10 days without blogging. Does it still count? Have I ruined everything? I needed a break from internet interaction, which felt as though it included this blog even though there isn't a comment system built into it. But I find that I really can't go on without something in my life. Especially today, with Wikipedia and Reddit down to protest SOPA/PIPA, I'm forced back onto my blog. But I think I'll continue to take a break from instant messaging for the time being. I think that's the way it goes: the internet for me is some kind of lowest common denominator or junk food, such that I'll consume it only because it's so easily within reach. But, if it's taken away, I'll go out and find other things to do and other paths of intellectual/social fulfillment that actually turn out to be better -- "more nutritious" -- than the junk food. Maybe it's time to make a more conscious decision to avoid the junk food. Read Tolstoy and go to church? Maybe. Or, more like, just try to spend more time with actual people and to hell with the goddamned internet.
I might find that I type a couple of paragraphs here and then stop. Actually, come to think of it, I might officially put this blog on hiatus and try some other form of writing. I downloaded Scrivener (software for writers, supposedly), and I might try to do some fiction or something like that -- something more planned out, at least, using the fact that I put together a Master's thesis without a lot of sweat as an inspiration -- and maybe even try to earn some money from it. A blog is junk writing that you're throwing away, basically, unless you have some kind of advertising system set up. In a sense it's a waste of time. But the biggest problem with it, I think, is that I feel very constrained in what I can and cannot write. It affects my honesty, and, as Pink Floyd says, "This...will...not...do (CALL THE SCHOOLMASTER!!!!)"
I really can't do much besides write (lift heavy things? Tech support? Go back to being a barely-average pizza driver?), and it's even doubtful that I am that good a writer; people who write for fancy publications like book reviews and such are a lot better. But maybe I can exploit the "everyman" quality of my writing so that it appeals to "the everyman" -- I don't sound like I went to Harvard, but neither did most other people. I went to state universities, and I'm just yer average Joe, and maybe the other average Joes (and Janes) out there can relate.
Ever since I came back from my vacation I've been uncomfortable blogging, and haven't wanted to do it. I basically used the blog back in 2002-2007 to occupy myself. Then, in 2007-2009 I did Facebook. Sort of funny that it takes so little to occupy me. But I think now I should try to focus on something more productive. When I returned I was sort of horrified by how little I had here waiting for me -- just a clean apartment, and that's it. Oh, and Wendy's, which I'm about to head out to again, in the cold and snow.
This means no more chatting online, and no more blog. I guess I'll leave the blog up and Google searchers can find it if they want, but I'm not going to update it anymore. I guess I'll go do the Scrivener tutorial and see if I can get somewhat fluent with that software.
But I definitely need to do something else. I can't just sit here in this broken and falling-apart chair, browsing the web, chatting, and blogging, until I die in another 40 or 50 years (whatever...at some point). I'd like to make my own business in some way but I don't know what I'd sell. I'm not qualified to be a consultant in anything. So I think my only hope is really to try writing. And, I guess get a part-time job as a sewer scrubber so I don't starve or lose my apartment (or my Mac...Mac, bike, guitars -- those are the big 3 possessions). I guess the sellout path would be writing for advertisers or something like that. Or, maybe, technical writer or editor.
Maybe today is a good day for a final webcomic.
You know, I think the problem is that I don't like maintaining a dialog with readers. I'm just not a social person, and when I am forced to be or even when I elect to be social for some small amount of time I am very guarded and shy and fearful and reticent. The blog is a place where I let my guard down, and I'm not prepared for that level of vulnerability to translate into interactive forums like Facebook, SDF, or even one-on-one chat. So really, it's either one or the other: blog, or chat online. And since chatting online has been pretty unsatisfactory lately, for a number of reasons, I think I'll opt for the blog. Except I won't do the blog -- I'll do another kind of writing, and just leave the internet out of it entirely. I sort of hate the internet, both culturally and personally (I hate myself for constraining myself to it).
I think really what I want is to find that one person I can be totally comfortable with. I guess this is the drive of monogamy. But so often, that fails, and people who look for a single person to be their end-all and be-all end up disappointed. I think I'm just not cut out for human interaction to the degree most people are. That's a very conservative statement (more so than "I HATE ALL HUMANS AND WANT THEM TO SUFFER AND DIE" or something like that), and it still sounds big and sweeping.
I've done most of my personal development on the internet over the last few years, I think at the expense of developing my "real" set of social skills. When I interact with people face to face, I feel like I'm 5 years old and just can't hold a conversation. I'm fluent and cool and normal chatting online, but there's a huge gulf ...and even as I write this I keep imagining the smart-alecky comments of people in chatrooms. I just can't stand people. I'm sorry, but I can't. I don't like them. They bother me immensley, and for the most part I just want nothing to do with them. I need a break, at least, from people. Maybe this is in part a reaction to my vacation, where I spent three weeks solidly in the company of others. I really don't know. Suffice to say I have a difficult relationship with other humans.
Why are we cursed with being such a social species, and then some of us just can't handle that social aspect? How can I be a hermit (as in, how can I fund it)? And furthermore, who am I talking to now? I think I need a therapist or something because I just can't handle normal human relations. And all the while, I'm advertising to everyone -- with my real name on this website and everything -- that I'm not normal, that I have these problems. I worry that if I ever do want to join the ranks of the grinning plastic liars in their office cubicles that I'm basically signing my death warrant here. And what's interesting about it is that I'll never know the result -- it's like Hannibal Lechter says: "People don't always tell you what they're thinking. They just see to it that you don't...advance in life." I just won't hear back from any of the applications I send out, and I'll never know if it was because someone read this blog and realized that I'm insane and some kind of risk, or just because there wasn't any money in the budget. Employment is really a kind of slavery, and it's sort of amazing that so many people put up with it. Isn't it better, in a sense, to die?
But yeah...hmm. Maybe I can still write in Scrivener and still do occasional stupid and superficial blog updates, or keep doing the guitar-blog thing and draw some webcomics. I'm just crazy. I have serious problems in the way that I relate to other human beings. For a while I thought this period of mental illness was brought on by my course of Amoxicilin I was taking, but I'm not sure anymore. Could be, though. My starting and stopping it seem to coincide with this time of troubles. Or, maybe the fact that I haven't been writing has made me sick. Maybe it will start to get better now that I've started again. I feel a little better just after having written this today.
Honesty is my liability and my weakness, in this contemporary culture of secrecy and lies. But, I wonder if I can somehow turn it into a strength. Well, I feel a little better after writing. It's interesting the way I always find a way to write. Even in these few days where I abandoned my blog, I started writing long emails to people and composing letters that I'd never send. And I'm sure you want to read them! BUT YOU WON'T. See? This is largely what I don't like about blogging: I feel this constant pressure from an imaginary audience of people, and I genuinely start to hate them. They feel like desperate leering slobbering voyeurs to me, and I have very little but contempt for them; the narcissist who screams "don't look at me!"
I might be in that category of person who "has to write" -- there was A CERTAIN UNNAMED PERSON WHO SHALL REMAIN ANONYNOUS AND NOT BE NAMED with whom I was talking, during the time of my undergraduate art program, about art and artists and why artists do art, especially when it meant they stand a very good chance of being a waiter or janitor and "making art on the side." He thought that the artist didn't really have a choice -- that he HAD to do art, whether it paid or not. That's not how I feel about art, even though I got my degrees in it. I can take it or leave it -- I just sort of got sucked into it, and getting a grad degree was the best option at the time.
However, this is how I feel about writing: it's just necessary for me to express myself this way, or I'll go crazy. I feel an almost physical sense of emotional relief when I've typed something out.
Will I update again? I guess it remains to be seen. But there's no way in hell I'm returning to chatrooms and instant messaging. I don't want to say "ever" because, y'know, "never say never"...but I don't foresee it. I need to be around real people I think. A part time job would be good. Then I can write in my spare time. Yes, this is my plan.
I think the problem -- my problem -- is that I got saddled with some really crummy people over the years in my relationships, especially around age 12-22. Those are important formative years, and a bad time to learn from experience that the world at large is out to get you and hurt you. Also, that's the time in which my parents were divorced. So really, it was just a bad 10 years, defined by bad people and people doing bad things. I'm tired of the restrictive feeling writing on the internet gives to my writing. I want to be even freer and more honest, and I feel that I can't do that unless I'm writing in private. Then, when it's all done, I can change the names and publish it in one fell swoop or turn it into fiction or whatever. Or I can just sit on it.
Pat Conroy got into trouble with his family when he wrote Prince of Tides for that very reason: a lot of the "fiction" there wasn't really "fiction" at all, but taken from his own life. I think all that stuff about this crazy sister especially was objectionable, although perhaps only to his crazy sister. Haw. Anyway, my understanding is that writers often get into trouble for this -- for revealing too much and damaging relationships in their real lives. Because really, what makes for good writing is honest emotional content. That's what people like to read, and what amounts to real communication. And the place to get real, honest, emotional content is from the experiences in your own life. So unless you change the names you're going to get into trouble. You might get into trouble anyway if everyone figures out that "Biff" is really Steve (at least you'll get into trouble with Steve).
So, ok...from now on no blog. Except maybe some webcomics or guitar recordings.
I dunno what's wrong with me. I'm just crazy. OOGA BOOGA *throw feces*
But I will start on that Scrivener project. Paypal $3,984,769,832,763,984,769,386 (3.98 sextillion dollars) to mjteigen@gmail.com if you want to read it.
I'm still on my "diet" (or "permanent eating habits change" if you want to get touchy-feely), except that I didn't lose any weight last week. But this has happened before, and I think it's just a function of this diet being so slow that minor water weight and glycogen fluctuations are going to mask the tiny incremental permanent body mass losses. Interestingly, I did lose some weight over xmas vacation, and I didn't count calories: I just did a visual portion control thing, where I ate 3 meals a day and made sure they weren't all that huge (about 800 calories each, or two big meals of 1000 calories and then a little one of 500). There's a sort of halfway point between precise calorie counting and "just trying not to eat too much" that can be helpful, and I think I approached my eating control over vacation with that semi-quantititave methodology. It worked, and I lost 6 lbs over the 3 week period. Some days I know I barely ate anything -- probably like 1000 calories or so, and on others it was more like 4000. So, it evened out.
You know what's funny though...how most people agree on what constitutes human physical beauty. This is partly culturally determined, but not wholly. Some people are just better looking than others.
Some fucker is drilling something in the apartment nextdoor. Humans and their noise bother me. I don't mind crickets in the summer, for instance, so much as I mind the sound of people chattering and laughing on the front stoop.
Yeah...I really need to switch to unnetworked writing. This blog is too much for me to bear. I think the profession where honesty would be most certainly advantageous is writing (or art, or acting...anything creative and expressive). And there's some buzz around our contemporary society being less honest on the whole, so it's almost as if I'm "fighting the good fight" against all of the marketing, diplomacy, and other lies I see around me all the time.
I'm trying to waste time til 11am and Wendy's opens, but at this point I think I've exhausted my writing juice, and will have to wait til it's replenished. I think later today I'll go through that Scrivener tutorial, and then tomorrow I'll start my new life as a writer. And what's so wonderful about not interacting with anyone is that all the people laughing at me in my head will stay in my head, and the more I ignore them the fainter the laughter will become. I bet this is the reason many hermits become hermits: they just can't take people -- they take them too seriously, and take what they say too hard. Every little joke and insult leaves permanent psychological scars. Just writing, here, by myself, is incredibly peaceful, and I'd like to continue that. Even if I end up homeless or whatever, I can still just sit and write. As long as I'm able to write I'll be ok. It's like a teddy bear, and it's something I'll always be able to fall back on for comfort. I'm grateful that I have that.
I think in a large way I'm done with the internet. No more Yahoo answers, Youtube comments, forums, certainly no more Reddit -- nothing where the yowling voice of the amateur is there in all its emotionally five year old glory. I think maybe I just can't stand certain people, or people of a certain stripe, and I'm mistaking that for generalized misanthropy. But so many people are objectionable. The majority, I'd say, or at least half. Half of all people in the world are not suitable for maintaining any kind of interactive relationship with, and the other half deserve about 5 minutes a month. It's funny that I talk about marriage and wanting a woman and all that so much, because honestly I'm not sure that I could stand it. When you come right down to it, a woman is just another human being, and all the qualities that I can't stand in others are probably going to be present in her, my imaginary hypothetical companion/partner, as well.
It's kind of nice that I can tell the world to fuck off.
The American political left would be well-advised that you can foster and celebrate wealth, beauty, power and vitality without being a Nazi. Likewise, the American political right would be well-advised that you can treat others with compassion and help those unable to help themselves without self-destructive, self-loathing masochism.
In a sense the American left vs. Right political landscape is an interpretation of society, politics, and resource distribution as a zero-sum game where if others win, you have to lose; if the poor are helped the rich will be hurt, and vice versa. This isn't true. I see this combative, you-or-me world view as part of the American mindset, an inherent belligerence that affects those on the right and left (and even American political "independents" who are still steeped in that culture). This primitive and immature world view needs to be cast off in order for American society to thrive.
The USA was founded by rebels, by anti-authoritatian revolutionaries who accomplished their goals by fighting. It worked, but the problem is that the American government, as it grew out of that culture, became just as belligerent in the way it rules over its own people as early British colonists were in defeating the British Empire. Consider the number of Americans in prison and on death row, and the recently signed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows indefinite detention without trial, made into law by an administration given political license to be as violent as it wants by its constituency. There's no question that the NDAA will be used by the ruling elite to tighten their grip, just like all legislation passed in response to the events of September 11th, 2001. SOPA is a good corporate power analog to the NDAA; both are used to control and suppress people, the first under the guise of national security and the second under the guise of stopping theft.
The essential task of the American people is to see through the right vs. Left false dichotomy that's been set up and that works to keep Americans' minds off the fact that their power is being taken away steadily by a uniform coalition of elites, in government and in business. John Dewey said, "As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance", and he meant precisely what I'm trying to convey: that government and corporations are the same entity with the same goals -- to keep power for themselves and away from the majority. This realization is vital to democracy and to any healthy, contemporary society.
I see the Tea Party and the OWS protesters as essentially identical, and the fact that most politicos in the USA hate one and love the other is a glaring reflection of just how potent the polarization of American politics is, and simultaneously how little this polarization accomplishes for the people at large (on the other hand, it accomplishes a great deal for the ruling elite). Both OWS and the Tea Party are populist, democratic movements -- they're concerned with a small minority of powerful entities controlling a large majority of the population. The difference comes in the Tea Party's tendency to trust corporations, companies, and wealthy individuals to be responsible with their power, while OWS tends to trust the government to do the same. Both of these views are naive, and miss the point: that those in power will always disenfranchise the less powerful, regardless of whether these entities are labelled "government" or "corporate." The problem is not so much that there are shadowy kabals of corporate and government leaders holding secret meetings on how to oppress the masses, but that any powerful structure of elites is set to grow into a juggernaut -- all power structures work unconsciously at furthering their own power. That is their nature.
The United States is not as functional a democracy -- as in, "the people rule" -- as many Americans are told in high school and still believe. Perhaps it's time to consider a new, nonviolent American Revolution, for freedom and against tyrrany in any form. The "left" and the "right" are actually on the same side -- the side of the people, the side of democracy -- and their division serves to keep them fighting each other rather than demand fair treatment from the ruling elite (or even the dismantling of the ruling elite). The process has been, for a long time now, to erode Americans' rights slowly, one bit at a time, so the turtle having the heat gradually turned up under the pot he's swimming in won't notice that he's being boiled to death.
I wrote this on my iPod while sitting in a Quiznos in London Ontario, after having an echocardiogram. I painstakingly capitalized everything properly and did a bit of editing when I got home. I promised a political blog entry sometime over my Christmas holiday, and today I delivered. I think I'll shut up about it from now on, because I agree with the sentiment I expressed that day I said I wanted to write on politics: that "the political instinct" is not a positive mindset -- that it indicates that someone is power-hungry and wants to tell other people how they should behave. I'm not comfortable "being political," and generally I think that is just another way to phrase "being an asshole."
This is partly why I try to take a conciliatory, balanced stance between the American political "right" and "left" -- I don't want to join into a fight that I think is mostly counterproductive to the goals of either side of this weird absolutist dualism that has grow up alongside the rest of the country's culture. In fact, I think that's the key to accomplishing any sort of power equality: peace, no more fighting, no more hostility. "Be Excellent Unto Each Other."
Consider Ghandi and the Indian Independence Movement in the years surrounding the turn of the the 19th century. The lesson to be learned there is, if they come for you, don't go. You can refuse and resist without violence, which is too endemic to the causative issues in the American political problematic to be useful; the "violence begets more violence" truism is to blame for our current state of affairs, and more violence won't move toward any good goals.
I'm not schooled in political science, and I'm generally poorly-read. I just felt like writing about politics, sitting there in Quiznos, so I did. It was sort of a cultural participation thing: since so many people seem to be becoming so political lately, I thought I would too. Take it or leave it. We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog.
Well this is novel: I'm back home and have access to my PC but am choosing to blog in bed from my mobile device. My sleep hours last night were inexcusable: 7:30pm - 2:30am. 7 hours, pretty much like clockwork.
I love my ipod -- I admit it. I just wish it had a more powerful engine. As it is it slows down a lot and I have to force-quit a lot of apps. This newest ios (5.0.1 I think) does a lot of multitasking and background processes -- there are more ways for an app to interrupt other apps, and this has slowed things down considerably.
I was tired enough for bed at 7:30 yesterday because I didn't get quite enough sleep the night before (2am - 7am or so), and because I spent all day bussing and walking around doing errands. It was nice to get out. I think I'm becoming one of those people who genuinely prefers the bus to driving my own car. For one thing there's a geeky enjoyment to be derived from planning a route according to maps and schedules, but mostly I consider it a luxury to have someone else drive me around while I listen to headphones.
I think it's time to get back into the audioblogging and webcomics. Yeppers. You'll note that adhering to capitalization conventions means that I've switched to my desktop PC.
I don't feel like doing a webcomic today. It's only fair that I start slowly when getting back into blogging in my home environment.