ejf3:
Your family is so good at pushing your buttons because they’re the ones who installed them.
“do this for you.”
it’s an incredibly frustrating phrase for a submissive personality to hear. but at the end of the day, it’s the most selfless, abiding, loving request ever made of me.
it means I’m responsible for my own happiness, and though that’s a responsibility few might want, it’s a damn sight better than being dependent on the ever-changing moods of the volatile creature known as “human” who is outside of myself and my control.
it means on the days when everything hurts, I have not only my pride and my accomplishments to hang on to, but also the unconditional love of someone who has every opportunity to ask me to do what he says (and instead has promised to love me anyway and asks only that I be myself).
it means I don’t just bring to the table my reactions to what is in front of me (causing negative situations to double), but my actions and my inner strength that comes from knowing that I can do what I set my mind to, that I can always impress someone (even if it’s just myself), that I could take care of myself if I had to.
so right now, I’m just taking joy from the fact that I don’t. 🙂
earlier Jake sent me a delightful ragecomicish picture that was basically like “what if everything were reversed and fictional characters were real and blogged about people in real life”
and then he goes “Commander Adama blogging about YOU” to which I just kind of went wooooooahhhhhhh that.
I’ve been flailing ever since. it’s the coolest thought, partially because we might all be part of a fucking computer simulation anyway so it could be possible, and partially because I mean c’mon, Abed analyzing my microexpressions is hilarious.
but it’s also kind of compelling, right? like – live your life as if someone else were going to blog about it and analyze your subtext and create memes about your awesomeness. live like you were going to be featured on a fuckyeahyourname blog. live like your name and story come up when someone asks who someone’s very favorite character is.
be extraordinarily you.
I become more certain with every visit to the internet that hypocrisy is the reason good-hearted people buy into religion.
because without a pretty heightened sense of self and others the human capacity for hypocrisy is ridiculous. in one breath we’re like “yeah I would never do that because {insert reason here}” and in the next we’re proudly declaiming our justifications for doing that very thing IN A SPECIFIC SET OF CIRCUMSTANCES
like somehow that makes it all better
(I pull this shit all the time)
The creative door
Today has been an amazing day all around. Friends have gotten bites on job applications, Jake has been an absolute beast of salesover at his studio, and I’m about to wrap up A God Grown Old outline version 1.0. So I’m certainly not here to complain or bitch and moan – I just have an interesting thought and quandary.
I’ll occasionally browse Tumblr’s tags just to see what’s out there. I find it to be a great source of off-the-wall ideas and inspiration, since I don’t exactly go in there looking for anything in particular and it’s rare that none of those pretty little slides don’t catch my fancy. Sometimes I see stuff like this, though, and I wonder: is there a creative door in my head I just haven’t unlocked yet? The imagination it must take to envision and then produce those images is…staggering. Yet I know that I have a creative power…I just think it’s not quite tapped yet.
I wonder, then, how to unlock that creative door. I’m aware of part of my problem: a fear of failure, or, rather, a fear of wasting time. Wasting time is, I tend to imagine, what happens when I get really excited about an idea and then show it to someone and all they can do is “thpppt” at it. Perhaps that’s also the fear of being rejected, since actually opening that creative door means exposing truer and truer parts of myself to the world.
I would love to find some resources, exercises, and essays on how to be more creative (possibly avoiding drug use. I’m not quite in need of mushrooms yet). Does anyone know of some helpful links or books I could check out? Or some activities/exercises I could try out?
the point of the things we choose – our partners, our friends, our media and even our food – is to distract us from our sadnesses, even just for a moment.
What are you known for?
I’m currently listening to an Ella Fitzgerald channel on Pandora, and thinking about how every time someone encountered her, throughout her whole life, they probably asked her to sing at least a bar or two from her most famous songs. She was known as a singer, as a bringer of beautiful and enduring music to the world.
I wonder if she hated it. But even if she did despise being known for her music, rather than something more nebulous and “spiritual” (like her “true self” – although one can make the argument that something created is a piece of one’s true self), she kept at it. She pressed on, knowing that she was imparting to her fans and casual listeners alike a chance to escape for just a moment into the worlds of her songs.
I have a few driven friends, people who are pushing to carve out their niche in the world, not because they are desperate to be remembered but because they can’t do otherwise. I am the same: I can’t not write, or create, or come up with new ways to inspire people with my words. I’ve known that’s what I was meant to do since I penned “The Hoppers Go on Vacation” at age five. Among my friends who will be known and remembered long after they are gone are programmers, writers, musicians, artists, engineers, nurses, homemakers, parents, scientists, athletes, salespeople, and crafters.
But I see so many directionless people around me, too. These are people who completed college because they could or because it was expected, not because they were chasing a passion. These are people who have no dream job. These are people whose biggest visions of the future include a night out with friends and a cup of coffee before work the next day.
Is there anything wrong with that? Morally, of course not. Psychologically, I see many of them atrophying, desperately clawing at the last shreds of what their family or their friend circle knew or knows them for. I wonder if it’s a question they’ve ever stopped to ask themselves: what am I known for? And I wonder if they would even be able to find an answer to that question. I suppose there’s only so much room in the world for the driven people, or else we would have been extinct long ago, but it still saddens me to see individuals who have no sense of belonging or legacy.
What are you known for? What would you like to be known for? How can you take your passions and beliefs and obsessions and transform them into a long-lasting impression on the world?
Just a thought.
How the Internet Made Me a Better Person (or, Why I Blame the Internet For All My Social Problems).
I was a fairly old person when I discovered the internet, even for my generation. I started logging onto sites like “Starfire’s Redwall Abbey” at the age of 12. (Nowadays, that’s like not reading until you’re well into junior high.) I spent a huge amount of time on Redwall-themed forums and Neopets throughout my young teenage years, logging on to an unsecured wireless network on a school laptop, hunched in the corner of my bed, desperately trying not to lose my one bar of signal or give away what I was doing. (The family thought I was writing. A lot. I was.)
From the first day I started poking around those message boards, I discovered a community of people so diverse it was staggering. Of course, we were almost all of a minimum class and education level, at the very least, and we all shared a common if fairly obscure interest in a book series involving sword-wielding mice. But compared to my little homeschooled world of about five people besides my family, it was revolutionary and refreshing. I met brash, outspoken Canadians; lesbians with a flare for the artistic; several grammatically prim and proper English lads and lassies; big-hearted Texans; and a plethora of shy girls and boys who, like me, were hiding behind the nearly-anonymous face of a cartoon avatar to let their true selves loose, the people they couldn’t be in their homes or churches or schools.
I made every internet interaction count. I wanted to produce content, not troll or waste my virtual breath. I won third place in a survivor writing contest, created my own e-zine, contributed for a while to the most popular Redwall-themed e-zine, and started a forum where my strange little posse and I could go crazy and talk about silly things as much as we wanted. At the height of my internet career, I was churning out about 10-15 articles per month, editing another dozen or so, and role playing a huge list of characters on various forums in the midst of all that.
And I was making friends. I was sharing my life with these online presences as much as I could, and probably as much as I would have with schoolmates. I discovered that in some ways, it was much easier to have an online friend group, because you could walk away from a message thread and come back to it at any time. If I had to quickly shut down the ‘net connection, I could do so without being rude. Plus, the community I discovered was teaching me so many new things about how the world worked. We all came from different religious backgrounds, different philosophies of life, different educational techniques and different hobbies, and all of those contributed to and shaped our (generally) civil discussions. I was exposed to ideas that were taboo in my home, things that I was able to consider long before I began Running Start a few years later. The formation of my personal philosophy began during a year that most of my peers were using to Catch ‘Em All and ride around on imaginary broomsticks, interjecting with laments about the onset of puberty.
Not that I didn’t participate in all of that, too. As much as I could get away with, I would run around from summer to winter with the neighborhood kids, pretending to be Rattata and lions in a circus and “Jiggy Nye” (long story). I was able to temper my rise to early philosophical young adulthood with playing imagination games much longer than other young teens I knew. I came away from the combined experiences with a profound belief in the creative as a spiritual practice and the value of all people, no matter and because of their diverse points of view.
If the story ended there, I would have nothing but praise for my early internet life. Even further into the future, during my lonely days in Florida, I reached out to my old Redwallian friends and they grabbed me back in a giant virtual hug that kept me sane. But that would be too easy an ending to the tale. I have come to realize just how much my years spent celebrating a diverse community took the kickstand out from under my most basic social relationships while not preparing me to handle the inevitable clash at all.
I was raised as your basic Christian: Jesus died and rose again; his sacrifice covers all sins; follow the Bible’s instructions. It’s simplistic enough, at its most basic level, for young children to accept without a lot of questions. And I’ve seen the questioning process happen many times before amongst my friends, with varying results – some outgrow it, others grow into it, and still others have it hanging over their shoulder like a tattered cape, not really useful but there because it’s always been. I am a philosophically-minded person, and I began making serious inquiries into the business of religion early on in my life (I spent a lot of time inside my own head). When the internet entered my existence, it simply spurred me to delve even deeper. I love these people, I would think, but they are wrong and sinners and going to suffer eternally, if what I was raised to believe is true. That didn’t sit well with me at all. I didn’t really want eternity, if it was going to be without the most interesting people I knew.
Long story short, the questioning has never stopped. I can’t bring myself to put blind faith into words written by men, chosen by men, and championed by men. I can’t see a good reason why Christianity, in the form I was taught or otherwise, has a monopoly on the truth. If God is in fact unknowable, then how can anyone claim to fully know God to the point that they can declare others’ versions of God wrong? I have yet to encounter someone with a satisfying answer.
And because of this questioning – because we no longer have an identical platform on which we stand to address issues – my family and I are in constant disagreement. My life choices are wrong on principle. I can’t get advice from my mother without it being accompanied by a Bible verse. Friends or significant others who haven’t fit the mold are already on the watch list. I feel I can no longer share my life without a family-wide breakdown or at the very least a novel-sized email conversation. At some point, I stopped buying into the philosophy for myself and started creating my own, and slowly but surely that tugged me away from what is supposed to be an everlasting support network. Even some of my friends have subtly turned on me because I no longer adhere to their “rules of proper lifestyle.” It’s sad and scary and a part of growing up I didn’t expect to have to do so dramatically.
And for that, I blame the internet.
It’s kind of a helpful habit, this replaying of sentences I speak seconds afterwards in search of sexual innuendos. It helps me catch when I’ve made verbal missteps.