Incite Full

I don’t know what makes me happy.

And it’s that which makes me wonder about the next 70 years of my life.

A friend of mine said yesterday that he felt bad for me. That everyone was expecting different things from me, and I couldn’t make all of them happy. Hell I couldn’t make any of them happy; I couldn’t even make myself happy. That was the worst part of it all, coming to (yet another) realization that I’m living for other people.

You know when you’re good friends with a person, and they have another real close friend that you don’t know so well? You know them well enough to make pleasantries, but that’s about it.  Now i’m sure tehre has been a time where you’ve had to spend a long amount of time with that other friend- about 20 minutes before your mutual friend arrives, or a short car ride, something, anything. It’s awkward as hell, isn’t it? You’re not sure what to say, and you realize you don’t really know this person at all.

That’s how i feel about myself right now. I feel like i’m waiting for the guy i know to arrive, and I’m having a real hard time spending time with this other guy in front of me. “the one i see in the mirror,” only I don’t spout out the entire four and a half minute speech Edward Norton does about hating everyone in ney york, I only keep thinking the last few words- Fuck you Mike Gangl.

And it’s not in an angry way, it’s in the “what the hell are you doing?” kind of way. I feel like Tyler Durden, what do you do after school- you get a job, what do you do after you get a job? You get married, etc etc. I’ve got the plans there, the scaffolding, but the concrete and the steel beams are fucking non-existent. Patrick Bateman said it best, “I simply am not there.”

Truth hurts.

To set a lighter note, I’ve decided that there is a special place in hell for people who leave their laundry in the washer or dryer for more than 5 hours. That’s fucked up.

I have a tendency to get down about things, but never show it. It just makes my head a little darker place than you’d imagine. Not like, pee wee’s fun house on acid, but it’s not the polyphonic spree. Anyways, I’m walking around old town today and there is a “fine art fair,” which is kind of funny; they’d call it fine art as opposed to just art. So I’m walking around and I don’t really care for any of it. It looks like the internet basically ate up a bunch of shit and vomited out a ton of memes and twits. I began to criticize silently, thinking what were these people doing?

Then it clicked. They are not doing this for me. They are not trying to make my eyes happy, or speak to my soul. They are not even speaking to anyone. They are simply speaking,  speaking through brushes, pens, pottery, jewelry, photographs… everything.  And damn do I admire that. It’s not that I hate my job or think it sucks, but there are a million other things I’d love to do. “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”  These guys do that every day. I’m sure they  fight about things with people, they have days where the ask themselves “is it worth it?” and always say “Fuck yeah, it is.”

I wish I knew myself well enough to know what makes me really happy, happy enough to give it all up and do it. Happy enough to know what I want, when and how to get it, everything. I’m not a royal mess or anything, but it’s hard. Fuck if the Taj Mahal took 12 years to make, it takes a hell of a lot longer to build a man.

Well, that was a long stint.

I’m reminded recently of how fast life can change. Not in a life or death kind of way, but how things, slowly simmer, waiting for the catalyst of time and opportunity to come to a boil, overflowing the pot with water and steam. These aren’t often things that happen, and they can be good or bad, but when you remember them, they are bad- when you tell people about them, they are crimes against your humanity- your life force.

Before I go on with metaphor and simile with which no one knows anything about, i’ll just stop.

I’m not even sure anyone reads this thing- which is completely fine with me. I’m writing as a cathartic practice, to fgure out what the truth is. Tom Lehrer (sp?) was on the Colbert report, discussing why he writes fiction in his off time. What he said was so poignant and to the point, it’s the only place where he can tell the truth. This is Tom Lehrer, host of the News hour on PBS. Think about that one for a minute.

Regardless, i’m going to be better about doing this. It’s a promise to me and to you, the royal You. I need to do this for my sanity, not writing was like a growth, some malignant thing in the back of my mind, a disease spreading to the rest of my body. It should be more like a knife- honed to an edge, to cut through the lies and bullshit and everything else i’ve created in my not-so-long life.

Over and out

Upon asking a teacher friend of mine why she voted for McCain after voting for Obama in the primary, and even volunteering on behalf of his campaign, she said the following: I didn’t know he was a socialist. 

I simultaneously vomited, became enraged, and laughed. 

Now, you’re free to vote for whomever you’d like. If she had valid reasons (not to me, but valid in at least some universe) I’d have been content to let her vote away. I could even let this go seeing as how her vote didn’t affect the outcome, but that wouldn’t be very inciteful, would it?

She latched onto a familiar phrase, the “redistribute the wealth” line that was made the anti-obama slogan nearing the end. After attempting to convince my mother otherwise of the academic sense in which Obama used those words, I just gave up and asked her what else. Color me surprised when I discovered Katie Couric ran Obama’s campaign.

What I found most disappointing is the effectiveness of negative ads on voters. I could wrap myself up in warm, billowy confidence that it only worked on uneducated voters. But it worked on her, and she is definitely educated. Can I convince myself that maybe she simply didn’t invest the time in finding out the facts? Even if that were true, wouldn’t common sense dictate that, if indeed he was a socialist, we would have heard about this long before he as debating for the presidency of the United States of America?

Other’s I know voted McCain because they earn over 250,000 a year. I guess I cannot argue with that. If enough people did that, and voted similarly, everything would work out.

Aside from that, I had some interesting conversations with friends about abortion recently. I won’t get into the specifics of the argument both for and against, but i’ll simply state an opinion I hold on our government and rights:

The constitution and legal framework that exists in America is exactly that, a framework for our society. I believe it to be the best available, and one that I believe in with all of my heart. With that being said, there are certainly instances and cases in which laws should be created- laws to safeguard things that could not possibly be known at the time our country united.

However, legislating decisions and choice for people is a band-aid for any problem for which the law is being made. In the case of abortion, teens will still become pregnant and abortions will happen. I will agree, fundamentally, that making it illegal will make it less likely to be done, but I will not agree that unprepared (meaning could result in unwanted pregnancy) sex will be reduced. 

I will not debate when the moment of life happens. It’s too difficult a topic for me to think about and understand fully. There is no concrete answer to it. 

What I do know, and feel most strongly about, is the fact we can educate people to know and understand the weight of the decisions they are making. The consequences, emotions, and turmoil that they might go through if two people choose to have sex when they are unprepared to raise a child. And after all of that, the pain, the emotions, the sleepless nights- if you still think that the choice of abortion is for you, then by what right does the government have to say no to that? Can you legislate against rational, informed, intelligent decisions?

Removing decisions from people is rarely the right thing to do. We are on the brink of marriage bans for same sex couples in California, and I have yet to hear a convincing argument for it. Hell, I have yet to hear an argument that makes any semblance of sense. And while i can respect and understand the differences between same sex marriage and abortion, they are both eliminating rights based on personal views and beliefs. We can teach views, we can teach understanding, and we can teach how to weigh consequences in our decisions- what we can’t do is unwrite laws, and what some other’s cannot do is get married. 

And that, to me, is one of the saddest things to see happen.

Sometimes I’ll be writing, just a free write or something simlar, and i’ll stumble upon some feeling on which I want to hold. To grip with a vice, exhaust, and then further refine my own process to extricate every last little ounce of raw, unmined emotion from. Strip mining my soul can lead to some interesting things, however, and one of which I’d like to avoid- failure.

Not in the typical sense, however, of that doing poorly on a test, or letting down my friends- those are all terrible failures in their own right- but I’m talking about something which I find increasingly common amongst my friends: the idea of a 5 year plan for our lives.

While some of them differ, they generally consist of a career goal and a personal goal. Most often this personal goal is marriage, although not always. Mine, when I was young and more naive, was to be married at 26, and start a family soon afterwards. Not that same year, but soon after- maybe by the time I was 30. Professionally I wanted to be done with schooling by the age of 30 in order to pursue my career full time.

It doesn’t look like any of these two things are going to happen in the allotted time frames, unfortunately. While talking to a friend who recently got engaged, I realized that I was still far away from such a feat. It’s not that I’m not crazy about my girlfriend- I am, it’s the fact that you need to know that you can grow with a person, that you are excited to see the evolution of a relationship, and to know it’s a very Zen like experience, it’s not about the end of the relationship- it’s about the process of communication and sharing of emotion.

I know I’m not ready for that giant step simply by the mechanical way in which I describe it. I want to understand it, feel it, pursue it. I don’t know how to learn it. There are no books or manuals. There are no romantic comedies that point you in the right direction except for the general, “follow your heart” line that gets tossed out there so much.

Wow there is a lot I still have to learn.

About my education, I have a Masters, but I want another one. As much as I like the tech side of things, I feel my people skills and emotional intelligence are fine tuned enough to do much, much more with my life. I don’t take my other skills for granted, they serve me well for now, but I want to deal more with the people side of things, the big picture, and that will require more education. Getting another master’s within the next 5 years might be tough, but I’m willing to try.

Where failure comes in, sadly, is that I am not sure what the next step for either of them is. It’s taken me a while, even though I knew in the back of my head that it was true, to acknowledge these things. It’s a lot easier to live in denial of your true feelings, to shut off emotionally for one reason or another, or to try and convince yourself that it’s not what you want. I’ve definitely been there before, and that’s something that I’m already paying for and trying to deal with. I’d rather know my shortcomings, wants, desires, and fears and move forward.