why is the sun good for me? because it gives light to my day, which makes me less likely to stumble about from here to there wondering where i am going. when does the sun stop being good for me in this venue? when there is a solar eclipse: when something comes in between me and the sun. if you are interested (or if you aren't for that matter), i will tell you what is good about a solar eclipse: the corona.
about a month ago, my life started feeling like an indie movie. or at least, i felt like a typical character in one of said movies: depressed, lonely, detatched, sad, wanting more but not seeing a way to get it. this is called depression. i couldn't tell you why it started; there are a number of possible causes: the days getting shorter, the cloudiness of the sky this time of year, the chill of the northern hemisphere at large, winter break. anything could have started it, but no matter the cause, i know for sure what had been consistently making it worse: the holidays. i can say it's the holidays that have been making it worse. but not just the holidays; the essence of what is contained in the holidays: community.
everywhere i go nowadays, i am reminded that i am mostly alone. when i go to the store, i am forced to acknowledge that i am at the store alone when i see people my age laughing with eachother and see people with their families at the store doing the disney family things (picking out lights for the tree, having a cup of tea at starbucks, picking out new phones for their family members, having a beer with their brother at the steakhouse, shopping for and with eachother, smiling at eachother). i am also forced to acknowledge my solitude when in every store-front window there is a poster of a smiling group of people that are a unit (family, friends, co-workers, choirs). everything looks so harmonious from the outside. the juxtaposition (contrastive comparison) of their lives to mine is unnerving sometimes, and there is no doubt that this is depression. i have never been more depressed in my life. but you know what makes it worth it? knowing that it is not something that will last forever. knowing that it will end. it has no choice to. the nature of depression is juxtaposition: knowing that there is more that you don't have that you want and not being able to reconcile the two ideas...quite yet. the 'quite yet' part makes the difference between suicidal depression and regular type.
this afternoon, i got in a bit of a disagreement with someone i love very much. and we parted ways on a weird note. not bad, just weird. i got out of the car after we appologized and agreed that we do not understand anything, and then i went inside, put my fish oil and herbal tea in my bookbag and went back out to see my dear friend heather. i honestly was dreading being with her, but not at all because i disliked her or because there is anything wrong with her, but because i knew that communication is an issue for me and i do not possess the capacity to tell her things like i used to. but i got to her house, and we hugged, and i felt her chin on my shoulder and the warmth of her embrace, the feel of her clothes on my neck, and the love, and i was immediately accosted by memories. really effing good memories. memories of a horrible time in my life battling alcoholism, anorexia, panic attacks, depression, and the unbearable lightness of being. things that she was there for that few others were...even if she didn't know what was happening or even that some of it was happening (because even i didn't at the time).
we went to best buy, the mall, target, the pet store, and wal mart. and we talked about the most senseless things: hegelian dialecticism, boxes and whether they exist, dogs, fish, crazy fish ladies, why self-important people exist, her roommate's engagment, marriage, our butts, whether the wayans brothers presuppose the existence of white people in their movies, italian/catholic/jersey kids, and whether Faulkner can be considered civil war era lit (i say 'no,' and she says 'no' too but on different grounds), and senselessness in general. then we went back to her house where her mom was washing dishes after a long day at the hospital, and we watched t.v. and i lit a cigarette and had my herbal tea in hand, and we were sitting on the floor as she wrapped her mom's gifts, and i said, 'do you ever miss smoking?' she affirmed. i replied, 'do you ever feel bad that you miss it?' affirmation again. and that's when it happened: i started crying.
'what's wrong?' she asked.
'i'm so happy,' i said with snot dripping out of my nose and tears running down my face. i did not look at her face, but knowing how facailly emotive she tends to be, i am laughing now at the prospect of what that look might have been. i cried, and she literally (as opposed to metaphorically) went out of the room and got me a napkin and a glass of water, and i cried there not because i was so happy in her presence, but because i was happy but knew she and kenny would leave after christmas and i would be miserable again.
it tends to put a surreal yellow-green hazy light on the situation: happiness, but to simultaneously realize that you will not always be happy.
i compared how i felt to a bright eyes song; don't judge me. it was 'june on the west coast.' the song isn't really about anything specific. it's just about life. it's one of my favorite songs ever, even thought i don't really listen to it anymore. one of the lines from the song had been playing over and over in my brain since we got to wal mart: 'i spent a week drinking the sunlight of annecca california, where they understand the weight of human hearts. because sorrow gets too heavy, and joy tends to hold you for the fear that it eventually departs.' it was the most true thing i had ever heard, next to 'life is like a fine wine. it will not appeal to children.'...and 'it goes well with cheese.'
to recognize a juxtaposition is to acknowledge that at least the idea of juxtaposition exists. i assert that depression has helped me in a weird holistic way. i almost asked for it. i asked God for wisdom two weeks ago, and all i could think to do was read psalm 42, and i was like, 'what the eff, i can't praise God when he's not talking to me,' but the funny thing is that i did. i didn't stop praying and acknowledging God in all that i did (even the less than savory things i did)...even though it felt totally fake, even though i imagined my words to Him coming out of my mouth and falling to the floor, shattering as they landed. even when i felt like my life was a bunch of shattered prayers, strewn about a postmodern ballet studio where life and reality are dancing on my grave asking me, 'are you sure you made the right choice by following God...no matter what?'.
i couldn't stop praying and reading. i had nowhere to go, really. even if i had my old happiness back but did not have God, i would shatter just as easily as i had last october, just as miserably as i had in high school (anorexia, suicide, meth), as miserably as i had in round 1 of college (suicide), round 2 of college (alcoholism), round 3 of college (anorexia, designer drugs, alcoholism), and the workforce (anorexia, panic attacks, solitude). but i did not shatter this time. instead, i hit rock bottom and could look up, because i now recognize that the corona of the sun is only hazardous if my vision is what i'm concerned about losing. otherwise, it is a testament to juxtaposition, a testament to a clash of essences...the reality that sometimes i will feel like my conversations with God are completely one-sided, no matter how much i praise Him and how much i want Him to make me feel loved and happy and He doesn't coupled with knowing how loved i felt before. it's harsh. it's been eating away at me, but i now have a sort of proof that i will still know God even when i don't feel loved and when i felt like most of me died when God stopped talking back.
it is a good thing to feel like most of me died when God stopped talking. it means that i knew Him for at least a season, and it also kind of means that He is with me still...and even if He's not, 'better is one day in His courts than a million elsewhere.' there is nothing that can make me go back to wanting to be who i was before, not even God's perceived absence. to know anything, much less God (outside of whether He can exist) is enough for me. i am content in that i knew Him for a moment. i can die happy now. but i won't die unless He pulls the plug. i'm not even sure if there is a plug that i can pull anymore. i'm not sure i'm even capable of thinking of suicide as an option anymore. to have known God for a hawt minute and experienced His love for 5 months equals the tantamount of a good time.
but the magic is not necessarily that idea, but rather a right hegelian homage to this idea: the magic lies in that i didn't stop sensing the beauty of life, despite my emptiness and crying all the time, random moments of hating life and hating that i was at a boring school with a bunch of people who don't actually know me. 'reality is like a fine wine. it will not appeal to children.' i can dig it. i'm not opposed to depression or even rock bottom any more. i won't go out of my way to get here, but i will not despair when i'm here. in philosophy, reality is a problem to be solved. in Theology(!)*, it is a problem that won't stop answering the question of Theology(!).
THEMES:
Bright Eyes: June on the West Coast.
Tegan and Sara: Where Does the Good Go.
Ke$ha: Your Love is my Drug.
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
Kierkegaard's Anxiety
THE SOUNDTRACK:
Explosions in the Sky: The Rescue.
*! denotes actuality.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Boxes
do you ever feel weird, like you're the only one who understands you? if that compound clause describes you, well, it is far less true than you think it is, because not even you understand yourself. think about it: if you understood yourself, wouldn't it seem only right that you would have no problems in life and that, in your knowledge of yourself, you could be yourself AND not feel weird at the same time? if you could understand yourself, you should be able to acknowledge not only why you are misunderstood (or not understood) and be able to reconcile the misunderstanding--or lack of understanding to be had--with what is outside of you. but sadly, that is not what happens. ever.
almost.
there is a soultion, but we will investigate that after i've attempted to convince you about boxes.
boxes are where we put things that we want to go together in the physical world. i have a box full of shoes that i don't wear (and don't see myself wearing) but refuse to part with, i have a box full of old papers that i wrote as a philosophy major, a box of things that remind me of the good things in life before i was dying all the time, a box of random books about hegelian dialecticism and how it shaped 20th century france (don't ask, cuz i don't know), and a box of old clothes. i chose to put those things in boxes, and i chose to put those things in boxes with the things they are there with. nobody told me, 'put all these things in designated boxes, and they have to go together or i'll shoot you!' the whole point of the box is that i put what i want in there, and i group it according to how i want to group it. otherwise, if things that i don't associate with other things in the box will not be found. i will simply not think to look for 'The French Postmodernist and the Crisis in Reason' in the box of things that remind me of the good things in life before i was dying all the time.
now, boxes are great and all, but there is are times where it is counterintuitive to put things in boxes, and that time is this: any situation where boxes don't exist, which is almost every situation that people run into trouble with other people...and often when people run into trouble with other people, it puts them at odds with themselves.
I pledged a fraternity this year, which was a huge (i don't even think there exists enough text-manipulable importance connotators to express how big it was) faith thing for me. i literally knew when i was told about it that i had to pledge. i didn't know why, and i didn't know what was going to come of it, but i did know that what was going to come of it was good, whether i got in or not, despite how much pain it was going to cause me, despite how weird i was gonna end up being...again, i just knew. and that's ridiculous, because i sometimes feel like i actually knew more 3 days after becoming a christian than i do since...and i definitely knew more than before i converted.
why?
it wasn't because i was hopeful about any of it. i was actually quite the opposite, but in a weird way: because i had peace about it but felt like i had no reason to feel peace about it (which is weirdly a form of anxiety. it's called paradoxical empathetic anxiety. it's ridiculous and makes you question your sanity when you've only ever experienced the kind that makes you feel like you're dying, cuz instead you feel like you should be feeling like you're dying...but you aren't feeling like you're dying.). i seriously felt compelled to pledge, even though my experiences said, 'NO!! YOU ARE GOING TO START DYING AGAIN AND ALL THIS SUMMER'S REHABILITATION AND GETTING YOUR LIFE BACK TOGETHER WILL BE A WASTE!!!' it was mostly unexplainable. mostly.
but anyway, back to boxes: all the people in my fraternity are at least a little off beat...in a way. but the way that they are all a little off beat is that...we don't recognize a beat that we have to synchronize to. the idea of this metaphysical beat is preposterous in itself, because the beat is a supposed self and is strictly theoretical. that makes little sense, so i will try to clarify with an example: when i first met all the active brothers as a pledge, i looked around and knew which ones i would like most and which ones i would really really really not like, just by hearing what they talked about and to a degree what they looked like (mind you, i had been a Christian for approximately 1 month at the time), but the detrimental part failed to be in who i discriminated against. the problem lied wholly in what formed the discrimination: the box.
there's this guy in my frat. he's really cool. he reminded me of my roommate from carolina: quiet, gentle, football-loving, criminal justice major, guy's guy. so naturally, since i identified with most of who he was more than the other brothers, i decided that i was gonna hang around him, because he reminded me of one of the last good things in my life before i started dying all the time (ie panic attacks, meth, anorexia, alcoholism, existential crisis): my roommate, Foster. i loved that kid. we would drink, chew backy, talk about katy perry's endowments, stumble back drunk to the dorm from 5-points, i would pass out and he would skype with his girlfriend. it was good to have a friend. and it was good to have someone who reminded me of that friend in the fraternity. but it was not good that i had an idea of him prior to extensive exposure. he caused me to go into existential crisis mode a lot...and most of the brothers did for that matter actually; sometimes as a unit, sometimes individually. anyway, since i thought he was much like a country bumpkin, i had a hard time with anything that he did that was not country bumpkin-y...such as like Lady Gaga. i literally remember thinking, 'that's not fair, he's not allowed to be goo-goo for Gaga! I'M GOO-GOO FOR GAGA!'
i didn't think it was wrong for him to like Lady Gaga any more than i thought it was wrong for me to, but the inconsistency of his personality made me a little bit angry, i will admit. it confused me, because people chrono-synclastically elsewhere in my life fit in boxes, and suddenly i'm thrown into a whole new world where boxes don't contain people...and it turns out never actually did. i was miffed, scared, confused, and felt very alone, because my classical torture was being different than other people...not that i wasn't the same, and now that suddenly everything i had previously concluded about the world was counterfactual to at least 1 person not myself, i could have exploded with what was going through my head. but instead of exploding, i just had a panic attack and called it a day.
and prayed. a LOT.
but the next day, i started realizing that most people i came across were less boxy than i had imagined them to be. my religion professor had an obsession with differentiating apocryphal literature from pseudepigraphal literature, my government professor was a Tennessee redneck conservative single mother with a black boyfriend who loves nascar (both of them actually), my beefy tennis instructor was went to a drag show over the weekend, my 80 year old computer science instructor likes Group1crew, my dad is a violinist and loves football, my mom puts tinsel in her hair recreationally, my granfather thought beef was blue until told otherwise...and my roommate from winthrop had panic attacks, and his best friend was a theater major who agreed with me that the girl from 'Dead Like Me' was weirdly hot. all of these people i had considered 'normal' until told otherwise, and when i realized this is when the fabric of reality started mending itself...with itself. (consider the prospect of mending reality with anything other than reality. it would make it not reality if part of it is unreal).
i am not necessarily an 'other'...unless i want to be. i could think of overt counterexamples to normalcy in every person in my life, but my problem couldn't be solved by just the people in my life; it had to be solved by the world at large, because the people in my life will not necessarily be the people in my life 10 years from now, so i did some investigating, and i concluded that i belong in France
...and Spain. and Nepal. and Turkey. and China. and Chile. and Australia. and Canada. and Germany...and America...and with the rest of the world, even when i can't see it, because just because i can't see it doesn't mean it's not true. 'trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways, acknowledge Him, and He will set your paths straight.' my own understanding led me to doubt, hopelessness, depression, anxiety, drug abuse, alcoholism, addiction, anorexia, other-ness, solipsism, narcissism, obsessive compulsions, and functionlessness. if i recognize that, then what reason do i have to go back to my own understanding?
so, given that people are not boxes, what are they then?
they are containers, meant to contain the power of God, not a personality. think of the personality as just the kind of container God is using his power through.
i like to think of myself as a gatorade container. i don't know why. maybe cuz i like to run...and gatorade's delicious.
almost.
there is a soultion, but we will investigate that after i've attempted to convince you about boxes.
boxes are where we put things that we want to go together in the physical world. i have a box full of shoes that i don't wear (and don't see myself wearing) but refuse to part with, i have a box full of old papers that i wrote as a philosophy major, a box of things that remind me of the good things in life before i was dying all the time, a box of random books about hegelian dialecticism and how it shaped 20th century france (don't ask, cuz i don't know), and a box of old clothes. i chose to put those things in boxes, and i chose to put those things in boxes with the things they are there with. nobody told me, 'put all these things in designated boxes, and they have to go together or i'll shoot you!' the whole point of the box is that i put what i want in there, and i group it according to how i want to group it. otherwise, if things that i don't associate with other things in the box will not be found. i will simply not think to look for 'The French Postmodernist and the Crisis in Reason' in the box of things that remind me of the good things in life before i was dying all the time.
now, boxes are great and all, but there is are times where it is counterintuitive to put things in boxes, and that time is this: any situation where boxes don't exist, which is almost every situation that people run into trouble with other people...and often when people run into trouble with other people, it puts them at odds with themselves.
I pledged a fraternity this year, which was a huge (i don't even think there exists enough text-manipulable importance connotators to express how big it was) faith thing for me. i literally knew when i was told about it that i had to pledge. i didn't know why, and i didn't know what was going to come of it, but i did know that what was going to come of it was good, whether i got in or not, despite how much pain it was going to cause me, despite how weird i was gonna end up being...again, i just knew. and that's ridiculous, because i sometimes feel like i actually knew more 3 days after becoming a christian than i do since...and i definitely knew more than before i converted.
why?
it wasn't because i was hopeful about any of it. i was actually quite the opposite, but in a weird way: because i had peace about it but felt like i had no reason to feel peace about it (which is weirdly a form of anxiety. it's called paradoxical empathetic anxiety. it's ridiculous and makes you question your sanity when you've only ever experienced the kind that makes you feel like you're dying, cuz instead you feel like you should be feeling like you're dying...but you aren't feeling like you're dying.). i seriously felt compelled to pledge, even though my experiences said, 'NO!! YOU ARE GOING TO START DYING AGAIN AND ALL THIS SUMMER'S REHABILITATION AND GETTING YOUR LIFE BACK TOGETHER WILL BE A WASTE!!!' it was mostly unexplainable. mostly.
but anyway, back to boxes: all the people in my fraternity are at least a little off beat...in a way. but the way that they are all a little off beat is that...we don't recognize a beat that we have to synchronize to. the idea of this metaphysical beat is preposterous in itself, because the beat is a supposed self and is strictly theoretical. that makes little sense, so i will try to clarify with an example: when i first met all the active brothers as a pledge, i looked around and knew which ones i would like most and which ones i would really really really not like, just by hearing what they talked about and to a degree what they looked like (mind you, i had been a Christian for approximately 1 month at the time), but the detrimental part failed to be in who i discriminated against. the problem lied wholly in what formed the discrimination: the box.
there's this guy in my frat. he's really cool. he reminded me of my roommate from carolina: quiet, gentle, football-loving, criminal justice major, guy's guy. so naturally, since i identified with most of who he was more than the other brothers, i decided that i was gonna hang around him, because he reminded me of one of the last good things in my life before i started dying all the time (ie panic attacks, meth, anorexia, alcoholism, existential crisis): my roommate, Foster. i loved that kid. we would drink, chew backy, talk about katy perry's endowments, stumble back drunk to the dorm from 5-points, i would pass out and he would skype with his girlfriend. it was good to have a friend. and it was good to have someone who reminded me of that friend in the fraternity. but it was not good that i had an idea of him prior to extensive exposure. he caused me to go into existential crisis mode a lot...and most of the brothers did for that matter actually; sometimes as a unit, sometimes individually. anyway, since i thought he was much like a country bumpkin, i had a hard time with anything that he did that was not country bumpkin-y...such as like Lady Gaga. i literally remember thinking, 'that's not fair, he's not allowed to be goo-goo for Gaga! I'M GOO-GOO FOR GAGA!'
i didn't think it was wrong for him to like Lady Gaga any more than i thought it was wrong for me to, but the inconsistency of his personality made me a little bit angry, i will admit. it confused me, because people chrono-synclastically elsewhere in my life fit in boxes, and suddenly i'm thrown into a whole new world where boxes don't contain people...and it turns out never actually did. i was miffed, scared, confused, and felt very alone, because my classical torture was being different than other people...not that i wasn't the same, and now that suddenly everything i had previously concluded about the world was counterfactual to at least 1 person not myself, i could have exploded with what was going through my head. but instead of exploding, i just had a panic attack and called it a day.
and prayed. a LOT.
but the next day, i started realizing that most people i came across were less boxy than i had imagined them to be. my religion professor had an obsession with differentiating apocryphal literature from pseudepigraphal literature, my government professor was a Tennessee redneck conservative single mother with a black boyfriend who loves nascar (both of them actually), my beefy tennis instructor was went to a drag show over the weekend, my 80 year old computer science instructor likes Group1crew, my dad is a violinist and loves football, my mom puts tinsel in her hair recreationally, my granfather thought beef was blue until told otherwise...and my roommate from winthrop had panic attacks, and his best friend was a theater major who agreed with me that the girl from 'Dead Like Me' was weirdly hot. all of these people i had considered 'normal' until told otherwise, and when i realized this is when the fabric of reality started mending itself...with itself. (consider the prospect of mending reality with anything other than reality. it would make it not reality if part of it is unreal).
i am not necessarily an 'other'...unless i want to be. i could think of overt counterexamples to normalcy in every person in my life, but my problem couldn't be solved by just the people in my life; it had to be solved by the world at large, because the people in my life will not necessarily be the people in my life 10 years from now, so i did some investigating, and i concluded that i belong in France
...and Spain. and Nepal. and Turkey. and China. and Chile. and Australia. and Canada. and Germany...and America...and with the rest of the world, even when i can't see it, because just because i can't see it doesn't mean it's not true. 'trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways, acknowledge Him, and He will set your paths straight.' my own understanding led me to doubt, hopelessness, depression, anxiety, drug abuse, alcoholism, addiction, anorexia, other-ness, solipsism, narcissism, obsessive compulsions, and functionlessness. if i recognize that, then what reason do i have to go back to my own understanding?
so, given that people are not boxes, what are they then?
they are containers, meant to contain the power of God, not a personality. think of the personality as just the kind of container God is using his power through.
i like to think of myself as a gatorade container. i don't know why. maybe cuz i like to run...and gatorade's delicious.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
The Art of Sonship.
have you ever messed up majorly bad and thought to yourself, 'oh my God! You are so...dumb! you'll never hear the end of this!' well, i have some hope for you, if this is the case: That thought didn't come from God. it is mostly indistinguishable where exactly that thought originated (yourself or otherwise), but it exactly did not come from God, that is to be sure.
so, knowing that it did not come from God is usually not enough for most people (high Theologians included) to accept right away after incidence occurred, which is the nature of co-incidence in general. to go on, i have to distinguish coincidences and co-incidences: coincidences are strictly dependent upon the existence of incidences, the idea that any two (or more) incidences can happen in the same general frame of time and space without a recognizable cause and form an extraordinary situation (ie 'what a coincidence, running in to you here...at the mall...where i used to work...oh, and you still like the same music you liked last summer...what a small world, you know i still live here too, and you seem to, too...' as if it's wholly unreasonable for two people to see eachother in a place where they both have ties and um... exist!), but co-incidences are different, in that they are not dependent upon the existence of incidences but rather the existence of existences. by 'existence of existences,' i mostly refer to different existences, in a way essential differences, like how i am essentially whole (ie my essence is founded upon the idea that my existence is made whole) and how much of the world around me not only is not essentially whole but self-definitively fractional and even goes so far as to shout the idea from every store window and food court, telling us to make ourselves whole with a new phone, or a new style, or a new box of random cheap stuff you probably won't want once you know what's inside (i saw this once and thought it was funny: my friend was consumed with 'what's in the box?' she was essentially unwhole in her knowledge of the box' contents. if she sought it and bought it, i could tell which was more important to her: the prospect of knowing the contents of the box and being disappointed, or the prospect of not having the box.). the problem with the clash of essences is that, even though there are things i hate about my former self (namely the activities which i expressed best by my non-whole essence), i still miss the familiarity, but never until faced with the familiarity, oddly enough. but frustratingly not oddly enough to not desire familiarity.
now that i don't smoke, i don't want a cigarette until i think about a cigarette. i don't go around the whole day thinking, 'i quit smoking in July, but i want a cigarette.' that would only be 'quitting for now', instead of what i did: decided that cigarettes could not fulfill me anylonger, that they were counterproductive to a full life, and now that my nature is decidedly unfounded in smoking (or satisfaction from smoking), i the opposite of think about smoking. it's kinda what non-smokers do and kinda what makes quitting ridiculously difficult for those who try and those around them: that they are turning away from cigarettes, knowing full well that they can go to the store at any time and buy a pack or that they can run into a person with a cigarette almost anywhere given that it's outside (which you don't really think of how big 'outside' is until you want a cigarette and know all you have to do is stay in the store with your dad until he's done haggling with the clerk, but simultaneously all you have to do is 'go to the car' *wink wink* for your special thing *wink wink* that's in the car that you for some reason need right now at the end of your trip to k-mart that makes your shopping experience complete *wink wink*).
Dad totally knew. He knew i didn't need my ipod at check-out, he knew why i was avoiding him for the previous 5 minutes, and he knew that if i actually did retrieve my ipod from the car that the ipod wasn't the reason for the trip. it was to be satisfied. by a cigarette. a chrono-synclasitcally counterintuitive thing (a cigarette is only functional as its ability to be smoked. think about it: a cigarette is only good for the moment, because outside of the moment, it's just carbon monoxide as ash and smoke, tar, and tar-stained brown cotton, and those things are not satisfying, epecially the cotton *cringes*...and they certainly aren't productive. no, it's just the cigarette that's producitive of those unproductive, counterproductive things.)...and the ride home is awkward, me just chilling in the passenger's seat with my ipod in my ears pretending to be consumed by the dead bug on my window, knowing that my dad smells the smoke, because my brother was a gas pumper and pumped gas for people while they sat in their car and smoked with the window cracked and sometimes blew the smoke in his face deliberately to demonstrate their superiority (which is unfortunate because had they realized that the attendant needed to be inferior to commit his time to the fun life of pumping gas for other people and knowing that not all will appreciate it but still just being thankful that there are those who do enough that it justifies the exposure to the elements, harassment, and the sacrifice of fun for duty.), dad also knowing that i was likely less than pleased with myself, and him also knowing that i wanted to tell him really badly that i messed up even though he already knew and i knew it.
just the sheer torutre of the awkward anxiety and turmoil i faced over smoking a cigarette, not murder, not rape, not herion, not anything that's gonna land me a nickel, just a cigarette. but the tortue did not come from smoking the cigarette. the torutre came from what i perceived my dad to be thinking: how mad i thought he was gonna be, how much he was gonna fuss about why i can't just say i'm gonna do something and stick with it, how much he was gonna tell me that i can never do anything right, how much i figured he saw me differently now that i went back to smoking after i told him that i was done. and how i knew i was gonna feel like death on the inside until i told him but was too scared of not being loved the same. but the truth of the matter is that my dad cannot not love me.
we are biologicall tied. his d.n.a signature in embedded in my d.n.a.signature, and there is nothing i can do about that. but we are not only biollgically tied, because i am just as biologically tied to my brother. me and my dad are psychologically tied too in that we share commonalities with eachother that i got from him, and we are socially tied because all my freinds know he is my dad, but we are tied another way, and this is the coolest way if you ask me. me and my dad have a cool thing going on where he's my dad, especially when i don't want him to be.
i mean we were almost home when i blurted out, 'Oh my God! I smoked an effing cigarette, okay? what's the big effing deal?!?!' and my dad looks at me, not surprised and says, 'finally! now I can tell you that it's not the end of the world, that crap happens, you're not going to Hell or anything ridiculous like that, and that now we can make a guideline for when we are out: knowing that i know that you are tempted to smoke when we are out, and knowing that you know that i know you really want a cigarette especially when we are out, if you stay with me and other health junkies like your brother (i mean, dude has muscles like you wouldn't believe and he knows how nasty smoking is in that he wasn't a smoker but was constantly surrounded by them), you will not pounce on the opportunity to smoke...and if you do think you're being rull sneaky, just know that you're not and that if you decide to sneak away again you'll feel like crap on the ride home and you'll tear me up on the inside knowing that you aren't telling me something because you're afraid i won't like you the same as before. ouch dude. who told you that?!'
in which case i shrug, and he hugs me and says, 'maybe when you're a dad you'll be able to see that i won't disown you, especailly over something as assinine as a cigarette, and that being a father and being a DAD are two different things:
i was your FATHER before you accepted me as your father and i punished you when you were bad as a kid (you shoudla seen your brother. i practically took the anger and hatered i had for the world out on him, so now i can chill with you the way i originally wanted!), but now...now, you're a grown man and we can be friends and i can tell you what you're doing wrong, mano y mano, because you recognize that i probably know a little more than you sometimes think i do and know that being a son means that you have to have a father, but there is nothing contained in the concept of fatherhood that i had to have been a son. i mean, i was...kinda...but just know that if i call you my son (ie i let you call me dad and enjoy you being my son, we hang out, have these neat little talks, you allow me to help you get healthy), you should consider that i am older and wiser sheerly in that i am a dad and you are not and that my ways are unknown to you (such as what we experienced in the car) and that this is proof (the relief that you have that i am not kicking you off the health club employee roster over this little thing you thought was sooooo big and that happiness that you have that i accept that you aren't always like me but i will not settle for letting you do dumb stuff) that i love you. it is all proof that i love you.
so, knowing that it did not come from God is usually not enough for most people (high Theologians included) to accept right away after incidence occurred, which is the nature of co-incidence in general. to go on, i have to distinguish coincidences and co-incidences: coincidences are strictly dependent upon the existence of incidences, the idea that any two (or more) incidences can happen in the same general frame of time and space without a recognizable cause and form an extraordinary situation (ie 'what a coincidence, running in to you here...at the mall...where i used to work...oh, and you still like the same music you liked last summer...what a small world, you know i still live here too, and you seem to, too...' as if it's wholly unreasonable for two people to see eachother in a place where they both have ties and um... exist!), but co-incidences are different, in that they are not dependent upon the existence of incidences but rather the existence of existences. by 'existence of existences,' i mostly refer to different existences, in a way essential differences, like how i am essentially whole (ie my essence is founded upon the idea that my existence is made whole) and how much of the world around me not only is not essentially whole but self-definitively fractional and even goes so far as to shout the idea from every store window and food court, telling us to make ourselves whole with a new phone, or a new style, or a new box of random cheap stuff you probably won't want once you know what's inside (i saw this once and thought it was funny: my friend was consumed with 'what's in the box?' she was essentially unwhole in her knowledge of the box' contents. if she sought it and bought it, i could tell which was more important to her: the prospect of knowing the contents of the box and being disappointed, or the prospect of not having the box.). the problem with the clash of essences is that, even though there are things i hate about my former self (namely the activities which i expressed best by my non-whole essence), i still miss the familiarity, but never until faced with the familiarity, oddly enough. but frustratingly not oddly enough to not desire familiarity.
now that i don't smoke, i don't want a cigarette until i think about a cigarette. i don't go around the whole day thinking, 'i quit smoking in July, but i want a cigarette.' that would only be 'quitting for now', instead of what i did: decided that cigarettes could not fulfill me anylonger, that they were counterproductive to a full life, and now that my nature is decidedly unfounded in smoking (or satisfaction from smoking), i the opposite of think about smoking. it's kinda what non-smokers do and kinda what makes quitting ridiculously difficult for those who try and those around them: that they are turning away from cigarettes, knowing full well that they can go to the store at any time and buy a pack or that they can run into a person with a cigarette almost anywhere given that it's outside (which you don't really think of how big 'outside' is until you want a cigarette and know all you have to do is stay in the store with your dad until he's done haggling with the clerk, but simultaneously all you have to do is 'go to the car' *wink wink* for your special thing *wink wink* that's in the car that you for some reason need right now at the end of your trip to k-mart that makes your shopping experience complete *wink wink*).
Dad totally knew. He knew i didn't need my ipod at check-out, he knew why i was avoiding him for the previous 5 minutes, and he knew that if i actually did retrieve my ipod from the car that the ipod wasn't the reason for the trip. it was to be satisfied. by a cigarette. a chrono-synclasitcally counterintuitive thing (a cigarette is only functional as its ability to be smoked. think about it: a cigarette is only good for the moment, because outside of the moment, it's just carbon monoxide as ash and smoke, tar, and tar-stained brown cotton, and those things are not satisfying, epecially the cotton *cringes*...and they certainly aren't productive. no, it's just the cigarette that's producitive of those unproductive, counterproductive things.)...and the ride home is awkward, me just chilling in the passenger's seat with my ipod in my ears pretending to be consumed by the dead bug on my window, knowing that my dad smells the smoke, because my brother was a gas pumper and pumped gas for people while they sat in their car and smoked with the window cracked and sometimes blew the smoke in his face deliberately to demonstrate their superiority (which is unfortunate because had they realized that the attendant needed to be inferior to commit his time to the fun life of pumping gas for other people and knowing that not all will appreciate it but still just being thankful that there are those who do enough that it justifies the exposure to the elements, harassment, and the sacrifice of fun for duty.), dad also knowing that i was likely less than pleased with myself, and him also knowing that i wanted to tell him really badly that i messed up even though he already knew and i knew it.
just the sheer torutre of the awkward anxiety and turmoil i faced over smoking a cigarette, not murder, not rape, not herion, not anything that's gonna land me a nickel, just a cigarette. but the tortue did not come from smoking the cigarette. the torutre came from what i perceived my dad to be thinking: how mad i thought he was gonna be, how much he was gonna fuss about why i can't just say i'm gonna do something and stick with it, how much he was gonna tell me that i can never do anything right, how much i figured he saw me differently now that i went back to smoking after i told him that i was done. and how i knew i was gonna feel like death on the inside until i told him but was too scared of not being loved the same. but the truth of the matter is that my dad cannot not love me.
we are biologicall tied. his d.n.a signature in embedded in my d.n.a.signature, and there is nothing i can do about that. but we are not only biollgically tied, because i am just as biologically tied to my brother. me and my dad are psychologically tied too in that we share commonalities with eachother that i got from him, and we are socially tied because all my freinds know he is my dad, but we are tied another way, and this is the coolest way if you ask me. me and my dad have a cool thing going on where he's my dad, especially when i don't want him to be.
i mean we were almost home when i blurted out, 'Oh my God! I smoked an effing cigarette, okay? what's the big effing deal?!?!' and my dad looks at me, not surprised and says, 'finally! now I can tell you that it's not the end of the world, that crap happens, you're not going to Hell or anything ridiculous like that, and that now we can make a guideline for when we are out: knowing that i know that you are tempted to smoke when we are out, and knowing that you know that i know you really want a cigarette especially when we are out, if you stay with me and other health junkies like your brother (i mean, dude has muscles like you wouldn't believe and he knows how nasty smoking is in that he wasn't a smoker but was constantly surrounded by them), you will not pounce on the opportunity to smoke...and if you do think you're being rull sneaky, just know that you're not and that if you decide to sneak away again you'll feel like crap on the ride home and you'll tear me up on the inside knowing that you aren't telling me something because you're afraid i won't like you the same as before. ouch dude. who told you that?!'
in which case i shrug, and he hugs me and says, 'maybe when you're a dad you'll be able to see that i won't disown you, especailly over something as assinine as a cigarette, and that being a father and being a DAD are two different things:
i was your FATHER before you accepted me as your father and i punished you when you were bad as a kid (you shoudla seen your brother. i practically took the anger and hatered i had for the world out on him, so now i can chill with you the way i originally wanted!), but now...now, you're a grown man and we can be friends and i can tell you what you're doing wrong, mano y mano, because you recognize that i probably know a little more than you sometimes think i do and know that being a son means that you have to have a father, but there is nothing contained in the concept of fatherhood that i had to have been a son. i mean, i was...kinda...but just know that if i call you my son (ie i let you call me dad and enjoy you being my son, we hang out, have these neat little talks, you allow me to help you get healthy), you should consider that i am older and wiser sheerly in that i am a dad and you are not and that my ways are unknown to you (such as what we experienced in the car) and that this is proof (the relief that you have that i am not kicking you off the health club employee roster over this little thing you thought was sooooo big and that happiness that you have that i accept that you aren't always like me but i will not settle for letting you do dumb stuff) that i love you. it is all proof that i love you.
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