[331] It's An Acquired Taste

I’m going to run with the idea that it’s all perfectly arbitrary. There’s no reason someone should be pent up with so much rage for longer than a day or so. Therefore, it is necessary and important that I find a way to become happy again.

My difficulties awaken when I start to make judgment calls. I’d say the sliver of wisdom, and it’s only a sliver, in not judging a person is a clearer path to happier thoughts about them. I’m currently weighed down by the idea of responsibility. Really, truly, the idea of responsibility is causing stress. This begs the question, responsible for what?

The simple answer is “life.” It’s being responsible for what you do and say, who you associate with, what your hobbies are, projecting, if you have one, a message. More specifically it’s a responsibility to awareness. For example, I can comfortably say I’m an idiot just like all the other idiots save for one thing, I know how to acknowledge and admit it.

This one little difference is generally what sets me up to like you forever or constantly insist to myself that you sell not just our relationship short, but yourself in everything you do. If I didn’t think of myself as an idiot, I wouldn’t constantly write things that are rife with opportunity to get judged, picked apart, and potentially thrown back in my face. I’m asking for the controversy because I don’t want to remain an idiot.

Right now, I’m an idiot because I have all the time in the world and I’m here, writing about how I have all the time in the world and it’s not quite as I remember it. Maybe I’m languishing on thoughts about my friends, maybe I’m just not as excited to scrape and spend to get back to work, or maybe I’m too plagued by my generations’ late 80s early 90s birth window and focusing is a thing of the past. I don’t really know.

What I do know is that I’m definitely not only or specifically angry at myself. When I think of that dammed responsibility it’s a vague enough construct to apply across the board from a friend to a newscast to a very poorly worded retort on a facebook comment. It just seems like everyone (read “everyone” as the majority of people in my experience thus far, there, now I never have to say it again) is making the same error. Everyone prefers to hear and see what they want and respond in kind. They refuse to take the actual point, and do the work, to figure out what and if there is a proper response.

I can raise a concern to a friend, they can respond with the brilliance of their long term earning potential. I can watch a newscast about Treyvon Martin and am offered the reasoned and appropriate expertise of Nick Cannon. I can offer an opinion on a “funny” article online and am only met with the learned and insightful point that different people find different things funny. I sometimes feel like my head must exist in a fairy land where I expect something to make sense so often, and am so often denied, that maybe I’m just a well-functioning psychotic. That would make a handful of you people crazy too; or morbidly encouraging.

How I want to be responsible does not match up in how I currently am. It’s not to scale. That doesn’t mean I don’t hold true to me or maintain a kind of demeanor, but I know I’m failing, I know there’s more room to work than I even have words for. It makes all the little things disinteresting. Part of the reason I was so motivated to learn everything I could about science/god stuff was the mission of going out and trying to celebrate reason and evidence and see about changing a lot of bad ideas. But it doesn’t just have to be your faith that you’re intractable about and there is no persuading the persistent fairy tale teller.

My cynicism or mean jokes is the “best” way I’ve come up with to express just how darkly I see the world. Your happiness, to me, is a selfish trip doing the best you can to forget that you don’t really have a functioning country, people die all the time for no reason, you don’t really give a shit and the hopeless feeling you get when you have to give a shit propels you ever farther towards what feels good. It so often gets characterized as preachy, but thinking about this shit really does start to fuck with me! Shocked?

Not only can I barely do anything about it, I’m seemingly the only one who’s frequently plagued by it. I’m the only one who can’t allow himself the kind of reckless abandonment that marginalizes things until they *somehow* get better later. I feel like I see people cheating. It’s too easy. They adhere to a construct for stability in a world unstable. They adorn laurels of praise and reinforcement from people who never expected otherwise; as if there’s dignity and wisdom hidden away in repeating the same failed experiments.

In one way, I’m not trying to shit all over your happiness, but in an increasingly depressing manner I really really do want to shit all over your happiness. I find myself envying not what people have, but their ability to put what I can’t aside. Oh what it would be to have the ability to focus on one small thing like a lover or job. If only I was content to be Joe Blue-Collar or even Burnout Benny, everyone’s favorite druggie friend!

I can’t get the conversations I want because just referencing the topic generally makes people defensive. I can’t get the solutions I want because they either take a fuck ton of time and/or money, and a lot of speculation and chance regarding the future. I certainly am not “happening upon” an intense and intelligent debate about any topics, let alone one’s I may have something to contribute to. It just gets old. Of course I could find a corner of the internet to satiate any flatly intellectual itching, but it’s not enough. I’m not just a fact reader. I don’t understand things merely as a collection of web pages or scholarly articles.

The only way I find myself being able to justify anything is to accept that it’s all perfectly arbitrary. That it simply doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do, outside of what you do or don’t think about it. There’s no moral imperative, responsibility is funny, and to stress out and think about anything besides the lengths of your self-determination is the height of folly. The only glaring problem with this is how it makes zero sense if you want or have kids, or friends, or find yourself enjoying the endless spoils from those you’ll never know. It’s simply, even if you can’t do much, you can at least think and talk. It can’t just be the responsibility of the “activists” or “smart people who will figure it out eventually.”

I crave a kind of feedback that hints at tearing down peoples’ worlds. They don’t like that, because after all, look what it does to me. I guess it’s time to draw up a lengthy analogy about the taste of beer.

[330] Problem Solved

Is it even possible to fix a problem?

As I find myself writing, still deeply rooted with the thought that I do not have real problems, I find that I don’t give myself really any credit in having this disposition. I didn’t have real problems when I was ridiculously broke, and I have even less real problems now that I have the money to restart business and live fairly comfortably for another year.

I’m intrigued by how often people get angry at this prospect. I’m also intrigued by how often they get angry that I expect things from people and my relationships. Furthermore, their anger over and insistence upon telling me I’m in denial is flatly amazing. It appears that many people simply don’t want to be better and are insulted at the presumed insinuation. I don’t know why.

Surely I’ve become “better” over time. Whether it’s with a calmer reaction or more information, it’s hard to argue that yelling and swinging solve things just as well. I find when I read old blogs that if my actions don’t change the meaning they take on grows under different lights. I’d say it’s precisely this that has mitigated much of the heartache concerning how and what to think of my friends. I’m still working on translating that to the whole of humanity.

The denial charge I find most insidious. It’s sickeningly ironic. Even when I try to invent problems or bitch about a circumstance, they just don’t resonate as real. More so, they aren’t mine. I didn’t hijack a truck, pop a tire, and burn through $50 worth of gas. I had to alleviate the situation, but it wasn’t mine. I didn’t choose that, that happened to me; it happened in and around my world. I don’t deny I wasn’t having a terrible amount of fun in fixing it. I also know how it felt, and continues to feel, having resolved it; this extending on from the moment it was resolved. I still ate, hit the gym, and Kristen’s in my bed. It wasn’t a real problem.

The “hot conversation” I got in about what I expect from people and what I expect from myself as “people” was the next most confusing. I won’t say it was structured or had much of a point besides tipsy squabbling, but what I remember most was a point about “well people don’t act that way.” I think we initially got into it because I got the usual eye roll and “pfft” noise about how an open relationship works. In any event, it quickly derailed and I honestly have no real memory of why.

All I took away was that I had been in that conversation many times before; not because there was a discernible topic by any means, but because I knew the second nothing could be conceded or taken for what it meant, instead of what it meant personally, it had nowhere to go from that onset. It’s unfortunate, but it was easier to navigate when there was nothing to lose. Surely voices didn’t have to rise, but who even knew such a scenario was even to play out until it was upon us? It couldn’t be “fixed” with anything but reflection. I read “tomato soup” and all I got was worms.

But this speaks to the nature of all my not real problems. My circumstances allow for an endless stream of misfired conversation starters. But I didn’t walk into someone’s house with derogatory comments and a misunderstood position, my voice raised to a level of expectation met only by the utmost polite and tranquil engagement this side of Downton Abbey. I suppose as “best” I can, I simply try not to be those kinds of problems. I create the problems I want. I’ll have the same conversation time and again to my frustration for the last sordid soul on Earth who actually came prepared to have it. I’ll drop of something of relative value in a semi-sketchy situation and take the damn car keys with me next time.

My “problem” comes in the form of what I’m willing to do, not what happens to me. Most of the time simply choosing fixes it just fine. A lot of my solutions come the same way except I didn’t die and give me money; that was my grandma. She helped create the conditions, influenced an environment so that I could keep not having real problems. Maybe once I get big enough or people read my voice in the English that it’s speaking they’ll start to figure out why they want me to have their anger and their problems. It’s not even that I don’t want them. I just can’t even accept them with the significance you need them to have. I can’t take and fix what’s not mine. You can shape someone’s world, but you can’t dictate their disposition.

[329] Who is En Nui Nui

A round of reading old blogs later….

I can chase a rabbit no problem. I want to assert a more specific goal. I simply want to experiment. The underlying motivation will be for global change, none too specific, but with the idea of things getting better. I want to explore a ton of vague-ish ideas and to pull any number of conjectures I can and put them under a spotlight.

My robot blog reminds me I’m only as good as the information I get. My “past love” blogs remind me of how easy it is to be retarded. A hundred or so on perspective tell me there needs to be more words for the word perspective. But all of my ramblings, for better or worse, are part of the experiment. I follow where my head goes at the time and cross my fingers. I have to take for granted that when people are doing things, retarded or otherwise, they’re doing just as much experimenting as me.

It’s why I really try not to make things personal. I need to draw analogies to grasp things. I, in some form or another, care about your lives and every new piece of information is a launch pad. I think I come across as “having all the answers” when I really only have many of them. ::wink:: The only reason to even talk in such terms would be to see how individuals sway a group. Patterns rule my life, and I’m sure it applies to when I make presumptive errors.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of people needing drama. How much of our perceived issues in the world are part of the fake fog of bullshit that isn’t really there for anything but boredom? How many problems are created when your resolve others? Maybe alone is significantly worse than “someone” for many people in a relationship and the idea of “being your full self” is an utterly foreign concept. Maybe there’s a ground floor act required regardless of the social or power systems that undermines ideas of change to begin with. Things I will need to collect more information about and experiment with.

I think I’m preparing myself to feel “less burdened.” That isn’t to say I don’t need to move fast, don’t care, have grown to accept, or anything resembling complacency. I think I’ve just become overwhelmed with the infinite potential for further answers and exploration, even amidst things that were easier to take for granted. I want to take more things with a grain of salt, not because I think they’re even good, but because I want to try to understand them even further. I think it’ll help slow me down as well and hopefully preempt these headaches.

[328] Good Gooder Best

Lately, I feel like I’ve been watching people set themselves up to fail. Maybe not today, maybe not even in the next couple years, but almost certainly eventually. If I look at my parents, it took them like 10-12 years to get divorced. You people realize that my general audience for these things that’s half their lives? They were a child maybe just getting into middle school and it took from the time they were born until then for my parents to figure out that their marriage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

 I’m not ragging on them for trying; I just want you to feel time. I want you to have a sense of how long things can go right or how long something wrong can take to unravel. When I talk to people who’ve gotten divorced or who’ve just been in long term relationships and see little choice otherwise, it’s a common theme. There’s the comfort and familiarity of the situation. There’s maybe a financial concern or kids involved. There are questions of what friends and family will think or how they’ll react.

 I think it’s not so much about separating a good from a bad relationship. It’s pretty easy to collectively wag our fingers at abuse or emotional manipulation. I want to make bigger lines between “good” “gooder” and the “best” kinds of relationships. Because I see plenty of good relationships that try to happily float past the very bad things that cause a lot of heartache and stupid things to happen over time. I also think there are different emotional states that predicate whether you find yourself in one of these categories or another.

When I first thought I was “in love” I would have done anything to be with that person. She was all I could think about. I wanted to change any and everything about me to make it work. It was hell, but it was absolutely the best kind of hell I could imagine. Even though at the time I knew I was an idiot, I definitely wasn’t an idiot! How could I be when it all just made so much sense? You’re not me, you can’t know, agree or I’m going to write off what you think and keep dreaming about her.

You know what would have happened if I got with her? Because I think it would have been terrible. After a while I would realize all the changes I made weren’t really me. I’d have a million little itches about how real life wasn’t living up to the fantasy. I would have made decisions early on that had everything to do with “us” and nothing necessarily to do with common sense or what’s best for me. But I was a kid. I got caught by the evolutionary drive that has made me one of the most recent incarnations of a billion year process to find someone overwhelming, knock them up, and throw caution to the wind.

When I think about that and compare it to what Kristen and I have, it’s like night and day. I craved, I was desperately in love. Now I have a constant hug and reminder, kisses I can constantly reflect on. Back then I struggled and contemplated every little thing I did. Now I get to just express myself and not stress out that any little thing is going to change what’s so naturally affirming. I was dishonest to myself and to what I could probably be to the girl in the past. I can’t think of a single thing I wouldn’t tell or haven’t told Kristen, and I don’t like how I could’ve been persuaded that something less than that would have ever worked. I hate the word love because I believe in something better than it. For me to care about her is so “duh” it’s effortless.

The transition from make-out buddy at a party, to spending time talking, to spending the night, to spending basically every night, to the first whispers throwing around that stupid L word took like 2 years. I made sure she knew that I wasn’t around to take advantage, I wasn’t about monogamy and don’t have too many feelings beyond general anger or general happiness. This never had her judging or making excuses for my views. She’s even said she would’ve been happy to get in a relationship sooner in order to feel special to someone. This we both identify as that trap where feelings begin to trump reality.

This is what I want for my friends. I don’t want them to be in good relationships, I want them to know they have someone in their life they can “take for granted.” Think healthy parent who always looks out for their child type taken for granted, not "I can do anything I want and you'll stick around." The second you pretend that those overwhelming lovey-dovey feelings at the start of a relationship mean something “magical” or “more than anyone else can appreciate” you’re setting yourself to ignore how much work it’s taking you to maintain. You’re ignoring what your parents can’t anymore that keeps them upset. It’s a wide brush to paint with the word “good” but it doesn’t mean you’re getting to be everything you are, only better, because you’re in that relationship.

Because that’s what I am; I’m better in light of her. It’s not “if only we could talk more things would be perfect.” “If only her jealousy wasn’t out of hand.” “If only I didn’t have to keep that part of my life or what I think secret.” “I wish this one (x) thing could just be a pinch more (y) and man would this be great.” She helps me better understand and express myself, and I’m fairly certain the feeling’s mutual. We don’t just get along, I didn’t just need a nice girl to sleep next to, and no amount of fucking around puts her out of my mind. You should think nothing less of yourself or the people you’re with.

Keep in mind this is a metric you should apply to any relationship in your life. I know which of my friends help me be a better me and which ones sort of almost play along until we stop sharing mutual friends. I recognize when you “struggle” to relate to something I’m saying or maybe just find it easy to pigeonhole where I’m coming from. Ironically I’ve had deep, insightful, and honest conversations with them in the past, but then something changes and it’s easy to get written off. I keep holding a candle for what was I guess. I think it has something to do with reading blogs like these as personal attacks and not opportunities to wonder why and if something sticks.

I see so many regretful old faces. It’s what could have been, who they once were, what they had to sacrifice. Whether you got knocked up early, ran your whole life from your fears, or spent too long finding the words for what you knew in your gut, I never want you to have the forlorn “back when I was this person” face. It’s not that people shouldn’t change you it’s that you shouldn’t let them stop you. You shouldn’t get used to it, you shouldn’t have to hide, and you shouldn’t ignore the details. Getting bogged down by societal or family or ill-conceived personal expectations closes the best door. There’s nothing like being understood and appreciated for who you really are.