I think I cleared some of the cobwebs in my earlier attempt to write. We might drill down on a few more specifics here.
Trust feels like a word to land on. My anxiety gets aggravated when I feel as though I can't trust "anything." I know this traces back to childhood under my mom's reign. The floor could never be trusted not to turn into lava in an instant. I compare how I feel, to this day, when I go to my dad's house versus how I feel dealing with people at large. I can just eat. I can simply sleep. I can talk or ask questions and not have to anticipate the backlash of doing so "wrong." I think there's so little we can actually trust, and the taken-for-granted aspects of our environment proved wholly untrustworthy in increasing ways over time.
I could count on one hand the amount of people I've tried to be friends with or would claim to be my family that haven't betrayed my trust. I genuinely wouldn't believe it was a thing to have were it not for my dad and grandma. There's a character from Blue Exorcist that comes to mind who is viciously self-reliant after being left helpless when her family abandoned her. For me, trust implies you have my best interests at heart in the same way I have yours. We're gonna buy each other drinks and meals and bowling games. In a car breakdown scenario, I'll brave the drive, the night, and weather to get you back home.
That feels like a level that should be almost throwaway obvious. What about deeper things? What about long-term commitments and investments? What about emotional well-being? What about when called to sacrifice or choose, they pick you? This is where I feel my longing to "really connect" with people has served to get me betrayed over and over. If I pull you into my camp, I'm spending money on you, I'm giving you all of my time, I'm using my tools, my energy, and my ideas to see what I can do for you. You have a particular priority? Let's put it first. It's not "you pick where to eat" or "whatever movie you like." It's, "Shit is as real as it gets and long-term stability is on the line."
I've wanted to feel "safe" my entire life. I'm always chasing or running no matter how much time I take between accomplishments to see a performance or marathon TV. I want to feel like my friends aren't going to ignore me when I'm afraid of dying via negligence. I want to know the bills can get paid with a fair amount of time and effort and I won't have to degrade or hollow out myself in service to "practicality." I want to know that when I defend going about the work I do in the way I do, I'm not going to have to look like a desperate hypocrite because something foundational has to be sacrificed in order to merely survive.
A couple months ago I wrote a little thing to an ex telling her I appreciated the work she had done and that I didn't want to haplessly fall into a pattern where everyone I'm close to becomes someone who never wants to talk to me again. She never responded to it. I asked her today whether she received it at all. She said, "I got it. What's the question?" All I wanted to know was whether or not she had gotten it, so it got left there. Immediately though, I feel the same pattern and same lesson is beating me over the head. An effort to contextualize or offer friendship is met with silence. I'm likely a thing she'll spend a considerable amount of her time trying not to think about, like most people I know.
Brandy follows through. My dad follows through. Hussain, when he isn't a ball of stress, follows through. When I say "follows through," I mean does the work of being accountable to our shared dynamic. It's not just that we're incidentally familiar or "friendly" with each other. It's that we exchange real shit that we mean and can trust and rely upon. For a time I would have said the same things about Byron and Allie, hence my larger time and financial investments. Most of my connections can't be bothered to answer a text within a week, let alone plan a trip or entertain the practical work of overhauling a living or work situation.
I'm not looking for anyone to blame. I'm just struck. I'm flabbergasted. I get exhausted thinking about it. I don't know if I'm missing some more insightful conclusion to draw. My friend recently told me she's trying to let go of the worry around making a mistake or the "wrong" decision. I can't tell you how long I've made seeking the next mistake and learning the wrong shit to do my mission. Nearly everything I pursue most earnestly or with the most history to back up what it's worth, the overwhelming feedback is that it's still wrong. From strangers, from "experts," from frequently opinionated onlookers. Fuck, from people I pay to do the wrong parts right. I'm just fucking up one thing after another until I get a 10 minute reprieve every few months.
I got home not too long ago from a…it was certainly a rendition…of Jesus Christ Superstar. Jesus predicts his betrayal. The people killing him aren't even sure why he must die, but figure out how to get there, washing their hands of any responsibility. I wonder how many people see themselves in Judas or the Pharisees. I wonder how many consider themselves background dancers and vocals, not stirring the pot, but not willing or able to step into their own spotlight. Does Jesus trust his apostles to do anything beyond betray him and prove him obviously correct? My phrasing for years has been that I "trust" people to do exactly as they show themselves to be. That's held true for everyone that's fucked me the hardest.
I trust your insecurity to win. I trust you'll get defensive. I trust you'll rely on cliches and extremely vague ironically-named pleasantries when you're unable to explain your behavior, decision making, or provide a personally responsible answer to a question. I trust your resentment and ambivalence. I trust you'll stay quiet more than anything. I trust you'll gossip. I trust you'll find ways to undermine things I'm trying to do, and you won't even be consciously aware of why, but you'll pick a turn of phrase or let some derogatory detail or comment inform the next person's view of what I'm doing. If you're the DCS regional management cunts you'll literally prevent us from getting paid at all to meet a gaping hole in service provision.
I can't stress how much I do not believe in our "better natures." I do not think we are fundamentally good. I'm certainly not. It takes me an incredible amount of effort not to act like what is offered to me. Do you think for a second I couldn't be rich preying on people? Do you think my concept of "fuck it" isn't capable of the kind of destruction you read about? I work to behave otherwise. I talk to myself. I share the struggle. I ground who I wish to be in examples, like this, because I only get to brush against them occasionally when I'm spending time with the small handful of people who remind me I'm not actually alone.
In a world that is fundamentally untrustworthy, how could I even believe, "The work will speak for itself?" That's been a consistent line I try to fall back on when I'm floundering. I certainly get the "You're so amazing!" feedback often enough, but I've said plenty on why you can't trust that. I'm thinking about the people with the money, or how the people who receive the work interpret what's happened. If all you practically are is worth the amount you can market yourself or convince and lie that your "mission" is the same, what then? I don't think our mission is the same. I think mine is to work. I think yours is to tell people you support those who "help."
The work certainly feels a different way. I don't care how poor I get, when I'm actually doing the right things, I feel better. I can allude to all of the terrible horrible places I can entertain as thought experiments, but not feel like I'm taking some chance that I'll make them come true. I know how crazy-making and rage-inducing it is to sit and seethe over greed, lies, and injustice. If there's 5 people left on the planet who see and feel the same shit I do, I want to find and work with them or die trying. I absolutely refuse to play along and let you win.
Showing posts with label Trust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trust. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Monday, February 5, 2024
[1102] Once And For All
I really need to talk and think "big picture" right now because this day in isolation is proving several orders of frustrating.
I'm about to hit about half as much as I typically make a year in debt. The largest portion of that is the investments I'm making in grant writers, fundraisers, and the infrastructure to keep my website, insurance, and credentials up to date/alive. Thinking about my needs in isolation, there's hardly a grant that could be granted that wouldn't cover my expenses for a year easy. Whether I invested $500, or $5,000 in landing a decent grant, in theory, I have little to worry about with enough exposure and submissions. It's the same story for an individual who might donate or securing funds from a corporation. I hit 30K, I'm not just out of debt, but the rest of the bills are paid all year.
Well, you ever hear about how hard it is to find good help? Even, it turns out, when you're paying $40/hr or, considerably more than $40/hr. For reasons I'm sure I'll contemplate the rest of my life, I can neither be too specific nor too communicative about what I need. If I use one word, they'll hear another. If I use 3 pages of words, they'll arc their head like a dog and ask for "more." I don't know what part of my insane younger self thought he wanted to be at the center of dozens of people's terrible interpretations of words, but some days it gets to such an overwhelming degree, you want to flush it all and just go fuck off at a factory or something.
Not a day goes by that I don't hear some horrifying mental health statistic. We're, broadly, getting dumber, less equipped, less accountable, and we somehow pair this with "positive jobs report" numbers while our psychological well-being is mercilessly dragged through raging gaslit fires. I have a company now poised to live or die on the back of our perception and goodwill as it pertains to what is, literally every day, described in numbers of tortured lonely souls, and I feel at constant battle to be allowed to address or work to make things the tiniest bit better for those in my orbit.
My state doesn't want anyone to get better. Insurance doesn't want anyone to get paid. "Competitors" want the same clients dependent and afraid and ignorant. Other do-gooders and "passionate" people passive-aggressively lay claim to the dignity and insight of their particular bubbles and ways of conforming to suspiciously blind norms. Everyone I talk to, even when they're not trying to, uses a tone that says something like, "You're new, or not enough, or not credentialed or organized or equipped in the way that suits me." I feel like I'm fighting for acceptance in a field that I've got years of demonstrated exceptional competence in. It creates a very cognitively dissonant place.
Am I a punchy little naive start-up looking for a big-brother sponsor and to have my hand held? Like, no. I'm a social work professional who's materially influenced and changed people's lives routinely for years who just wants the bare minimum "keeping the lights on" in return, even for the first few fucking years! This despite the personally-experienced level of need observed and engaged that should allow for more than subsistence living. Your extra year and a half in a Master's program or social work school specific degree isn't decades of experience and competence creating an obscene gulf between us in how we might relate or help each other.
It's a multi-layered "attack" on what I'm trying to do. There's the practical with taxes, start-up fees, online infrastructure and credentialing costs. There's the personal, with my business partner an almost perfect stress machine dealing with his severely injured wife, or battles with his school and the licensing board. There's whatever you want to make of my own head and things that make me want to pop. There's the language and communication barrier where everyone I speak to has to be online or mostly via text and email, and no matter what gets said, they find a way to capitalize on it in a way that has me spending more and getting less, or nothing at all. And then even the good-natured genuinely capable can't help but occupy overt and increased skepticism that tends to cripple the path towards a problem getting solved verses a path that doesn't wish to be bothered.
In any given moment where the weight and racing thoughts about all of that rush in, freeze me, or feel way more persuasive and compelling than waiting or looking for the next opportunity, it's about as bad as I can ever feel without being sick. Even looking at the next thing that might cause any level of stress feels unbearable. So, you can pull back and watch TV or fuck around on a guitar. Good luck in that moment not shitting on yourself for not powering through the discomfort. That's, of course, unfair and unrealistic and unnecessary. Tell that to how you feel anyway. Also, be by yourself pretty much all the time. Then, all of the disconcerting words and feedback exist as a kind of fogginess and extra steps removed from ever getting resolved.
I could pack what I do or what I've done into 4 sentences appropriate for an elevator. I'll have to write a fucking book or ten about the infinitely infuriating process, barriers, and human condition that makes remotely achieving anything feel like a fucking miracle. It's not one step forward and two steps back. The paradigm isn't backwards or forwards. The paradigm is now and whether now is aware of how to make now actualized into one moment over another. Every moment I'm trying not to sound disorganized, incomplete, exhausted, or like a cunt because I think you've just taken advantage of me or wasted my time, suggests I have no fucking idea how to make now better than it feels.
I'm gonna try again tomorrow. I'm gonna fuck around with my shows and instruments tonight. I'm gonna keep waiting and seeing if I can meet or talk to people that don't complicate things more than they need to be. Thankfully, if I know nothing else, it's that I'm at least as wrong and full of shit in my despotism as "they" are in their ignorant optimism or pride in how they engage me. Their persistent, almost motivated failure it seems, is all the more evidence that I shouldn't act like them against myself. Don't I trust they're blind cunts? Don't I trust they'll be sly and calculated in their denial about trying to fuck? Of course I do. I'm inviting them in to do so. Why react when you get proven right with anything but joy and confidence? I mean, that's obviously an incredibly dangerous path to self-deluded hell, but you know what I mean. Of course, you don't.
Do you have any idea how much I don't want to be right? I think an obscene amount about the idea of, "You can be right, or you can be happy." It's one of those lines that has never left me and nags like an old crow. I want to be wrong about so much shit that keeps proving true in the most consistent and painful ways. I wish I could trust the things I feel I need to exist in a healthy mental place, but I need to doubt, aggressively so, or I can't function. I will literally lose too much money or people to work with in any capacity if I trust. That's fucking crazy to me.
If I treat the environment I'm working within as though it actually cares about people, you know what happens? I get targeted and taken advantage of. I behave as though problems are there to be solved, therefore, in violation of the reality, I become their problem. I get lectured and condescended towards. I get "good luck" sentiments. I get gossipped about. This shit isn't conspiratorial either, word makes it back to me. How could you not? I stick out. I fight. I'm angry. I don't give a fuck how you feel if you're doing dumb wrong shit that conflicts with the smart good shit I'm attempting. I illicit that look and pause and exasperated airy sentimentality that really does not wish to be bothered, but doesn't want to be blamed as more complicit or indicative barrier than support.
I have exactly 5 relationships in my entire life that have maintained a fairly equitable investment/output kind of dynamic that weren't otherwise mostly superficial acquaintances. Whether we're talking literally financially, or emotional work and time to maintain. 9 out of 10 people in my life cost me money, will gleefully draw from my time to their own ends, ignore the work of maintaining their own sense of balance or mental health, or will levy endless commentary or judgment about me that I don't, or at least didn't feel or return about them as it was raining in. This most often manifest as silence as I'm expected to deal with whatever the fallout becomes of their negligence.
And I aspire to counsel people in situations where 9.5 of the people in their lives are pulling the same shit, and the shivering half of their own self that they can still recognize and respect feels as dark, overwhelmed, and made to feel as crazy as I described feeling above. Sounds like a fucking party.
One of my clients called and texted several times, waking me up too early, to freak out about information I'm not inclined to share with her PO, and am also bound my confidentiality regardless. After calming down, she brought up speaking to her friend who she has implored to start speaking with me, especially after I said I'd hold sessions for free. Don't you know? Her friend said she "definitely" would, but it might take a few weeks because she has doctor's appointments and yada yada yada. My client doesn't understand her friend isn't going to call me. My client is my client because she genuinely wants to get better. Her friend is 9 out of 10 people who pretend they don't have an hour to sort themselves out, at least a little bit, one day, between the moment you find out about it, and the weeks or years you'll spend pretending it doesn't exist.
I let myself suffer unduly for about a half hour before I started writing. That's practice. I identified things about me that reflexively catastrophize and conceptualized my fledgling feeling effort. I broadened the scope. I denoted the indifferent or impartial patterns people follow and depersonalized the particular cunts who drew focus. I feel a little better than when I began. Shouldn't we all get really good at our own version of this? And is it not existentially right to pursue a way to sustainably help people to keep practicing if 1 in 4 have a substance use disorder?
I'm about to hit about half as much as I typically make a year in debt. The largest portion of that is the investments I'm making in grant writers, fundraisers, and the infrastructure to keep my website, insurance, and credentials up to date/alive. Thinking about my needs in isolation, there's hardly a grant that could be granted that wouldn't cover my expenses for a year easy. Whether I invested $500, or $5,000 in landing a decent grant, in theory, I have little to worry about with enough exposure and submissions. It's the same story for an individual who might donate or securing funds from a corporation. I hit 30K, I'm not just out of debt, but the rest of the bills are paid all year.
Well, you ever hear about how hard it is to find good help? Even, it turns out, when you're paying $40/hr or, considerably more than $40/hr. For reasons I'm sure I'll contemplate the rest of my life, I can neither be too specific nor too communicative about what I need. If I use one word, they'll hear another. If I use 3 pages of words, they'll arc their head like a dog and ask for "more." I don't know what part of my insane younger self thought he wanted to be at the center of dozens of people's terrible interpretations of words, but some days it gets to such an overwhelming degree, you want to flush it all and just go fuck off at a factory or something.
Not a day goes by that I don't hear some horrifying mental health statistic. We're, broadly, getting dumber, less equipped, less accountable, and we somehow pair this with "positive jobs report" numbers while our psychological well-being is mercilessly dragged through raging gaslit fires. I have a company now poised to live or die on the back of our perception and goodwill as it pertains to what is, literally every day, described in numbers of tortured lonely souls, and I feel at constant battle to be allowed to address or work to make things the tiniest bit better for those in my orbit.
My state doesn't want anyone to get better. Insurance doesn't want anyone to get paid. "Competitors" want the same clients dependent and afraid and ignorant. Other do-gooders and "passionate" people passive-aggressively lay claim to the dignity and insight of their particular bubbles and ways of conforming to suspiciously blind norms. Everyone I talk to, even when they're not trying to, uses a tone that says something like, "You're new, or not enough, or not credentialed or organized or equipped in the way that suits me." I feel like I'm fighting for acceptance in a field that I've got years of demonstrated exceptional competence in. It creates a very cognitively dissonant place.
Am I a punchy little naive start-up looking for a big-brother sponsor and to have my hand held? Like, no. I'm a social work professional who's materially influenced and changed people's lives routinely for years who just wants the bare minimum "keeping the lights on" in return, even for the first few fucking years! This despite the personally-experienced level of need observed and engaged that should allow for more than subsistence living. Your extra year and a half in a Master's program or social work school specific degree isn't decades of experience and competence creating an obscene gulf between us in how we might relate or help each other.
It's a multi-layered "attack" on what I'm trying to do. There's the practical with taxes, start-up fees, online infrastructure and credentialing costs. There's the personal, with my business partner an almost perfect stress machine dealing with his severely injured wife, or battles with his school and the licensing board. There's whatever you want to make of my own head and things that make me want to pop. There's the language and communication barrier where everyone I speak to has to be online or mostly via text and email, and no matter what gets said, they find a way to capitalize on it in a way that has me spending more and getting less, or nothing at all. And then even the good-natured genuinely capable can't help but occupy overt and increased skepticism that tends to cripple the path towards a problem getting solved verses a path that doesn't wish to be bothered.
In any given moment where the weight and racing thoughts about all of that rush in, freeze me, or feel way more persuasive and compelling than waiting or looking for the next opportunity, it's about as bad as I can ever feel without being sick. Even looking at the next thing that might cause any level of stress feels unbearable. So, you can pull back and watch TV or fuck around on a guitar. Good luck in that moment not shitting on yourself for not powering through the discomfort. That's, of course, unfair and unrealistic and unnecessary. Tell that to how you feel anyway. Also, be by yourself pretty much all the time. Then, all of the disconcerting words and feedback exist as a kind of fogginess and extra steps removed from ever getting resolved.
I could pack what I do or what I've done into 4 sentences appropriate for an elevator. I'll have to write a fucking book or ten about the infinitely infuriating process, barriers, and human condition that makes remotely achieving anything feel like a fucking miracle. It's not one step forward and two steps back. The paradigm isn't backwards or forwards. The paradigm is now and whether now is aware of how to make now actualized into one moment over another. Every moment I'm trying not to sound disorganized, incomplete, exhausted, or like a cunt because I think you've just taken advantage of me or wasted my time, suggests I have no fucking idea how to make now better than it feels.
I'm gonna try again tomorrow. I'm gonna fuck around with my shows and instruments tonight. I'm gonna keep waiting and seeing if I can meet or talk to people that don't complicate things more than they need to be. Thankfully, if I know nothing else, it's that I'm at least as wrong and full of shit in my despotism as "they" are in their ignorant optimism or pride in how they engage me. Their persistent, almost motivated failure it seems, is all the more evidence that I shouldn't act like them against myself. Don't I trust they're blind cunts? Don't I trust they'll be sly and calculated in their denial about trying to fuck? Of course I do. I'm inviting them in to do so. Why react when you get proven right with anything but joy and confidence? I mean, that's obviously an incredibly dangerous path to self-deluded hell, but you know what I mean. Of course, you don't.
Do you have any idea how much I don't want to be right? I think an obscene amount about the idea of, "You can be right, or you can be happy." It's one of those lines that has never left me and nags like an old crow. I want to be wrong about so much shit that keeps proving true in the most consistent and painful ways. I wish I could trust the things I feel I need to exist in a healthy mental place, but I need to doubt, aggressively so, or I can't function. I will literally lose too much money or people to work with in any capacity if I trust. That's fucking crazy to me.
If I treat the environment I'm working within as though it actually cares about people, you know what happens? I get targeted and taken advantage of. I behave as though problems are there to be solved, therefore, in violation of the reality, I become their problem. I get lectured and condescended towards. I get "good luck" sentiments. I get gossipped about. This shit isn't conspiratorial either, word makes it back to me. How could you not? I stick out. I fight. I'm angry. I don't give a fuck how you feel if you're doing dumb wrong shit that conflicts with the smart good shit I'm attempting. I illicit that look and pause and exasperated airy sentimentality that really does not wish to be bothered, but doesn't want to be blamed as more complicit or indicative barrier than support.
I have exactly 5 relationships in my entire life that have maintained a fairly equitable investment/output kind of dynamic that weren't otherwise mostly superficial acquaintances. Whether we're talking literally financially, or emotional work and time to maintain. 9 out of 10 people in my life cost me money, will gleefully draw from my time to their own ends, ignore the work of maintaining their own sense of balance or mental health, or will levy endless commentary or judgment about me that I don't, or at least didn't feel or return about them as it was raining in. This most often manifest as silence as I'm expected to deal with whatever the fallout becomes of their negligence.
And I aspire to counsel people in situations where 9.5 of the people in their lives are pulling the same shit, and the shivering half of their own self that they can still recognize and respect feels as dark, overwhelmed, and made to feel as crazy as I described feeling above. Sounds like a fucking party.
One of my clients called and texted several times, waking me up too early, to freak out about information I'm not inclined to share with her PO, and am also bound my confidentiality regardless. After calming down, she brought up speaking to her friend who she has implored to start speaking with me, especially after I said I'd hold sessions for free. Don't you know? Her friend said she "definitely" would, but it might take a few weeks because she has doctor's appointments and yada yada yada. My client doesn't understand her friend isn't going to call me. My client is my client because she genuinely wants to get better. Her friend is 9 out of 10 people who pretend they don't have an hour to sort themselves out, at least a little bit, one day, between the moment you find out about it, and the weeks or years you'll spend pretending it doesn't exist.
I let myself suffer unduly for about a half hour before I started writing. That's practice. I identified things about me that reflexively catastrophize and conceptualized my fledgling feeling effort. I broadened the scope. I denoted the indifferent or impartial patterns people follow and depersonalized the particular cunts who drew focus. I feel a little better than when I began. Shouldn't we all get really good at our own version of this? And is it not existentially right to pursue a way to sustainably help people to keep practicing if 1 in 4 have a substance use disorder?
Saturday, March 3, 2018
[693] Another Day, Another Collar
I'm writing because I ate considerably too much at too late an hour to be able to rely on the "itis" that caught me already once today. I also like to use blogs where I feel very little is on the line to scavenger hunt for something I didn't realize was important.
It seems that right at the "last push" of another month or so of working, where at the end I should presumably have a house that I can survive in, if it still lacks certain amenities, I find myself yearning to take it easy. I noticed that when in a "rut" or pattern, I can reliably wake up 2 minutes before my alarm, and at one point I was waking up with all of the energy morning people claim to have, though I only have my car seat to direct it to. That's gone. I wake up tired whether I sleep 4 or 8 hours. I know a big component is what I'm eating. Of course, because it's me, I don't want to bother with eating healthy or food prep unless I feel I can stick with it and do it right.
None of that is interesting. In fact, the last line is one Derren Brown used on a "personalized survey" to try and show people that with enough vagaries and catch-all sentiments, you can trick a large portion of the population into thinking you've read their mind. No less, I can literally read my mind as I carry on writing, and still manage to express a "personal" truth that I can see manifesting itself in my behavior time and again. For some reason I just thought about masturbation rituals. You get someone feeling really ashamed or embarrassed because dare they share when they cum, they like to shoot it from their ear. Ultimately, there's only so much you can do, and it's probably been done before.
I was thinking that not only do I hate my job, but I hate how easy my job is. I drive around town. I sit around a parking lot. I can do this indefinitely as long as I show up early enough and the business stays open. No matter how long I engage in this activity, it will never bring me joy. I will never feel a sense of accomplishment or ownership. I will never take with me anything more or less than every fabled piece of discontent shared by labor across time. Yet it exists, and people profit mightily from it, and have invested a ton, and make excuses for it, and celebrate the "freedom" one has to come and go as you please, even when that's not a correct thing to say. So many levels of bullshit curate our world, from the delivery boy to the boardroom, we normalize deluded bullshit.
This is an idea I find myself increasingly commenting on with, "I don't understand this." Isn't life hard enough? No matter what I seem to achieve, quickly or otherwise, I'm always anxious and pursuing something new. No matter how many relationships I'd like to trust or rely on, I still have to deal with feeling guilty or ashamed for reaching out and expecting honesty or candor. No matter the amount of money I may make or small villages I'll insist on bragging about helping will make me think any more positively about "the human spirit" or general human endeavor. Life gives you enough things wrong with your head and your daily life, why add another layer? Why perpetuate the lie, whatever it is? Why pretend you deserve the money? Why pretend you're as good a friend as you can be? Why think anything so assuredly that you're willing to tear down instead of preserve and explore?
I think like this because I find myself feeling lost in the woods of diversion media. I had preferences, now I'm constantly trying to mine for surprises. I want to be caught off guard laughing, not walk into something with expectations because it's labeled "comedy" and stars a familiar face. I have little to no contact with "the culture at large" that isn't bathed in internet inanity, so I try to become familiar with things that get popular or make their way to late night talk shows to be promoted. As fate would have it, I get into more pointless conversations about TV shows than nearly anything else, followed my the occasional "How is Trump killing us now" banter.
I could arguably be terrible at preservation. Perhaps it is my fault for literally every person that's left my life or felt some undue burden in how I contacted them or tried to talk. I don't actually believe that, but I'm willing to entertain it. Perhaps I should have scheduled "reach out" sessions and kept stoking some nostalgic flame. I'm the obsessive perpetual child, no? It's my job to drag everybody down into my hopeful naivety that envisions one impractical dire necessity after another. I could claim to do it for my sake or theirs, but doesn't everything fall under my sake?
I think a marginal savior of my sanity is that I don't believe in anything. I don't believe in myself, so when I manage to get anything done it's this lacking-in-object-permanence kind of surprise. The piece of me, the pieces I use to navigate the world, or just my little hopeless bubble, feel fluid. They can get tired without notice. They can run at a thousand miles an hour and whip me into shape. I don't know that I'll stay on to work all day. I should. I should know that's what I want to do because I want a house, and I want to never again hear something so stupid like, "Hey, I have a friend coming over for spring break, do you think you can just...not live here for a while? I didn't consider you could just sleep on the floor, and that you slept in your car before it got cold because you had nowhere else to go, and that you pay rent, but I'd like my friend to be able to have the couch."
I think so often about what a world without the added layer of incoherent dishonest bullshit would really look like. I want to know what it's like to be able to trust 50 or 100 people. I want to know what it means to have things get fixed and go right more often than wrong. Moreover, wrong for deliberate and ridiculous reasons. Someone like me, who's proven adept enough with money to at least navigate business ownership, land stewardship, and house construction, should be able to get that less than a month's wages loan from the bank to get work done in a timely manner. I should have been able to work the coffee shop in the mall for a quarter of the rent, and been made whole when they fucked me for the electricity. There should be resources and outlets for those who achieve that aren't exploitative contests and game shows where you humble yourself to gods of money and excess in order to try and fail once where they've been a thousand times.
What if people actually took my advice and wrote? What if they came to well-reasoned positions about me or my behavior and our relationship, and we didn't have to have an awkward text or fight because I asked a question? What if I was correct, and acknowledged and rewarded for being correct, like we attempt to with children, and we built from there? What if I never needed your "faith" because you allowed yourself to realize the day to day work? What if we all have our long and convoluted story as to how we came to a place that was always "on" and assessing and willing to engage? What does the world look like when we all decide to take considerably more responsibility for it than any of our fellow failures insists upon us? Aren't the dimwits from Parkland showing us what a dozen pissed off people can do for the Left? They're barely more coherent than Tea-baggers if you let them talk too long, and it doesn't matter.
I've said in the past that once the house was done I've contemplated just sleeping for a week. Just sit out there and soak up the idea that there isn't a bill just around the corner urging me to get up against my will. Just take in the idea that it exists, and now I exist in it, and it took considerably more effort and bullshit than anyone will ever care to hear the details of. I know I won't be able to sit still for very long, so it seems like a worthwhile challenge. I dream as though I already have memories of living there. As far as what I may make of the probability wave concerning my future, the house is done. I'm there, I'm blasting music and practicing instruments all night. You should see how quickly I retaught my fingers to speed pick.
Before the headache, eyestrain, chest pain, knee throb, sore ball, or knotted neck and shoulders get me, I hope I can remain there as I keep finding ways to persuade myself that a southern Indiana parking lot, waiting to be stuck in traffic and stood up by an entitled Indian kid, is exactly where I need to be. I'll keep drumming and building wrist chops. I'll keep doing vocal exercises. I'll keep the TV marathons goings. I'll try to talk myself out of wasting money on McDonald's. I'll proclaim the niceness of the day or lament the ongoing rain. Never let yourself be fooled that what I'm doing has anything to do with "me." I'm preoccupying my brain with half measures and distractions so I'm not driven mad thinking about what I can't think about. I'm desperately clinging to shades of the vibrancy I'd rather paint with so I can bother to say there's at least still color in my world.
I want to create and live in a world that makes sense, but I'm forced to operate in one that does everything in its power not to. I want to feel like the taking up of responsibility for what I create or who I let into my world is a measure of my worthwhile perspective. I want to reacquire the time to contemplate complicated ideas with the details. Instead, I'm sat, fat, tired, and downtrodden about my inevitable future, because even one day of tyranny is tyranny nonetheless. The added dogma of man superimposed on the guy so worn down he's chosen a field in the middle of nowhere as a bastion of last hope, if only in one day using the value inherent to escape his circumstances one way or another.
Here we make it to the end. I feel the eyes starting to hurt, it's late enough that I'm guaranteed not to get enough sleep if I want to go in as early as I need to. I'll probably sleep a little longer and try to go in a little later. While I claim to already be living in a version of my idealized future, what I know seems to have considerably less bearing in the face of all I don't. I could stand to know more. I could bother with the responsibility to help, fix, or sustain more than myself. I could matter as the social animal with at least an ounce of personal integrity that works overtime to combat my chaotic impulses. I'll get there, just in the dumbest way possible that keeps me longing for death by the time I do.
It seems that right at the "last push" of another month or so of working, where at the end I should presumably have a house that I can survive in, if it still lacks certain amenities, I find myself yearning to take it easy. I noticed that when in a "rut" or pattern, I can reliably wake up 2 minutes before my alarm, and at one point I was waking up with all of the energy morning people claim to have, though I only have my car seat to direct it to. That's gone. I wake up tired whether I sleep 4 or 8 hours. I know a big component is what I'm eating. Of course, because it's me, I don't want to bother with eating healthy or food prep unless I feel I can stick with it and do it right.
None of that is interesting. In fact, the last line is one Derren Brown used on a "personalized survey" to try and show people that with enough vagaries and catch-all sentiments, you can trick a large portion of the population into thinking you've read their mind. No less, I can literally read my mind as I carry on writing, and still manage to express a "personal" truth that I can see manifesting itself in my behavior time and again. For some reason I just thought about masturbation rituals. You get someone feeling really ashamed or embarrassed because dare they share when they cum, they like to shoot it from their ear. Ultimately, there's only so much you can do, and it's probably been done before.
I was thinking that not only do I hate my job, but I hate how easy my job is. I drive around town. I sit around a parking lot. I can do this indefinitely as long as I show up early enough and the business stays open. No matter how long I engage in this activity, it will never bring me joy. I will never feel a sense of accomplishment or ownership. I will never take with me anything more or less than every fabled piece of discontent shared by labor across time. Yet it exists, and people profit mightily from it, and have invested a ton, and make excuses for it, and celebrate the "freedom" one has to come and go as you please, even when that's not a correct thing to say. So many levels of bullshit curate our world, from the delivery boy to the boardroom, we normalize deluded bullshit.
This is an idea I find myself increasingly commenting on with, "I don't understand this." Isn't life hard enough? No matter what I seem to achieve, quickly or otherwise, I'm always anxious and pursuing something new. No matter how many relationships I'd like to trust or rely on, I still have to deal with feeling guilty or ashamed for reaching out and expecting honesty or candor. No matter the amount of money I may make or small villages I'll insist on bragging about helping will make me think any more positively about "the human spirit" or general human endeavor. Life gives you enough things wrong with your head and your daily life, why add another layer? Why perpetuate the lie, whatever it is? Why pretend you deserve the money? Why pretend you're as good a friend as you can be? Why think anything so assuredly that you're willing to tear down instead of preserve and explore?
I think like this because I find myself feeling lost in the woods of diversion media. I had preferences, now I'm constantly trying to mine for surprises. I want to be caught off guard laughing, not walk into something with expectations because it's labeled "comedy" and stars a familiar face. I have little to no contact with "the culture at large" that isn't bathed in internet inanity, so I try to become familiar with things that get popular or make their way to late night talk shows to be promoted. As fate would have it, I get into more pointless conversations about TV shows than nearly anything else, followed my the occasional "How is Trump killing us now" banter.
I could arguably be terrible at preservation. Perhaps it is my fault for literally every person that's left my life or felt some undue burden in how I contacted them or tried to talk. I don't actually believe that, but I'm willing to entertain it. Perhaps I should have scheduled "reach out" sessions and kept stoking some nostalgic flame. I'm the obsessive perpetual child, no? It's my job to drag everybody down into my hopeful naivety that envisions one impractical dire necessity after another. I could claim to do it for my sake or theirs, but doesn't everything fall under my sake?
I think a marginal savior of my sanity is that I don't believe in anything. I don't believe in myself, so when I manage to get anything done it's this lacking-in-object-permanence kind of surprise. The piece of me, the pieces I use to navigate the world, or just my little hopeless bubble, feel fluid. They can get tired without notice. They can run at a thousand miles an hour and whip me into shape. I don't know that I'll stay on to work all day. I should. I should know that's what I want to do because I want a house, and I want to never again hear something so stupid like, "Hey, I have a friend coming over for spring break, do you think you can just...not live here for a while? I didn't consider you could just sleep on the floor, and that you slept in your car before it got cold because you had nowhere else to go, and that you pay rent, but I'd like my friend to be able to have the couch."
I think so often about what a world without the added layer of incoherent dishonest bullshit would really look like. I want to know what it's like to be able to trust 50 or 100 people. I want to know what it means to have things get fixed and go right more often than wrong. Moreover, wrong for deliberate and ridiculous reasons. Someone like me, who's proven adept enough with money to at least navigate business ownership, land stewardship, and house construction, should be able to get that less than a month's wages loan from the bank to get work done in a timely manner. I should have been able to work the coffee shop in the mall for a quarter of the rent, and been made whole when they fucked me for the electricity. There should be resources and outlets for those who achieve that aren't exploitative contests and game shows where you humble yourself to gods of money and excess in order to try and fail once where they've been a thousand times.
What if people actually took my advice and wrote? What if they came to well-reasoned positions about me or my behavior and our relationship, and we didn't have to have an awkward text or fight because I asked a question? What if I was correct, and acknowledged and rewarded for being correct, like we attempt to with children, and we built from there? What if I never needed your "faith" because you allowed yourself to realize the day to day work? What if we all have our long and convoluted story as to how we came to a place that was always "on" and assessing and willing to engage? What does the world look like when we all decide to take considerably more responsibility for it than any of our fellow failures insists upon us? Aren't the dimwits from Parkland showing us what a dozen pissed off people can do for the Left? They're barely more coherent than Tea-baggers if you let them talk too long, and it doesn't matter.
I've said in the past that once the house was done I've contemplated just sleeping for a week. Just sit out there and soak up the idea that there isn't a bill just around the corner urging me to get up against my will. Just take in the idea that it exists, and now I exist in it, and it took considerably more effort and bullshit than anyone will ever care to hear the details of. I know I won't be able to sit still for very long, so it seems like a worthwhile challenge. I dream as though I already have memories of living there. As far as what I may make of the probability wave concerning my future, the house is done. I'm there, I'm blasting music and practicing instruments all night. You should see how quickly I retaught my fingers to speed pick.
Before the headache, eyestrain, chest pain, knee throb, sore ball, or knotted neck and shoulders get me, I hope I can remain there as I keep finding ways to persuade myself that a southern Indiana parking lot, waiting to be stuck in traffic and stood up by an entitled Indian kid, is exactly where I need to be. I'll keep drumming and building wrist chops. I'll keep doing vocal exercises. I'll keep the TV marathons goings. I'll try to talk myself out of wasting money on McDonald's. I'll proclaim the niceness of the day or lament the ongoing rain. Never let yourself be fooled that what I'm doing has anything to do with "me." I'm preoccupying my brain with half measures and distractions so I'm not driven mad thinking about what I can't think about. I'm desperately clinging to shades of the vibrancy I'd rather paint with so I can bother to say there's at least still color in my world.
I want to create and live in a world that makes sense, but I'm forced to operate in one that does everything in its power not to. I want to feel like the taking up of responsibility for what I create or who I let into my world is a measure of my worthwhile perspective. I want to reacquire the time to contemplate complicated ideas with the details. Instead, I'm sat, fat, tired, and downtrodden about my inevitable future, because even one day of tyranny is tyranny nonetheless. The added dogma of man superimposed on the guy so worn down he's chosen a field in the middle of nowhere as a bastion of last hope, if only in one day using the value inherent to escape his circumstances one way or another.
Here we make it to the end. I feel the eyes starting to hurt, it's late enough that I'm guaranteed not to get enough sleep if I want to go in as early as I need to. I'll probably sleep a little longer and try to go in a little later. While I claim to already be living in a version of my idealized future, what I know seems to have considerably less bearing in the face of all I don't. I could stand to know more. I could bother with the responsibility to help, fix, or sustain more than myself. I could matter as the social animal with at least an ounce of personal integrity that works overtime to combat my chaotic impulses. I'll get there, just in the dumbest way possible that keeps me longing for death by the time I do.
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
[501] Tales To Astonish
I’m struck by my lack of identity.
As I study more history or learn about the traits and ideas different countries hold, it becomes ever-apparent how much of “you” has been shaped in the motions of our histories. The rarely forgotten war or trade dynamics are often cited in joking or criticizing one another. The taglines in tourism brochures hope to intrigue you about a point of pride regarding a nation’s identity or self-determination. It just leaves me feeling like, with so much at play, how does one ever really define and come to accept things about their personality?
This feels like it wants to start-off sounding very high school. This is also something I often brush against in hoping to get people to unpack their language and look harder at the source of their feelings. But I want it pressed on harder and to explore the source of my own frustrations when it feels like “my identity” is being ignored or disrespected.
I sit here writing. Pull back and I’m 1 of 3 roommates, in 1 of 4 townhouses, in 1 of dozens of townhouse clusters, in 1 of hundreds of apartment complexes. Perhaps in a Nordic country this gives a sense of calm as I likely know or am related to nearly everyone in every one of those complexes. Here, I don’t know my neighbor’s names. Immediately there’s going to be a huge cultural influence regarding trust and how it can or can’t be employed.
To trust is to be able to look forward to something. It’s rarely framed in a way like you trusting your car to start. You trust your kids are going to grow up. These are things, provided there’s not some extenuating circumstance, we sort of take for granted. If we break them down in the language of trust though, it seems to provoke, quicker than anything, the question of “why?” The most straightforward answer I can think of is “because it’s generally done so.”
If you take that answer far enough back, it tends to betray everything. Surely, you can always invent a layer of bullshit justification for the things you do, but if you’re working with an incomplete puzzle, fundamentally, you have little reason to trust anything, let alone your capacity to assess and evaluate an ingrained yet fluid personality. Ingrained in that you didn’t have to teach your eyes to see or brain to fire upon doing so. Fluid in that your tastes change, your attitude wanes, and if you’re lucky there’s always room to surprise yourself.
It’s extremely disorienting, and I’d argue probably unhealthy, to carry on like you can’t trust anything. Pragmatically, you’re not going to have a panic attack questioning the probability each time you start your car, but what if, as I fear has happened to me, a fundamental shift happens and arrests your perspective? What if you become stuck, unable to see yourself as freely obligating yourself to anything, now merely at the whims of change? It’s almost something of an argument against free will, but that’s not the direction I’m going.
I feel myself compelled. Whether it’s to write, or read, or watch, or just generally try to be learning at all times. I can speculate it came from being incentivized as a child. I can grasp at the strings of random potential conversational connections. (As it turns out, I hardly ever haven’t read at least something about what you’re into.) I can get all hippie-speak and claim some internal philosophical wisdom I’m drawing from my connection to the hive-mind. I can play faux-physicist and borrow explanations that describe me as a single neuron or experimental synapse of a higher intelligence’s simulation. But do you call your compulsions “you?”
You could as easily describe my examples in cold bio-socio-political terms. There will be a map one day of every synapse in my brain and when it fired depending on what I engaged with. Rarely do people let it sink in just how much of their approach to the world has been shaped by pop culture. I encourage you to read as much as you can about the little engine that could churning in your subconscious the next time you think you’re really making the decision. What does learning about these things really afford me? Why do “I” invite the stress of knowledge when I even know the science that says homogeneous and stupid breeds the most contentment?
The idea that I have ever arrived at a goal, for any reason beyond survival, becomes an endless speculative road. It harks, in my mind, to fundamental questions regarding existence in and of itself. Why not be some simulation meant to live out my selfish conception of the world? I’m perhaps just the latest in things the universe doesn’t know yet. Simple enough.
Why should I be frustrated that my time is being wasted when I know time isn’t really a thing? Why am I concerned about achieving some grand level of wealth or intellectual accomplishment when, the farther we pull back, the universe, let alone the world, let alone my country, let alone my town or even apartment complex is really going to blink once I’m gone? And then once all your friends die, you’ll be lucky to be properly quoted as anything that ever accurately described you or what you contributed. And you won’t care.
I don’t know that there’s some fundamental truth about the value of American elitism verses Nordic conformity that unites us all besides ignorance. It’s the ego-ridden who feel suffocated when transplanted north, and the reserved who feel embarrassed for you for sticking your neck out. People concerned with the long-term feasibility of humanity lament that content people aren’t terribly innovative or motivated. The content watch the mania of being the smartest and richest tear people apart, and often the world along with them. There’s always some opposite, diminishing, word to describe what doesn’t feel embedded in your genes or heritage.
It’s like I’m always looking for permission. I don’t know what to be really upset about. Unless I’m fabulously drunk I feel like I’ve forgotten how to do things like cry. Without a semi-constant reciprocity I have no way to describe how I value friendships. I can’t point to the precise moment I found myself capable of saying yes to initially fear and panic inducing things. Like I’m waiting for my programmer to input the coordinates of where I’m to end up next. I can claim I’m the one typing, feel each key, sound out each word, but there was no plan for this. Nor do I have a goal but to feel comfortable stopping. I could even invent a goal, like persuading you of adopting socially responsible pride. But it’d be a lie. I don’t give a shit.
I latch onto an idea of a kind of tornado. Billions of potentials swirling in the back of my head, condensed to a joke, blog, or decision to approach some topic. That “I” am the swirling, and everything I kick up and spit out the experimental results. Perhaps often if not fundamentally results I can’t read correctly or even access. I’m necessarily evolutionarily programmed to seek out cause and effect, and I operate under a grand illusion those effects are much to do with my perception or will. No matter the degree of scrutiny and doubt I interject, no matter the scientific insights I use to infer, and well independent of mystical hippie language, I’m no less compelled, and feel I have no control. I find it equally liberating and absolutely terrifying.
As I study more history or learn about the traits and ideas different countries hold, it becomes ever-apparent how much of “you” has been shaped in the motions of our histories. The rarely forgotten war or trade dynamics are often cited in joking or criticizing one another. The taglines in tourism brochures hope to intrigue you about a point of pride regarding a nation’s identity or self-determination. It just leaves me feeling like, with so much at play, how does one ever really define and come to accept things about their personality?
This feels like it wants to start-off sounding very high school. This is also something I often brush against in hoping to get people to unpack their language and look harder at the source of their feelings. But I want it pressed on harder and to explore the source of my own frustrations when it feels like “my identity” is being ignored or disrespected.
I sit here writing. Pull back and I’m 1 of 3 roommates, in 1 of 4 townhouses, in 1 of dozens of townhouse clusters, in 1 of hundreds of apartment complexes. Perhaps in a Nordic country this gives a sense of calm as I likely know or am related to nearly everyone in every one of those complexes. Here, I don’t know my neighbor’s names. Immediately there’s going to be a huge cultural influence regarding trust and how it can or can’t be employed.
To trust is to be able to look forward to something. It’s rarely framed in a way like you trusting your car to start. You trust your kids are going to grow up. These are things, provided there’s not some extenuating circumstance, we sort of take for granted. If we break them down in the language of trust though, it seems to provoke, quicker than anything, the question of “why?” The most straightforward answer I can think of is “because it’s generally done so.”
If you take that answer far enough back, it tends to betray everything. Surely, you can always invent a layer of bullshit justification for the things you do, but if you’re working with an incomplete puzzle, fundamentally, you have little reason to trust anything, let alone your capacity to assess and evaluate an ingrained yet fluid personality. Ingrained in that you didn’t have to teach your eyes to see or brain to fire upon doing so. Fluid in that your tastes change, your attitude wanes, and if you’re lucky there’s always room to surprise yourself.
It’s extremely disorienting, and I’d argue probably unhealthy, to carry on like you can’t trust anything. Pragmatically, you’re not going to have a panic attack questioning the probability each time you start your car, but what if, as I fear has happened to me, a fundamental shift happens and arrests your perspective? What if you become stuck, unable to see yourself as freely obligating yourself to anything, now merely at the whims of change? It’s almost something of an argument against free will, but that’s not the direction I’m going.
I feel myself compelled. Whether it’s to write, or read, or watch, or just generally try to be learning at all times. I can speculate it came from being incentivized as a child. I can grasp at the strings of random potential conversational connections. (As it turns out, I hardly ever haven’t read at least something about what you’re into.) I can get all hippie-speak and claim some internal philosophical wisdom I’m drawing from my connection to the hive-mind. I can play faux-physicist and borrow explanations that describe me as a single neuron or experimental synapse of a higher intelligence’s simulation. But do you call your compulsions “you?”
You could as easily describe my examples in cold bio-socio-political terms. There will be a map one day of every synapse in my brain and when it fired depending on what I engaged with. Rarely do people let it sink in just how much of their approach to the world has been shaped by pop culture. I encourage you to read as much as you can about the little engine that could churning in your subconscious the next time you think you’re really making the decision. What does learning about these things really afford me? Why do “I” invite the stress of knowledge when I even know the science that says homogeneous and stupid breeds the most contentment?
The idea that I have ever arrived at a goal, for any reason beyond survival, becomes an endless speculative road. It harks, in my mind, to fundamental questions regarding existence in and of itself. Why not be some simulation meant to live out my selfish conception of the world? I’m perhaps just the latest in things the universe doesn’t know yet. Simple enough.
Why should I be frustrated that my time is being wasted when I know time isn’t really a thing? Why am I concerned about achieving some grand level of wealth or intellectual accomplishment when, the farther we pull back, the universe, let alone the world, let alone my country, let alone my town or even apartment complex is really going to blink once I’m gone? And then once all your friends die, you’ll be lucky to be properly quoted as anything that ever accurately described you or what you contributed. And you won’t care.
I don’t know that there’s some fundamental truth about the value of American elitism verses Nordic conformity that unites us all besides ignorance. It’s the ego-ridden who feel suffocated when transplanted north, and the reserved who feel embarrassed for you for sticking your neck out. People concerned with the long-term feasibility of humanity lament that content people aren’t terribly innovative or motivated. The content watch the mania of being the smartest and richest tear people apart, and often the world along with them. There’s always some opposite, diminishing, word to describe what doesn’t feel embedded in your genes or heritage.
It’s like I’m always looking for permission. I don’t know what to be really upset about. Unless I’m fabulously drunk I feel like I’ve forgotten how to do things like cry. Without a semi-constant reciprocity I have no way to describe how I value friendships. I can’t point to the precise moment I found myself capable of saying yes to initially fear and panic inducing things. Like I’m waiting for my programmer to input the coordinates of where I’m to end up next. I can claim I’m the one typing, feel each key, sound out each word, but there was no plan for this. Nor do I have a goal but to feel comfortable stopping. I could even invent a goal, like persuading you of adopting socially responsible pride. But it’d be a lie. I don’t give a shit.
I latch onto an idea of a kind of tornado. Billions of potentials swirling in the back of my head, condensed to a joke, blog, or decision to approach some topic. That “I” am the swirling, and everything I kick up and spit out the experimental results. Perhaps often if not fundamentally results I can’t read correctly or even access. I’m necessarily evolutionarily programmed to seek out cause and effect, and I operate under a grand illusion those effects are much to do with my perception or will. No matter the degree of scrutiny and doubt I interject, no matter the scientific insights I use to infer, and well independent of mystical hippie language, I’m no less compelled, and feel I have no control. I find it equally liberating and absolutely terrifying.
Friday, September 18, 2009
[200] It's Kind Of Hard To Explain
Friday,
September 18, 2009 at 4:25am
Initial
topic: Brainiac. There's a couple things I want to talk about if this
seems without some overall point. First, I was told I was smart by my
psychology counselor because of my demeanor about class and how I
don't consider any of them particularly difficult. I felt compelled
to tell her that I'm not that smart. Don't get me wrong, I am, but
not in the way she was trying to attribute to me. I can't just read
something, have it memorized, and ace the test the next day. I rush
to read and put assignments together the night or hours before
they're due. If I don't repeat something like math time and again,
I'll forget I even took the subject in school. I'm not that kind of
academically smart kid. If anything I think this is just a testament
to how utterly dumb everyone else is. The amount of information I get
on any given class day could be done no less than 5 times faster in a
much more applicable and interesting way. The fact that I feel
comfortable putting off studying for a test until the night before is
because all I have to do is make ridiculous word associations for 30
some power point slides. Hardly that difficult if you can focus for
all of an hour or so. If I go about "learning" this way in
college and that makes me smart, what does that say about the people
who "don't find it that easy," as the counselor put
it....yaaaah.
New topic: trust. I already ranted about trust before and I just want to make sort of an aside here. If I've given you a reason to not trust me, I'd appreciate knowing what it was. I try to go out of my way to be trustworthy because I know what it's like to be fucked by someone who doesn't care if they defy your trust. Also, it's kind of an ego thing to think that I can keep secrets and be important to someone whilst the rest of the world is just that pathetic. When you don't trust me, and it's basically regardless of what's at stake, you're making a character judgment about me. If I've shown you something that would make you think I'd be tempted, or am incapable, or whatever else with regards to what you're trusting me with, then even I don't know what it is. So, pretty please, think about what else you're saying when you choose not to trust me.
New topic: Boys and girls. It will never cease to amaze me how eager we are to pussy foot around one another when feelings are involved. I probably shouldn't say much more from there ;). Well, aside from when I say "we" I mean, all you lil chillren who need to make up their minds and grow some cahones.
New topic: The future. Every time I try to explain what it is I want to do with my life, or what I'm currently doing to try and make that vague future come true, I'm met with pretty scant or, in my opinion, unfulfilling explanations for the people who've asked me. What it boils down to is this; I want to have fun, I want money for the purposes of freedom, not just because I get hard for green paper, and I want to be able to explore and work in areas that I have deemed interesting. In my naive little mind, I think that meeting a ton of people, learning about what they want to do, and then developing a plan for us both to get what we want is a good way to go about this. For whatever reason, I've decided that in order to avoid ever having a boss again, I need to learn as much as I can about the people around me, who they know, what they can provide and whatnot, and use that along with our friendship to create something we know we'll enjoy. Something even crazier tells me that almost regardless of what I do with my life I'll be able to make money. So, why am I in college? People are here, potential is here, I'm in a sea of people who just need to be prompted and lead. And if I get good at it now, then I'll still get to have fun doing it in the future.
FIN
New topic: trust. I already ranted about trust before and I just want to make sort of an aside here. If I've given you a reason to not trust me, I'd appreciate knowing what it was. I try to go out of my way to be trustworthy because I know what it's like to be fucked by someone who doesn't care if they defy your trust. Also, it's kind of an ego thing to think that I can keep secrets and be important to someone whilst the rest of the world is just that pathetic. When you don't trust me, and it's basically regardless of what's at stake, you're making a character judgment about me. If I've shown you something that would make you think I'd be tempted, or am incapable, or whatever else with regards to what you're trusting me with, then even I don't know what it is. So, pretty please, think about what else you're saying when you choose not to trust me.
New topic: Boys and girls. It will never cease to amaze me how eager we are to pussy foot around one another when feelings are involved. I probably shouldn't say much more from there ;). Well, aside from when I say "we" I mean, all you lil chillren who need to make up their minds and grow some cahones.
New topic: The future. Every time I try to explain what it is I want to do with my life, or what I'm currently doing to try and make that vague future come true, I'm met with pretty scant or, in my opinion, unfulfilling explanations for the people who've asked me. What it boils down to is this; I want to have fun, I want money for the purposes of freedom, not just because I get hard for green paper, and I want to be able to explore and work in areas that I have deemed interesting. In my naive little mind, I think that meeting a ton of people, learning about what they want to do, and then developing a plan for us both to get what we want is a good way to go about this. For whatever reason, I've decided that in order to avoid ever having a boss again, I need to learn as much as I can about the people around me, who they know, what they can provide and whatnot, and use that along with our friendship to create something we know we'll enjoy. Something even crazier tells me that almost regardless of what I do with my life I'll be able to make money. So, why am I in college? People are here, potential is here, I'm in a sea of people who just need to be prompted and lead. And if I get good at it now, then I'll still get to have fun doing it in the future.
FIN
Updated
about 5 months ago · Comment · LikeUnlike
It's
all about having fun. Have fun and nothing else matters. NOTE: NOT
quoting metallica...
Bottom
of Form
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
[192] Burn
Wednesday,
August 5, 2009 at 2:08am
Keep
trying to fuck me. I'm noticeably more capable of indifference and am
much quicker at initializing it than I was able to in the past. I
will always find the lesson to be learned, and turn your belligerence
into an opportunity. None the less, I wish I was above getting played
(read, I wish I'd stop allowing myself to doubt and deny my initial
and overwhelmingly correct thoughts and feelings.) Trust is such a
commodity it's practically sacred if you can find it. I need to get
out of the habit of trusting anything more than what I perceive. Or
more likely, I need to accept more rapidly what indeed it is I do
perceive. I don't think I've fallen into the same kind of rut, but it
does draw parallels with the past despite its own nuances.
I can't trust you.
This isn't because I'm closed off, naive, or stubbornly won't, it's because I've so rarely found someone who values trust and understanding like I do. They are values that are "beneath" most of you, or perhaps more nicely, simply taken for granted. Of course you'd immediately object. Who better than you to have a flood of names come to mind that you would slap the word trust onto your relationship with them? Fine, believe it and I won't have even the slightest compulsion to argue otherwise. Or maybe, you empathize with that sentiment. What then of your relationships? Just know that I do not have it with you. Nothing beyond the, for lack of a better word, superficial can you expect to trust from me. I'll "feel" around you, talk and have fun, be there and help anyone I've deemed as a friend, but I won't trust you, yet will continue to do whatever I can so you understand what trust means to me. I don't expect the same out of people as I do from myself, and that's how I allow myself to get burned. When I "hope" or "have faith" that I misinterpreted, or things are more unclear than I'd claim, when they come full circle I still can't stifle that five or so minutes of shock and disruption. I'm working to never allow you another five minutes.
I need to feel above the problems I encounter in life. I am hopelessly excited about the future and what I can accomplish, and can't let the sudden waves of bullshit detract from that. I have a choice, I fully understand that I have a choice, and it is a difficult choice. I'm trying to make it easier for me to make it. I've decided that I'm only a sociopath to the point of self-preservation. I can't go on a wanton killing spree and truly feel empty, nor can I go down a check list of ways to betray people I'm beholden to and not blink an eye. I put value in what I can get from people, and try to return the same amount. I'm discovering more concretely that practically nobody cares to understand or live by this code of "selfishness." Their brand is petty, defiant, and sacrificial. I am simply awed by how true it is that people find themselves most "alive" when they think you are suffering. I won't forget that it is their sickness, not mine.
It's easy to understand how I don't care about you when you don't care about me. Even more so, and I think more importantly, I don't care about you when you don't care about you. I'll stop pretending. My defiance will be a stoic form with a single question, "Is that so?" when your edicts and "values" are dropped into my presence. I can't justify in myself having the capacity to keep searching through your rulebooks of endless games. I can't allow myself the luxury of dreams that include your steadfast contributions. This has been the major flaw in my perception. That I could somehow recruit people into making my dreams reach their full potential. How foolish of me to forget or stay my thoughts and hard fought understandings about people when they would conflict with my dreams.
I've been given so many opportunities to "play god" if you will and start stirring the pot of other peoples' lives. Do that "beyond mere asshole" thing then proceed to fold my arms and nod my head with a grunt. There simply is no reason in it. I try to reach happiness with people. I try to value and hold onto our relationship as long as it will work, in whatever capacity, as frequently or infrequently as is required. I can't find a single credible motive to want to destroy that. What is yours? Where in your mind do you go to make yourself okay with inching over the line? Do you resent that you truly are that vulnerable? Do you expect me to exploit it? Do you hate that I don't?
To me, it's as simple as keeping your hand off of a lit stove. You not only hold your hand to it, you're nonchalant in suggesting our fingers should be interlocked. You try to justify and nullify my objections because in "my world" I could never understand the sophistication and, dare I say, love embodied in such an act. You'd even deny your screams and scorn my help if you could catch a glimpse of horror or pity on my face. Burn.
I can't trust you.
This isn't because I'm closed off, naive, or stubbornly won't, it's because I've so rarely found someone who values trust and understanding like I do. They are values that are "beneath" most of you, or perhaps more nicely, simply taken for granted. Of course you'd immediately object. Who better than you to have a flood of names come to mind that you would slap the word trust onto your relationship with them? Fine, believe it and I won't have even the slightest compulsion to argue otherwise. Or maybe, you empathize with that sentiment. What then of your relationships? Just know that I do not have it with you. Nothing beyond the, for lack of a better word, superficial can you expect to trust from me. I'll "feel" around you, talk and have fun, be there and help anyone I've deemed as a friend, but I won't trust you, yet will continue to do whatever I can so you understand what trust means to me. I don't expect the same out of people as I do from myself, and that's how I allow myself to get burned. When I "hope" or "have faith" that I misinterpreted, or things are more unclear than I'd claim, when they come full circle I still can't stifle that five or so minutes of shock and disruption. I'm working to never allow you another five minutes.
I need to feel above the problems I encounter in life. I am hopelessly excited about the future and what I can accomplish, and can't let the sudden waves of bullshit detract from that. I have a choice, I fully understand that I have a choice, and it is a difficult choice. I'm trying to make it easier for me to make it. I've decided that I'm only a sociopath to the point of self-preservation. I can't go on a wanton killing spree and truly feel empty, nor can I go down a check list of ways to betray people I'm beholden to and not blink an eye. I put value in what I can get from people, and try to return the same amount. I'm discovering more concretely that practically nobody cares to understand or live by this code of "selfishness." Their brand is petty, defiant, and sacrificial. I am simply awed by how true it is that people find themselves most "alive" when they think you are suffering. I won't forget that it is their sickness, not mine.
It's easy to understand how I don't care about you when you don't care about me. Even more so, and I think more importantly, I don't care about you when you don't care about you. I'll stop pretending. My defiance will be a stoic form with a single question, "Is that so?" when your edicts and "values" are dropped into my presence. I can't justify in myself having the capacity to keep searching through your rulebooks of endless games. I can't allow myself the luxury of dreams that include your steadfast contributions. This has been the major flaw in my perception. That I could somehow recruit people into making my dreams reach their full potential. How foolish of me to forget or stay my thoughts and hard fought understandings about people when they would conflict with my dreams.
I've been given so many opportunities to "play god" if you will and start stirring the pot of other peoples' lives. Do that "beyond mere asshole" thing then proceed to fold my arms and nod my head with a grunt. There simply is no reason in it. I try to reach happiness with people. I try to value and hold onto our relationship as long as it will work, in whatever capacity, as frequently or infrequently as is required. I can't find a single credible motive to want to destroy that. What is yours? Where in your mind do you go to make yourself okay with inching over the line? Do you resent that you truly are that vulnerable? Do you expect me to exploit it? Do you hate that I don't?
To me, it's as simple as keeping your hand off of a lit stove. You not only hold your hand to it, you're nonchalant in suggesting our fingers should be interlocked. You try to justify and nullify my objections because in "my world" I could never understand the sophistication and, dare I say, love embodied in such an act. You'd even deny your screams and scorn my help if you could catch a glimpse of horror or pity on my face. Burn.
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