Starting my third week tomorrow and I feel more comfortable. Worst part so far is still dealing with the customers who insist on being extra. *ding goes off in my headset for the drive-thru* *.01 seconds later* "HELLO?!" Who fucking raised you? Jesus Christ. And I'm being serious about that one. That actually happens. No exaggeration. Thee second they reach the speaker they start with a rude, demanding hello. Where are they in a rush to get to? Oh. That's simple. The three cars that are waiting in front of them, which they're probably going to have to wait behind whether they finish their order within the first three seconds of pulling up or the first three minutes. Ah, the joys of customer service! But I still like the people I work with. I still haven't quite got the hang of making drinks, although I do feel better about making cold drinks than hot ones. I also have a much better handle on taking orders, both in-store and in the drive-thru. So it's not all bad. It's even improving. And I know I could do a lot worse. Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow I only work half-shifts which is nice. Nothing worse than getting burned out at a job. Now I just need to find somebody to take a shift for me toward the end of the month. I've got university orientation to go to. I'm hoping that since I'll be dealing with so many people, some of the experience will rub off on me and I can write better characters, as that's the biggest and most frustrating thing I struggle with in writing.
Started my new job today. One thing I took away from Steven Pressfield's "War of Art" is that the areas in life where we experience resistance are often the areas we must forge into. Face your fears and all that. If only this useful reverse psychology was as easy to follow as it is to preach. I'm trying. Everything in my being was saying, "Don't let them convince you to work there. It will be bad. You won't like it. It will be too difficult." But how would my life turn out if I let it be dictated by that kind of attitude? Besides, I needed a job, and it isn't every day that genuine offers come knocking on your door like some Vault-Tec rep. I processed this and realized that since I'll be moving away to go to university this fall, I need a stable job. And Starbucks seemed like the best opportunity. At least I know many of the people who work there (most of whom will be working the same shift as me), and they're cool. It isn't often one can say that about their co-workers. There's also an impressive amount of benefits, ranging from stock grants to paid-for online courses, and the management at my store is very good about working with school. They're very willing to help me transfer to a location by my university when the time comes at the end of July. At which point I intend on working the minimum amount of hours necessary to survive up there; I'll need time for my studies. Should I take one less class than what is considered full-time? I really think so. I'd rather have a buffer that I can utilize to ensure I do the best I can in my courses, rather than cramming and crunching things and pulling all-nighters, or otherwise working in a manner that is unsustainable and overall less effective. Work there for ten years and you get a "coffee break". An entire year's salary and you don't have to work a single day. I don't know the specific stipulations but at first glance that's wonderful. You could potentially make the salary of somebody working two full-time jobs for an entire year if you found other employment while on your coffee break. Although I have to wonder if that'd be breaking some sort of rule. Anyway, I don't plan on working here for a decade. But you never know. It also depends on if the store I transfer to is a corporate location, or franchise. Anyway, today wasn't all bad. I definitely didn't get enough sleep, so 2/3 of the way through the day I was starting to crash. Add on the information overload, and the mind-numbing online onboarding, where all the information slides make your eyes glaze over. I reached a point where I felt like my mind was melting and I couldn't retain anything. However, the on-hands training was much better. I learn best this way. At least I was on my feet and moving around and directly working with my shift supervisor and trainer, who's been awesome so far. There's nothing so far that I've encountered that I feel like I can't do. At the moment I feel overwhelmed instead from the sheer amount of new things all being thrown at me at once, at full-speed: entirely new environment, new machines, new computer systems, new people, new roles with unfamiliar responsibilities, new procedures, new menu... I've never had a high stress-tolerance; I'm hoping that the long process of conquering this job will help some things fall into place in my mind in that regard. I also haven't been feeling 100% lately. Haven't been eating as well as I should, not getting sleep like I should, etc. I'm pulling it together. I remembered that I can't be having a lot of coffee even while I'm at work. No matter how inconvenient it is. My stomach doesn't like it, it wreaks absolute havoc on my already delicate and strained handling of anxiety, so it's going to be water from me here on out. I'll take a few sips of something when I need to sample a drink, but besides that I'll have to abstain. I also need to figure out how to fit other obligations into my schedule, as a full-time job necessarily dictates how all that is arranged. Back at it again tomorrow. Going to try and get some sleep if my mind will allow. I think my biggest fear right now is dealing with people who want their Grande iced caramel macchiato with soy milk, extra caramel, light whipped cream, add salt, and baptized, and literally say all that within the span of about 5 fucking seconds. Here's me: "Okayyy, so I got a Grande... and what else?" Mostly being hyperbolic, but don't even get me started on people with indecipherable accents. THE FIRST CUSTOMER to come up to the register today was a terrifying eastern European(?) man with gang(?) tattoos who spoke very quietly and was impossible to understand because of his English. He must've had to say "triple filtered water" 6 fucking times before even my trainer knew what he was saying. If it'd just been me, we'd still be standing there right now. "Sorry, I didn't catch that. Could you repeat that please?" One thing is for sure. I'll definitely be more clear and even-voiced (is that even a thing? I can't think right now; it's too late) when ordering in a drive-thru. Talk too loud and the volume spikes and gets all wacked and you can't understand what's being said. Talk too quiet and, well, you guessed it. It's too fucking quiet, and either the microphone can't pick it up or the rest of the store is too loud for it to be heard on the headset. And my brain is already concocting fictional scenarios of some douchebag talking to me deliberately slow so as to make fun of me, as if I'm a retard. I struggle with this thing called "not caring" and tolerating gross behavior. The world is full of too much tolerance and it's to blame for why they continue acting that way to begin with. Nobody wins. If nobody put up with it, the vast majority would get with the program. To Hell with the few who don't. They had their chance just like everyone else. There's winners and losers. While there's no reason to rejoice at the fact that somebody is a loser, or no reason for malicious conspiracy, there's no reason to forbid losing, either, in my estimation. To some degree, natural selection needs to be free to operate. It's a law of the universe. Should they choose rejection or ostracism, so be it. Should they repent, forgive and welcome them with open arms. Anyway. Enough ranting. Once it gets existential I realize I need to stop. Someone is bound to write an essay in response to a point that is entirely removed from the actual point of writing this blog: my job, school, what's happening in my life, my plans. For now, I admit I am grateful. And I admit that a significant part of me is hopeful- no, not just hopeful but *intends* to master this, if only it can just hold on. Maybe I'll be able to build some damn character. God knows I could use that.
"Mike Tyson could be a history teacher and football coach who teaches at a school in a rough neighborhood, Jennifer Aniston could be an art teacher at a more affluent school but in the same district..." I didn't get much farther than that. My group-mates and I were trying to figure out what to do for our class project. Basically, we were doing a two-page ad (there's an actual term for it but it escapes me... a "spread"?) in a fake magazine for an imaginary movie about teachers. Well, you've got to cast for a movie, even if it's not real. Nobody else was taking the initiative on that end. So leave it to me! Pretty soon somebody voiced concerns about racism. "I don't see why Mike Tyson has to be the teacher at a rough neighborhood..." Okay, besides just how absurd it is to cast Mike Tyson as a middle-school football coach and history teacher in the first place, which is part of why I did it, I didn't say it had to be him. Just to cover the bases, nor did I say it has to be Mike Tyson because he's black. Paraphrasing this conversation, by the way. Thus it was such, that the moral busybody had jumped to the rescue of their own projected racism. Anyway, admittedly caught off-guard I replied, "Woah woah woah there, I didn't mean it like that. Who else do we want cast?" Finally somebody else spoke up and said, "We should have Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson instead. He's a better actor than Mike Tyson, very charismatic and seems like a good dude." "Okay, so we'll have The Rock instead. That's cool with me. But is it okay, because he *is* black," I said with some emphasis. The person who'd suggested The Rock then laughed. The other girl from before said, "That's not what I meant, but okay." (Mutes her microphone.) Well, I do have a soul. I'm not a psychopath and I have the capability of detecting and deciphering the neuron-firings known as feelings in other entities similar to myself. Or as normal people call it, possessing empathy. I did feel bad, but at the same time, I really couldn't think of anything I needed to apologize for. I wasn't going to make this the hill to die on. This wasn't even a real movie. It's just a stupid class project, for which it's way more important that we get along and work together. But I can't help but acting the contrarian toward this ideology of moral busy-bodying. And I do not take credit for that term; I first encountered its succinct and sharp-witted brilliance from a C.S. Lewis quote: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." I can't be bothered to look-up the precise source. You can if you want. If I recall correctly, I've verified it before. Anyway, having taken our grains of salt now, I must add the caveat that this fellow peer of mine was not "tormenting" me or anybody else. She's really quite a sweet girl by all appearances. We've been in the same group of 5 students for a few weeks now, and it looks like we will be for the remainder of the semester. I'm happy about that, because we all do good work including her. But out of principle, when I encounter this moral busybodying, I can't help but stand fast. After our online class was over for the day, she texted me (we're all in a group-chat so we can communicate outside of class) and apologized if she'd been rude. I said there was nothing to apologize for, and tried to make her feel validated by saying that I understood her concern. Which, I believe to be the truth; I just don't agree with her concern. But I get it. Now, I get that it's reasonable to consider the... appearances of things, and how an action or statement may be misinterpreted. But I put emphasis on reasonable. In no universe do I think it would be reasonable to assume that if Mike Tyson was cast as being a middle-school football coach and history teacher in a lower-income neighborhood, then it *must* be the result of racism. I wouldn't even wonder. Because what does such a ridiculous interpretation entail? I never said that Mike Tyson was from the imaginary neighborhood that he's teaching at. For all she knows, I could've given his character a backstory where he comes from a rich family in the Hollywood Hills. I never said that the demographics of the school were black, but it sounds like she made that assumption herself. (I think we all know the words of wisdom about assumptions and what they make of you and me.) I never said that I'm casting Mike Tyson for this role because he's black. These situations happen more often than you think. And oh how easy would it all have been resolved if she'd simply asked me, "Why Mike Tyson?" And I would've said: "Oh my God, I was watching Mike Tyson's Mysteries the other night on Netflix and it was great. You gotta' watch it." Yet somehow it is the Righteous Crusader herself who makes it all about race. Hmm. Thus we all see how a problem was created where there was no problem. How peculiar. Right now in Hollywood, there's lots of talk from Kathleen Kennedy and her ilk that gender and race play a part in their casting choices. And you know what, I'll steel-man that, if only slightly. Yes, in certain situations I think it is acceptable to make casting decisions based on those characteristics. For example, a director might want a woman to play a *gasp* female character. A director may want to accurately cast for the time, place, setting of a given film. Or it could be a decision to stay true to a character's original design, as in the case of movies based on comic books or something. That's all fine and dandy by me, not that they need to come to me for permission. But when it doesn't matter, in the Star Wars universe, in a galaxy far far away, we're saying the least racist thing you can do is to let race influence your casting. We're saying that the best way to appear as non-racist and diverse, is in fact to discriminate by race and gender to force a certain outcome. "Sorry, we already got enough of your kind for our film. Now scram." Funny, innit? The lesson I learned yesterday on 10/28/20: don't be quick to assume there's a problem where you're not sure there is one, because your very assumption may become the only problem there ultimately is. Rather, akin to "What would Jesus do?", try to remember to ask "Why Mike Tyson?" And in so doing, we can all play our effective parts in rooting out active discrimination or unintentional bias where it is present, instead of putting out fires that we ourselves started. As Freud would have put it, sometimes a Mike Tyson is, in fact, indeed, indubitably, just a Mike Tyson.
Finish a work by Orwell or Tolstoy, Twain or Joyce, and you may feel like a mere man among gods. But thanks to the Hemingway Library Edition of A Farewell to Arms, we find it is possible to see through the monuments and marble statues and busts of our literary idols, until all that’s left is - in fact - the man. So here’s three things we can learn from a behind-the-scenes perspective of Hemingway’s craft. 1. Economy Yes, it’s well-known Hemingway’s style was spare and straightforward, characteristics picked up from a career as a journalist. However, it’s one thing to hear that and another to see it. That’s exactly what the appendices of this edition provide: valuable demonstration. “The ambulance stopped and they lifted out the stretcher. The jolt at the moment of lifting moving made a sickening pain feeling; it was a feeling like as of dropping in an elevator except that here it was pain.” The unedited version of this passage would’ve been 35 words. The edited version, 30. And actually it could’ve been made even shorter, something like, “...The moving made a feeling as of dropping in an elevator except that it was pain.” In any case, this scene - the opening of chapter thirteen - is very different in the book. A lot better too. The point is that if you cut an average of a dozen words per page across 300 pages, that’s approximately 3600 words. That’s roughly over half-a-dozen pages of redundant or otherwise unnecessary words. This is just one of several ways to trim down your writing. 2. Handwriting This edition also features photographs of Hemingway’s manuscript, both typed and longhand. These give us some insight into Hemingway’s train-of-thought. “They carried the stretcher into the hospital and set it down. From the door of the ambulance to the door of the hospital the Lieutenant passed was in the street. It was early morning and they were watering the street and the he saw the market place and an open wine shop…” It’s reasonable to assume that Hemingway did not cross-out ‘passed’ or ‘the’ after completing the passage. These were removed in real-time and we can only imagine what paths were sealed off in his mind before ever reaching the page. We can see from the manuscript photographs that even when Hemingway wrote with a pencil, he did not erase. And even the typewriter would force one to leave errors. Whereas today we erase our mistakes and nobody else will know what it was, and thanks to backspace nobody will be the wiser once the page is printed. But one invaluable thing about seeing our own mistakes is being able to follow our own train-of-thought. Trusted readers can see this as well, helping them help you. Or, who knows, maybe that material discarded to the floor can be used for some other purpose later on. It can be hard to not use that little rubber eraser; I know it is for me as a chronic sufferer of perfectionism. I also can’t resist the convenience of the computer where I’m able to easily edit and revise as I go. So I always write a first draft with a pen until I am ready to transfer it to the digital space. Hemingway said, “If you write with a pencil you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get another chance to improve it, and again in the proof. Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is .333 which is a damned good average for a hitter. It also keeps it fluid longer so you can better it easier.” 3. Rewrite Again, it’s likely old news for many of you that Hemingway said he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. What many of you probably don’t know is that this Hemingway Library Edition includes all those other endings so you can read them yourself. Finish reading the book though, even if you’ve read it in the past, before moving onto the appendices. With the story fresh in your mind it will be easier to compare the rough drafts to the finished product. You’ll be able to decide for yourself why many of the alternative endings would not have been satisfying. “The first draft of anything is shit.” Hemingway wasn’t excluding himself when he said that. He was not above the rule. I’m sure many of us have read Hemingway’s quotes on writing countless times. We’ve gone through plenty of top ten lists on the internet that treat them like commandments. Yet, every parent knows that kids don’t learn by simply being told something. In the same way, it would not be enough if a coach or teacher did not demonstrate the lesson for the students. The appendices of this edition help us better understand some of Hemingway’s writing advice by showing it in practice. Hemingway filled two pages with other possible titles, and I myself am glad he didn’t pick any of them. The story isn’t just about the backdrop of the First World War in Italy, but the relationship superimposed on it, and “A Farewell to Arms” captures that brilliantly. You have to be willing to rewrite the beginning, the ending, all the scenes in between, and even the title as many times as it takes for you to feel you got it right. * * * Next time you read a classic from a great author do not fall to your knees in worship. Respect them, admire their prowess, but do not forget all the words they scribbled out that we may never know of, and how long they agonized and rewrote. Do not forget that they’re more like you than they are different. Do not put them up on an unreachable pedestal. In the future I hope to see more books like this one that light the path to achieve such greatness.
"The world's always been crazy." I saw Weathering With You today. Took a five-hour round-trip, but I did it. I'd hoped it'd be dubbed, but subtitles were fine. I still really enjoyed the anime. Without spoiling anything, the commentary that I got from the film on the matter of sacrifice was really thought-provoking. Pray for yourself. What good is it trying to carry all the burdens of others without carrying your own? There was some about climate change as well, and it definitely wasn't what I was expecting. Very refreshing and insightful. --- "You're seeing yourself for the first time. The light at the center of the darkness." "Who are you? Do not think that I know the answer. Only you know the answer to that. It is time that you stop looking to the outside, and start looking inward. That is why she was asking you, is it not?" "Where do you go?" Repeated. Still not sure how I want to execute this WIP; to what extent I want to place it in this fictional landscape. --- On the rock, the two shadow people held hands, faces touching-- but gone were those who'd cast them. ... In another WIP, I thought about having two different characters, but I now believe they're really supposed to be one. This will create conflict, hopefully a richer character, and challenge me to make some decisions and say something of note. --- This weather sucks. Made it home just before the winter storm hit. Work tomorrow is going to suck, but maybe it will be really slow again because of the snow. I wouldn't complain if we didn't open. --- She sat on the bench, motionless. Glistening eyes gazed upward into the array of pink petals that rustled in the breeze. Her eyes were blue, like the clear sky above. And equally distant.
Not a very big brainstorm. Just one of those wild summer rains that leaves as quickly as it arrives. I've intermittently been thinking about topics that I'd want to cover, should I start making some anime commentary videos on YouTube. So far... Your Name changed my life Anime: Running Away from Reality, or Toward? The Psychology in Monogatari (multi-part series) Violet Evergarden and trying to understand Love The recurring theme of fearing attractive women The appeal of harems I could probably do a lot of content on Monogatari. Philosophies, character-arc analyses...
Supposed to have a call with my academic adviser tomorrow in regards to my existential crisis / not knowing what I'm having for dinner / having for breakfast / what I'm going to go to school for / what I'm going to do with the rest of my life / why I'm good at things that are useless and that I can't make money doing / why I enjoy things that don't matter to other people and that can't provide me a living. Well, I can only talk to him about the school part, specifically. In other news, finished a ~6250 word paper on depression and suicide. Isn't due for like another week but I just want to be fucking done with it already. I think it's good. I spent more than a few hours revamping the thesis and writing the conclusion. I think it came together well. Fixed a few other things he pointed out in the rough draft. Altogether probably close to a whole day spent on it, across 6-7 days. Altogether going to net me: zero dollars and zero cents. Could've netted me over $200 if I got paid to do it. But alas, selling overpriced coffee to people is more valued by society. All the things I hate about life are more valued by society, which is exactly why depression and suicide is such a problem that I have to write a 30 page paper on it (double-spaced). I'm going to make my case for why I'm not formatting it to MLA and see what he says; with no swear words and in a very professional manner, of course. If he really wants me to, I'll make him a separate copy that's completely MLA format. But honestly, it's fucking unreadable without having a line space between paragraphs. And also single-line paragraphs look stupid when you indent them, and look just as stupid if you don't indent them but indent everything else.
I don't really know where to start with this but some of you may remember a blog post I made a little while back about an experience I had involving coke. I thought my best friend died in front of me. That all started with a trip we made to Canada where we met some semi-pro hockey players who were staying at the same hotel as us. Not all of us tried it; only part of our friend group went on the trip, and only a smaller portion of us did it. There won't be any names or specific locations or even dates and times mentioned. The point is that at the time of trying it, I never anticipated anything serious coming of it. I didn't think that when we got back home, some of us would seek it out and buy some. When you're in a good group of friends where everybody trusts one another and we're open with one another, it really stands out when suddenly a smaller segment is doing something and not letting the rest know. A big secret seems odd after years of transparency. I do believe that the intentions were good, but I don't think I need to tell you how the road to Hell can be paved. Some of us were only trying to have fun. I get that the motivations weren't to hurt anybody, but the exact opposite. I hate to go all Tolkien and give you the backstory (as much as I love Tolkien's writing). To keep it brief, towards the end of high-school the friend group I was in - "the crew" - merged with "the flock". Two friend groups came together. The groups hang out separately more than they hang out together, but we're all still very close on the whole. I would say that I'm about as close with my original friend group as I am with "the flock". After the incident where I thought my friend died, I decided that was enough. That was the wake-up call. As Alan Watts says (paraphrasing), after you get the call, hang-up the phone. The rest of them didn't seem to take that event as seriously as I did. All I know is that I remember having a conversation about how often we were using it and that the consensus was essentially, "Well, if we keep it to special occasions" (that is to say: rarely) "then it shouldn't be a problem." But since then, almost every gathering (I must emphasize the *almost*) it has been present. Overtime, more and more people have been included in the circle of users. I didn't want to be complicit in that anymore. There were times where we took it over to friends' houses without them knowing. I didn't want to be complicit in that anymore. In my opinion, THAT is the breaking of trust right there. Having people at parties where they don't know it is present is also irresponsible in my opinion. Having close friends kept in the dark about it - intentions aside - seems like a shitty thing to do. In a way, it seems like doing something behind somebody's back. Not to mention girlfriends, none of whom know. I didn't want to be complicit in that anymore. As I may have already said, I let some of the people know (who previously didn't know). When I did that, it had nothing to do with anybody's reputation. It wasn't a judgment of anybody's character. It was out of concern for what I call my extended family. It was out of concern for the act itself, not who did what. I wanted the whole thing put behind us. How could it be about their reputation when I did it too? How could it be a judgment of them, without simultaneously being a judgment of me? We're young. We're exploring and did some stuff that was fun, but wasn't good for us. I felt that we should stop doing it. That's that. Maybe I didn't handle it the best way. Maybe I should've gone to them first instead of going behind their back. I'll be the first to admit that. I could've done it the courageous way rather than the cowardly way, and I failed. But to be honest, at the end of the day I don't give a shit. I still think I did the right thing. My love for all my friends and concern for them is greater than anything else. If being public enemy number one is my sacrifice for that, so be it. I was added in a group chat titled "An Unfortunate Conversation" and this was what somebody said. I'll leave it at that for tonight. "It's come to my attention that one of you spread the word we were "re-energizing" in the basement at [the last party]. I cannot begin to explain how incredibly disappointing it is that one of my closest friends felt the need to spread my business around. I specifically said that what happened there, stayed there. If you had a problem with what we were doing, you should have approached me first. If you felt that our health was in question, you should have considered the near alcohol-poisoning that happens at the parties we have and assessed our situation in context. If you felt the need to include it in a conversation, you needed to consider the ramifications on me of what you chose to say. I specifically said that I didn't want to be known as the coke guy and yet here we are. A member has come forward that he refuses to come to any party that we have that substance at. I've been told he is not alone in feeling this way. While I think this is an overreaction, I will comply with this request and not bring any to future parties. The fact that this person didn't know what we were partaking in until someone decided to tell them speaks volumes about how well we are able to handle ourselves, especially given the incredibly small amounts we choose to partake in. College is meant to be a time of exploration, a time to try new things. Even potentially dangerous things that are harmless in moderation. If you know how rarely we consume it and you know how tiny the amount we consume is, you should also know it isn't a problem. I pride myself in keeping the secrets that people confide in me solely within my own possession. I recognize that my business is my business and that theirs is theirs. If I have a problem or concern about what someone tells me or shows me, I speak to them. Never in my life have I tried to "solve" one of these situations by spreading it around to all of their friends. Why this simple courtesy could not be reciprocated by someone in this group is beyond my comprehension. To the person who spread this information, you should be ashamed of yourself. You have not changed my opinion of the substance at hand. Not in the slightest. You have, however, greatly changed my opinion of you. I'm not mad that you had a problem with what we were doing. I am extremely disappointed that I can no longer trust you. I don't know who you are. I won't pursue that answer. I'm too afraid of finding out because I know that my trust will instantly degrade to zero. Never again would I be able to look at you the same way. I sincerely hope that you feel that tarnishing my reputation in a group of my closest friends was worth it." (That isn't what happened, by the way. We don't think of him as "the coke guy" when there were literally almost 10 of us doing it. The implicit assumption here is that I was trying to tarnish his reputation. That couldn't be further from the truth, and more than that, wasn't even an unintended consequence.) "To those of you who didn't say anything, I appreciate your vigilance. Thanks for keeping our business ours. Thank you for considering the consequences of your actions. Thank you for considering not only how your actions affect you, but also how they affect other people. I'm very sorry that you had to read this. To the person that said something, I hope you feel that your actions were worth it." (I do, thanks.) "Consider yourself lucky that I will not have the chance to look at you differently, given your anonymity. Consider yourself lucky that you will not have to reconsider which of your friends you can actually trust with secrets, as I now have to do. Consider yourself lucky that my anger is contained by the sole factor of not knowing who you are. If you believe that I made a mistake by bringing it to the party, you should have discussed this with me. Everyone makes mistakes, yet not everyone broadcasts their mistakes to all their friends. You have not made me regret my decision to partake in what I partook in. You have simply made me regret my decision to believe that you would come to me with an issue instead of going behind my back. You have simply mad eme realize that the mistake that I made that night was to trust you. I'm disappointed in you." I did not say anything. Not out of fear, but because adults don't handle something like this in an antagonistic group chat. I called a friend of mine (the one who I thought had died) and explained to him in a one-on-one phone call what was going through my head. I don't feel like going into details because I'm honestly tired, but I think it went well. At least I got to say what I needed to say, and he got to say what he needed to, and we understood one another. There was no way I could've done that in that group chat with six people in agreement with the diatribe I quoted above, over text with people talking over one another, and within the stilted framework that the conversation was set.
As foreshadowed in my previous blog rant post, I finished Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms". I wasn't brought to tears, but I think that might paradoxically be due to how hard it hit me. I understood the gravity, but I probably won't fully feel its effects for some time. The neat thing about my copy is that it includes appendices of rough drafts and alternate endings to the novel, which I started today. It completely dashed my silly notion that where one starts writing the novel is where the novel starts. It dashed the silly thought put into my head by arrogant pricks that writing was easy and effortless for the greats. It dashed the idea that you'll just need one rough draft; that if you want to be the best writer you can be, you need to write that passage, that chapter, over and over until you get it right, or until you realize you've been barking up the wrong tree all along. And it provides a lot of insight into Hemingway's personal craft. From the start we see "lifting" struck out, having used "lifted" in the prior sentence. We see "sickening pain" crossed out, traded for a metaphor (going from 'telling' to 'showing'); Hemingway shortens the wording of the metaphor, which I believe makes it punchier. "The jolt at the moment of lifting moving made a sickening pain feeling; it was a feeling like as of dropping in an elevator except that it was pain." One can see where his train of thought changes, as demonstrated: "It was early morning and they were watering the street and the he saw the market place and an open wine shop." What's interesting is that a thoroughly revised and refined version of this scene is in the book, but it's told in first person as opposed to third. Another thing that really caught my attention was that there were a lot of "breaking the fourth wall" passages, and all of them were scrapped. These passages are Hemingway undisguised; whether he intended it that way or not, it feels far more like Hemingway projecting himself onto the writing process, rather than anything that would've come from the main-character. For example: "The writer of this book can make one promise to every reader, a promise as a gift -- that he, the writer will die and that so will the reader." Or here again: "I do not like to remember the trip back to Milan. The train got back into the station early in the morning. If you have never travelled in a hospital train there is no use making a picture of it. This is not a picture of war, nor really about war. It is only a story. That is why, sometimes, it may seem there are not many people in it, nor enough noises, nor enough smells. There were always people and noises unless it was quiet and always smells but in trying to tell the story I cannot get them all in always but have a hard time just sticking keeping to the story alone and sometimes it seems as though it were all quiet. and nothing going on but what happened. But it wasn't quiet. If you try and put in everything you would never get a single day done. and then the one who reads it might not feel it so I will try to tell it straight along and hope that the things themselves will give the feeling of the rest. Besides when Also when you are wounded or a little crazy a little out of your head or in love with someone the surroundings are sometimes removed and they only come in at certain times. But I will try and to keep the places in and tell what happened. It does not seem to have gotten anywhere and it is not much of a love story so far but it has to go on the way it was although I skip everything I can." And I'd like to know more about Ernest Hemingway, as I'm curious to see just how heavily his novels - or at least A Farewell to Arms - is based off of personal experience. My educated guess would be *very*. The last thing I'll add is a portion of the manuscript that does not appear in the novel, although the ideas and thoughts do at different times and in their own ways. While I have some notions as to why this would've been reworked, I really liked this part, and it brought tears to my eyes as I finished it. "We had a fine life, all the things we did were of no importance and the things we said were foolish and seem even more idiotic to write down but we were happy and I suppose wisdom and happiness do not go together. Although there is a wisdom in being a fool that we do not know much about and if happiness is an end sought by the wise it is no less an end if it comes without wisdom. It is as well to seize it as to seek it because you are liable to wear out the capacity for it in the seeking. To seek it through the kingdom of heaven is a fine thing but you must give up this life first and if this life is all you have you might have remorse after giving it up and the kingdom of heaven might be a cold place in which to live with remorse. They say the only way you can keep a thing is to lose it and this may be true but I do not admire it. The only thing I know is that if you love anything enough they take it away from you. This may all be done in infinite wisdom but whoever does it is not my friend. I am afraid of God at night but I would have admired him more if he would have stopped the war or never have let it start. Maybe he did stop it but whoever stopped it did not do it prettily. And if it is the Lord that giveth and the Lord that taketh away I do not admire him for taking Catherine away. He may have given me Catherine but who gave Rinaldi the syphilis at about the same time? The only thing I know is that I do not know anything about it. I see the wisdom of the priest at our mess who has always loved God and so is happy and I am sure that nothing will ever take God away from him. But how much is wisdom, and how much is luck to be born that way? And what if you are not built that way? What if the things you love are perishable? All you know then is that they will perish. You will perish too and perhaps that is the answer; that those who love things that are immortal and believe in them are immortal themselves and live on with them while those that love things that die and believe in them die and are dead as the things they love. If that were true it would be a very fine gift and would even things up. But it probably is not true. All that we can be sure of is that we are born and that we will die and that every thing we love that has life will die too. The more things with life that we love the more things there are to die. So if we want to buy winning tickets we can go over on the side of immortality; and finally they most of them do. But if you were born loving nothing and the warm milk of your mother's breast was never heaven and the first thing you loved was the side of a hill and the last thing was a woman and they took her away and you did not want another but only to have her; and she was gone; then you are not so well placed and it would have been better to love God from the start. But you did not love God. And it doesn't do any good to talk about it either. Nor to think about it."
I was reading a preview of a book on acedia, and in it I read that one's relationship with God - and / or perhaps it was Christianity as a whole - was much like a journey through the desert. I'm probably butchering it, but I found the general metaphor to be apt. It may be that God is happy that I said I would spite him. There was a time when I claimed to not believe in Him at all. One can choose not to believe in the existence of something, and one can spite something, but one cannot do both. And as I've thought more, I realize the tremendous hypocrisy I committed. Do I believe I am at fault, or do I not? Is God to blame, or am I? In the same way that one can only disbelieve or spite, it can only be one or the other. After some intermittent thinking I've come to the conclusion that my original intuition is right. I am the problem. God has every right to deny me what I don't deserve. I'm too shallow and self-centered, and what business would God have in actively perpetuating sin by way of reward? It would be irresponsible of him to do anything but what he has done. Am I supposed to learn the lesson of Cain? That a sacrifice is no sacrifice at all if it is made with the aim of benefiting oneself instead of others? That the error may not lay in what one does, but rather in where one's heart is placed? Does my error rest in my motivations? In the "why"? --- Even when all my friends tonight, for a moment, unexpectedly in unison turned their backs on me and attacked me for being a supposed homophobe, obsolete, an ignorant-this, a disrespectful-that, God does not turn his back on me. Even when I turn my back to him. Or when I face him in pathetic wrath. The moment I feel alone is the moment I am alone no longer. Even as it becomes clearer that this world and society along with it are moving more and more toward a state that I despise, that I cannot live in, and as I am more and more alienated and hated and shouted-down in attempts to silence me for wrong-think, God does not leave. God understands. And so it is that what I identified as His one critical weakness, is in fact his greatest strength. And I am fortunate enough to be the beneficiary of His divine grace. Do I need to heed the wisdom of Erwin Rommel? "You don't need to think that you were abandoned by the world. The world never took you before." Because I certainly feel abandoned by my naive faith in the reason of men, and shaken by the reminder that even the support of friends is not unfailing. I guess I shouldn't be so shocked. This social justice, a double-speak perversion of the latter word, has infected many and will use them to poison and warp the world. I was no exception; I bought the sales-pitch like any other fool. Only the greatest of minds didn't. Now the false messiah of the marginalized and oppressed seeks to marginalize and oppress, dwindle and destroy all that it categorizes in cold ironic calculation as a threat to its empty promise of utopia. It's easy to get people to commit the greatest injustices by putting them to the music of compassion. As they say, "Don't cut yourself on that edge." The sword of compassion is double-edged, after all. It's great until your head is on the chopping block. "Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath. Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am faint; heal me, Lord, for my bones are in agony. My soul is in deep anguish. How long, Lord, how long? Turn, Lord, and deliver me; save me because of your unfailing love. Among the dead no one proclaims your name. Who praises you from the grave? I am worn out from my groaning. All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears. My eyes grow weak with sorrow; they fail because of all my foes. Away from me, all you who do evil, for the Lord has heard my weeping. The Lord has heard my cry for mercy; the Lord accepts my prayer. All my enemies will be overwhelmed with shame and anguish; they will turn back and suddenly be put to shame." -Psalm 6
High-school is when my depression got really bad. Before classes, between classes, after classes, I almost always had my earbuds in. Listening to some stuff that I'm sure would make me cringe now. I kept my eyes to the desk, or the carpet, or the shiny hallway floors. Not everybody is as lucky as I was, I realize. I still had friends who always kept the door open for me. Most of my classmates were nice, or nice enough, or at least would leave you alone. Unlike some schools, I was fortunate to have some really great teachers. I'm also glad that my counselor and the principal and so many other people were as understanding as they were. I think if they hadn't been, I might've turned out a lot worse. But it's hard to say for sure. I can only remember so much, and memories are imperfect. But I remember being a bit out-of-touch with my own emotions when I was much younger. Maybe I wasn't socialized as well I should've been or something, I don't know. I was angry about something, that's for sure. And I think when I realized that I'd hurt other people—like tearing up a note that a girl wrote for me right in front of her because she liked me and I didn't like her, or turning down another girl a few years later in a pretty crass way—I must've turned all that inward. By the time I realized that I kind of just... fucking sucked as a person, it was too late to apologize to a lot of those people. I'd made up all kinds of lies about who I was because I didn't like my actual self or my life. I'm not quite sure where I got those ideas from. Maybe it was my parents fighting. Maybe it was the way that their frustration with each other would sometimes get taken out on me, not physically but verbally. I didn't have anybody to talk to about these things. I was too young to be able to understand it on my own yet. Instead, I figured that it'd all simply go away eventually. If I kept it bottled-up long enough, I'd forget. But forgetting isn't the same as going away. In middle-school I fell in love for the first time, if you can call it that. I call it that because I think it might be the only time I really fell for somebody and it had nothing to do with how they looked, but who they were. She had a radiant personality. I was too wrapped-up in myself to do anything about it. The chance came, and it went. But oh, in high-school I still tried. And failed. And embarrassed myself, and probably embarrassed her. I said some hateful things that I'll always regret, and that I apologized to her profusely about. Then eventually I did what I always do, and that's isolate myself. For the first time I really hated myself. While other people were having other kinds of firsts, I was learning what it felt like to not feel anything at all. I was having suicidal thoughts for the first time. Life isn't fair. It just is. It's taken me a long time to come to terms with the things I've done. It's tempting to say "it was just stupid stuff that happened when we were kids". I have adults say that kind of thing to me, and it doesn't make me feel any better. It doesn't seem to appreciate that, in reality, the stupid things we do or that happen to us when we are kids can significantly shape us. I don't think change is impossible, but the shame from the things I did to other people, and my completely toxic self-image, are why I struggle with looking people in the eye. I look down a lot; I don't mean sad, but literally. It took a lot of constant effort to change my posture to one that's more respectable, so at least I come across as shy and not as a total loser. No offense meant to anybody who feels like a total loser. I still feel like one every now and again. I merely put on appearances. A Silent Voice is a movie I needed when I was a freshman in high-school. In my senior year I think it's safe to say I'd hit rockbottom. At least, it was the worst I'd ever known, and it could only go up from there right? I was coming to terms with some things, and it didn't feel like I had to let my past define me. I went on isolating myself a lot, but I also played varsity soccer, a return to the sport that I'd quit a few years before that. That made me open up to people a little more; on occasion people would be talking about me, out of curiosity. I made a name for myself but even still, I kept being avoidant. Somehow my avoidant nature, my skipping classes, and some of my other antics had people thinking I was "cool" or that I was baked all the time. People actually thought me, the kid who can't take a puff of weed without having a panic attack, was the biggest class stoner. I got attention from girls who I believed would never give the real me the time of day. I got attention from the girls I'd wanted attention from, and yet there was something wrong: it only served to further ruin my outlook, and leave me with more misgivings about women and what they want. What they wanted is not only something that I wasn't, not only somebody that I couldn't be, but somebody I didn't want to be. I don't mean to make it sound like I got a lot of attention. Nobody asked me out in high-school. But girls made efforts to talk to me and inquired about who I was going to prom with and so on. They'd ask me to study and stuff like that. I didn't really get it, because I wasn't trying to attract them, and I didn't figure any of this out until years after I'd graduated. And it's possible that most of them just wanted to be friends. Whatever. It's safer solo. And by that time I'd embarrassed myself numerous times on social media when I'd go on a drunken bender, claiming that I identified as an anime girl on Instagram, loosely implying that I'd kill myself, etc. Sometime I wasn't even drunk, but not thinking-straight because emotionally and internally I was such a mess. The last I saw anybody from high-school except my closest friends, was at an unofficial reunion. I got shitfaced drunk, threw-up in the bathroom, and left without saying goodbye to anybody when it wasn't even midnight yet. I wished I'd had somebody to talk to all those years ago before I learned to live in sadness. I wished I'd known even just some of the things I know now; I wished I'd had a bit more perspective. I wished I wasn't a coward who ran from the bad things I did, instead of confronting them and asking for forgiveness and trying to be better. I wish somebody would have stopped me from emotionally and mentally lashing myself for more than half a decade. But, I've accepted that that's the way things went. They could've gone differently, but it can't be changed now. At least, maybe being able to put all this into words is a sign of making good progress. I think taking some gap years was the best decision I could've made before going to college, even though it was unintentional. In some ways turning that anger inward, beating myself down, tearing myself apart, it taught me some things, even though they may have been lessons I could've learned the easy way rather than the hard way. I think it made me nicer to people who feel the same things that I've felt so strongly, especially if they don't deserve them. I don't know if I deserved the things that happened to me, that I did to myself or not, but I can't change the past. The past still haunts me. Echoes of it, or sometimes face-to-face, but the past all the same. Since then I've tried to be a better person, and I've tried to not repeat the same mistakes that got me in such a terrible place to begin with. I've slowly figured out how to forgive myself, how to identify what was my fault and what wasn't, and that maybe I'm not quite as shitty of a person as I once believed. Emotional scars are like any other scar, in that they don't go away. There will always be reminders. Phantom pains. But, I do know that I don't have to let it define me. I'm not doomed to repeat the past, although habits can indeed be hard to change. And maybe I'll have to carry on with some of the damage, like how a person has to live to learn with a limp, or the loss of their hearing or something else. I've come to accept that struggling to meet the eyes of people is just that: a struggle that started somewhere back-when. It's something I can get better at, but it will take time.
I read at least a dozen books this past year and for 2019 I'm raising the bar to 25. How to Read Novels like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster We by Yevgeny Zamyatin 1984 by George Orwell Animal Farm by George Orwell Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley Island by Aldous Huxley Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess On the Beach by Nevil Shute A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami The Silence by Tim Lebbon Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl Unit 731 Testimony: Japan’s Wartime Human Experimentation Program by Hal Gold The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo The Gulag Archipelago Abridged: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (P.S.) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism by Ronald Rychlak The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray 25. The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City by Jennifer Toth I feel confident I can finish by the time fall comes around, at which point I will be starting school. I actually have a plan now which I've deliberated with purpose and a direction in mind. Some of these I've read before in high-school. I wanted to include the classics, but there are also some more contemporary picks in there, namely 1Q84, The Handmaid's Tale, and The Silence. The last 8 are non-fiction but are very relevant to the ideas I want to explore in a few of my novels. Will help me keep the story grounded. Please allow me to quote Seneca in Letters from a Stoic: “Be careful, however, that there is no element of discursiveness and desultoriness about this reading you refer to, this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind. To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life travelling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships. The same must needs be the case with people who never set about acquiring an intimate acquaintanceship with any one great writer, but skip from one to another, paying flying visits to them all. Food that is vomited up as soon as it is eaten is not assimilated into the body and does not do one any good; nothing hinders a cure so much as frequent changes of treatment; a wound will not heal over if it is being made the subject of experiments with different ointments; a plant which is frequently moved never grows strong. Nothing is so useful that it can be of any service in the mere passing. A multitude of books only gets in one’s way. So if you are unable to read all the books in your possession, you have enough when you have all the books you are able to read. And if you say, ‘But I feel like opening different books at different times’, my answer will be this: tasting one dish after another is the sign of a fussy stomach, and where the foods are dissimilar and diverse in range they lead to contamination of the system, not nutrition. So always read well-tried authors, and if at any moment you find yourself wanting a change from a particular author, go back to ones you have read before.” (Seneca 33-34) I still think that I could be criticized for not spending enough time with each author. In my defense I do have two more books by George Orwell on my shelf, and there are many more books by some of these authors in my Amazon cart that didn't make this list because the theme here, with little exception, is dystopian or totalitarian. That was the manner in which I organized this, rather than organizing by author. Gotta' read what you wanna' write. I want to say more on this matter but I'm coming down with some nasty illness. *sigh* Off to bed for me.
About all this cat is good for. Whining at 8 AM for no reason; has food, has shelter, has water, has a brand new cat tree, and almost every night I have it chase around a laser for an hour or get into little play-fights with it. Sits outside my roommate's door and howls nonstop. You get plenty of attention for the other 16 hours in the day. Let me sleep please. Of course, it does this because eventually she gives in and lets the cat into her room, because unlike dogs, cats think that they pay the bills and don't give a damn about the hand that feeds them. A dog is intelligent and understands that they need the owner for food. They also know "break thing, bad". Cats on the other hand operate in a world of delusions where they scooped their own food out of the bag, poured their own water, and can break things because they pay for them. Which, is exactly why I hate cats. They don't know their place and they don't listen. And the perfect way for me to exact my revenge is to never make the mistake of owning one. Don't even get me started on how destructive they are on the ecosystem. But truth be told, the stupid, loud, nonstop meowing so that the cat can go into a room and destroy the blinds and scratch up furniture isn't the most annoying part. It's knowing that if nobody paid attention to him, he'd shut up. And then we could all sleep. After all, there's no reason he NEEDS to be in there. He receives attention for two-thirds of the day, and his food and water and cat tree and everything else aren't even in there. He can get over it. He can learn the apparently difficult lesson of "I don't get to go where I want, whenever I want." Cats are like children. You can't teach them, inadvertently or otherwise, to seek negative attention. Being an annoying little shit who wants to go in and out of the same room 12 times an hour when they have plenty of food and toys and water and other places to go in the house-- that's negative attention. Realizing, "Hey, when I'm not obnoxious I get what I want!" That's what you need to instill in your pet. For the sake of everyone else around you. If I had it my way, knowing that the cat is not abused, is not neglected, is taken care of in terms of food and entertainment, and is not a nuisance except when there are people trying to sleep, I would let it sit there and howl like an idiot as I put my sound-proof headphones on and ignore it with the biggest smile. Just like a kid, the cat takes advantage of the weak parent in the household. Whenever I come into the kitchen it screws right off and into the living room because it knows every time it jumps up onto the kitchen table where we eat food, and onto the counters where we prepare it, I pick him up and put him in the dog's old cage until I'm done. When I'm finished I let him out. He doesn't like that though, so he just goes somewhere else in the house. Of course, behind my back when I leave he's all over the counters and the table. And the "weak parent" will only set him down on the floor, not put him in a cage for a little bit, so he just keeps climbing back up until she gives up. Dogs respect you and don't do shit even when you're not around (assuming you've trained them and take good care of them). Another reason why I'll only ever own a dog. They also listen, unlike a cat who's like a second-generation immigrant pretending to not know English. Oh well. If I left a review I'd rate 9/10: "Roommates are all awesome! But cat needs to be tranquilized." God I fucking hate cats.
I uninstalled all my dating apps and have no intentions of going back. All the profiles that have those "must be this tall to ride" and "must be xyz" are enough to make me want to ALT F4. Yeah, I'll admit, I'm IDEALLY looking for a 8/10, thick thighed, nerdy athletic gamer girl who wears nekomimi hats or fox tails or whatever. It's cool to have an ideal, but to literally shamelessly filter by that is something so special it simply blows my mind. If I wanted to filter based on my perfect imaginary girl, I'd never swipe right on ANYONE. To each their own though, I guess. Maybe it works well for the ladies who can afford to do a suspect line-up of every guy within a 100 mile radius and pick The One. You'll literally drive yourself mad trying to follow advice nowadays. There are as many theories of advice for dating as there are girls and guys and pied pipers. I've gone around in circles and tied my mind into knots following this advice, then that advice, as if I was metaphorically juggling knives and balancing on a unicycle blindfolded. Is it my profile? Is it my pictures? Is it my bio? Is it me? Is there something wrong with me versus these other guys? Why are they successful, and I am not? Anyway. The apps seemed to confirm what I already know about myself. I'm not that desirable, because I am average. Beyond a certain point, there's nothing I can do to change that without completely trying to pretend to be somebody I'm not, and what would be the fucking point in that? "Lower your standards." No thanks. My standards aren't that high to begin with to be honest. Everyone including myself has their "perfect match" or whatever, but I don't seriously filter by that. Not even close. I'm just an insin. Involuntary single. I've dated before and it was just as miserable and tedious of an experience and my two relationships both ended in disaster, one of which was my fault. Sex is great and all but its a surprise, not the main course. Yet, there's no point in being mad at some amorphous mass of women or Silicon Valley nerds or something. There's no point in being mad at a specific girl or guy who perpetuates or has fallen victim to this accidental societal mess. All these Dude Bros say go to the gym, focus on your studies, focus on your career, focus on family and friends and hobbies bro. That's all good dude. But what they need to stop fucking selling, is the last line: "And it'll come bro." Or, "It will happen when you least expect it bro." There is no guarantee. It very well might not. Ever. Regardless. So while I appreciate the gesture, stop selling false hope please. Just tell people to genuinely be productive, good Dude Bros, and to live the rest of their lives the best they can without selling some snake oil to them at the very end. And tell people the hard truth: It may OR MAY NOT happen. Thanks. Dating is Admiral McRaven's sugar cookie story. Guys are the soldiers, women are the drill sergeants. You can do everything that's demanded of you to the fucking T. Dance around like monkeys, play some games, pass shit tests, or be "genuine", or be a dick, or just be yourself, be nice, support feminism, or just lie and claim that you support feminism, or truly work on yourself, focus on your hobbies and interests, and at the end of the day the drill sergeant still yells at you to jump in that ice cold surf and then roll around on the sand. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. Because you can do everything right, you can work on yourself, you can try to better yourself, you can try to be a good person, you can make a lot of money, you can do all this Woo Woo shit, and there is no. guaran. tee. That's life. You aren't entitled to shit. And the more malicious among us might even actually take time out of their day to intentionally remind you of that. They're rare, but they walk among us. In the end, I'd rather stay single than live my life knowing some 30 year old settled for me out of anxiety about her hitting the wall, not being able to have children, and not getting exactly what she wanted. It would be no different than if I was still desperate. I want to be in a relationship when I choose them FOR them, and they choose me FOR me, rather than treating me as some kind of lesser product they had to settle for because they didn't have the one they wanted at the store, and the store was closing in 5 minutes. And that's primarily what dating apps do. Turn people into shelves and shelves of products at the store. And when society celebrates treating people like that, you'll likely be one of the thousand products that get passed up, not even looked at, collecting dust. Obviously I haven't completely moved on from dating if I'm taking the time to rant here. But, I have been spending way more time on other parts of my life like the Dude Bro at Delphi told me to. I think what got me salty this time was somebody saying "Don't worry bro, it will happen." I'd sooner listen to a Magic 8 Ball. Again, at the expense of repeating myself, stop selling false hope to people. Encourage them to make positive and healthy choices and changes, absolutely, but don't make a relationship or getting laid an imaginary result of those things. That's not how it works, and it pisses me off when people frame it that way to already struggling guys, setting them up for unnecessary disappointment. Nothing is promised. For in the wise words of Kaiki Deishuu: "Nothing is irreplaceable. There is nothing that can't be substituted. A woman [Senjougahara] I know... A woman I know well always treats her current romance as if it's her first. She always looks like she's never fallen in love with someone before. That's the right way to go. That's how it should be. There is no peerless person. There is nothing irreplaceable. Because humans, as humans, can redo something as much as they want." Or, in the wiser words of the modern poet-artist Miles Lenehan: Spoiler when she turn away she said theres something in my eye if i go home early u wont wonder why say it all all except i never tried still it runs dry still the time goes by look at my walls i was locked inside left here to die birds pick me dry okay ive lost my face just trust its me in 40 days ive left no trace now its cold out could u close that door thought we both out what u call me for im at home now in this strangers apartment how they pass out but i barely have started seen the cold shoulder but this one like the arctic im on her side but i feel like the target pluck at my strings shes the human guitar pick come in so whole and they leave broken hearted we hurt we heal and go again in hopes we feel something different in jest in pain in love in fights i want u here with me tonight
UPDATE: I believe the original put the faculty member in an unfair light. So I will start by saying that this person has taught me a lot in such a short span of time. What he said does not make him a bad person, and I still look forward to working with him and learning all that I can. He has a wealth of knowledge and experience, and I am thankful that he's willing to share that with me. It was in big part thanks to his help that the assignment ultimately turned out very well. "We always believe. Right?" The fact that a question pulled straight from the ideological purity test had actually come up in normal conversation so matter-of-factly was disconcerting. And from a university faculty member, no less. My response has also been bothering me: "Mhmm," I nodded. What I've come to understand is that the problem is worse than it's often made out to be. Simply put, the battle is over when the people do not see "always believe" as the loaded ideological statement which it is. Because to see it naked, recognizing it's an ideological statement, is to acknowledge that an opposing viewpoint exists. But I realized in that moment that "don't always believe" may very well have been inconceivable to the human being sitting across from me. To him, "we always believe her" has been disguised as a self-evident fact, indistinguishable from saying the Earth isn't flat, or the sun rises in the east. What's more, we're talking about potential future jury members. You really want a jury chock-full of "always believers"? I seem to recall how well that worked for blacks in the south less than half a century ago. (It didn't.) I did not challenge his casual statement because I was in his office on other business, regarding a feature story I was writing. The story was on an exceptional young man who has been in a wheelchair all his life. He'd just graduated, and was helping make the campus more accessible to people who have disabilities. Therefore, I wasn't expecting such subtle subliminal messaging to make an appearance. It wasn't until after I'd had the metaphorical urge to get some popcorn that I realized I had indeed seen a couple frames of a concessions ad displayed in the middle of the movie. The goal is to make "always believe" fully integrated. When this belief is challenged in its adult form, it agitates rather than instills doubt. Someone polite like myself will have a difficult time knowing how to react in a situation like this. Do you make a big deal out of it? Maybe, if you don't particularly care about the consequences. And we all know that there are times in your life when you have to live or die on a hill. I now see that the best response from me would've been to say nothing. Just hold polite eye contact. If he had pressed further, repeating the question, I would've had to parry. "We should listen to what they have to say, and help connect them to the appropriate resources, yes." Reframing, followed by an affirmation, can cause an intense amount of cognitive dissonance. Most probably won't know what even hit them at first. They'll likely be confused by the fact that you didn't exactly say what they said ("always believe"), and yet ended with an apparent confirmation. It will be unclear if you are disagreeing with them, or if you merely haven't finished the ideological pilgrimage yet. It wouldn't have been the time or place to begin an overt argument about how "always believe" is, indirectly, one of the reasons why The Crucible was written. Similes using Salem or McCarthy wouldn't be appropriate. I see it as my job to infiltrate. Stay away from the universities, they say? To Hell with that. It will be satisfying to come out the other side with ammunition and the guns to use it. Right now I'm inside the wooden horse with a shit-eating grin that I can't seem to wipe off. Too busy thinking of future book-sales for me to care. This shouldn't even need to be explained. I more or less always believe a close friend, or my parents, because they've earned my trust. They haven't lied to me. Or if they did, they've long atoned for it, and re-earned my trust. Purported Rape Victim is a stranger. I neither believe, nor disbelieve them. That's not my job. I let our criminal justice system, the best that the world has ever seen, investigate, interrogate, and decide in a trial. Believing has nothing to do with it. I mean seriously, how stupid can you get. There's nothing to believe in the first place. It either is, or it isn't. It's not a guessing game. You either have evidence, or you don't. That's how it works.