| Goals... I need Goals... |
[Jan. 20th, 2009|09:23 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | kinda scattershotbrained | ] |
I tend to just intuit, assume, fill-in-the-blanks, stop-gap, and toss.
When I have ideas, I tend to follow them as long as the new idea seems fun, and then abandon them when they become work. I'm a past master of unfinished projects.
I have ideas, and ideas about those ideas, and ideas about what I should be doing with the ideas and their ideas.
I don't yet have anything written down. That's part of the problem.
There is no skeleton. There is no framework on which I can paste my ideas, to organize them into a coherent whole. Mostly because there's no reason to have one.
And therefore, there's no reason to direct my writing towards any particular goal.
But, you see, I have... well, if not, properly speaking, goals, then at least targets, aims that it might be... desirable to attain.
So, what I need to do is list what they are.
Then list what it would take to achieve them.
There are at least 3 reasons I can think of for me to start writing on a regular basis. Reasons why I would want to.
We'll see. Expect more later.
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| Who wants to be a SuperVillain? |
[Jan. 10th, 2009|12:22 pm] |
So.
I've been exposed to fictional serial-killers, whom in my personal antipathy toward the human race I have elevated to the status of personal hero.
I've also been encouraged to pursue a career as an evil-genius supervillain.
These are not completely mutually exclusive but they do have very different MO'S and psychological mindsets.
That my closest friends are telling me these things does nothing to persuade me that a life of moral saintliness is within my grasp.
So, I am asking you, gentle reader: SuperVillain or Serial Killer? In which evil profession do you see me fulfilling my destiny? By all means, please give me your thoughts.
Bonus points will be awarded for coming up with a psychologically feasible way in which the aims and goals and MO's of both can be harmoniously integrated into a single evil career. |
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| A Facebook-inspired pity-party |
[Dec. 4th, 2008|09:37 pm] |
Good thing about Facebook: getting in touch with people I knew from 10 years ago, my days at Samford. Almost ANYONE I knew then I had, till now, completely lost touch with. This is absolutely a blast from the past and a wonderful chance to connect with people I haven't heard from in far too long.
Like everything else, there is a dark side. Everyone I knew is married, it seems. They are proceeding apace in their careers, sometimes even on second careers.
Let's leave aside things that really sting - like, for example, my perpetual failure to ever find anyone remotely interesting who is remotely interested. (the universal rule about women is that the more we have in common, or the better we seem to get along, or the more potential there seems to be that the girl and I could get along wonderfully and have something incredible, the more certain that she won't be interested in anything beyond friendship.) (It's not that i'm depressed about being single: it's that I'm depressed that it doesn't matter what I do, where I go, how hard I try, or why things are the way they are: my status never changes because girls who could actually relate to me meaningfully are VERY rare, and ALL of them are either already taken or not the least bit attracted to me.)
I don't know, exactly, what set this off, but I'm pretty sure it was seeing the names of a couple of girls I knew at Samford, with their new last names, names of the guys they married, guys they met way back then. Wow, 10 years out and these guys are married, still together, they found something successful back then and it worked and 10 years later there lives still have the shape they assumed way back when and wow maybe relationships and marriage and all that are the norm and not the exception so WHY THE HELL..........
I'm just... tired. Really. Sick and tired and disgusted and frustrated and angry and hurt and sad and depressed. I mean, seriously, why me? Why ME??? How can I NOT feel... alone, how can I not feel like some degree of failure, no career, nothing to show for my time, no progress on anything of note, nothing to point to and say "This is who I have been, what I have done, in the last decade"... and if all of THAT weren't enough, not only am I AS alone as I was, way back when, but I also seem to have this RELENTLESS and UNENDING and UNBROKEN and PERMANENT fate, decreed since before the Big Bang itself, that under NO circumstances am I EVER to actually find someone I might really be interested in who will be interested in turn in me.
But you know what the real bitch of it is? This is me NOT looking. I'm not. I'm not looking for a relationship, I can think of several reasons why it would be a bad idea for me, reasons I agree with, and am choosing to do other things with my time. (I mean, it's not as if actually TRYING to find someone out there has ever yielded anything close to positive results, so why bother?) So, this isn't, really, the sting of rejection I'm feeling so much as the frantic restlessness of despair. As in, I'm not getting any younger, my opportunities aren't falling thick on the ground, so that I need a higher success rate or an increased number of opportunities just to stay even; not only are neither forthcoming, but the better it seems my prospects the worse they end up actually being.
I had so much potential and promise, so long ago. Now I feel I have nothing, and no one to share it with, too. And neither looks like it's going to change anytime soon. |
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| Random ramblings |
[Oct. 24th, 2008|09:20 pm] |
At times like this, it's hard not to think of yourself as some sort of failure....
I wish I had the excuse of feeling broody right now. I don't even have that: dark, melancholy moods are a young man's game, back when nothing is quite so important as whatever it is that is absolutely the most important. It would be nice to say I have "more important" concerns pressing upon me but unfortunately there simply isn't all that much there. I'm bored. I'm bored, restless, somewhat lonely (not remotely crushingly so), and pondering how things could have gotten here in the first place.
I suppose things are not as socially dire as all that. After all, my best friend is watching his daughter on the weekend that his grandmother died and he's getting ready for a trip to California, so he isn't exactly free at the moment; there's a party going on tonight that I specifically didn't go to, not because I didn't want to, but because I was with the group last weekend and will be with them again tomorrow and probably for Halloween, and I don't want to tip my hand to the fact that they are pretty much my only social outlet; and there's a phone number that I got from a girl at work this morning, but I'm not going to call that number till tomorrow anyway. So, I'm not exactly a social pariah; I'm just being socially selective.
The problem is that I have time, and I should be writing, but I'm not writing when I said that what I wanted to do is want to be writing. This just doesn't seem all that much like obsession to me.
It's not that I don't want to write. After all, I'm here writing this, now, so it's not as if I'm running screaming from the prospect of (by the way, those old ladies, perched like vultures, in front of the coffee bar, are really {expletive deleted} annoying) writing. But the fact remains that right now I feel that there are things that I could be having, that in a certain sense I should be having, and yet I'm not having them; and in not having them I'm failing to be... rewarded as I should be, perhaps?
I think it's the fact that I'm bored. The golden mean and all that: if I'm too immersed in socialization, I never focus on getting things done; if I'm too isolated I go stir crazy and my sanity starts slipping. (Now it's a stupid idiot teenage boy. Damn a world full of losers!) (Bottom line, I'm not a people person.) The problem (well, one of them anyway: far be it from me to claim to have cured myself of a raging host) is that I don't quite have ADHD, in much the same way I don't quite have Bipolar Disorder, or I'm not quite a narcissist. I'm probably not quite a genius, either....
I'm a 95-percenter. Maybe 90. Probably 89, now that I think about it: good enough on sheer talent to do better than almost anyone, to do really, really well, and therefore completely allergic to ANY kind of effort whatsoever....
Except, that that's not it. It's the sterilization: It's the fact that I'm tired of the only person I'm sharing my thoughts with is me. It's hard to be motivated when all you have to look forward to is more of the same....
There's a part of me that recognizes, or at least believes, that personal wholeness lies in the direction of success, and that success lies in the direction of dedication; but there's a part of me that suspects that success won't happen until I'm so fully engaged in my work - and by that, I ALSO mean socially - that I can't think of anything else to do.
How the HELL do I get there from here? |
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| Idle thoughts... |
[Oct. 17th, 2008|10:58 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | BN, Bridgestreet | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  contemplative | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Dvorak, New World Symphony | ] |
I don't have to be angry...
Had a couple of interesting conversations tonight.
That's always the way it is when I'm hanging out with the NAFA people.
Socialization has been on my mind quite a bit lately.
Mostly the fact that I hardly do any of it. That I don't know how to doesn't help. That I don't know where to go to do it is also beneficial. That in my current state of mind I'm slightly less misogynistic than Arab culture is similarly salutary.
As a general rule I deal with this particular melange of moods by (when I think about it) trying to convince myself that I what I really want is to sell myself to writing so that I end up being successful; and from a position of success worrying about socializing (generally) and women (specifically).
Yes, there are reasons why I'm feeling misogynistic. No I'm not going to discuss them now. Yes I've written on them in LJ. No, I haven't published that post yet. Or much finished it for that matter. The long story short is: I don't trust women (as women; I have very good and very close female friends whom I trust as people, as friends; but they're not in my dating pool. I can't look at a girl I might be tempted to date and manage to muster sufficient positive opinions, and put in abeyance sufficient negative ones, to convince myself it would be worth the trouble). I've been beaten and scarred very badly; and short of either a) adopting a naively romantic stance or b) becoming intolerantly hostile to women generally, the best coping mechanism I can devise at the moment is just pure emotional suppression/repression. I will simply ignore both the attraction and the repulsion, the hope and the fear, the delight and the anger; I will simply act as if none of it exists, as if this were not a part of my life that is still open and gaping and raw, and attempt to focus my energies on that which I know I must accomplish to succeed.
I don't have to be angry. I'm trying to be dedicated; hell, I'm trying to be obsessed. And thinking like that does, honestly, help. But I can tell that there are definitely parts of me that doesn't like that things are this way. Unfortunately they cannot think of any other way they can be.
I only wish that sometimes I could forget all of the above. |
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| Better living through mood-altering chemicals... |
[Oct. 8th, 2008|08:37 pm] |
Don't inhale cigar smoke.
I was in a down mood two hours ago.
I was feeling rather melancholy. Recalling that it has been a year since I moved here.
My headspace is, if not necessarily more stable, then at least more consolidated and grounded, than it was a year ago. Nothing left to who I am but who I am, and all I have to do is make of myself what I will. And all that.
I was remembering Gwynne's family. The feeling of belonging I had with them. Autumn is the season for wanting-to-belong. And while I'm not feeling particularly alienated from my family, I am so far from where I want to be that connecting to them is... out of the question at this point. I'm feeling somewhat alone but not ready to arrive yet.
I was writing out a letter that I thought I might want to send to her mom and stepdad, with whom I had become friendly while we were together. My thoughts were rather melancholy.
I was taking solace in what little of my heritage I actually have any connection to. Some CD's of Puerto Rican music my mom used to play when I was a kid. Thinking about the the tattoo I'll (eventually) get. I was hungry. I got dinner.
At a Caribbean Restaurant.
This is when things started to get better.
I like food. I like my heritage. I like trying new things.
Jonathan was happy.
Afterwards, bookstore. Cup of (decaf) coffee and a (Puerto Rican) cigar, and I'm out here on the deck at Books-a-Million.
Life isn't great, but at least I know it doesn't have to be bad. |
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| A Sliver of Bitter |
[Oct. 5th, 2008|06:38 pm] |
There really aren’t a lot of people who know me that well.
This isn’t a knock against people who know me. It’s just an observation on how furtive I am at times.
Jake told me how is ex(-wife) tried to guilt-trip him and failed. “I’m impervious to guilt” he told her. She replied, “I know; it’s your superpower.”
I congratulated him.
It’s not difficult to guilt-trip me, IF you’re someone I have a personal attachment to. However, in the abstract, there’s a lot less that I will recoil from and say “you know, that’s a bad thing to do” if I’m left to my own devices. I have a very strong sense of right and wrong, don’t mistake me; it’s just that it fails to track things that most people would consider to be worthy of moral valuation.
There’s a reason for this, of course, though that’s not something I’ll get into now. But being responsive to the cues and expectations of others is a significant factor in how we develop, socio-ethically; correspondingly, being (mostly) unresponsive will cause one to “deviate from the norm.”
Being shaped by how we are treated and reacted to by others is a fundamental human characteristic, and once upon a time, I was very concerned to act in a way that met with others’ approval. To the extent that my moral compass does not track as most others’ do is as much an artifact of “my treatment by society” as it is my own actions and behavior.
The thing is, I am perfectly happy with the person that I am now, perfectly content to abide by the moral code by which I act now. That there are some parts of who I am that would make a majority of people’s skin crawl is, in a very real sense, no fault of my own. I am, after all, who they encouraged me to be. Once upon a time, my views, opinions, ethics, and morals were not terribly dissimilar from the ones society explicitly claims to endorse. It took quite some time for me to shed them. I may be self-made (“We are all self-made; but only the successful among us admit to it”) but I was pointed down the paths I took by the sum total of influences upon me, in no small part by the actions of others, throughout my life.
In other words, if society had truly wanted me to “play well with others” and fit nicely into it’s view of “nice” it would have done well to reward me back when I was trying to play by its rules. It didn’t.
I have abrogated the responsibility to take charge of making my own rules, and the rest of the world can go fly a kite. Had they really wanted things to turn out otherwise, they might have done well to recognize they were treating me differently than they now expect me to treat them. |
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| And here the problem lies... |
[Sep. 25th, 2008|07:51 pm] |
I had a delightful conversation earlier today with a wonderful friend. (It was evidently existential-crisis management.)
I left the conversation feeling... empowered, energized, invigorated.
I had plans.
Reality, on the other hand - well, that's not true. Reality has no plans. (I don't necessarily believe it doesn't act intentionally, but it doesn't act with any particular designs.)
Actually, Reality doesn't Act.
That is not to say that Reality does not resist. And that is what it is doing here.
You have to want it bad enough. Well, DO you?
In a word: Yes.
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alarican's journal