy adventures can jump out at you at any moment without warning.  And I most certainly embrace the random crazy adventures.

Title from this song.  Or click here for a very energetic (yet less melodious) live version.

Saturday, May 3, 2008, 3:25 p.m. March 9, 2009

I’m sharing an old journal entry that I liked, because I don’t feel like writing something new. I wrote this in Village A1, in my pajamas in the scoopy chair. Keep in mind that it wasn’t written to be read.

“The world is so goddamn beautiful.

It’s so fleeting, this kind of feeling, and I just want to hold it here in my hands for a while and try to let it soak into me, permeate me, change me. I want to be made of light. The world is made of light, and I am made of the same substance as the world—I am a part of all of this beauty and it is a part of me. It’s always here, all around me, in secret pockets and hidden corners and right in front of my face, and it’s within me as well, even when I forget how to find it. There will always be a way back there. It’s a cycle, and the cycle itself is full of beauty.

I want to write it here, to hold onto a piece of it even once the moment is gone. I don’t know if I can capture it, though, in describing concrete events. I want a record of the fact that even fairly crappy semesters can have happy endings. And I don’t want to move on yet, because when I feel like this, I feel like nothing can top it, like no matter what I do now there’s no way to go but down. It’s an exhilarating and terrifying feeling. Because it’s only for the moment. Everything we do and feel and experience is only for the moment, and what is life if not a collection of moments? If I’m happy I won’t stay that way, and if I’m sad I won’t stay that way either. The impermanence is frightening and comforting at the same time. There’s nothing to do but live the moments as they come—savor them as much as we can, and relinquish them once they’re over. We can keep the memory but we can never return to the moment itself: we must go off in search of new ones. …That’s life.”

…In which I ramble extensively. February 25, 2009

We’re nearing the end of February, which means that my JV year is more than half over.  It’s strange to think that just a year ago, I was stressing out over my senior thesis and how in hell I was going to get 35 pages written by May.  In a lot of ways it still feels like that semester just ended, but a lot has changed since then too.  I’ve been working on getting a lot of stuff figured out… I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I have anything figured out, but I’ve been putting a lot of thought into it, which is good.  I think this JVC thing was a good idea.  The program has its flaws (such as a general mild lack of organization and the occasional tendency to baby us), but I also think it provides an opportune environment for you to just chill out and sort through your life, which is a pretty valuable thing to do.

It’s funny, but I feel like I don’t write a whole lot about JVC itself here.  Maybe I’ll start trying to do that more.  For example: I organized my third Spirituality Night on Monday—we’re supposed to hold Community Night and Spirituality Night each once a week, but we’ve been alternating weeks for a while now just to free up a little of our time.  For my first Spirituality Night (back in early September) I tried to do something Ramadan-related because it happened to fall on the first day of Ramadan.  For my second one, I stole an idea from Joe at fall retreat: I had each person pick a song that was meaningful to them, and then we went around the room and played our songs and talked about them.  This time we decided to check out the free Monday night meditation class at the Women’s Building.  It was pretty interesting.  The woman who teaches the class is a Buddhist monk, and she offers the classes for free—you could tell how much she loved what she was doing.  We had 15 minutes of meditation, maybe 15 minutes of talking about meditation, a short break, and 15 more minutes of meditation.  I thought it was pretty cool for just the breathing and the focusing, even though I don’t really buy into all the aura/chakra stuff.  I think it would be cool to make kind of a database of different spirituality night ideas for JVC, because when I’m drawing a blank and run Google searches on these kinds of things I come up empty-handed.

Sometimes I want to go back to Buffalo after JVC, sometimes I want to stay here, and sometimes I want to go Boston or Ireland or India.  Sometimes I want to get a job, sometimes I want to go back to school, and sometimes I just want to wander.  Mostly what I want is stories.  This is the time in my life when I’m supposed to be amassing stories that I can tell when I’m older.  And stories, I think, are usually something that comes to you whenever the time is right—in the meantime, I guess I learn the art of waiting.

There are times when I feel both old and young at once: there is a part of me that’s fifteen and there’s a part of me that’s fifty.  On the subway this morning I could feel them both sitting there silently, watching me through my own skin as the stops slid by.  For one I am the future, and for the other I am the past.  This is a unique moment in my life and a unique moment in history, and I want to be present in it.  I feel like reality is more real to me sometimes if I look at it from a perspective that is not my own—if I think of myself as that fifty-year-old woman thinking back on this moment that she experienced so many years ago, or as the fifteen-year-old trying to picture where she’ll end up in seven years.  This is what I am, this is where I am, and this is the only reality there is.  Now is the only time that this moment has ever been and ever will be.  Isn’t it amazing to exist?

The Perks of Lunacy February 12, 2009

As a child, I never really had an answer for the classic question What do you want to be when you grow up? I always took it very seriously and I’m pretty sure it always stressed me out. But I was a sassy kid as well as serious, so when I got tired of saying “I don’t know,” I started to make up bogus answers for people. We were at my grandparents’ house in Ohio one summer when this exchange took place:

My Uncle:  So Elizabeth, what do you want to be when you grow up?
Me:  I want to be… A LOONATIC!!! [Insane laughter.]

This is one of the stories my family still feels the need to resurrect every so often. It came back to me this morning when I was (yet again) pondering what the hell I’m going to do with myself after my JV year. …And I thought, you know, I might really have been onto something there. Is that such a terrible thing to aspire to be? A lunatic, in effect, is someone who does not conform to our social norms. And what good does conforming to social norms do anyone? You’re accepted by society; okay, I guess I get why you would want that. It’s good to be accepted, and it’s probably the easiest way to function. (I guess I don’t see a whole lot of value in ‘easy’.) What else do the social norms get us?

My current theory is that society is trying to sell us a meaningless existence of isolation and boredom while placating us with consumerism and alcohol and pills and reality TV. The way I see it,* society’s set up so that we work at jobs we don’t like, producing goods we don’t need, in order to earn more money that allows us to buy more stuff we don’t need and will throw out shortly anyway, essentially using up the world’s resources and creating waste for no reason aside from making more money. The cycle exists only to perpetuate itself. Many of the social expectations placed on us (go to school, get a job, buy a house, etc.) are there to make us into “productive members of society,” which to me means cogs in a giant wheel that is turning for the sake of turning, filling the pockets of a select few without really making anyone happy or bringing anyone peace. Where is the good in that?

So for now, I think that I would repeat my answer again and again. YES, I want to be a lunatic when I grow up. I want to be absolutely fucking bat-shit crazy, if it means that I’m rejecting the dominant paradigm and defining life on my own terms. I want connection in place of isolation, and I want individuality and self-expression in place of conformity. I want genuine human interaction and social consciousness and a stronger sense of community. I want to challenge our preconceived notions of life and how we as a society define “success,” just as I am seeking out and challenging the preconceived notions I hold within myself. There is so much more to life than meets the untrained eye, and there is so much more potential out there that I think we just forget sometimes. What we could be is so much greater than what we are, and the adventure is in getting there. And if all of this labels me a lunatic, then so be it. Bring on the madness.

---

*I would like to acknowledge that I’m presenting an extremely abbreviated and one-sided view of things for the purposes of this particular post. I would also like to cite The Story of Stuff, which I watched a few months ago and which synthesizes these points pretty nicely.

“Tell me this is paradise, and not some place I fell.” January 23, 2009

Answer (to the previous post):

I am scared to death that I am wasting my life.

I’ve been over and over this, too. I can’t be wasting my life as long as I’m living every moment, appreciating every experience, and enjoying being alive as thoroughly as I can. The trouble is that sometimes that’s freaking hard to do. This week was a very long week, even though it was only a four-day work week. I was pestering lawyers to get back to me with statistics and scrambling to put them all together for one of our grants, and it was really, really tedious. I had a couple nights where I was up insanely late for no particular reason, and I was turning this “grad school vs. job” thing over and over and over in my head until I was just so sick of thinking about it, all I wanted was to turn off my brain. Tired of working, tired of thinking, tired of existing. I need something new.

“I want to feel the car crash
I want to feel it capsize
I want to feel the bomb drop, the earth stop ‘til I’m satisfied.

I want to feel the car crash
‘cause I’m dying on the inside
I want to let go and know that I’ll be alright, alright.

Just push me ‘til I have to fly
I’ve shed my skin, my scars
take me deep out past the lights
where nothing dims these stars,
nothing dims these stars,
stars…”

(Matt Nathanson)

The song was playing while I was typing and it just seemed to fit…everything. This year is a lot of me learning to cope with the tedium and monotony of the adult world, of 9-5 work days and paying the bills and not having all your friends within a mile of you, and I’m so, so scared of disappearing into the boredom. I don’t want to be bored with life. Still, I’m having to face the fact that we’re never genuinely free to do and be what we want. So much of what I want from life is beyond my control, and it’s really frustrating. There’s got to be a way to make life worthwhile, to find exhilaration in every single day and keep the numbness at bay. It has to be out there, and I’m going to find it, because the alternative isn’t something I’m willing to consider.

Old Journal Excerpts… December 23, 2008

Every time I come back home, this place is less and less the house I grew up in: over the past year we’ve gotten all new carpet, new banisters, new curtains, and a new toaster, and we repainted the entire exterior of the house in addition to chopping down a big pine tree in the front yard. None of this was my doing and I find it all a bit disconcerting, but I basically don’t live here anyway, so I’m not going to worry about it too much.

One of the most interesting parts about coming home is that I can go through all my old stuff (since I am a packrat and never throw anything out) and kind of get back in touch with my roots. This time it’s giving me a chance to read through some of my really old journals, and since I haven’t so much as glanced at them for months and months and months, it’s an interesting experience. I started yesterday with my journal from senior year of high school, which was (oh god) five years ago now. I’m continually surprised that I’ve changed so much in some respects but not at all in others. Reading back through it is kind of cool, almost like I’m able to have a conversation with my former self. Senior year of high school, I was engaged in trying to figure out what I was doing after graduation, and therefore I was muddling through thoughts on life and the future and adulthood and change, much as I am now, although my perspective was very different. I find that my past self actually has some potentially useful insights to offer me. My life was a lot simpler back then, and I had experienced a lot less of the world and life, so initially I didn’t think whatever insights I had at 17 would be worth much. But what I discovered was that sometimes simplicity is insightful in its own way—all this other crap in life (endless debates that go nowhere, trying to tear every issue into pieces for analysis, constantly second-guessing myself) can be unnecessarily confusing, and sometimes it’s nice to go right back to the start and remind myself of where I stood instinctively, before I became mired in all of that.

Disclaimers: When I was 17, I wrote like an early 20^th century novel in translation, and said things like “alas.” It’s ridiculous and I was probably picking it up from whatever I was reading at the time (early 20^th century literature in translation, as well as fantasy novels and ancient Greek stuff for class). Also amusingly, the most I used to swear was “bloody” and “darn.” It just sounds silly. Apparently college did away with my linguistic censorship. And finally, I had a tendency to be exceedingly vague, redundant, and sentimental in my writing. I try harder to avoid those things these days.

Thursday, November 27, 2003

“I know what I want and I know what sort of life I want to lead. I want…to fall in love with life. I want to live to the fullest extent of the word; I want to keep myself surrounded with that energy and vitality… I want to experience everything and revel in it, every pain and joy. I am thankful that the world is filled with love and poetry. The rain in the lamplight speaks with more eloquence than words ever could, if people know how to listen—and love, of course, is the reason for everything. Love is beautiful and exists everywhere—what more could one ask?”

This is an example of where I still essentially agree with my 17-year-old self, but I tend to lose sight of this all the same. And it just sounds so freaking sentimental.

Thursday, December 11, 2003

“I want life to invigorate me… I want to revel in the beauty of each and every moment, however seemingly commonplace some may be. I’m not actually bad at that… I guess I’m just afraid of forgetting. I don’t want my life to stagnate. I think I’ve mentioned that before, so I must really mean it. I don’t know what I want in my future, but I want to be enthusiastic about it… You know what I’d really like? I’d like to fall into a poem. I want to wake every morning with the mist and the sunrise, to run through purple meadows with my hair loose in the wind, to lose myself in the starry night sky…to savour every little sensation and to believe in the love that pervades the entire universe, that turns planets and lives and hearts and fills every particle of air.”

Sunday, December 28, 2003

“On another note: I have ambition tonight. This is completely alien to me, this whole attitude, but I kind of like it… I’ve become stubborn and determined and idealistic to go along with it. I don’t know… I’ve decided I’m going to take my life where I want it to go rather than sitting around complacently trying to figure out what might become of me. I know what I like, and I have my ideals and halfway decent judgment… I want to come into my own. I seek knowledge and understanding of myself, all people, and the world around me. I know generally what sort of a person I want to become, and I should apply myself to that and to adjusting that vision based on what I learn from life. I know my own faults and weaknesses, too, and can apply myself to the conquering of them. I will not be ruled by fear or by doubts of my own abilities, and I will not submit to anyone else’s concept of me or of how I should live my life. I refuse to settle for someone else’s dream… Whatever I do I will be passionate about it, and I will keep my heart and mind open to the freedom and possibility breathing everywhere.”

Back then, I identified as an optimist and not an idealist, so the whole idealism thing was somewhat new to me. I like the spirit of refusing to settle for what people think I should be doing. What I need to do is dig deep inside of myself to figure out what I want, and then I have to get out there and go after it.

Saturday, January 3, 2004

[Regarding studying abroad in college:] “The thing is that going to a foreign country for a semester where no one speaks English, facing an entirely different culture and even taking classes in a foreign language scares the living hell out of me—well, not yet, but I’m sure it would the first week or so of me being there. This is good. I need to have the hell scared out of me so that I can overcome my fears, learn about people all over, and become a functional, world-savvy adult. Face your fears to overcome them, I guess…”

I think that I still need to have the hell scared out of me—ideally, I should have the hell scared out of me on a regular basis throughout my life. I don’t grow by being comfortable; I grow by challenging myself, facing my fears, and beating them into the ground.

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

“I wonder if most people will ever know silence? Silence like darkness, silence like the light from a single star, the immensity of the silence of a snow-covered Earth. It’s a beautiful thing, but I think that it’s overlooked by too many people… The silence of existence, of eternity. Inner silence is probably the most difficult to find; I know for me it’s difficult to calm the thousands of thoughts racing across my mind and just to concentrate on being, where I am, as I am, and accepting everything. It sounds new-agey, I know; but I’ve been into it lately—especially in my most boring and most aggravating classes. Just breathe, and then try to find my perspective—I start by waking myself up, becoming more aware and observant. Then I get to thinking about stuff…deeper stuff than I’m usually thinking in school…like life, and people, and the whole world and how it works. I enjoy having a bit of perspective, I guess, and remembering that we’re all part of something larger; and then the more trivial concerns start to fade away… Life is beautiful, and I know it best when I can simply enjoy living for the sake of being alive, listening to the world around me and savouring every moment for itself without rushing time.”

What I’m describing here is something that I forget about a lot these days. I’m constantly trying to drown out the silence, drown out my thoughts, distract myself with music or movies or talking… I’m always up later than anyone else in my house (whether in Webster or San Francisco), and those last couple of hours are always tough because I am alone. I’m no longer used to it like I was before, and maybe I need to start learning how to enjoy it again.

Saturday, May 15, 2004

“There’s just so much—so much life, so much world—that I’m sure there is no way in heaven or in hell that we can appreciate it all. For that we would have to be—just be, without anything following the verb. Any words that might follow would by their very nature qualify and constrain the word “be,” which entirely destroys the meaning. Be what? Be everything, be nothing, be here, be not here, be human, be the air, be space, be time itself—in short, to exist totally, completely, in every form and moment imaginable or unimaginable. But unfortunately that cannot be done. The best we can do is absorb what we can… Time is passing so quickly for me I cannot seem to get any sort of a grasp on it. The start of spring has gone by in the blink of an eye, and it’s left me with nothing but giant question marks. I’m standing barefoot in the grass with my arms spread wide and my head flung back to take in the Life raining down on me—liquid sky running down my face and over my bare shoulders, collecting in my hair and pooling in the curve of my back.”

This is me being silly and overdramatic and seventeen, but it’s also me trying to express something inexpressible… some aspect of time and existence that’s completely breathtaking and overwhelming and that I’m still trying to grasp. This also relates to my theory on why I have so much difficulty making life decisions: I’m ever reluctant to confine myself to a single existence, although there is no feasible alternative. I want to be everyone, feel and experience everything. I want as much life as I can get my hands on.

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

“My problem is that I’d like to feel assured of future success, know that I’m going to lead an exhilarating and meaningful life, make lots of amazing friends, fall in love, etc. and so on. Part of me (a very human part) would very much like to have my whole life planned out neatly before I live it so I don’t suffer any surprises. But then an equally human part of me answers back that if what I want is an interesting and meaningful life, I’m just going to have to take things as they come, no matter what they bring, and face them as best I can. I need to trust that there is an ultimate plan for my life even though I don’t see it and that life will bring my rightful share of both joy and sadness. I need to live from moment to moment, delighting in every moment and seeking the beauty in each; and I need to accept whatever circumstances in my life while always trying to improve. I need to learn to love life’s very fickleness and unpredictability, and I’ll cease to fear for the future.”

Loving unpredictability is a very difficult thing for me to do, and this is something that I still struggle with all the time. I’m not sure anymore whether I believe that there is an ultimate plan for my life. I’ve kind of strayed away from that idea over time, although it would be a comforting thing to believe. I’d like to think that things will take care of themselves somehow—I have free will, and my decisions do matter, but life itself will guide me. I read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet on the plane on the way home, and in it, Charles Wallace must learn to let go of his desire to control every situation and instead listen to the guidance of the universe, which knows how to fix itself if given the chance. It’s an interesting theory and I haven’t fully worked out my thoughts on it yet.

“It’s a blue, bright blue, Saturday…” November 24, 2008

Days like this I know it does no good to think about anything. Days like this I’m frozen in time, moving through molasses, each motion requiring a monumental effort. Days like this are best spent in bed with a book, but somehow I forgot this basic fact and spent the day trying in vain to accomplish things.

Days like this, I don’t want to do anything. Don’t want to work, don’t want to talk, don’t want to write, don’t want to eat, don’t want to shower. Don’t even particularly want to go to bed, though I’ll regret that in the morning. All I want is to stop—stop moving, stop breathing, stop thinking—and turn in my resignation from the human race.

Days like this, I start to wonder how I’m going to get through life with so little motivation. And life seems so very long… But I know it’s just the day that does it to me, and it’ll pass if I just wait it out. So I light some candles and grab a book, curl up on the futon wrapped in a blanket, and wait until it’s time to sleep. (Or maybe post about it online, for my imaginary captivated audience.)

(Also, I’m aware that it’s not Saturday, but it’s close enough.)

Some musings… November 19, 2008

One of the things I’m liking best about this year so far is that it’s been forcing me to think about things.  A large part of what I want to accomplish this year is to make steps toward “figuring things out,” which is a nice, vague concept that essentially involves trying to develop somewhat cohesive ideas about life.  One would think that living wouldn’t be all that complicated—eat, sleep, breathe, work, etc.—but oddly enough, there are a lot of issues that arise in between.  (Shocking, I know.)  So I thought I would treat you to some of the stuff I’ve been mulling over.

Idealism: improvement vs. acceptance.

This is a long-standing issue for me.  As I’ve mentioned before, I consider myself an idealist in that I have (sometimes surprisingly specific) ideas of how I want things to be, and I’m always trying to figure out what I can do to get things to that point.  This is more pronounced for things that relate directly to my life and less pronounced for things that concern the world as a whole.  (Maybe that makes me selfish, but that isn’t the point.)  Okay, so my dilemma is this: If we can only be happy by accepting things as they are, then to what extent should we work to improve the undesirable things in life?  And phrased another way: If we are supposed to learn to love ourselves as we are, then how do we work toward self-improvement?  I can’t get past my conception of the two things as mutually exclusive.  Do you see what I mean?  To what extent do we accept the current state of affairs, and to what extent do we fight for positive change?  Do we just accept what we cannot change, like that quote says?  How do we love ourselves if we only love certain parts of ourselves?  Can we love something the way it is and try to change it at the same time?  It just doesn’t make sense.  I haven’t come up with a solution to this yet.*

The reason that this is such an absorbing issue for me is that it relates directly to what I’m trying to do this year.  This is supposed to be a year of change and personal growth, and some of the ways that I would like to change include becoming more confident and outgoing.  How does one become more confident?  By accepting oneself as one is, or by striving to become what one wants to be?  At some point, confidence has to come from loving yourself.  (Second person is much easier grammatically.)  So should I be trying to love myself as I am, right now, or should I be trying to love myself as I would like to become?  Do I learn to love what I am, or do I learn to be what I love?  I believe in self-improvement; therefore I’m more inclined toward the latter.  And of course, that is where this dilemma arises.  Is it possible to love what is changing—love in motion?  Can the love itself change in parallel?  And this also applies to loving other people, because of course people change.  This train of thought has the potential to get ridiculously long.

Although I have by no means resolved that dilemma, I have come to a few realizations that relate to it.  In the realm of self-improvement, I have a tendency to try to model myself after people I admire—and I have a tremendous capacity for admiration of other people.  There are just so many amazing people in the world.  But recently it’s occurred to me that I haven’t exactly been going about this in the best way.  I tend to assume that unless I precisely emulate these amazing people, I am somehow inferior, and I have the potential to frustrate myself endlessly trying to become things that are just not part of my character.  It dawned on me a few weeks ago that, hey—just because I’m not exactly like someone who is cool, doesn’t mean that I’m not cool in a different way.  (Obvious, yes, but at the same time somehow not.)  Clearly there are myriad ways to be awesome, so there’s no need to beat myself up just because I can’t be awesome in the same way as someone else.

My other realization in the same vein was that not everyone who exudes confidence is worth emulating.  I have a tendency to be taken in by confident people—they say and do everything with such conviction that I assume they must be right, even when I would have disagreed with them.  It occurred to me recently that just because someone is confident about something doesn’t mean that they’re right.  (Again, not always as obvious as it seems when I type it out.)  Half the time these things are subjective anyway, and there’s no need to surrender my opinion for agreement’s sake.

Also along those lines, I’m starting to distinguish between people who are cool because they’re genuinely great to be around and they make everyone around them feel great as well, and people who are “cool” because they exude confidence, but they’re not genuinely open to the people around them and they inspire jealousy more than admiration—they make people feel inferior rather than challenged, inspired, and accepted.

…Ergo, progress :~)

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* I feel like there are two separate but related issues here: accepting vs. changing the world as a whole, and loving vs. improving oneself.  The closest I’ve come to some kind of solution is the idea that we find happiness not necessarily in accepting things as they are at this very moment, but in accepting things as they are on a larger scale—in accepting the transience of moments and the process of change.  Accept the mechanisms and change the specifics within them.  The second issue seems more difficult, for some reason—likely because I’ve substituted ‘loving’ for ‘accepting’.  Acceptance isn’t a particularly difficult concept, but love is insanely complicated.  I’ve never encountered two people who define it the same way.  So the hypothetical solution I was toying with for this end of things was to expand my definition of love, or to revolutionize love itself.  (Am I talking out of my ass?  …That is a distinct possibility.)