More Foolish than I'd Like

     I was an arrogant prick.  Well, I wasn't actually a prick, but I had a pretty high opinion of myself when I started this blog, if my previous posts are any indication.  It's been well over a year since my last post, and while my circumstances have not changed much, I'd like to think that I'm no longer the person I was then.
     I'm writing this, not because I have made some tremendous discovery that humanity must be made aware of.  Right now, I feel I want to share something, even if it's not worth sharing.  This will be more in the style of a diary entry than a blog post.
     I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to write here.  Writing is supposed to be a form of communication, but what do I want to communicate, and what don't I want to communicate?  Maybe I just want people to know that I want to communicate with them, without the burden of actually having anything to say.  But if I don't have anything to say, and I don't actually want to be around people, then why would I want to communicate with them?  For that matter, what is communication?  Can something be communicated when nothing is communicated?
     I haven't edited this, I haven't made it appropriate for public, and no one will want to read it if anyone even does.  I have a stream of consciousness, and I want other people to be aware, or to know that other people could be aware that my consciousness exists independent of the organization I provide it when I speak or write on or for the behalf of others.
     Underneath the organization, I have no control.  Things just come out of me, thoughts fly around in my head.  I can't see most of what's happening in or to my body, I can't understand most of what I see, and I can't be bothered with most of what I understand.  Normally, that narrow tiny little bit that I can see, understand, and be bothered with is what I'd like to think the whole world and all the people in it that bother with me see.
      But that's not true.  What they see and what I see may be totally different, even if we're both only looking at me, and we both may be right to see only what we see and not what the other sees.  If I don't see something, though, is it mine?  Does a trait belong to me if I'm not aware of it and don't want to be?  Is it alright to be a narrow tiny little bit?
      Maybe that's all I want, and am confused by all this complexity that doesn't seem to have anything to do with me, narrow tiny little bit that I am.  Is it even ok to be more than that bit, more than I think and know I am, more than I could possibly see or control or understand?  I don't know if I want to be more than I am, even if I am already.

And Two Become One

     Change is death.  Or at least that's what the majority of people believe.  In order to start a new diet, they have to kill of the old one.  To start exercising, laziness must die.  To quit a job, some violence (hopefully metaphorical) must occur.  In the most fundamental way people seem to feel the need to kill something, inside or out, in order to become stronger.
     I don't think this is the way of things, though, because those gremlins (someone else's coined term for inner monsters) never stay dead.  They always find  ways of manifesting themselves until the person is so tired of failing to change that they just give up.  For a while, because even the gremlin of change doesn't stay slaughtered long.
     But what if death and change are not one and the same?  An old diet may not need to die for a new one to live.  Instead, the old diet and the new one may be the same thing, the new inevitably growing from the old and able to come in no other way.  A difference, perhaps, more than a change.  Wonderful if true.
     The question then becomes;  why doesn't this happen?  It's practically the stuff of fairy-tales to say that a old crappy life can spontaneously become a new life resplendent with health and happiness.  But with all the killing going on, this is hardly surprising.  When you try to destroy the old you, you're hacking at the roots from which change and newness spring.  And it's a self-perpetuating cycle;  your effort to kill the you that is killing you is just more of the same.
     You don't need to stop killing so much as you need to stop believing in the power of death and violence to bring change.  Force begets force, but change comes through growth, not death.

The Meaning of being Meant for Greatness

     I have always thought of greatness as something great.  By that, I mean something that feels great, something that is awesome in the most literal sense of the word.  This might be flawed.
     "Meant for greatness" means that greatness is a forgone conclusion.  But if greatness is in my nature, then why should it be given any more credit than anything else I do?  I don't feel awe or wonder when I brush my teeth or eat a meal.  These are simple daily routines, things I do without thought and often without notice.  Perhaps the key to being great, as I am meant to be, is for greatness to become routine and below notice.  Greatness not as an effort towards something higher or an exaltation, but as a routine, an activity of great importance but little note.
     All my life, I've thought of greatness in terms of feelings.  When I act great or achieve something great, then I'm supposed to feel great.  But is that not the mark of the amateur, the novice, the less-than-great?  I don't think God, if he exists, would be in awe of His own greatness.  He would take it for granted as a given.  So if we are to be gods, then perhaps it is also necessary that we take no pride in or notice of our own greatness.  Perhaps the final secret of greatness is that it's not.

Brutal Honesty

          I have found the solution to one of my most socially crippling disabilities;  the inability to effectively hit on women.  I still have a lot to learn, but from now on it will be an actual learning experience rather than a desperate effort to compensate for a handicap.  The solution is surprisingly simple, depressingly obvious, and almost universally discouraged.  For you see, the answer is Brutal Honesty.
          My biggest difficulty was that I didn't want girls to know I was hitting on them.  I wanted them to react as if they knew I was attracted to them, but without actually having to openly communicate as much.  I would try to make conversation and act interested in a girl, but it would be stilted and inauthentic.  I wouldn't ask the questions that I really wanted the answers to, and even if I made my interest explicitly known I would not allow any implicit natural signals of attraction to slip through.
           I confirmed all of this in the course of one such conversation.  I noticed an attractive girl on the train, and I started talking to her.  Although it was obvious to me that there should be some connection between us, she barely responded at all.  In fact, she preferred working on her desperately uninteresting homework rather than further pursuing conversation with me.
          So I sat back for a few minutes and compared this situation with some previous experiences I had had.  I remembered one in particular, where I had been sitting next to a girl on an airplane who had been utterly resistant to conversation until I came out with the line "Do you get hit on a lot, or is that just a really interesting magazine?"  Instantly, her manner toward me changed.  Adapting that line to my current situation, I asked the current girl "What are you looking for when a guy hits on you?"
           Once again, instant response.  She didn't know what she was looking for, but in her response she let me know;  she was looking for a man with the courage and self-assurance to be attracted to her.  Not just attracted, but obviously attracted, in front of God and everybody.  After a little more conversation, I asked her for her number, to which she gave the typical response of girls that I hit on;  she had a boyfriend.
           However, she did not say no.  So I asked again, and again.  She tried to misdirect me or ignore me, but I would not be misdirected or ignored.  I knew I was in control because I knew that she wanted to give me her number.  She got more and more flustered, moving her head in quick jerks and looking down at her homework and generally avoiding eye contact.  Even more telling, she began involuntarily smiling and biting/sucking on her bottom lip, which is probably the most adorable thing a cute girl can do in public.  Eventually, after a succession of noncommittal answers, she made a quip about my persistence and gave me her number.
          There is a reason I call it Brutal Honesty and not just Honesty.  In order to succeed, I had to respond to her as a person, not a persona.  For most people, this is very painful.  She didn't want to know that she wanted to give me her number, and even worse, she didn't want any of the other people on the train to know.  She just wanted to safely and blindly be faithful to her boyfriend, and if that meant hiding from her desires then desire be damned.  My honesty was both painful and euphoric to her.  It is wonderful knowing what you want and being encouraged to take it, but it's also disconcerting when there are so many other voices saying that it is wrong.
           Brutal Honesty is not be limited to flirting, either.  Soon after this incident, I had a job interview that I wanted very much to go well.  While sitting in the waiting room, I wondered what I could say or do to convince the interviewer that I was the best candidate for the job.  Then it occurred to me that if honesty could get me a number, perhaps it could also get me a job.  I committed myself to making it obvious that I wanted this job and knew I deserved it.
          As far as I can tell, the interview went spectacularly well aside from some awkward small-talk.  The main interviewer seemed to respond fairly well, but I really shined when she introduced me to my potential future co-workers (whom I believe will have a big hand in picking candidates).  They laughed and joked and basically acted as if I had already been hired.  I could hardly imagine things having gone better, even though this was only my third real interview ever.
          So if honesty works so well, why doesn't everybody do it?  Well, it's frightening to be Brutally Honest at first, because most of us have learned to treat real honesty as if it were doing actual violence to a person.  The fact that the words Brutal and Honesty can even be associated together is proof of that.  It is an almost impossible barrier to overcome, because nobody wants to be honest if it comes at the price of hurting someone else.  But the real brutality is living life behind a facade to protect the world from your own brilliant power and potential.  Don't worry, the world will survive.  It might even give you its number.

What if we're gods?

          I used to have a problem with stress eating.  My reaction to being stressed or bored was to eat until I felt sick.  I no longer have this problem.

          The problem is that I didn't do anything to fix it.  I moved into a new apartment last week, and bought a bunch of groceries.  I bought a lot of healthy food, which is something I would have done in the past since I don't like wasting money on things that aren't good for me.  I only buy unhealthy food in [lots of] small doses.  My expectation was that in two or three days I would get stressed out and go buy a pizza or something unhealthy.  Then I would give up on eating healthy altogether and just live off of pizza.  This is how it always played out in the past.  But not this time.

           I sit here now, very hungry and with nothing to stop me from at least getting a Subway sandwich.  Except I don't care to.  It's not as if I am trying to avoid eating fast food or anything unhealthy.  I simply have no desire to.  When I feel like it I'll get up and eat a grapefruit, or maybe some boiled eggs and a pear.  The only reason that I'm even aware that I was ever a dysfunctional eater is that I remember how I used to react in situations like this.

          There wasn't a solid cut-off point between the way I used to eat and now.  It wasn't an "aha" moment.  I didn't even know that I'd stopped being screwed up until I noticed that I wasn't going to get twelve inches of pepperoni and cheese foam.  I can't be excited or grateful, because I didn't feel anything change.  I may as well have always been like this, for how different I feel.

          That makes me wonder;  what if that's the secret to life?  What if one day I wake up and find that I have become everything I ever dreamt of becoming, except I don't notice until I actually go out and do it?  No incident or indication, just a new me that is capable of anything.  No exciting changes, no trumpets, no apotheosis, nothing at all.  I just walk out my door and forge a lightning bolt, and wonder why I remember ever being unable to do so.  Are we allowed to become gods without the ability to appreciate it?  Because I think the only way to become a god is to always have been one.

What was, is. What is, will be.

          Are you tired?  I'm tired.  Do you feel sick?  I have a headache.  Are you secure?  I am tens of thousands of dollars in debt, have a part-time job that I haven't even started yet that could end at any time, and resume that could get me a job at Starbucks but doesn't seem to interest anyone else.  Are you inevitable?  I am.

          I look around my room, a wasteland of half-unpacked junk that I've developed an emotional attachment to, and what I feel is that this is inevitable for me to become what I must become.  There is nothing perfect about me.  I'm a huge wad of clay, all potential and no actual.  I'm tired, in pain, disorganized, unmotivated, and basically without any redeeming characteristics beyond what I one day could be.  But what I will be is a function of what I am and what I was.

          There is no difference between me a year ago and me a year from now.  This mess around me, figuratively and literally, is the means by which I will become the man I am to be.  It's not something to be avoided or overcome.  It's a springboard into the future, where I will be far more than I could imagine right now.  I'm not afraid of my mess, because I know that it will take care of me.  It is my future, manifested here in the present where I can see it with my own eyes.  It will easily and naturally take me to the place where I belong, and the less I fight it the sooner I will get there.

          Normally, a mess is something to clean up, a nasty thing to be avoided at all costs and gotten rid of as soon as possible.  That's just destructive positivity talking, though.  In our society (or my society, at least), we are taught that our lives are supposed to be full of bright sunshine and clean floors.  Darkness and uncertainty are things to be avoided.  This is wrong, because darkness and uncertainty are as necessary to our development as sunshine.  Not only that, but we can't seem to get rid of them no matter how hard we try to look at shadows as if they were daylight.  I don't believe that positivity is necessarily a positive thing, nor do I believe that negativity is necessarily negative.  If my world is messy, I say let it be messy.  It will clean itself up if I let it.  Our lives are not guided by the thermodynamic principle of entropy;  a body, left to its own devices, often repairs itself.  If we stop picking at our wounds in an effort to get them to heal, maybe our lives can repair themselves too.

          As bad as my messy life is, I'm sure you feel like yours is worse, if only because you don't feel mine at all.  That's ok.  See, you're inevitable too.  You don't need to fight to go anywhere or to get out of anything.  You're already there.  Your mess is proof of that.  You may be going places, but those places have always been your own.  Unhappiness, uncertainty, and pain are not to be feared.  They are the harbingers of your future and they are here to help you.  Question is, are you ready to accept that, or do you need more help?

Hurry up and wait.

          Once upon a time, in my sophomore year of college, a girl liked me.  We'll call her Jill.  Jill was beautiful, smart, and fun.  I was overweight, smart, and awkward.  Long story short, I completely blew my chance.  Unfortunately for me, I did not blow my chance so hard as to preclude the possibility of having another one.  For months I hung on to the chance that I would be given another opportunity, long after all hope was lost.

          As bad as my initial failure was, the subsequent Purgatory was much worse.  Even knowing that there was absolutely nothing I could do to get Jill to go out with me, even knowing that it was direly necessary for my own wellbeing that I let go, I couldn't.  Despite being unable to do anything useful in the present, I could not give up the chance that the future might bring some new hope.

          Worse, I could do nothing that would damage this chance.  I had to put a stranglehold on my life, so that I wouldn't take any opportunities that might cause me to become unavailable to Jill.  I was miserable.

          Does this sound familiar?  Are you putting your life on hold for an opportunity that you know you can do nothing to bring about?  If so, then this is my advise to you;  stop it.  I know you're frightened.  I don't you don't want to risk throwing away all possibility of what you desire coming to pass.  But that possibility is a mirage.  It looks like life-sustaining water now, but once you get there it will just be more dry sand.

          Often, this type of mirage comes about because you failed the first time around and are waiting for a second go.  However, in the meantime you have done nothing to change or improve your methods.  Your intent is to simply do what you did before, but with more intensity.  This will not work.  The methods that failed before, will fail again.  What you really need to do is let go of this futile hope and allow yourself to grow.  Maybe then if the chance you were hoping for comes around again, you'll be ready.  But if you put all growth on hold so that you can remain the same person that got the opportunity before, failure is all but guaranteed.

          Eventually, I did let go of my hopes for Jill and myself.  This allowed me the opportunity to correct many of the things in myself that had caused me to fail so profoundly in the first place.  In a very real way, it changed my life.  I never did get another chance with her, but I don't regret it.  I let go, and in doing so I gained very much more than I lost.

          If there's nothing you can do, don't hold yourself back with the hopes that someday that may change.  Move on.  Even if the chance never roles around again, you won't regret what you lost.  You'll only regret what you never allowed yourself the opportunity to have.