Trying to Lift My Vision

Another late night: almost 1:00 am now. The issue with today was that I slept for a couple of hours in the middle of the evening (6–9pm), which made trying to go to sleep at a decent hour pretty much impossible. I hardly got any sleep the night before, and my head has throbbed with a sort of pressure headache. I've interacted with everyone politely, even amiably, just as they may have avoided me due to a subtle vibe of alienation that radiates away from me like a silent radio signal.

I continue to wrangle with my negative emotions as much as always, but I think I have been dealing with them a bit better today. Even though today was a short workday, I got a few projects done and feel pretty good about catching up on them by the end of the week. I still have two projects for other people that I must complete very soon, but they can wait for the time being. The summer is my busiest as far as work goes. I grapple with motivation when it comes to my individual designs. That will be my next career/personal challenge.

And, speaking more broadly about how I feel about life and my place in it, I think I can see a certain kind of emotional acceptance about my current situation that makes the inevitability of the future more easy to grapple with. Poverty and struggle may be my lot in life, despite my ambitions for more outward successes. These last few years have really clarified for me how focusing on my inward successes, and trying to develop into a better person, is my true and most important goal anyway. The outer successes would have been nice, but I always knew that it wasn't the most important. And as the prospect for that outward acclaim or achievement falls away, the inward self-directed enrichment process gains some momentum. Of course, I truly hope that no one thinks that I am saying I am perfect, or even that I am a slightly better person than most.

In fact, most of the intense depression that I felt these last few months has arisen out of a painful recognition that, even a year ago, I was a better person than I am now. Through a combination of actions and inactions, I have fallen backwards into a trap that holds me tight within the frozen grip of regret and churned up frustrations. All my good intentions were transmuted into foolishness, and even then, I ignored most of what I should have been doing in the search of another distraction. I have learned the hard lessons of dissipations and lethargy. I still try to come to terms with compromises that have cost me more than I would have wanted them to.

Of course, there are all sorts of signs and signifiers during the day that leads me to one of these thoughts or another, and I realize that it all sounds so very vague. So, I will leave it for now to discuss my day.

Like I said earlier, I had not gotten much sleep. After informing my "boss" that I was tired and that I may not be in to work right away, I ate a small bowl of cereal and went back to bed. I probably dreamed about something, which was frightening in its limitations, but I do not remember it. I do not have nightmares in the traditional sense. My nightmares arise out of the limitations that the dreams show me, out of the possibility of a life circumscribed by poverty, chance, and fate bought through earlier actions. I wish I could tell you how I am haunted by some of them, but most people wouldn't understand the implications. And, honestly, I am glad that I dreaming again. My dreams had left me for a few weeks, and it scared me in the way that adults can be scared without showing it on their surfaces.

I approached work in a workman way and probably did more than I thought I would get done. I feel a little wistful frustration about this job because there are always deadlines that are too close to do any real research or exploration of the themes, symbols, or possibilities. But, I don't dare feel too much frustration because I recognize that I have much more flexibility in this job than I would have anywhere else. I am lucky to have this job, and I know it. In the back of my mind, I am deeply worried that I may lose it in the future, but I do not think that it will be something that I have caused. I feel relatively assured that I did the best I could to prevent that outcome.

After work, I went home and had dinner with my parents before drifting off in that nap. When I awoke at 8:30ish, I talked with them briefly, and discovered that my sister had asked my Dad to purchase her something from the store that she claimed she needed. Perhaps she does, but her needs are always immediate and transcendent above everyone else's. It would be easy to tell another person no, but my sister cannot help who she is or how she thinks. And so the order of the day is compassion.

I drove into town and went to Walmart. I called my parents on my cell phone, and asked them what kind of thing it was that my sister needed. My dad told me, but I couldn't find it there. Therefore, I went to Safeway, and after a lot of searching found, it.

I went back to work and made another gameplay movie for youtube, but I think my heart is going out of it. It takes a lot of work, and the initial returns that I imagined I might be able to achieve appear as elusive as ever. I could do more research over the issue, but that would require even more work.

I've been thinking that I need to return to all of the other interests that I have fostered throughout my life, and continue to develop those. I could go back to writing and drawing. I could read more, take time for myself and photography. Worry less, and allow other people to take personal responsibility for their own lives. I may be an irrelevant person in the grand scheme of history, and I may have harmed inner and outer self and damaged both, but I still have time left. Perhaps, through perseverance and more effort, there is a chance to claim some small amount of personal dignity so I can arise as a person who was given wisdom through some occasional and self-inflicted hard knocks. I wish to hear the voice of wisdom speaking to me, and guiding me through a life of difficulty. To feel the rays of the sun of wisdom and assurance shining on me once more. To be washed in the seas of forgiveness for those actions and inactions. And, to ascend to a wholesome place of truth, insulated from the cold winds of sorrows and pains that are always reflected in the downward glances towards an earthly life. I want to lift my vision towards a broad and warm horizon of better internal possibilities and confirmations that I can personally achieve.

Uncertain about Writing

I am really uncertain about whether or not I should write a book. It seems like it is something that I have put off for a very long time. There has always been an internal prompting for me to write one. However, as I get older, I think to myself that almost everything I thought was important really is not. Every pop-culture reference, joke, effort to improve myself, vocation, avocation, etc. was simply another distraction away from something else I should have been focused on. Maybe that other thing was to express myself and my views with a novel, especially since my writing is one of the few things that I have gotten the most positive feedback from other people about, but then again, maybe not. All I know for sure is that the "one thing" that I should be working for always seems to escape me. I know it is there, but I don't know what it is.

I'll be really honest at the moment. I am solidly middle-aged. I have no money for retirement, a part-time job that I can barely do regularly and probably should have been fired from a year ago, and tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. I never managed to find a companion to share my life with despite my efforts to try, and I have no tangible assets like a house of my own, savings, or a decent car. It is hard not to feel like the world's biggest failure.

I wish there was another word for jealousy. Jealousy implies that there is a passion inside the person afflicted with it, a drive that keeps the fires of emotion burning hot. The jealousy I feel is very cold. It is a sad recognition that many things that I dared to hope for are somehow impossible, so daring to hope feels dangerous. If I had allowed myself to feel the hot jealousy for the average achievements of a common person (ie. a steady and successful job, a loving family, a pleasant relationship with a wife, etc.) then I would be consumed by pain. Instead, whenever I feel the first twinge of wanting more than I can apparently achieve, I avert my inner and outer gaze as quickly as possible. Too much focus on those things will be dangerous. I can't do it.

I keep hearing from everyone around me that the economy really is difficult right now, but I have to say that, when looked at globally, it hardly seems like our economic problems will be solved soon enough for me to benefit from. I need about a hundred miracles for these troubles to go away, but I doubt they'll be arriving any time soon. I don't want to sound so negative, but I have to say that the whole world is in a real fix, and that, while I didn't personally cause the troubles it has, they will affect me more than I would like and more than I can change. Writing, a broad and non-specific avenue towards a fantasy of redemption, whispers into my heart and suggests that it is the only hope I would ever have at climbing out of my current mess. It has been done before, but I also know I'd have to be very lucky and have a better plan than I do now.

Grinding my way towards Discipline

I still end up hurting myself in these weird internal ways that I feel that I should be better able to control. It's those small moments of choice, where the gust of a impulse or whim blows quickly upon you, and then, ignoring a reflective thought, you allow yourself to be pushed in a direction you would rather not go. It's the later recognition of these small moments that grind on me more than I want.

Is it in my personality to foster discipline, to choose the more difficult paths, to accept the many failures and move forward towards hope? I believe, when I am truly honest with myself, the answer is yes. But, I am equally bewildered when I try to describe how I might go about acquiring that discipline—the regulatory control over my choices brought about by detachment—and applying it to my life.

My inner voice says, "I know I can do this. It is within my ability. I must persevere. I must continue despite the emotional consequence of actions or inactions." I know that voice is right. The only path is the path forward. Still, the difficulty that this internal project holds disturbs me in a powerful way.

Functionality

It seems like everytime that I come to this journal lately, it is to write about how difficult life seems. I think I will just accept that. I know that it doesn't endear one to other people to continually discuss all of the problems that life has in store for us as we wend our way awkwardly through it, but this journal is more for me than it is for anything else. It is a place to grasp a few thoughts I have at these writing moments, and fix them in place. The hope is that, by capturing thoughts, they can be examined a bit more objectively in the future, but I would have to develop more of the habit of reading what I have written. Aside from a glance at the most recent previous posts, it is rare that I go back over much of what I have said. I also know that a lot of what I have already said, I have said before.

It is true that my previous post discussed an event that will have (and probably has had) a profound impact on my future and my future plans. Yes. It was one of the worst moments of my recent life, and definitely the worst all year. I cannot help but end up using at as a jigsaw puzzle piece in a metaphorical narrative about my life. Unfortunately, as that awful piece slides into place, the larger story the picture reveals isn't pretty. Perhaps I have the piece in the wrong place, or perhaps it is not a piece to the puzzle I am trying to solve. However, if I place it where it seems to fit, then the story told by all of these little events is ultimately one of failure. Of course, it is difficult to know how much of this failure is under my control. Yes, I have made some bad choices, but then again, perhaps previous experience has made some of these bad choices more inevitable than they would have otherwise.

I suppose I could look at it like this: Through no fault of your own, someone steals the keys to your car. With you keys missing, it is more likely that you will be late for work. Once late for work, you miss an appointment to discuss a new client account, and due to an argument the client had with his children that morning, he is in a bad mood and decides to cancel the order. It would be very human for the person who had their keys stolen to feel frustrated, to feel as if there was something in their control that they missed, to feel like the bad results of the day were their fault. And yet, it wasn't. It was the bad intention of the thief and the bad mood of the client that led to those places.

So, it follows that, due to no fault of one's own, a poor economy could lead to poor job prospects, poor jobs prospects means a financial tightening of the belt, which leads to poor diet, which leads to poor health and frustration, which leads to even further difficulty. It is easy for the people suffering from economic forces beyond their control to feel like a failure for not having done more, for not being super-human enough to transcend those problems. And yet, looked at objectively, they, as one individual, have little effect on a economy that is created by thousands, or millions.

This is where I suspect I am at. I have a narrative about my life that seems to fit. I have missed chances and opportunities everywhere I turn. I see some of the challenges I have had to deal with, especially ones that I know others do not have. But, eventually, I am uncertain. Maybe some of that bad feeling comes from a real tangible force that I have little or no awareness of. I could be grappling with something that isn't entirely my fault.

But, of course, even with all of our challenges that we face, we are responsible for engaging with life as it presents itself to us. We must figure out a way forward, even if there is something pulling us back. After all, I am best able to measure my own intentions and efforts than anyone. And, even after working at this problem for a long time, I keep coming up short. I keep thinking about how I should have known better, should have worked harder, should have dedicated myself to make a more genuine effort. I do feel blessed that, among the people living today, I have a slightly better insight into the kinds of behavior that are more likely to lead to a better place. This knowledge has prevented me from making even larger mistakes with even greater consequences. Still, if there was an objective third person listening to all of my thoughts, watching all of my actions, then I am not so sure I would fall into a positive light.

I do not want to feel like everything important I have reached for has escaped me. I do not want to feel like I have failed at all of the big things in life. However, after petty arguments with people who cannot be expected to be any more heroic or long-suffering than me (and I am light-years away from either condition), I feel like a tremendous failure. I am not responsible for anyone's choices other than my own. I desperately desire, but do not know how to transcend the emotional toll that bad experiences, or my own inability to live up to my high expectations, has on me. I would like to be able to float above some of the petty difficulties that, intellectually, I know do not matter. However, it is too easy for me to feel hurt and frustrated by poor choices I have made that lead me to even more disappointments.

It must be said that the crack of uncertainty about any of this grows larger when I admit that depression could be coloring all of my so-called objectivity. It is hard to judge my best moments and far to easy to condemn my worst. Still, every slip on the razor's path increases my fears that I have not exerted the right type or amount of effort to be a happier person who is functional enough to live life as an independent adult.

Difficult to Say

Sunday was one of the worst days I have had in a year or so. Life seems to hold so many mysteries for me, and lately, most of them have been unpleasant at least on the surface.

Of course, I understand that unpleasant experiences are not always harmful, or exclusively harmful. I'm sure we often learn more about ourselves and each other on our worst days than we do on our good ones, as long as we commit to learning how not to end up hurting ourselves (or others). The bad helps us avoid similar experiences in the future, or acts as a practice when we try to handle them differently. Those awful moments can have benefit, even when you are overwhelmed by strong and and poisonously enervating emotions of frustration or depression.

These difficult experiences, combined with my age, is helping me to realize, in a tangible way, that I will not experience many things in life I have been exposed to. I will never travel around the world seeing its many wonders. Now, I understand that I will probably not have a family of my own, or a house, or a well-paying career that would be emotionally or financially fulfilling and provide me with a positive sense of purpose.

These handful of moments, these light sketches on the pages of life, are ephemeral. Everything is washed out by a greater unveiling of lights where it suddenly takes on a new or changed appearance.

I am not sorrowful that I will not experience them before growing old. No, the challenge for me is to try and not feel sad about not being able to share all of those experiences with the people who I have grown to love throughout my lengthening years. Things don't matter, neither does a new or exciting experience, unless there is someone whom you care for (and care for you) to share it with.

Dream that persists throughout the Day.

Today was not as productive as I would have liked, but I did manage to get some things done at work, as well as try to assist my family in feeling better about their personal troubles. I still need to mail some important letters, but I will get that done tomorrow.

The most interesting part of my day was the nap I had this morning. I have been feeling especially out of energy lately. My night routine isn't much of a routine at all. Aside from being below perfect health, I go to bed at irregular times, so it is often that I wake up at a good time, between 5:00 and 7:00 am, but I wind up falling back asleep around 8:00 or 9:00 am. This was one of those mornings. It was during this extra sleep between 8:00 and 11:00 am that I had a dream that I was working in some non-teaching capacity at a school, perhaps I was even attending some college level class there. It was while I was in the auditorium, helping to clean up or assist with the other younger students that I met the most beautiful and vivacious teacher. Her dark auburn hair and lovely figure was not the most intriguing thing about her. The most intriguing thing was that she seemed to be genuinely interested in me as a potential romantic partner. She wanted to go on a date, not as a way to fill an emotional need of hers or to play out some predefined cultural role that dictated how she should find a partner. It was a genuine interest in me as a person. I remember feeling disoriented by it. I could be a confident person in almost any other scenario except this one. I was pleasantly surprised, uncomfortable, and slightly incredulous and suspicious.

It was this dream that hung with me all day more than anything. More than my sister's complaints about her life's struggles. More than the work that I needed to do. More than the television shows I distracted myself with. And more than the chores I did before going to bed. I am not sure why these internal journeys of the inward spirit take so much precedence over the more tangible ones of the outward being, yet in this case, it did.

Personal Goals for Improvement

I need to spend a little more time reading classic literature. It has a mysterious quality that helps inspire and invigorate my internal life just a little more. For example, just before going to bed, I read the first chapter of Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert, and the richness of the translation was—how else can I put it?—savory. When I first discovered some of this classic literature in college, my experiences were a bit limited just because I had not yet experienced many of the classic troubles that refines a person's character. While youth has its many advantages, age brings sorrows and sorrows bring wisdom and understanding. (Of course, as no one is omniscient, that particular wisdom and understanding that age brings is necessarily confined to each individual's vision and personal perspective.) As I grow older, my own perspective on the text gains a lot of this depth.

Today, I plan to take care of some personal tasks I have been putting off. I need to mail some letters, and I should make a trip into the larger city to look for clothing. It would probably help me greatly to make a list of the various tasks I need to complete, as well as figure out a weekly plan for achieving my goals. Spring seems like a good season to do this. The trouble for me is that I sometimes get so bogged down in the plans, or making plans for plans, that I never get anything started. It has helped me to have a personal pad of paper that is not a "journal" or some kind of sketch book with refined art in it. I tend to treat those things with too much trepidation, as if they themselves were the final pieces, and not a workbook that ideas should spill onto in a chaotic mess.

To clarify some of my goals for myself, I should read each day to be a better writer. I should draw each day to be a better artist and visual thinker. I should work on mastering wordpress development so I can have more flexibility with my blogging/writing. I should learn more about computers and networking in general, web design and development, and coding in other languages. This is as good a place as any to explore some of my plans for myself.

Trapped inside the Emotions.

It's nearly been a year since I last wrote something here, and the previous post (after having just read it) is something I really could have written yesterday. The feelings, those pent up emotions that stagger around in my head and crash into each other from day to day, are still the same. Nothing has changed. Nothing.

And, that means, I've really haven't made progress. In fact, in some ways, I feel worse now then I did before. (Of course, there is the chance that I can't be objective enough to see the progress. Yet, looking at it from just the surface, I am a little stunned at how much of what I have written then is the same now: I still feel like I need to improve in all of the major and minor ways I mentioned. Even the bit about "motivation following practice" is something I thought the other day, and until this moment, believed it was an idea I had only just discovered.) Reading, I see a foolish person that year ago, whining about needing to be better and not really understanding how much worse it could be. I need to forgive myself, they say. I need to not be so hard on myself. However, looking on all of my internals in a way that those friends and my family cannot, I see the pain and the failures more closely. Worse, I know how much I could have achieved, but through laziness, fear, and ignorance, see how much has escaped me. I will return to a better life (with more challenges) soon, and I will attempt, yet again, to overcome my failures.

Envisioning a Future

I've been thinking that I really need to be a little more serious about writing. Now that several years have passed along and I have had a few years trying my hand at finding my own way in the world, I've discovered that, despite what I may have wanted in the past, what I thought would be the best course of success in life, success isn't going to be found in personal preferences and talent, but instead in improving myself to the point where, even if I don't wind up doing what I would like, I have become a decent person doing whatever I find myself doing in the future.

(It's a bit hard to explain just tapping it out quickly on a keyboard as the thoughts arrive. At points, it appears we live in an information age where the information we receive is incomplete, distorted, or plain wrong. Forgive what may seem like moralizing or solipsism, but working through these personal thoughts is sometimes messy even if I hope to one day transcend them.)

I worry about not being able to pull out from underneath the hidden assumptions that afflict us all. Nevertheless, despite the potential presence of my own assumptions, the people I see around me, according to my particular viewpoint in the world, seem to feel that future regrets are hidden in not achieving the material successes they incessantly desire. Hidden in failing to achieve a life of material comforts that do not extend beyond their too-myopic dreams. But again, to my point of view, most of those same people do not realize that the vision of material success to which they strive is so far out of reach that failure is an inevitability. We admire achievement and success when it happens, but we do not seem to recognize how rare those things are, or the kinds of troubles they will eventually bring. Instead, we burn in the fire of vague personal frustrations, treating each other poorly because our sense of who we are and what we feel we deserve has been distorted. It's as if our failure to build ourselves in a material image that has always been false is a tragic injustice, that the world has somehow wronged us for not providing us the false comforts of a rich and famous lifestyle.

Which is why it seems to me that life is about becoming a better person through trial and errors while struggling to avoid the overwhelming waves of ignorance, contention, and selfish thinking. And of course, it is not easy or pleasant to think about. But, as seems obvious, the happiness people seek in things, achievements, and worldly success is a mirage. Happiness itself is a virtue that is found in aligning oneself to the better qualities that make us all truly human. And in that sense, it can developed and practiced. I only hope that I can develop it as a professional athlete develops muscle so that I may use it confidently and unconsciously and feel, ultimately, all the better for doing so.

Transformations

Not sure how to describe an illness where the main symptom is a dissatisfaction with yourself so intense that it makes you feel ill and puts you slightly out of time with the Universe. Life continues to swirl around you with the same vibrancy and colors it always had, but instead of a warm and satisfying red, or an enjoyable rich blue with a calming coolness, everything is pasted over with a light pastel yellow that, like a sticky film, clings over everything you happen to glance upon.

There is something about my life that feels a bit unsatisfying, perhaps tinged with the portent of doom or trouble ahead, or an anxiety about the course of the future that will not lay flat, and I cannot shake it. I want to. People who I am close to say that is nothing more than common anxiety, or perhaps it is yet another flare up of a lifelong battle with the inane minor demons of depression, but no. It somehow seems more than that. More frightening.

I have been imploring the benevolent forces in the Universe to guide me to a transformative path, a path where I find the calming centers inside myself, the ones I have been seeking and fix my feet firm upon it to walk straight ahead into both joy and sorrow with an equanimity that has still somehow remained elusive. There is an honorable and dignified course of life that feel remains out of my grasp.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that I am always seeking the difficulties in life rather than allow myself to be human, to love myself with an impartiality that can acknowledge my failures without berating me for them. Love, not the weird definitions of it that exist in my current culture, seems to be the only proper way to motivate myself to good course in life. Too much sorrow leads to either despondency, or a defeated resignation that permits failures as just another one of life's "horrible" inevitabilities. I need to be able to feel the sorrows, to forgive myself for the pain they cause, and trust that I can endure without succumbing to the worst of them. If I can somehow cultivate the habit of joy, then I will be fortified against the onslaught of sorrows.

Habit, now there is an interesting word. Since the mundane chores and duties of life must be dispatched along with the goal of self-improvement, the best way to handle them is develop good habits. I've wasted too much time thinking that overcoming pain or sorrow or improving myself was an intellectual exercise of the mind more than a life practice that requires regularity in its execution. One of the lessons of the world is, obviously, this: if one wishes to become good at something, one has to practice. Personal transformation of one's inner life can, it seems to me, be encouraged through good habits which help you practice being a decent, good person on a regular basis. As such, the first habit that I need to develop is "discipline." Discipline, as a virtue, is, it appears to me, nothing more than an expression of "Faithfulness." You must be faithful to yourself, your obligations, your spirit, and the larger world around you. Motivation follows practice. Heat produces motion, stillness freezes us in place. This is one of my first tasks in the process of transforming my life: encouraging and practicing the habits of a good character, to becoming a devoted person, morally upright, and always prepared to do the right thing no matter how hard it might first appear to do so.

I think that I am going to have to write more. The only problem that I seem to encounter is that I often do not know what to write about. I think I would like to try to discuss something that is meaningful to me, and I would hope, helps bring meaning into the world. This is not to say that I am some kind of egotist that is seeking to inflict my particular view of knowledge on the world, but rather I am trying to share something with the world that lends itself to a meaning and positive influence for the world itself. I would hope that doing so would help me feel like I have accomplished something good in the world, but I also know (in the depths of my heart) that offering up something that I believe to be good to the world may be personally more difficult for me in the long run. I know that I am being vague about all of this. I apologize. Even if I provided some specificity about what I was talking about, it would still be difficult to express this idea.

It's just . . . it may be that I feel that I have reached an age where some opportunities are closed to me, possibly for the rest of my life. There is a finality to some of these recognitions that is slightly unsettling, a new freedom that it more disturbing than emancipating. Simultaneously, I am also beginning to see that there is still some chance to achieve something that would help the world achieve a greater good. If I can somehow grapple with all these impulses to try and 'do better' or 'be better,' maybe I can achieve my goal. The thought hidden right there in that former statement perhaps expresses my feelings more than any other: "my goals are shifting." No longer do I feel that I can grasp some material life of comfort that always seems just out of reach anyway, a media chimaera designed to ensnare foolishly immature hearts and minds. Yes, even now, I would like to have certain unfulfilled elements of my life fulfilled, but I recognize that this may not ever happen. Therefore, I must refocus my life and change my goals in such a way where I find personal meaning by attaching myself to something bigger and more important than an indolent life comfortably lived for myself and my desires alone.

I feel that I am a reasonably intelligent person who could achieve more in life if I worked harder at it. Every day, it seems, becomes a struggle. I still am constrained by the oppression of lost chances, poor choices, outside forces, and fate. Yet, I am going to try this new journey.

Another Sunday

I awoke this morning rather tired from not having slept very well last night. Sleeping through the night has been one of the more difficult things for me to do lately. I am not sure why I can't; I suspect some aspect of my health is part of it. The older I get, the more my physical health seems to be creeping up as an issue. I feel like it's an unkempt garden, charming early on perhaps, but increasingly a problem later.

Sunday is my day for going out to a study group. I won't say what or why at this point because some things are going to be just for me.

Anyway, I got ready and organized and was out the door by 9:30, time enough to make it to the group if I went straight there, but I decided that I should visit my mom at her shop first. It was a check in. I am concerned about the amount of work and stress that she seems to be constantly under. I don't know how to help alleviate any of that, so I keep checking in. She said that she would like to have an unsweetened iced tea from McDonald's. It is one of her minor indulgences that she allows herself, and I am not going to be an insensitive jerk and discourage it. It is also hard not to see it as a stress reliever. And as a demonstration of care for someone, there isn't anything quite like treating them to food, or in this case, tea.

The wait in the fast food line was really long since they had not made the tea for that day. They were in full-blown breakfast mode, selling their breakfast sandwiches left and right. I indulged myself and ordered one, and later, after having eaten it, wondered how something so remarkably tasty could leave you feeling so unsatisfied. It is one of the oddities about that particular form of fast food.

I delivered the tea back to my mother, all while worrying about how inordinately late I was going to be. I drove in an mild panic thinking about the interruption that I was sure I was going to cause with my late arrival. However, without speeding (a minor point of pride), I was only a few minutes late and relieved to see that they had not yet begun.

As for the group itself, overall I enjoyed it and am already looking forward to next week. I will say that the group dynamic was a little strained during the middle. There are some real gems of knowledge that come out this meeting for me. However, at times, some of the other participants seemed to get bogged down in their own ideas and people start to get frustrated. If I do speak, which I try not to, I only try to point out what I find personally illuminating about what it is we are reading.

Afterwards, everyone decides that they want to attend a buffet lunch downtown, which is where the real heart of the meeting emerges. With ten people, I imagine it to be something like the large feasts you see in period movies where guests try to engage each other with interesting anecdotes about their own lives. The cool avenues of knowledge that are explored during the earlier meeting finally dissolves into the broad paths of warm feeling. I was very worried that the one participant who seemed to be the focal point of the earlier strain during the meeting wasn't eating, and yet to bring up the issue might have caused embarrassment.

After it was done, I made my goodbyes and left. I wandered to the bookstore and made a half-hearted attempt to look for an engaging book on design, but left without a more full exploration. Most of the books there, seemed like ones I had seen there before. I did some more walking downtown before finally getting to my car and calling a former college colleague about a debt I needed to repay.

During my video class, I was in a group that needed an actor. So, I asked a friend from the photography class we shared if she would mind helping out. Because the project involved a lot of on location shots and travel, I was seriously worried that I was asking too much. Therefore, I promised her that I could give her a nine by nine sheet of muslin to use as a photographer's backdrop. I knew that she and another friend had already painted one, and that she might like to make another one. However, that video class was one of the last ones of my final term, and then I was out of school when I finally got the muslin. With it finally in hand, it was difficult trying to figure out how to get it to her. She was working overseas for a few months I had it. I knew that she acted in the video as a favor and wasn't at all concerned about getting anything in return, but I was seriously worried about leaving this promise unfulfilled and debt unpaid.

I finally called her up and asked if I could deliver it to her, to which she said yes. I felt relieved it was finally in her hands. We talked for a bit in her driveway before I left.

I made my way to Value Village to look for some blue jeans and possibly a shirt. And it was there among the racks of used clothes that I started to have some trouble. I saw myself in the other patrons of that store and realized just how poor and out-of-shape I was. The financial poverty I have struggled with all my life has left some deep social scars that seem difficult for me to repair. For one, I would like to dress more attractively, but I don't know how and, worse, would feel uncomfortable in anything other than jeans and T-shirts. Under fluorescent lights, I mentally went down the list on how deficient I felt I was in regards to my appearance, a process which ultimately leads me to same unpleasant mental place again and again and again. My imagined solution to the problem of this bad feeling is irrational, somewhat selfish, and unpractical. Intellectually, I know this. And yet, I want it so strongly anyway that it forces that knowledge to the side where I do my best to ignore it. The real solution to problem is not removing the consequence of these bad feeling through distractions, but controlling the conditions that cause the bad feelings to arise. Strike at the root cause and not its effects. Easier said than done.

I went home and took refuge in bed, trying to catch up on that sleep I missed. I was probably a mistake to do so, but it made me feel slightly better. The empty feeling of not accomplishing something more tangible during a day is preferable to the misery of berating oneself for conditions that cannot be alleviated overnight. I awoke, had a chocolate cereal dinner, watched some television before writing this post. As it is more of the proper time for bed, I am going to resolve to do better tomorrow.

Changes

Looks like Google changed the layout of my website somehow. I am not sure that I did anything to change it, but there is the possibility that I did. It has been a long while since I last posted here, it's difficult to know for sure. I do know that there has been many changes on the backend of this program. The whole mobile first movement seems to be at fault for it. My feeling about that is somewhat mixed. Yes, I do know that all things internet seems to be moving towards the mobile market. However, it is my feeling that the mobile form does not allow for the longer essay like posts that I prefer. I will try to hang on to words as long as I can, even though our visual culture marches forward.

Disappointments

Not that I have abandoned this blog, far from it. It's simply that I do not feel the same motivation that I had for writing that I once did. I know that isn't much of an excuse, but at least it is an explanation.

It's somewhat fair to say that I been feeling poorly, but perhaps that is a bit of an understatement too. I've been grappling with a lot of issues related to my self-concept. It feels as if I am falling into a direction in life that I wouldn't have chosen for myself if I could have avoided it. It seems that, for the rest of my life, I will be as poor as ever. I have far too many debts from school, a tremendous burden that will sap the opportunities for a life with simple pleasures: a wife, a home, a family, etc. My naivete was extreme in my college days, but there was no-one to tell me where I was headed. And of course, I might have not listened anyway.

I feel a bit upset when I consider how a future life of poverty was incurred as a result of my striving for something better (a PhD and professorship), and then failing at it because of my ignorance of myself, my difficult and (also failed) romantic experiences, and seeming inability to endure it all. But there it is. It cannot be bargained with or changed. It was real and it happened. Therefore, I must continue on and face consequences of actions that I did not know I had chosen at the time.

I am trying to make the best of it. One of the things I most frequently hear from friends and family is that "life is what you make of it." True enough to provide some hope and thereby small measure of comfort. And yet, while one can try to improve life and circumstances to a degree, no-one seems to acknowledge its severe limitations. Life restricts opportunity as much as it provides it. The difficult life lesson is learning how to accept its restrictions with calm equanimity and be unperturbed in the face of failures.

I wonder how people who experience a persistent and oppressive injustice in their life learn to cope with the outside forces that prevent them from attaining their visions of comforts and happinesses. I should consider myself lucky that I do not experience racism, persecution, hunger, and etc. that many people the world over do. I suspect that the key is to ignore the restrictions imposed from the outside and learn to be content with the life one leads on the inside, but as with everything, knowing something isn't the same as doing it. Or in my case, feeling it.

I hope to continue on my internal path of change, so that I conform my behavior to my vision of a better and happier self. Faced with frustrations, depressions, irritations, and unhappiness it seems hard for me to get there. I will not, and cannot ignore restrictions. Most modern folks I talk with say this is the way to get happy, but really they seem to be advocating blindness and ignorance. There should be a richer path of acknowledging injustice, pain, and disappointment without it sending your emotions careening over the edge into an expanding void. I grasp at the solid iron bar of calm acceptance, but it still seems a little out of reach.

Inflated Pride

On my bed are two balloons: one, blue, and the other green. I bought them a couple of years ago in one of those dollar store packages of balloons you get at the grocery store or Walmart. Most people buy balloons for some party giving occasion, but I bought them because I intended to use them for a photoshoot for a student design project for a book about clowning. In the end, although I took the pictures, I did not use them for the project. Instead, I took a picture of a classmate wearing the clown nose I had bought. She had an anxious, almost sad expression. The balloons came home to rest on the television nook for a year. I took them off about a week ago, intending to use them for a friends party. I was a guest, but even for all of my outward hilarity, I felt out of place. For one, I was among the very few attendees who did not have children. Most of my friends were distracted by their offspring for much of the visit and our conversations only occurred in brief half-minute exchanges that are difficult to piece together into an entire thread. Thought is broken up, and lacking words to fill the spaces between us, emotion fills in the cracks. This time, it was anxiety and embarrassment for having become this old without a clear direction in life, and a certain sadness for being middle-aged and not having a place entirely of my own or a career that marks me as a reasonably successful person who has the means to provide solely for himself and, perhaps, one or two others. The balloons came home in my jacket pocket, and somehow, through a series of small and unremarkable and forgettable daily actions, ended up on my bed next to my evening reading material.

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I have had a couple of tormenting dreams. The most memorable of which was not the one in which I experienced the hell of being in a place or among people who I did not wish to be around and responding to their terrible actions. No, the most memorable and meaningful one centered on how my vision of myself, my self-concept, is opposed to reality and is mildly delusional in a mundane manner. However, please do not think that I mean to say "delusional" that I imagine myself as some character like "Napoleon," or think of myself special and unique, apart from every other human on the planet. Other than the experience of being human with human thoughts when we find ourselves by ourselves with moments for reflection, I do not live in a world separate from reality, nor do I have such a disconnection with reality that I cannot operate as a functional member in it.

The delusions that I mean are the ones that the generality of humanity has about itself in our era. We each think of ourselves as the heroic actors struggling in the movie or play of ourselves, and how we are being either shaped by tragedy or accomplishment, we thereby achieve the natural results of our endeavors, endeavors that most of us judge to be good.

And yet, this belief is nothing short of vanity.

As young people, this sort of vain thinking is so extreme in its improbability as to be utterly laughable if it was mentioned aloud. As adults who have mellowed (or tried to) in their years, the struggles we imagine lend to our shaping as beings of pure virtue surrounded by difficulty are much, much more mundane. No longer do we imagine ridiculous success filled with fame and fortune; instead, we find our "heroic" struggles in paying bills, dealing with co-workers or relatives, or some other life event. But, in its way, this sort of thinking is can be no less vain or laughable.

Which leads me to my dream. I cannot say what the images were that played in my head, who the "actors" were in this dream, or what I saw. Frankly, I have forgotten it; perhaps, if I try to recall as accurately as I can, I saw myself. The real meaning of the dream was in its impact. I realized that how I see myself in my daily actions, how I comport myself in my head and the thoughts I have about myself, can be in complete and utter conflict with how things really are. My thoughts, which I believed were a reflection of reality, a pilgrim's path of virtue, were in fact, imaginings that were vain to a such degree that it led me to blindness.

My attachments to how I want my life to go, to how I want to direct myself to this new heroism of virtue, lead me to think of myself as an heroic actor. And yet, to really be a decent man, I have to give up this stupid thought. I am not a mighty hero, standing tall with a sword of nobility against the gales of ungodly daily enemies. Enemies representing everything from my propensity for anger when a driver cuts me off, or my pride of intelligence and creativity I feel I receive an unfair criticism about my work. Yes, I do need to fight against those things, to give up anger and pride. But to imagine myself as the heroic actor in this play of myself? That is too much limited thinking. It makes me the center of a universe that disdains me for silly haughtiness and spits me out towards wretchedness.

I must strive to be a better person who can attain virtuous qualities and do a good deed or two a day, but I should also give up the idea that I am a better person for doing so, because that leads to pride, which causes blindness, and then people fall. And when they fall, the fall horribly hard and damage themselves. There is another thought here about seeing the end in the beginning, about how recognizing how this path of pride and vanity will lead to falls, and therefore, seeing danger ahead, one can avoid it. But I will leave that thought for another time, so that I may better try to hold on to the feeling of being exposed in my dream for my vain thinking which has led me to this wasted day and feelings of remorse for the stupid things I say and do in these occasions. I truly want to be a better person, I want to be virtuous, but life can really show me up sometimes, so I have to guard myself from too much stupidity on my part and recognize that, for how much I think I know, I really don't know anything.

Slight Frustration

I think that I feeling a slight frustration from wanting to be more accomplished than I am at art and design, hearing about more people without training describe themselves as designers, and not knowing how to earn an income from doing what I am doing now. I have been told that I should write a book, but I don't feel the passion for it like I used to. I may think up an idea for a story or two, but really hammering something out does not seem like it is in the cards for me. I fear that I rely to heavily on cliches, don't do enough reading (like everyone else), and wouldn't have something to say.

Although, the creative idea that I have lately center on the nonsense tales of the 19th century. It seems like 21st century could use an update that isn't a mere imitation of the past. There are plenty things in the world that are ripe for parody and satire, and the deft use of metaphor would go a long way of helping certain people be aware of the layers of nonsense that have built up over the years. (If I may digress: maybe they are seeing it? There is a lot of tumult in the news lately in many countries. People are suffering under the burden of not knowing what to do or where to go to solve their problems. Another person reciting those problems to them in a literary way isn't going to put food in their mouths or make them less miserable.)

I guess I am trying not to get too stuck too much in a limbo of despair. Yes, there are a lot of people out in the world who call themselves designers and maybe do not have all of the skills that they need to have for that job. Maybe, the world is too much over-saturated in media anyway and a new designer isn't going to bring real change to the world. But then again, maybe there is still room for me. Maybe I do have something to say or offer to the world in my chosen profession that will set me apart from the rest. I know that I have some talent, but I am frustrated that some people still haven't recognized it yet. I know that I can do this and be great at it. I know that I can achieve this and astonish everyone, but getting to that point without succumbing to my old "friend" of melancholy is going to be the real challenge. I cannot let him chill my heart into inertia or inaction. I must continue to strive to do my best and not allow poverty to keep me back too much.

There is something real here and I have to work even harder in the next few weeks to push myself forward to get it done properly.

Going along

My last post was pretty gloomy, and frankly, I was in a gloomy place. I have done a lot of personal reflection since then, and I feel that I am in the midst of turning over a new leaf. I wish I could say that I had some kind of awakening that was like a jolt, a sudden insight that opened up a new reality, some kind of startling cause to get me to try and turn things around, but the simple fact of the matter was that I was tired. I was miserable and tired and did not want to be like that any more. Years and years of struggling and focusing on all of the bad things in life, things which were as real as the moon above, had chilled my heart to such an extent that I lost a lot of hope. Hope has gotten some bad rap, and I think most of it is deserved. Hope is like that one aunt who listens to all that airy flute music, is concerned about her cat's feelings more than the local homeless people, and thinks that good things happen to people if they think good thoughts. It's pleasant to think so, but if you're going to be able to move out of a lot of pain, you have to acknowledge that there is a lot of pain out there. Life is difficult, plain and simple.

Still there is an element of choice in how you feel about life being difficult. If you choose, or more likely, simply don't choose, life's ugly side will present itself to you with growing volume and intensity. It's like the absence of light, you can invite it in, or it can sneak up on you. However, if you allow yourself to think good things on occasion and do good things for other people (and not be so focused on your selfish needs and wants), then real hope, quiet hope for the honest small things in life, can begin to grow. And that quiet hope is like a rock, a visionary individual protected with the armor of faith from all of the poison arrows of doubts and sorrows.

I have chosen not to feel bad for the mean things in life, the sorrows, and the pains it holds. Yes, I still feel some sadness and confusion for some it, but I will really try much harder to not be overwhelmed by it. I will not allow myself to let its darkened arms wrap themselves around me and freeze my heart in its place.

All of that having been said, today was a little bit of a difficult day. It was a kind of day which, if I hadn't just spent a couple of months trying to recover and reconnect to better myself, I would have spent a few miserable weeks in bed. My artwork was rejected publicly for reasons that cannot or will not be made clear to me. I had more than one instance of someone making the wrong inference about me and my life. An instructor, without consciously meaning to, even teased me about my handwriting on an assignment. The sum total of those events made me feel, for the thousandth time in my life, like I was truly out of place. I feel as if no one really understands me or where I come from. If I could count for you all of the times that I have been called weird, unusual, or something similar, you would be astonished the number.

And yet, I will try and choose to see this as my particular path in life. There is nothing that I could do differently to change this day. It has already happened. I will try to remember the silver linings to these clouds and hope that tomorrow will go smoother. If life itself is an educational experience, then I can learn from it, and if I can learn from it, maybe I can get better at it as I go along.

Anguish

It is hard not to hate myself for my lack of success with most things I try my hand at. I feel like a reverse King Midas at times; everything I touch turns to rust. If there is something beautiful and golden about life, you can be sure that I am going to ruin it somehow. Usually, it is through my desire to preserve it, or capture it, or even, sometimes, just witness it. And, of course, when I touch something beautiful or golden, innocently at first, then with the desire to possess, it crumbles before my eyes in that dirty rust pile. You would think that I could be used to that as often as it has happened to me, but each time it happens, I am so distressed and distraught about it, that I can barely function.

I feel monstrous, like there is an inherent flaw within me that causes this to happen despite my best intentions. And this monstrosity creates a pain that burns into a searing white hot blast of hatred for myself. I eat the fire of hate and it boils in my stomach, a toxic crucible of molten pain. And in that crucible, the devouring snake of nihilism, grief, anguish, and tortuous cruelty winds itself upward to my heart and swallows it slowly in the grotesque opera of self-destructive hatred. My brain tries to speak to my heart, to soothe it, to prevent the snake from completing it missions, but it can't be heard above the heart's screams.

And then, the snake, having eaten its fill whispers its forked narrative of hatred. I become the monster of hate for myself. My snake heart convinces the brain that I am the most hateful person on the planet, that god has decided to hate me, that it is my destiny in life to be isolated, alone, and ugly. My brain, struggling to pull logic out of a locked or hidden closet, says that there are things I can do to prevent this from happening. But the snake heart is more convincing; its words have more sting. "You will not be successful," in one venomed filled word. In another, "you will always be alone," and "women do not like you," in another. My brain cannot make reply because these words seem to be couched in the deepest truth.

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I am in utter anguish about my failures. I want so much to connect to a special person, but it is not for me. I have prayed, pleaded, bargained, and struggled until I cannot sleep anymore, but it is no use. I am monster. Hated, ugly, and alone.

The Accident

I'm still searching for still waters and trying to keep an even keel. The period directly after my graduate school career (and breakup with my then girlfriend) was the biggest upheaval in my life so far. I truly hope with a visceral feeling that there isn't anything in the future that comes even close to that. It was a trauma, pure and simple. It has been a handful of years since that event; I can vividly remember those handful of days at the end, and remember the extraneous details that most would have forgotten. The first several years was struggling to cope with the reality of what happened, the loss of everything (including very nearly myself), and new realities it had created. Recently, it seems that I am beginning to see how the dust has finally settled just a year or so ago. And Now, I am in another period of great change, but this time it is my own choosing.

I was riding along in the car "of life," and hit a tree. At first, I was unconscious, and then I was recovering from the immediate injuries of that for the longest time. The pain was excruciating and forced me into difficult positions and hideous thoughts while I recovered. I do feel like I can start working towards goals again. This period is akin to physical therapy. I do have my scars and, so while the injury no longer hurts like it once did, I am a little tender in those spots and am more likely to react when I wouldn't have otherwise. I need to learn how to control that reaction.

To that end, I think I am going to try to recenter myself. Instead of looking outward for solutions, instead of analyzing inward for new insights and answers, I am going to try and forget all of that and work on developing an inner calm. During the healing process, I may have tried a a few things that I thought would be the shortcut to recovery. I realize that there are no shortcuts, and so, maybe meditation, thoughtfulness, and calm is the new way to go. If I have the self-discipline and the courage to face the horrors that life sometimes contain, I really do think it can help me.

Turning Invisible

So, yeah. I'm pathetic. And no, I am not pathetic in the hipsterish, too cool for his own good way. I'm simply pathetic in the aging, not really that important to notice anymore way. It's like I am slowly turning invisible against my will. I'd like to fight it. Hell, I am trying to fight it, but some fights are lost even before they get started.

I'm not sure how I could describe the multitude of thoughts that lead me to the above conclusion, probably because any amount of detail would reveal too much about myself and other people. As for myself, I seem to care less and less these days about how many people perceive me, which is mostly as an epic (but nice enough) loser. But even losers can be noble about wanting to protect other people's privacies, so I keep my damned mouth shut.

The basic problem I seem to have at this exact moment is "wanting" and not "having." And, being who I am, I think about how I could have what I want if I worked really hard for the next several years. Scratch that. There is no guarantee that I could have what I wanted if I worked hard. I guess I mean to say, I could have the chance to get what I wanted. Time will not wait for me to catch up.

I think about how my life got to this point. (Like I always seem to do. This entire blog is nothing but several years of me sifting through the momentary grains of sand that make up my life.) I think about the many, many mistakes I seemed to have made without realizing, of course, they were mistakes at the time they were happening. For example, I should not have ever tried to go to graduate school as English major. It is not for poor kids who don't already have money to burn or powerful connections to exploit. Poor kids with aspirations can usually only hope to be middle class providing they learn a sale-able skill. Not going to graduate school really wouldn't have prevented the mountain of debt I accumulated during my first pass through college, but it might have lessened its overall mountainous size. I also should have realized what was happening in that earlier relationship I was so committed to. I should have simply "let go" years earlier.

And many other thoughts like these about past events. But, then again, like I said, I didn't realize these were mistakes while they were happening. There was no warning bells clearly delineating any of the consequences of making those seemingly small and daily choices. I believed that, if you really want to make something of yourself, to improve your lot in life, you go to college and try to go as far as your brain will take you. I did not know that you could ruin your future with a lifetime of debt. I really did not know that by hanging on a relationship that had long since ended, that was draining me of self-esteem, I would be condemning myself to middle-aged regret and loneliness, and that I would be compounding and reinforcing that condemnation by preventing myself from exploring other, perhaps healthier, relationship opportunities. At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was being faithful, noble, pure in heart, and well-intentioned.

Now, looking back, I try to untangle the Gordian knot with rather old and stiff fingers, tracing each ropey path back to its source, usually discovering another source behind that other source. And slowly, the choices I made begin to look a lot like fate. If I did not know that choice A would lead to consequence B, then how could I have prevented B from happening? If my problem now is that I do not have the means to provide for the people I love, can I trace that back to generations of poverty, systematic economic oppression? Can't anyone in the history of the world can? If yes, then why not also me?

Many of peers have said that I have always had full control over circumstances. And I do recognize that one can have an impact on own's fate. I do feel that one can work to improve their lot in life and try and make the best of things as they are. But, I cannot agree that you can fully choose your own fate. This is not a popular idea in our modern world, where independence and choice is an ultimate virtue. You say things like this and people react emotionally. The truth of the matter is that there have been, and will always be, forces beyond our control that will shape our lives as much (and in some cases, more than) our own choices.

And, for me, this where the frustration has crept in. I do not know how, among all those past mistakes, all those past choices, I could have prevented becoming a lonely middle-aged man in the depths of extreme poverty. Conventional wisdom is that one can control their own fate, and they implicitly mean that one can "fully" control one's own fate. I wish I could agree. I can't. Experience has taught me different.