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[Aug. 3rd, 2009|08:38 pm] |
Okay dudes and dudettes, I've not been posting because I've been crazily busy, for me at least. I've been promoted to tour guide, and it's kind of cool, and also kind of the exact opposite of my personality! I miss a lot of y'all, so add me on Facebook, the mind-numbing tool of social brain mushitude. But I still check that more regularly, cause people send shit to you all the time there.
Here I am:
http://www.facebook.com/ericka.abraham?ref=profile |
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[Jun. 28th, 2009|07:46 am] |
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What was meant to be a meditation turned into a bitch fest, so I'm going to try again later. |
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| I'm kind of dumb. |
[May. 21st, 2009|10:14 pm] |
So today I met with a philosophy meetup group, organized by meetup.com. It was my first time there, and really my first time discussing "real" philosophy in my whole life. I simultaneously believe myself a fool, and the others in the group. Which proves the notion that there is no truth, because they're probably both true.
I should be humble; the organizer and several other members are steeped in philosophical knowledge and study. Yet I'm not, as you might imagine. I like to open my big fat mouth. I have opinions on everything, and I usually think I'm right.
We're reading Hegel's Science of Logic (your fave, danO, the Heg-meister.) Today we only covered about two pages, because of frequent diversionary discussions, usually initiated by me. Often I'll play the innocent, the eager student, because people love to teach, to feel important. Sometimes I believe they especially like to do this when the object of thier teaching is a woman, regardless of the sex of the instructor. But I digress (as usual).
As the initial innocent, in addition to actually wanting a fuller knowledge of things of which I'm ignorant, it's difficult to get people to listen to you. Which is frustrating when you know all the answers ;-).
To the meat of the matter, the several men indoctrinated within philosophical scholarship seemed often to not be able to break away from canon. A canon which is fascinating, and of course valuable to learn. Which is the instance in which I should sit down and shut up, listen and learn.
The introduction I read was about why the study of logic needed new, big ideas, and it needed to be systematized. Apparently the students versed in the traditions read it as a slam of Kant. Historical perspective is all. Ironically, Hegel's dialectic is all about the inability to ever make a clean break from that which came before, and new knowledge or spirit is always grounded in the past belief structures.
Yet when I discuss ideas I don't want to talk history.
Postmodernists tell us that no text is interpreted the way the author intended, and this subjective reading is truth for each individual, and no interpretation is any more or less accurate than another. I love this idea, at least in the specific sense that if a passage of text is generative, you should run with it and think of as many branches of the ideas you have as you can. Philosophy may need its systematized models, but it needs creative thought, speculation, and different ways of thinking about things thought of many times previous. Can these men not separate themselves from strict academic interpretation? Is my knowledge of the issues so scant that my ideas are nonsense? Can the act of generating interesting thought of the world around you be nonsense?
I'm often wrong and right, simultaneously, so I can barely tell what's going on. |
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[Apr. 12th, 2009|10:38 pm] |
Another example of me not being able to express myself well is in a recent argument with Todd about what makes a good, fulfilling, cohesive community, and for me some of this is more of a feeling than a logical position, so I guess I get more heated. More specifically, my idea of how a community "should" be has been built over years and years, class after class, book after book, movie after movie, and I have a tough time teasing out the whys and the whats. But there are parts of my beliefs that I do think sound and beneficial to people (and to me, to what I want! :P Which, of course, I plan to get into in this entry).
I worry that I do hold up standards to the way things "should" be entirely too often, and I think I've talked about that here. I don't just do it for the big things, like jobs and romantic relationships and friendships, but for every damn little thing. Dishes should be washed in a certain way, reading a book has to be challenging enough, well written, and I have to focus in a certain way for it to be meaningful, etc. It's part of why I'm so anxious all the time. They also call this perfectionism, and most people with anxiety and depression manifest it in some way or another. I'm learning how to let it go, and it feels good.
So I wonder if my want of a bohemian community full of weirdos and artists and creative people is a fantasy that has never existed, nor ever will, or if my belief that Manhattan has become "mallified" is overblown, or if, more likely, the truth is somewhere between me and Todd. Commodification and consumerism are certainly real threats to meaning in human life, but probably not as grave of such as I imagine. And convenience is not something I'd really like to give up in a lot of cases. But is this pathology of the times on my part, or is there a positive outcome to this convenience?
I read The Geography of Nowhere in college, which has some very interesting points, anecdotes, and passages, but overall is actually a really super dull work, to me anyway.
Okay, be back to finish, dinner time! |
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[Apr. 12th, 2009|09:12 pm] |
I've had a little bit of a short fuse lately, but not really a short fuse to anger, more like one to annoyance and frustration. I have all these Ideas about things that come up in life, or about what I'm reading, and I try to talk to people about them, but am always rebuffed, for various reasons. Todd says he likes to have intellectual discussions, but then says I yell at him when we disagree (which is pretty much on every topic). I do get annoyed when he cuts me off or won't listen to my argument, but in general I'm not even close to annoyed when he clams up. I just get passionate about my ideas, and speak louder.
A lot of people say they like debate, but in my experience most don't. Everyone takes being disagreed with a little bit personally, including me. And even aside from that, most people don't listen to what other people say, they just gloss over and wait for their turn to speak, again including me. When I talk about stuff I always feel rushed, like I don't have the time to make my point before being intruded upon. So I guess I"m not sure I really like debate either. Convincing people is tough, and I'd rather they just understood what I meant and then believed me. :P
I've been reading this book, Nature Via Nurture, by Matt Ridley, for a while now. I read about 4/5 of it a few months ago and then let it go a bit, but am now trying to finish. I don't know why I can't concentrate on it, it's a very interesting read. I guess when something is intellectually challenging I psyche myself out, which really gets me down.
Anyway, the whole thing is about how the nature v. nurture debate is ridiculous, and genes take their cue from the environment and genes also determine who you become. In other words, you and your environment form a complex system that cannot be disentangled. To me this is common sense, and some of the downstream effects of this play directly into parts of my worldview.
I don't think I understand the universe, or ever will, but I do have an ability to synthesize information and understand models of the world. And that is what science is, a bunch of models of the world. I've also been lucky to have studied social science from teachers who focused upon good, strong, clear thinking. And a good, strong, clear thinker never oversimplifies. They always remember that everything effects everything else, nothing is clear cut, correlation is not causation, etc., etc. And with my disclaimer done, I can move on to my argument.
My friend Melissa often oversimplifies. She takes stereotypes and boils everything down to support of those stereotypes. I don't want it to seem like I'm just beating her up in the rest of my entry, because she's just the latest in the parade of almost all people I talk to to regularly do this. And it infuriates me. There are so many things wrong with doing this that I get so flustered I am unable to dismantle their ridiculous claims. Such as, with M recently: all human behavior comes down to the drive to mate.
It sounds reasonable and compelling. Because our human brains have accidentally(sort of) evolved to parse information through simple answers. Our ancestors were faced with lots of information, lots of environmental data. And the ones who survived were better at classifying information and storing only what helped them get by. That's natural selection. That's kind of why there is still a nature v. nurture debate at all! (Scientists have been past it mostly, for decades) We like black and white reasoning, we like clear cut.
With her specific simplification, I can attack on many different fronts. Imagine an ancient person, and their civilization. They have a set of genes. Some survive and pass on their genes more successfully than others. Now, within that set of genes, maybe you have the ability to hunt game better and engineer better shelters. In this example, those are the only two things the environment and your genes have combined in you to help you to survive better than your peers. But there are probably a whole slew of other traits that are neutral, that don't help you to survive or hinder you. Bad posture, a liking for talking, whatever. Some traits you have are just neutral, in other words.
Two, there's nothing so simple as "the genes for." Such as "the genes for aggression," or "the genes for creativity." As mentioned previously, there is a complex interplay between the environment and the genes. Many "downstream effects," also mentioned before, are results of this interplay and come as a side effect of some other process. Some of these side effects are selected because their primary functions are selected, and have nothing to do with, well, pretty much anything.
Three, I can name a bunch of traits that aren't reproductive in origin that are "common sense" as to why they would aid in survival: compassion, which gets other people to help you; love, which attaches you to offspring and close kin; cooperation; and friendship. I'm sure there are more, but let's move on.
A difficult section of the book discussed the origins of culture, and language, which obviously are large topics of scientific research and speculation, and these two are often intertwined and difficult to tell apart. Which drives me crazy, because often one is passed off as the other. In this example, Ridley discusses changing bones in the hand and wrist, and the expansion of the brain, and then extrapolates as to how these things affected culture, and vice versa. It's certainly interesting speculation, and there is evidence for some of what he discusses, but certainly not all. I digress, as usual.
He concludes that culture is extraneous to whatever it is that made us human beings, separate from the rest of the the animal kingdom. We had our brain capacity for a million years and we only had one tool, the hand axe. Nothing changed. Our hands changed many many years before our vocal chords did, leading many to believe that we developed gestural language long before vocal.
So now, lets relate this all to the topic at hand. The accepted doctrine is that the ability to accumulate knowledge (part of what makes us "special"), which is culture, came about because of population density and trade, division of labor.
So all that we have as human beings, our thousands of years of fighting to get away from "genetic determinism," our art, our science, our music---has little to do with base survival. Not exactly a super complicated or mind blowing concept, but it does have a lot of repercussions that may not be immediately apparent. And a lot of people define themselves within these spheres---as a dancer or a sculptor or a writer, whatever. To say they aren't important to what it means to be human, or central to behavior is naive and, in my opinion, absurd.
And yes, you can relate some of that to pure reproductive instinct: some behaviors are downstream from displaying genetic traits to the opposite sex. But as always, it's more complex than that. |
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[Apr. 7th, 2009|11:34 am] |
I've been a smoker for ten years. My story is the same as many, that of course I didn't start out to get hooked, I did it socially, I enjoy it so why would I quit, I'm addicted but I think quitting will reduce my happiness, etc.
I've been on and off trying to quit for about three or four years. And been thinking about it for even longer. About a year ago I stopped for three or four months completely, but I think I broke down and had a cigarette or two just weeks into it. I'd get these thoughts, these thoughts that nothing else could ever make me happy, that my life sucked so bad and cigarettes were the only pleasure I had, so why shouldn't I smoke?
All the literature I'd seen treats quitting as this grave thing, this mountain you are approaching that may just be too big to climb. You might, even probably, won't be able to conquer it. And that's because you're giving something wonderful up, something dear to you.
But now I'm reading Alan Carr's The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, and I'm actually excited to be a non-smoker. At the risk of sounding gushy or naive or gullible, it's pretty fucking cool.
He's not really all that good of a writer, I don't agree with some of his major tenets, you could drive the space shuttle through some of his fallacies in logic, often he relies on stereotypes which he abhors just sentences previous, and he contradicts himself quite a lot.
But his major thesis and the reinforcement he gives for it has lifted a weight off of me in relation to smoking. Lifting a weight isn't powerful enough to describe it really. It's more like euphoria. I'm not saying I definitely won't mess up, that I'm done for good, because addiction certainly is powerful. But for the first time ever, I can actually be sincere in pride of non-smoking.
People who have never been addicted to anything I don't think can even begin to understand how powerful your brain can be when it is wired to want something. You make up the rationalizations that are the most powerful to your own brain, and then you put them on a pedestal. My friend Dan and I used to talk about how smokers were the interesting ones, the artistic ones, the creative ones, etc., etc. There is this mystique surrounding being a smoker, the act of smoking, that makes it cool, that makes it rebellious and wonderful and attractive. The book helps me to tell myself honestly that that's just a bunch of stupid bullshit. I'm not more creative because I spend money to poison myself. I'm not more artistic, more of a loner, more of a leader, more interesting.
I've noticed that same romanticization of depression, of mental illness, and I think it's all part of the same trope. There are certain historical archetypes that make the Other, the misfit, the weirdo, etc., the creative one who can have insights about people that status quoians can't. But correlation isn't always causation. Okay, this is a little bit of a divergence. But it's something I've been thinking about a long time. And in the case of smoking, I really do believe that one thing has nothing to do with the other.
If you look at it honestly, smoking gives nothing. You are losing nothing when you give it up. Absolutely nothing. You aren't climbing a mountain, you're shedding a handicap. And if you can learn to look at it that way, the whole game changes. I haven't had a cigarette in five days, and I feel fucking fantastic. I have energy, my stomach doesn't hurt, my fingers feel better, and I'm smiling!
If you're a smoker, read the book. Don't be afraid of what you think you're losing anymore! Because you aren't losing anything but an addiction. Any satisfaction you receive from smoking is just staving off withdrawal from an addiction. Even withdrawal so mild that it doesn't seem like it's "really" an addiction. That, in fact, is what makes it so sinister with smoking. It's still really an addiction, and you're still really a junkie. But it doesn't fuck you up so bad as heroin or alcoholism, so you can convince yourself that it's not that big of a deal.
So once you get past all that, yes, you will be happy. You will be calm, able to concentrate, able to enjoy coffee and beer without a smoke, able to drive long distances, able to listen to your favorite song. Actually even more than when you did smoke. Because get this--there is no pleasure from the smoking, just from the relief of withdrawal.
I know I'm going on and on, but the reversal of mourning a loss to the rejoice of change is a big one for me. I hope I can make it last. I should do it with drinking, too, probably, but that's a different entry. :P |
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[Mar. 10th, 2009|07:32 pm] |
When I stay away from LiveJournal for a while, I go back as far as I can on the friends list and skim faster and faster, feeling overwhelmed and agitated that I'm not caught up. I feel this way about feeds, television shows, music, sometimes books, as well. It's ridiculous, and I can't stop it. Never enough, never enough. I guess I do it with everything I try to do---all or nothing.
I've been thinking about fame for the past few days.
Living in New York brings me near to a lot of celebrities. I'm kind of oblivious when I walk around, usually thinking of my nerves or the scenery or getting to where I'm going, so I don't notice most of them, I'm sure. Often it takes me being with someone else, and having them point out the person, before I see anyone.
There's this idea of how you are supposed to be in NYC, which is to let the stars be and give them a place they can live normally. It goes along with a supremely long list of other ways you're supposed to be if you want to be a "real" New Yorker, but that's a different topic and would diverge from my point. I'll just say that for the most part I agree with this one. Celebrities may be public figures, but I can understand wanting to take a walk or buy toilet paper or get lunch without being hounded.
In discussion of this very topic, after having both Gabriel Byrne and David Arquette (or Luke Wilson, they sort of look the same to me, and he went by quickly) walk by our table, my friends and I had a dissatisfying discussion on fame. Not because of its content(no fault on the part of the friends, in other words), but because it's been brewing in my head for a while and I can't quite articulate why just yet. I said I didn't want to be a starfucker, and that's true. I don't want to bother people, and that is true as well.
Yet when I see someone there's this little thrill that runs through me, against my will. And I wonder why.
During that same discussion, a friend posited that you want to go and say hi to people that have done something that has meant something to you. Thank them. And I guess that's part of it. But it happens with people I couldn't give two shits about, also. I brought up the national obsession we have with fame, trying to get to the meat of the matter, but again just skimmed the surface.
Why do we want to be so near famous people? Do we think somehow it'll validate us? That all of a sudden we'll be discovered as amazing human beings that deserve fame ourselves? That they'll fall in love with us and make us special? Give us money? Importance? What makes a person deserving of fame? Is there such a state? None of it makes sense to me.
I know you feel like you know someone if you've seen all their movies, or you see them on TV all the time, and I know you don't actually know them. I know that a glance from an actor won't bestow me with riches or respect or a purpose in life. So why the excitement?
I've always said I would never want to be famous, and that is both true and not true, but mostly the former. I can barely take strangers looking at me now, as an anonymous denizen of a city. I do not take criticism well, and find the level of scrutiny given to stars bilious and absurd.
Yet I always said I wanted to be remembered, make my mark. With books, with ideas and knowledge, with thoughts. I'd just always imagined a Thomas Pynchon type dealie. Hiding away, furtive. Even my full name on Facebook gives me pause.
So I have a war in myself, thinking my brushes (more like light atomic dusting, for the actual interaction I don't have with fame) might put me near to permanence and world markage, while simultaneously knowing how ridiculous that is?
Another aspect is my rabid jealously of success. It's unbearable to see someone who has made something of themselves. Not because I think they shouldn't have the successes they do, but because I see them and am reflected only the wasted time of my life, my void of experience(everything's about me, didntcha know). My past is a bubbling cauldron of piss poor memories, ones I'd like boiled away. Well, that's how I recall it, anyway, which is half the problem.
To sum up my paragraphs of cliche with another: I want everyone to acknowledge me and my wonderfulness, while also disappearing and crawling in a little hole and never talking to anyone, ever again. Everything in me comes down to judging or being judged. |
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[Feb. 8th, 2009|08:30 pm] |
Perfectionism is a thing a lot of people experience at different levels, but I'm convinced that, like most aspects of mental dysfunction, it's not really something these people analyze as to how it really manifests inside their heads and lives, or empathize with when it is experienced by other people. Instead it's a throwaway comment, like "I'm about to panic." People who say that have probably never panicked in their lives. What I am trying to get at is that there are some things that get you in the gut because you can feel the other person's feelings, but for some reason mental hardships are very difficult to empathize or sympathize with.
Perfectionism manifests itself strangely for me. I generally don't start things because I know they will not be the way I want them to be. That, in itself, isn't all that strange. When I think of how my projects/self/world/whatever would be if they were the way I wanted them to be, I realize that it's sort of like the search for a unified theory in the physical sciences. They want a few equations to encompass the entire universe; I want one moral/character/organizing principle/value system/self master list to describe me, and my entire life. I try to break things down: what I want to do with my days, how I want to be healthy, both mentally and physically, what I want to do with my mind, how I want to love, how I want to relate to people, whatever. But every time I sit down and make lists the categories shift like sand.
I cobble together self knowledge and knowledge of others and the world a little piece at a time, and even as I do that I cannot point to any specific, concrete iota of information. It's all nebulous, connecting to many different things, un-pin-down-able. I need somewhere in my stomach, in my brain, in my heart, to pin things down. To put labels on them, to make them known.
And really, that's impossible.
It's not the way people experience life, the way they experience the surrounding environment. Sure, our brains are wired to categorize things, in order to make sense of sensory information. And sure, that becomes so enmeshed within our very makeup that we tend to take it to extremes, with the stereotypification of every damn little thing. But when you look around you see continuous reality, and when you think of something there are innumerable aspects to it, associations that you've made over the years you've been alive. When you dream you can't describe it well to other people because of those indescribable tangential feelings and smells and connexions with things you aren't even sure of yourself, so your wonderful amazing fantastic dream becomes "...well I was happy but not really and sad but actually a turtle but everything, even the sounds, were blue..." and people tell you to shut the fuck up.
It's amazing we can even categorize and list-ify to the extent we do, with the onrush of crap that comes across our paths every day, added to all the crap that's already stored inside our heads and our bodies.
We've built an amazing upside down pyramid of knowledge that is new every day, added to constantly, and is really the difference between monkey and consciousness...it's this huge, comprehensive, contradictory, shifting, growing, learning body that no one person can ever really "get." It goes without saying that it's cobbled together as well. I may as well accept the fucking plaguing uncertainty that eats away at my every teeny moment, or I'll be frozen forever. Also for the other ten million reasons I'm frozen [fear of failure, short term comfort beats long term gain every time, fear of judgment, obsession with inadequacies---other things that are hard to care about in other people, but paramount in your own brain), but hey, one at a time. |
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[Feb. 3rd, 2009|01:56 am] |
I embarrassed myself profoundly today, and I would do it again in a microsecond.
Arlene's Grocery has rock and roll karaoke, and a live band backs you up. Almost everyone who went was fucking amazing. I was not.
I did Alanis Morissettes' "You Oughtta Know," and I was awful. Beyond awful. But I had a fantastic time, singing with a real band, and if I did it again, I would do better. I made a stupid joke. I sang. I was beyond horrible. But it was fun! I am so glad I got up and did it. I would be everyone's foil for the rest of my life, to not sit on the sidelines and do nothing. |
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[Feb. 1st, 2009|11:09 pm] |
You might not think of me as a sports person. And mostly you'd be correct. Except for the Steelers. I can't help it. I grew up in Pittsburgh. I've always loved the Pirates, but I haven't watched baseball in years. I like hockey, but again, without TV it's difficult to watch much. And I understand all of the arguments that call major league sports a mass distraction.
But really.
Were you watching?
What a game! It was FUCKING AWESOME tonight.
Steelers, 2009 Superbowl champs. Punching people in the face, regardless. |
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[Jan. 27th, 2009|04:27 am] |
I've just finished Proust was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer. It's a fantastic book, and it's a terrible book, and it's sometimes obvious as a first book. But, as always, books that inspire thought are high on the importance list for me. I had several very brand new thoughts, and I think it'd take me hours to write them all down.
For now I can say how jealous I am of Mr. Lehrer. He's an editor at Seed magazine, the new wave science one I have mentioned before (I would love to work there), and he's an editor for RadioLab, hands down the best podcast I have ever listened to, merging science with philosophy with art with narration. It's fantastic. And now he has published books. Sorry Mr. Lehrer, but I hate you. And love you. And hate you.
But it's got me thinking about what I would do with my life if I could do anything. And it would be, in no particular order:
run
read
write
meditate
eat
music
build intimacy and caring
I want to move to Hawaii and work a subsistence farm and do these things. I think this is my new dream. I'm not sure school is for me. It's a difficult goal for me to let go. A class or two, I would love. Pressure, not so much. And the structures of academia can be stifling. We'll see.
The chapters are Walt Whitman/embodiment, George Eliot/free will, Auguste Escoffier/the sense of taste, Marcel Proust/memory, Paul Cezanne/the sense of sight, Igor Stravinsky/music, Gertrude Stein/language, and Virginia Woolf/emergence and self.
His thesis is that art provides valuable information about the actual experiences of life, and show that pure biological determinism is in error. Science has a way of knowing, and art has a way of knowing. They are not mutually exclusive, but they are set in different contexts. I picked it up after seeing its cover dozens of times and scoffing without actually reading what it was about. I often dislike reading about authors, because I feel a sense of insecurity that I am not well read enough, I am never going to be, and I'd rather read the artist himself than a critique. But I don't often move past that stage.
Yet when I did pick it up I saw it was something I needed to read, because often I feel myself slowly gliding toward strict materialism. I'm still a materialist after reading the book, but I think I can explain it better. See, I don't doubt that the experience of life is different from the science of life. Watching neurons fire isn't experiencing what the person who's neurons they are, are. I just think sometime in the far future, if we survive as a species, say 1,000,000,000 years from now, we'll probably understand a great deal more than we think we will, and saying something is "unknowable," except perhaps in a vague way to art, I believe is silly.
Almost every chapter touched on something that fascinates me. I usually say I'll come back to it and then don't, but I really have to get up sometime in the morning, and it's almost five. I hope I do. |
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[Jan. 20th, 2009|02:41 am] |
When I read something that is inspiring to my mind, it's nothing but painful. Graham Greene said "I sometimes wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation."
But for me it stays, it stays until I can bodily eliminate it through numbness, through distraction, through expurgation of self. If we are embodied, if we are mind+body and one cannot be stripped from the other, if we become how we feel and feel what we become, I'm nothing more than someone who strives in all her days to remove my very own singularity from the map of reality.
Everything comes back to platitudes for most, especially for me...believe in yourself, what? It's one of the most mocked truism there ever was, and for good reason. But you have to, to survive, and when you think with every mote of your body-self that you'll never change, that you'll end up on the most terrible path you can imagine, you do.
What's it take to change? What's it take to value? What is Value?
It fluctuates.
It vacillates.
It's defined by the world at large and so are you,
But if you make your own meaning, where's it come from? Why does it mean anything?
And it burns, because it feels valuable, it seems valuable, but you can't get it out, you can't communicate it, you can't do anything but let it go. Because it's gone already. |
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[Jan. 12th, 2009|09:37 pm] |
Hello.
If LJ goes under, I'm going to be at eiaboca.blogspot.com. |
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[Jan. 7th, 2009|02:58 pm] |
I was walking around yesterday, and I saw one of the many new LCD billboards around, and it happened to be advertising for Pepsi. My boyfriend said they talked of this throughout the election, but to me it looked like Pepsi had just changed their logo:
Which looks like this, to me:
I thought advertisers were more subtle these days. |
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[Dec. 11th, 2008|07:18 pm] |
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I was in a pretty shitty mood yesterday. I guess I am a little bit still, but today was productive, at least. An LJ friend of mine had the idea to send holiday cards to whomever wants one, and I like that idea. I like making things, and I like feeling productive, and I'd be happy to make someone else feel good, even if it's only a little smile. So, comments are screened, and if you'd like a card, leave me an address, a fake or real name, whatever. Happy times! |
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[Dec. 10th, 2008|08:56 pm] |
People always talk about the spark you get when you're feeling creative or passionate, and I get it from time to time. Very far apart times. Most of the time it has to be anger that overcomes guilt, which in turn has caused the ennui, or the distraction culture I immerse myself within.
I avoid waking up. I avoid going to sleep. I avoid doing the dishes. I avoid thinking about what I have to do on whatever day. I avoid thinking about my student loans. I avoid thinking about how I feel like a scumbag piece of shit because I can't even get a fucking minimum wage job anywhere. I avoid thinking about how I feel dead, how I don't think I'll ever experience passion ever again. About how I wake up day after day and watch television in the midst of filth, avoiding my totality of failure as an autonomous human being.
I like being angry. Today I just sat. And wallowed in guilt. Guilt so bad it fucking gave me heartburn. It gave me a headache. It sat on my head like a two ton bomb. And nothing I could do would make it go away. Except some random anger, caused by some little nothing that really doesn't matter all that much; any information I get to back up my already firm notion that I'm never really going to go anywhere can set it off, it doesn't matter if it's the molehilliest of the molehills, now it's going to be fucking Everest.
But the worst part about it is that it's going to be gone tomorrow morning, and I'm going to go back to watching shitty TV 20 fucking hours a goddamn day. Fuck. |
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[Dec. 8th, 2008|06:53 pm] |
In romantic comedies or novels, you're usually supposed to identify with the hero(ine), imagine yourself as the plucky adventurer or the lady who gets her man. I've never been able to do that.
At most I'm the evil stepsister, the one who gets her comeuppance in the end.
I think of myself as someone who doesn't deserve anything, and that's what I've consequently gotten. This isn't to say I'm not lucky, with food on my plate and a roof over my head, a man who loves me.
Bandied about often are trite notions of self esteem, and you're told that you're a snowflake, and to expect the best. I'm not immune from this, either. But most are destined to be mediocre, or there wouldn't be a superior. In this age of digital, everyone can pretend better than before, put up a face of depth, of talent, skill, beauty. I can't even master this in the lashings I give my own self.
I don't have low self esteem per se, as when I compare and contrast I'm often on the heavier end of the scale. I like to think of myself as an unlucky genius, waiting for the perfect opportunity to thrust my glorious brain on the masses of the world, who will bow in awe at what wonders I can wreak.
But I really don't know how to interact with other people; where it seems easy in theory, in stories, on the street when other people do it, I think I have it down, I'm just like them, but somehow I make a mess of any situation in which I actually have to open my mouth. Instead of wonders, shame. Recrimination heaped on guilt and doubt, magnified over time into preposterous stretches of idle time, time that should be spent on building a better me, not dwelling on the me with supposedly intractable flaws.
There's always the outliers looking in on the beautiful star, the stalwart or quirky hero, and they're jealous. They think it should be them. Most people reading the book are these people. They're not the genius. They're not the protagonist. If only I could look at the world in this practical way, maybe I'd be able to see actual opportunities, real ways of making a mark upon the world, ways to be productive.
Imagination and perseverance should be an asset, but they turn monstrous when limited to only negativity. Such a little sentence, seemingly small in scope, but they encompass my entire mind. I can't even see a way to positivity, to rationality, to honesty that isn't forced on strangers who ask me for the time.
So a tiny room, literally and figuratively, is where I spend most of my time, dreaming of other and bigger worlds, but for someone else.
In other words, I need to shut my fucking mouth and do some damn thing. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 4th, 2008|02:06 pm] |
http://www.flyclear.com/apply/
This is kind of...unsettling. Does anyone else feel like this is both an invasion of privacy and a lessening of security? Security that already isn't that secure. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 5th, 2008|04:20 am] |
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Also, what the fuck is wrong with you, California? |
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eiaboca's journal
