|
| Hi xanga... I've bee neglecting you. I'm sorry. You don't deserve a guy like me, but you take me back every time. I love you xanga <3
here's an old entry that seems poignant. I'm plagiarizing, but it's myself so I give me permission and it's all good.
"|
EUREKA! well... that may be a strong word. But I've just made a discovery. A SELF-discovery. Those can be the best kind. I realize that sounds a little self-centered, but I've never denied being a self--centered person. I don't like the word self-centered though, because it misrepresents what I mean. I think self-centric is a better term. It's not like I want everything for myself and never think about other people. On the contrary, I'm often overly considerate or giving. But through it all, I think mostly about myself, as in I think about everything in relation to myself. Instead of just being happy for someone, I'll bring myself into the picture and think about how their achievement may affect me. This doesn't have to be a bad thing though, and that's why I prefer "self-centric" to "self-centered." A self-centric person is just unable to remain ignorant of themselves, as other people seem so blissfully able to do.
That wasn't my discovery though. That was all just pulled out of my ass. I came to my discovery while writing an article based on a Times article about the downsides of perfectionism. This is the specific sentence that lead to my epiphany: "Either you’re clean or you’re not; there’s no safe level of use." This is why I couldn't handle being a Christian. Also this sentence: "The trouble is that falling short still reeks of mediocrity; for them, to say otherwise is to spin the result." I've never really considered myself a perfectionist. But when I was Christian, I was a moral perfectionist when it came to myself. I wasn't huge on judging others or whatever, but I held myself to such high standards that it was a constant source of stress. After a few years, my mind broke down. I know there's forgiveness in Christ... I know that all too well. I sought it constantly. I learned to forgive myself too. I believed I was forgiven, and I was able to recover from all sorts of huge slip-ups. But it was just too much. I couldn't handle my own sin. Over and over again, time after time, and I believed I was right in saying I was sinful. From my interpretation of the Bible, I was quite often in the wrong, which is why I was always confessing and repenting. There was no tolerance for sin. I couldn't say that it was okay for me to sin because I knew I was being forgiven. That's not how it worked. Christ was all-patient and ever-accepting, but not because it was "okay" that I sinned. On the contrary, every time I sinned, that was another tiny piece of suffering that he had to go through on the cross. So even though I was accepted in spite of my sin, I still had to be sorry for every single one. Even though I was being forgiven, I couldn't say "It's fine, it's not that bad." For a depressive person like me who tends to ruminate on my own failures, this was not an easy yoke or a light burden. Here's something I wrote shortly before I broke down.
jan 20 2006
numbing soul paralysis
forbidden imaged phantom trysts
promise of unending bliss
met with only loneliness
lies of God-forsakeness
belief that grace ain't limitless
hiding my foul broken-ness
from my Savior's omniscience
eighteenth chance to change my sins
trashed again for sin's sour kiss
will nineteen come like eighteen did?
Does God not even notice this?
I sin, it slides, it seems He sighs
one chance, it's gone. one more? how long?
again? my bad. for real, I'm sad
repent, a while, sin's gone, God style!
but wait, it's back, my heart, more black
deep hole, no light, no will, can't fight
renewed, once more, there's hope, what for?
i know I'll fall, can this be all?
back to present
I fell. But I wouldn't say I fell hard. It was more like falling into water. On land I was stuck on the ground, and I could only jump so high, and I couldn't fly. When I fell, I fell into water. Suddenly I was free to move however I wanted in any direction. I grew gills. The water is now my habitat, and I fly in complete freedom. Gravity still pulls me down, but it doesn't feel like -9.8m/s^2 anymore. Just a slight kick or paddle and I'm rising again. I'm free to be happy. I'm free to be sad. To take from andi's ownage graduation speech, I'm free to be wrong. I'm free to fuck up and laugh at myself. What's more, I'm free to be right. I'm free to say, "I like myself." I'm free from constant, driven self-improvement. I'm free to be content, not in the knowledge that my eternal destiny is secure, but rather in the knowledge that right now, I think I'm a pretty good person. I have friends and family who love me, and I love them back. I'm a decent-looking guy. I can pursue romance. I have potential. I can make a difference. And I can do none of that stuff and still be okay. I made the decision not to try to lead anyone away from Christ, not to criticize Christianity or become embittered. And I'm not. I'm not criticizing Christianty but rather my style of belief. It's unsustainable. And while I don't want to lead anyone away, I do have this one thing to say. If this sounds familiar to you, I offer you just one cliche: "Come on in, the water's fine." |
"
| | |
| I'm in the first week of a relationship, my Bermuda Triangle of the Internet. Deep down a lot of my xanga and facebook activity is a function of romantic loneliness (okay maybe not that deep down), so when I'm not lonely I feel no need to write or troll statuses or browse pictures or what not. I was smart enough to ask Andi out again, and she was dumb enough to say yes again, therefore I will probably be a ghost online for a few weeks. When I do start posting again, it won't be due to loneliness but rather from overflow of awesome.
| | |
| I'm feeling pretty good about myself and stuff and things. When you think about it, that's pretty odd considering my computer is dead, I'm almost broke in a foreign state, and I'm going to my last choice law school. But I'm a pretty odd guy, so it's expected that odd situations would do odd things for me. Is that a triple odd negative? Do levels of oddness cancel each other out when the oddness comes to be expected? But is that expectation again canceled out when something odd happens, i.e. something normal happens? Quick, somebody get me the world's leading expert on oddity! Oh wait, I think that might be me.
Everything I lose shows me one more thing I can live without. That's how I'm dealing with my laptop loss, although I can see merit in Simon's strategy of "Everything I lose - I can hopefully replace with something better, possibly more expensive." I like living a bare-bones existence, although I do enjoy certain luxuries. I guess it'd be more accurate if I said "Everything I lose is one more thing I don't have to carry around." I won't deny the tiny bit of joy I get when I lift up my laptop bag to switch houses and it's lighter than I remember.
Brokeness in a foreign state isn't that bad because there are awesome people that love me, and I love them too. Hopefully one day I can make everything right. Most likely I'd be doing this over several days. I owe a lot to the people who love me, and I plan to spend my life paying them back by paying it forward. Well, and also by actually paying them back if it's possible :P
Yes, Houston was my last choice of law school, but it has a certain appeal that I'm feeling very strongly right now. Plus it's not a bad school and I'm saving money and maybe I didn't want to go to New York anyways HMPH >.< lol... but really I think I'll be very happy in Houston. For one thing, it's less than three hours away from Austin, a city filled with people I love. Also, Houston itself also contains several people I love. It's cheaper, I get my own apartment, and I think with less stress and excitement (so with more boredom) maybe I'll better accomplish my actual purpose, which is to learn to wield the law. Also, it's less than three hours away from Austin.
So like I said, I'm feeling great. Like stupid great. Like so great that I wonder if this is the greatest but I think probably not because I'll feel even greater later on in the week but then I'm afraid to feel great because that might invite something going wrong but then I can't not feel great because something is making me feel GREAT. That's how great I feel. Okay the overuse of this word is starting to grate upon my consciousness. Ba-ZAM!
Can't wait to see Austin in a few days ^_^
| | |
| How come all of my google ads are about shoulder pain and burn scar treatment? Where are my ads for laptop funeral services, laptop coffins, or maybe even laptop resurrections? PRIORITIES google. Priorities.
I just feel like blogging. I feel like throwing my thoughts out there into cyberspace, seeing if any bounce back, seeing if any keep going all the way around the Internet and hit me in the back of the head, seeing if maybe they'll float off for a few years before they find a new home, settle it under great adversity, thrive and flourish after a few hard winters, and then raise little thought families of their own that eventually consume the resources of their colonized home and have to spread out and find new homes in an endless cycle of consumption and death. Or maybe someone will comment and say "haha lol."
Anything could happen I guess. Gods I've been reading too much Douglas Adams. Anyways, when I feel like writing but don't really have a topic at the top of my brain, I reach back into this bag of vague ideas that I wanted to write about before but didn't have the energy for. I used to have a lot, but I think they're dwindling.
But I have at least one more! Twitter. Twitter, man. Freakin' Twitter. It really struck me as something a while back, and I'm trying to remember as what. And how! Ah belgium my urge to write is gone again. Well I feel bad getting started on Twitter and just leaving it hanging, so I'll say what I was going to say as simply as I can. Twitter lets you "talk" to celebrities, and it leaves open the possibility that they might actually respond. You don't have to line up for an hour for a chance to say something to a celebrity. You don't need courtside seats to talk to Shaq. If you have a crush on, oh say, Kat Dennings, you can confess your love to her on Twitter. Well 140 characters of it, anyways. Also minus the 12 characters of @OfficialKat and the space you have to put behind it. So you can tell Kat Dennings 127 characters of the crush you have on her, and the mind-breaking thing is that she could see it and respond directly. You could confess 132 characters of love to Ashton Kutcher, and he could click on his replies and see your love and respond back. And everyone can do this in their underwear from the comfort of their own home, or out on their Blackberry in a public place, or out in a public place in their underwear on their Blackberry, or in the comfort of their own home sitting at their computer inexplicably wearing a full tuxedo. I think it's just such an astonishingly simple and effective communication schema. It wouldn't work with anything else. Facebook requires adding, xanga is tldr, and MySpace is full of porn. The simplicity of Twitter is beautiful.
I realize that the chances of getting a response are slim, and why any response is desired is also something to think about, but what's important here is hope. There is the hope that your celebrity will check their replies right as you're first on their list, and there's the hope that they'll read what you wrote oh so cleverly, and they might just smile. They could chuckle. They could even guffaw, but what's important is that they might respond. And then... well then I dunno what happens then. I suppose you realize the futility and emptiness of idolatry. But that's another entry. I seem to remember saying something about saying something as simply as I could, but I messed it up because my urge to write resurged while I was writing. Neat trick. Anyways, all I'm saying is that Twitter blows my mind when I think about how it changes the potential interactions we have with the gods of our time. We can send up little 140 character prayers, and they might just get answered. We can take our voyeuristic love affair with fame and actually do something other than voyesque or whatever the hell the French conjugation of that verb should be. Also I wonder if it makes the stars seem a bit less stellar and a little more human. I dunno. I'm tired. I'm just gonna throw in something hopefully clever I thought of a while back that's vaguely applicable and call it a night. "Twitter is like pounding xanga shots."
"How's that working out for you?"
"What?"
"Being clever?"
| | |
| I randomly clicked on a link for an old acquaintance's derelict xanga, an acquaintance who I remembered to be a little ditsy. The header on her page said, "What am I thinking?"
The body of the page said, "There are no posts."
I chuckled, felt a bit guilty, but then chuckled again.
Anyways, I'm in Southern California at the moment, once again caught up by a strange urge to be grammatically correct on xanga. I just had a great time at Tommy's bachelor party where we did manly things like eat rare steaks and smoke cigars over whiskey. I also read hundreds of pages of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which accounts for the strange grammar patterns that are floating around in my head. I'm a language sponge, so if I'm around a lot of clever witticisms, I'll leak clever witticisms. When I was reading Dorian Gray with all its contradictory, meaningless aphorisms, I leaked contradictory, meaningless aphorisms like "it seems like the only things worth knowing are the things I don't know." When I'm reading Douglas Adams with all his utterly bearable cleverness, I'll leak my own attempts at utterly bearable cleverness, which are rapidly becoming unbearable. They are in fact becoming so unbearable for me that I will write a paragraph completely devoid of attempts at cleverness, just for the sake of my own sanity.
My laptop died while I was in San Diego. I drunkenly fell asleep trying to watch Arrested Development, and I woke up to find my computer completely soaked and sitting on an ottoman that was also wet. The liquid was clear and unscented, so I assume it was water. I'm confused, though, because I wasn't drinking water. I found on the coffee table next to me a half-filled Double Big Gulp which I had been drinking. I went to look at all of the cups in the kitchen, and they all had whiskey and coke residue on the bottom, which means that they hadn't had any water in them the night before. I'm still completely puzzled as to what might have happened to my computer. Since it spent a few hours completely soaked but still plugged in, I think it's completely fried. If you ever get your computer wet, you're supposed to unplug it and take out the battery as soon as possible so as to eliminate any potentially damaging electrical currents. If you can do it in the next few seconds, you might be okay. I had waited at least a few hours, so I just accepted that I was screwed.
I feel that attempts at cleverness have fallen to a more tolerable level, and I'm feeling much better. Life has been very different without my computer around. Thinking back, that computer has been the only constant in my life for almost four years. I don't even have the same body I had four years ago. My younger body was healthy and strong and some even said attractive. My body now is unhealthy and useless and marked up. My eyes are different, and my face is definitely more haggard. I have different goals, a different outlook on life, different spiritual beliefs, different people around me. I even got a little better at dota. That laptop was there with me through it all, and I kind of miss having it around. Sure, I was planning to replace it in a month, but I'd wanted to give it a better ending. I think certain objects, when used enough, start to gain a personality. My laptop's personality was stoic and accepting. It didn't care what country it was in, how long it had spent in its bag on a floor of an airplane, how dirty it got, how it had to be duct-taped because of a crack. Sure it had its moments of weakness, like when Chris destroyed the partition that held all the quick reset files when he was installing Linux. But for the most part, it took everything I threw at it without a complaint, without even a name. A few months ago I realized that it had no name, so I named it Nameless Hero. And now it's dead, unceremoniously drowned in a way that I can't even remember. May it live forever in memory.
My urge to write has subsided, so I'm going to stop writing. Thankfully I'm not a professional writer, because I don't think they are allowed to do that and keep their career for very long.
| | |
|
