Day 1
and already i have lost the appeal of this. and therein lies part of who i am, part of what i believe. i guess i should at least try and just throw something out there, to see if i agree with it or not. i should at least have a fairly solid self-realized self in any sense. but i don’t. after having so much of me change and my ideas change, i feel like i have nothing to commit to, because it’s going to change anyways. i will be a constant victim of hypocrisy if i commit to something, because i’m sure there’s more than one situation where i’d be doing the opposite. the other side of the coin isn’t that much of a stretch for me. i just think of how i would react in that situation, and since i seem almost capable of anything, it’s not that hard to envision.

so then, do i believe in myself? to what extent? because i don’t always feel i’m doing the right thing. well, i guess i do. i do what i feel is most right in any given situation. then more information comes into the equation. suddenly i’m not so right anymore. or maybe i’m more right, depending on the info. it maddens me though, becuase i know i would have probably decided differently if i had been thinking with the extra information.

i guess that would leave me believing in information i have gathered throughout my life, but i’m a trained scientist (and a skeptic at heart anyways) and i know that there aren’t any established facts, just that some patterns are more defined and predictable than others. i have to choose information though, true or false because i have to make descisions. i can’t be bothered all the time to know if they are 100% right. i hate 100%. it entails that it contains everything, that there’s no wiggle room for anything else, since it is complete, perfect. and that is shennanigens in my skeptical book. if this perfection is obtained, then there’s nothing else. you got your 100%, what the hell else do you want?

it’s at the root of my math hating. if you follow the rules just right, you will get a said answer. there’s a beauty in that i appreciate, but i suck at it. there’s too many options, too many rules to try and use, and if i’m off by a few numbers, so what? exactness is not in my nature, that’s one thing. numbers, figures, amounts, are barley retained, and i don’t really care. i don’t know how much bob dole gets paid a speech. i don’t know how much coastline alaska contributes to the US’s total. i know all sorts of inanities, but very few of them are numerical.

why do i hate this exactness? because i’m not good at it, therefore i shouldn’t force myself to deal with it? it’s in my self-defined essence to not like these things, so that’s that? is it because all i can tell about life is expressed in greys and being exact seems rediculous? i think that’s what i settled on over the years, but i think there are probably a million reasons for it. i get to a point where something bugs me enough for a period of time and then i come to terms with it. i come to terms with myself, for who i am. i have to on a daily basis and it gets tiring. but now that i have accepted so much, i feel the ennui setting in, where the crank up robot goes and does things that are so familiar, he could be blindfolded. poor baby thinks he can have it all without struggle, that without the strife, there isn’t anything worth obtaining.

is it possible to live a life without the strife without being crushingly bored? i like to say that everything is a balance, but why does it have to be like that? why do i even believe that? balance is something that is found and discovered, but then you find it and then what? you live you life according to this balance? you use it as leverage to balance out something else? balance bot, here to bring balance to your life. don’t worry everything will be equal.

well that’s no fun. if everything in life was balanced, nothing would happen. it takes an idiot to build a scandal, and a pack of fools to carry it out to fruition. i am drawn to these extremes. celebrity gossip is way more fun than politics. watching reality tv crowded with drama queens sure beats the hell out of a show that is packed with losers like me. why do i call myself a loser? because i’m boring and non-confrontational? because carrying a conversation is sometimes more insurmountable than running a marathon? do i really want to emulate all those other winners and become the person i’ve always wanted to be, cast in the image that i have built on the shoulders of all the winners and losers that came before? what other standards do i have to hold against myself? i feel i am happy with myself, but it feels like delusion at times. not because my life is terrible, but because i have these standards that have almost been dictated to me by others. everyone’s got a stake in that, and the numbers stack up on one of the many sides of the issues, and i’ll choose one. it makes me feel less icky to vote against child labor, but makes me feel warm and fuzzy to vote for clean energy. so the hell what? is this what i have to base me, as a person, off of? or only in the social arena?

where else do we have to go but the social arena though? it’s where everything happens. people exchange ideas. people do stuff with them. shit. the exchange of ideas, without actually knowing anything about what makes them believe that. i accept all my info from people who have no idea who i am, and i don’t know if they have any siblings, or if their parents are still alive. the information i recieve from peoiple i know versus people i do not. i can’t know everyone, but people you know are treated different than strangers.

the idea that i come to look at these sources as facets of my life, parts of me. they are what dictate my reality to me, because i choose to accept it. i can’t do all the fact finding and i allow as a distribution of labor, someone else to do it for me. and i take it at face value, then go off and integrate it into something else. something that i believe is a part of me, and will help validate it to others. so that they may more readily understand where i’m coming from. but this is towards the people i know, not the talking heads. all these people i like get the same information though, and they don’t always agree with me. i suppose this only pertains to the social arena though.

but if it’s no big deal, i could be zen with myself right now and never have to worry because i can always put on a mask for the ball. i think i do anyways. i act different around different people. they are sides of me that i allow others to see, what they will most accept without questioning anything. it’s not that i am denying anyone who i really am, it’s just that the filter is changed.

all these filters inside my head, pull one out, put another in, and the image will change just enough to know that it is different, but really it’s still the same. i have to get at that picture. i can keep stripping away layer after layer and never come to a core, that thing i call me because there can’t be a core, can there? if it was core to me as a human, wouldn’t it be core to everyone else? at what layer does the core turn from something that is impossible to live without to something that changes the permutation enough to make a different person with the same building blocks?

there’s more questions than answers. check.