book obsession

Here is a list of all the books that I read this year. I read books by authors from 22 different countries: Russia, France, England, Germany, South Africa, Japan, India, USA, Austria, Persia, Canada, Portugal, Brazil, Columbia, Turkey, Iraq, Peru, Iran, Algeria, Zimbabwe, Hungary, and Chile. Last year I decided that I wanted to read more Latin American writers, and I definitely did so. My reading list has a strong gender bias: only 1/5th of these were written by women. Only about 2/7 were written before the 20th century.


The List
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Candide - Voltaire
Meditations on First Philosophy - Rene Descartes
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
The Master of Petersburg - J.M. Coetzee
On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
Musui's Story - Katsu Kokichi
Fury - Salman Rushdie
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami
Adventures in Missing the Point - Campolo/McLaren
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis - Sigmund Freud
A Very Short Introduction to Globalization - Manfred Steger
Runaway World - Anthony Giddens
The End of Poverty - Jeffrey Sachs
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
The Rubaiyat - Omar Khayyam
First Snow on Fuji - Yasunari Kawabata
Beloved - Toni Morrison
The Black Company - Glen Cook
The Vagina Monologues - Eve Ensler
Ceremony - Leslie Silko
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven - Sherman Alexie
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai
Blindness - Jose Saramago
The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell -Jorge Amado
Diary of a Mad Old Man - Junichiro Tanizaki
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
City of Djinns - William Dalrymple
The Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe
The First Horseman - John Aberth
After the Quake - Haruki Murakami
The Black Book - Orhan Pamuk
Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata
Slow Man - J.M. Coetzee
Epic of Gilgamesh
Arabian Nights
The War of the Saints - Jorge Amado
Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words - Jay Rubin
Snow Country - Yasunari Kawabata
The Ark Sakura - Kobo Abe
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Baltasar and Blimunda - Jose Saramago
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
If This Be Treason - Gregory Rabassa
Confessions of an Economic Hitman - John Perkins
Baghdad Burning - Riverbend
The Makioka Sisters - Junichiro Tanizaki
In Praise of the Stepmother - Mario Vargas Llosa
Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee
Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
Fantasia - Assia Djebar
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
The Book of Not - Tsitsi Dangarembga
Adam Bede - George Eliot
The Icarus Girl - Helen Oyeyemi
The Sign of Four - Arthur Conan Doyle
Personal Knowledge - Michael Polanyi
A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle
No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
After Dark - Haruki Murakami
The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
The History of the Siege of Lisbon - Jose Saramago


Top Ten Novels (no order)
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano.
The Black Book - Orhan Pamuk
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Blindness - Jose Saramago
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

This is a pretty unsurprising list, considering what I read. They weren't necessarily the ten best reading experiences, some of them are really frustrating/exhausting books to read (Savage Detectives, One Hundred Years, Black Book). But, this is probably close to the list that I would make in 5 years looking back. I wish that everyone in the world would read Brothers Karamazov. Another reflection: I read fatty books, fatty novels, but they're often the best books I read.

All in all, I think it was a good year for reading. I don't think there's anything on the list that I regret reading. Some of what I read just wasn't very good, but I still think it was worth reading for one purpose or another. Reading ambitions for the coming year: I want to read more non-fiction. Part of this is more reading on diseases and epidemics (the historical and societal side, not the biological side). I'd also like to read more academic theological writing, since most books on Christianity that I've read have been popular inspirational writings, or writing on spirituality and "Christian living." That's fine, but I want something more meaty. And, I want to read some good travel writing. I say that I want to read more philosophy, but I'm not sure how helpful it is to just dive in and read philosophical works, or how realistic it is. Specifically, I want to read more works on epistemology. And, finally, I want to read more linguistic theory.

On the fiction side, I want to keep up with reading Japanese and Latin American authors, as well as more 19th century literature and more American authors. Books that I'm either excited to read, planning to read, or wanting to read in the next year:

- 2666 - Roberto Bolano. I just finished reading The Savage Detectives, and wanted to keep reading his writing. Apparently 2666 is his masterpiece.
- Soul Mountain - Gao Xingjian. I know some of my friends had trouble reading this, but I'd still like to give it a shot.
- Don DeLillo. I'll probably end up reading White Noise, and maybe Cosmopolis.
- All the Names - Jose Saramago. Like Rushdie, or Marquez, Saramago can be a really irritating writer. But, I keep going back to read more, so he's doing something right or I'm just dumb.
- The Unconsoled / When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro.
- Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands - Jorge Amado. Another irritating writer that I like to read.
-Dickens. I'm not sure which of his novels yet, but Oliver Twist is on my shelf, so that's a likely candidate, although this is another book that friends of mine have hated.
-N.T. Wright. I haven't read anything by him, and don't know what to read of his, but I want to read something.
- I am a Cat - Natsume Soseki. Worth it for the title alone.
- The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie.

We'll see what happens.

tsunami

Today is the 4th anniversary of the south-east asian tsunami. This is something I realized early after waking up this morning, and I remember thinking about it last year as well (and probably the year before that, as well). What's strange for me isn't necessarily that most people have "forgotten" or that they just don't remember. The strange part is that the tsunami, for me, is the most important historical event of my lifetime, more important to me than 9/11, or hurricane katrina, the war in iraq, the election of a black president, darfur, etc. I'm not making claims about its historical importance in relation to these other events, just its importance to me. But the tsunami is much more haunting to me and has much more impact than these other events. I don't even understand why I feel this way, or I why I feel so strongly about it, but I do. One year from now, I want to be in Phuket attending the tsunami memorials, but we'll see if that happens. In large part, I would just like to talk to the people who were there when it came.

undeworld

I like to know what people do. What their work is, how their work works, what they do there, how things run. I'm excited for more of my friends to graduate and get jobs so that I can talk to them about what they do and how it works, what it requires of them, and what they think of all of that. Which is partially why I feel drawn to the underworld, I'm curious about what goes on and how things work.

christmas

Well, I haven't bought or made a single Christmas present for anyone so far this year. Several years back I would say that I wasn't getting presents for people because I would rather get them something at a random point in the year that I knew they cared about rather than buying them junk that they'll never use. But I never actually did that.

This is my first SPU Christmas break that I didn't go back to Thailand. Also the first that I had no wisdom teeth pulled, no visits to a clinic or hospital. No motorbike. This will be the first Christmas in 11 years that I have been in the States. I miss Thailand a lot, especially seeing the Christmas pictures popping up on my friends' sites. I do not miss being one of the wise men in my church's sunday school production of the Christmas story.

I am eager to avoid Christmas events this year, especially church Christmas events. I just don't care about fighting for "the real meaning of Christmas." What I want is to hear the story of Jesus' birth and the events surrounding his birth without any reference to "the real meaning," or even the meaning, of Christmas. Incidentally, griping about consumerism is also old hat and isn't very productive. In that way, I am bored of Christmas.

clips

1. Lately I've wanted to walk around the city late at night. I'm not sure why. I often walk by houses, or other buildings, and wish that I could go inside and see what is there. I'm not interested in stealing anything or in actually doing this, I'm just curious.

2. I've thought for a long time that I am an elitist snob, and maybe I am, but lately I've noticed that I'm not as much of an elitist as many of my friends, and that a lot of times their elitism, their disregard of music or novels or people or food or activities or ideas bothers me. I am skeptical of elitism or of the desire and the attempt to be high class, even if most people would not say that's what they are trying to be. Some of it I just don't understand. Small example: recently I was at a desert theatre where nice deserts were being served. During this experience, I realized that a lot of nice deserts, fancy foods, are expensive, have smaller portions, are not necessarily more nutritious, and don't taste very good. This is when elitism fails me, when it doesn't result in anything that's actually better. Then again, other times I'm angry about the shit that I see other people reading, especially when this is all they read. I feel like I'm accepted in both worlds.

3. Over the past quarter my life has been pretty predictable. This isn't necessarily bad, since my life has been pretty determined by what I've chosen to do, but it feels more boring sometimes, or lonely.

4. I am supremely frustrated when people appeal to law for an ethical standard, or as an argument with someone about what is right or wrong: "Well..it's illegal [therefore wrong.]" Along with this is my frustration with those who want to return to origins, whether this is the original intent of American government ("Just follow the constitution") or the early church, or translation, or anything. It can be useful, but it really shouldn't determine the way we live now.

5. I am skeptical when I hear people talking about revivals, or the need to spiritually revive the church, or a city, or a country, a school, whatever. Once again, this is a question of returns, where merely returning to a previous (perhaps non-existent) state will guarantee future success or growth of some sort. Similarly, I don't want to be a child again. I don't think that childhood was the best time of my life or that I was a better person as a toddler then than I am now. I don't mean this in the total depravity, original sin sort of way. What I mean is that as a child I really didn't have to make moral decisions, or at least the choices that I have to navigate now are much more complicated and ambiguous than in childhood.

6. Ethical approaches to history are meaningless, or at least are no longer historical. What I mean is looking back on history and asking whether a choice that someone made was right or wrong. These questions are meaningless. It is useful, meaningful, to ask what the results of a decision were, but trying to decide whether one choice was right or wrong means pulling that decision outside of its historical context. Talking in that way is just nonsense.

theology

Recently I had a conversation with some of my friends that has inspired me to write out for them some of what I believe, and how I have come to believe what I believe. I don't write this out to argue with anyone, or to convince anyone that I'm "right." Mostly, I think that sort of conversation is a waste of time. I want to understand my friends and for them to understand me. That said, I'm not going to create a list of different beliefs that I have. I think that is a simplistic way of understanding belief that doesn't take important things such as life experience and epistemology into account, so I am going to take both of those into account as important components of my belief. I don't write this to offend anyone, but to be honest so that you can understand me.

1. Epistemology

Quick definition of epistemology is "how you know what you know." An epistemology is a certain way of knowing. Mostly I want to talk about epistemology and the bible.

When I was 15, I believed what many evangelical Christians believe about the bible and certain stories within the bible: it is the infallible word of God, and the events represented in the bible really did happen in the way that it says they happened. At this time, I remember being very afraid of evolutionary arguments, or arguments against the inerrancy of the bible. But eventually it became clear to me that the bible really does have contradictions within it. Check out the resurrection stories in the gospel as one example. I have seen people try to reconcile the stories through logical shenanigans, but they really do contradict one another. I started to notice passages like when Paul distinguishes between what he's written that is from God and what is just from him: "To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord)" (1 Cor. 7:12). In other words, I began to suspect that the actual authors of the bible did not understand their role as setting down everything from God, or as bearers of absolute truth. Then, as far as evolution, that whoever wrote Genesis probably did not intend for his mythological account to be taken as fact in the way that we have taken it as fact, or asked it to be fact. Authorship is another part, when I began to hear that Moses probably did not write the Pentateuch, Solomon did not write Ecclesiastes, Paul did not write some of the letters attributed to him, etc. Ultimately, none of those authorship questions really change what I think of the content, it just began to shift what I thought of the Bible itself. Since then, I've also come to learn that our contemporary idea of the bible as the infallible word of God is quite recent, and that belief in an actual seven day creation story was not really present in the church until the last 150 years (basically since the rise of evolutionary theory). In other words, the very problems that I was having with the bible were actually problems I had with relatively recent ideas about the bible.

Tack on to that the fact that neither the Apostles Creed nor the Nicene Creed (two very important, early Christian creeds) never mention the Bible or scripture. Partly, that's because the Bible didn't exist at the time as a single, canonized compilation. I became aware of that, aware that at some point, people choice what was to be canonized and what wasn't, and aware of the influence of other belief systems upon theology in the Bible (Zoroastrianism upon Hebrew cosmology, for instance, or Greek philosophy upon Paul's writings). In other words, I became much more aware of the human element within the Bible.

Then there were the four gospel accounts. As I said earlier, there are some situations that are direct contradictions. Other times, there aren't contradictions, but the same event is told in a very different way, where Jesus' words are different from a passage in one gospel to a parallel passage in another (the two Lords' prayers, in Matthew and Luke), or the same event happens in a very different way. This doesn't bother me at all anymore, but it did a lot at the time, and it altered my view of the bible.

Additionally, I began to be very uncomfortable with the way Christians talked about the bible. I realized that in many cases people were more interested in following the Bible than they were with following God. I want to follow God, not the bible, and to follow the bible inasmuch as it helps me to follow God and know God, and no more.

Another part of my changing view of the bible was based in linguistics. Thinking about linguistics, I realized how slippery words are. Words are slippery, dictionaries are not authorities for what words mean but catalogues of how words have been used. In that same vein, all language is symbolic out of necessity, there is no way for a word to represent a real thing completely. In other words, when I say I'm talking about God, I'm really using symbolic language to talk about a real thing, and that it will always be inadequate, and that the words and ideas in the Bible are the same: they are using symbols to speak of something real, and are always going to be inadequate to describe anything fully, especially God, if God is anything as amazing as people (including me) say he is. Perhaps an appropriate scriptural reference here is Jesus' words in John 5:39-40: "You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life." There is no eternal life through finding the bible, the bible points to God, and by following him we find life.

I see the writing in the bible as different frameworks for understanding God/life/reality/humans. As frameworks, they should be used inasmuch as they are useful, and matched with other frameworks that help to fill in these inadequacies. To reject this is, I think, to reject the legitimacy of every field of study, including theology.

To sum this section up: my belief in the bible changed so that I find it difficult to believe the bible has one monolithic perspective on very many issues. It is a compilation of different writings that tell the truth in a variety of different ways, and much of what is in there is difficult to determine or to make sense of. What "it says" on many issues is ambiguous, because it's a host of different people writing on the same issues, or not writing on them at all. It is not a simple book. I also don't hold it up as the authority for how to live my life. That is the position that I want God to have. I believe the bible says many things about how to live life, and that many of those things are from God, but that God is the ultimate authority. This has not been an easy journey, but I do feel much more at peace now than I used to, and I don't feel afraid anymore.

2. Sin

To understand how I think of sin, you have to understand how my life looked until about 3 years ago. At that point, I began to realize how ignorant I actually was about the ultimate implications of every action of mine. As a result, I began to feel moral anxiety over ridiculous decisions like whether or not to finish a can of pop, whether to go one place or another, to go to a friend's house or not. It was crippling, and I realized that this could not come from a God who was good, because it was unhealthy and destructive. Perhaps at this same time I realized how obsessed Christians are with their own sin, and that most Christians are really more obsessed with their own sin than they are with God's goodness. Additionally, I began to suspect that they were much more interested in their own sin than Jesus was, and that much of what Christians call sin actually isn't, or that was is sin for one person isn't sin for another. I began to see the subjective nature of most moral decisions.

Then, about a year ago, I read two books. One was Silence by Shusaku Endo and the other was Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard. Both of these dealt with issues of God telling people to do something wrong. Kierkegaard's talks about God telling Abraham to kill his own son, and Silence is the story of a priest whose choice is to apostasize (deny Christ) or to watch as his fellow Christians are tortured and killed. In the story, God tells him to deny him, out of love and mercy for the priest. In other words, I began to see God as much more concerned with mercy than with morality, and that sometimes the right thing to do is the wrong thing, even if that something is still wrong. This obviously leads to tricky territory, but I believe that is more accurate towards life and God and reality, and it's not an excuse for people to do whatever they want even when it's clearly wrong.

3. Jesus: his mission

Reading through the gospels, I began to realize that Jesus is more concerned with life than he is with sin. A few brief glimpses of Jesus' mission: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him" (John 3:16-17). Here, the mission of Jesus is to bring people life. This eternal life doesn't begin after death but begins right now, in the present. Jesus did not come to make the world aware of how wicked it was but to give it life even in its wickedness. This is perhaps just as explicit: "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full" (John 10:10). In other words, when Jesus talks about his mission on earth, the reason that he has come, it is in terms of bringing life. It is the verse immediately following this that he talks about laying down his life for his sheep. When he talks about his death, it is in the context of giving people life, and not about erasing their sins, or that his death is necessary for them to be forgiven of their sins. It is about giving life, and everything that Jesus does has to be read through that context.

4. Jesus: his death

Last year around this time is when I really began to think about the crucifixion. Part of this is my dissatisfaction with the idea that Christ died to appease the wrath of God. Part of it is that I think it's a very incomplete, skinny view of the cross to talk about it in terms of sin and the forgiveness of sin. If that is part of it, it is one part, and not the whole.

A few preliminary thoughts, things that I noticed:

1. Jesus forgives people of their sins, totally, before his crucifixion. He tells people over and over that their sins are forgiven. This alone tells me that it was not necessary for Jesus to die for God to forgive humans of their sins.

2. When I read the bible, I saw no evidence that Jesus died to appease the wrath of God. It's just not in the Bible. To be sure of this, I asked Professor Steele about it, and he confirmed that there really isn't any evidence for that model.

3. He also talked about the problem of the ransom model for salvation/crucifixion. The bible clearly describes Jesus as a ransom for many. The problem is who is being paid here? If it's a ransom, is Satan being paid? Why should God have to pay Satan for anything? Is God being paid? This turns God into a sadist, who kills his own son merely to appease himself, with no other factors. This does not fit with the idea of God as good, or of God as love, which is what I, personally, have to believe more than I believe anything else in the bible. Everything has to be understood in terms of his love and his goodness.

That is some of what was going through my head a year ago. Around this time last year I went and heard Rob Bell speak, and he talked about the Hebrew sacrifices. He talked about those sacrifices as being symbolic in nature, and that they worked as symbols to benefit the Israelites, not God. God, he said, does not need our sacrifices for anything. He has the entire world. And, as the writer of Hebrews says, "it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins" (10:4). And yet...these sacrifices functioned precisely in that manner, they would sanctify the impure and unclean, it was a way of becoming right in God's sight. But as that verse says, it was totally unnecessary from God's point of view. The payment is artificial, rather than real. Rob Bell argued that it was a symbol so that the people themselves would have a concrete way of knowing that God had forgiven them.

Rob Bell didn't extend his thoughts in this instance to Jesus, but I think that was the obvious next step. The suggestion is that Christ died as a symbol, and not to satisfy a hungry God. Significantly, Jesus himself makes this connection between his death and symbolism when he says, "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life" (John 3:14-15). Here, Jesus connects his death to healing through symbolism. Looking to the snake obviously had no inherent qualities that would heal people, the power was in the symbolism of the gesture. Similarly, Jesus's death should be seen as symbolism that was designed to heal, to bring eternal life (that begins now) to anyone who looks to him. The underlying question for me is how can God ever be pleased through death, through murder, through sacrifices that involve murder? From this point of view, it was necessary for Jesus to die, but it was necessary so that we, humans, would believe that we were forgiven, not to appease God or to pay an actual debt.

So, when I read later new testament writers speaking of Jesus' death as forgiveness of sin, I read it as their framework for understanding how Jesus brought life to them through his death, and their framework for understanding what happened at his death. This framework should not be read as the only one for understanding what happened, or as a monolithic, eclipsing framework that excludes all other ones. The Jewish writers understood Jesus as a fulfilment of prophecy and as a sacrifice, which is why they wrote of him in that context. I think it is a mistake to only think of his death in that way.

Another important part for me is what Kalistos Ware talked about when he came to SPU last year. He was talking about the Orthodox model of salvation, and talked about many different models. What was important to him is that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus must be included in a model for it to be accurate. Believing in Christ's death as forgiveness of sins doesn't require him to have lived at all, and it does not require him to have been resurrected. From the point of view of Jesus only as sacrifice, he might as well have been nailed onto the cross as a baby and stayed dead.

In that sense, Jesus' resurrection and life have become much more important to me as necessary elements of understanding his death. I am de-emphasizing the importance of sin in the crucifixion and in my life, both as a reaction to the obsession I see around me in most churches as well as because I believe that is what God is asking of me. I do believe that Jesus saved me, and I believe that he is saving me every day and moment. My understanding of morality, or sin, has moved away from the legal language that many of the biblical writers to a health, life based model, where things are good because they are healthy, and things are evil because they are unhealthy and destructive. Jesus saves me, and he does it in many ways, and he does it by bringing me life, not only by saving me from sin (especially because no one is done with sin even after finding Jesus).

5. Final Thoughts

I have laid this all out so that my friends can understand not only what I believe but how I have come to believe those things. Belief is not something that is abstract from life experience, but is directly based on my experiences and the epistemological processes that I have been part of. Additionally, I believe what I believe because I am compelled to, just as you who are reading this are compelled to believe what you believe. I believe what I do because it is the only thing that I can believe and still worship God and love God, it is the only thing that I can believe and still feel that I am being honest and that I am being a person of integrity. Similarly, you believe what you do because it is the only way in which you can love God and worship God, and to be honest with yourself and to be a person of integrity. I don't ask anyone to believe what I do about the bible or Jesus or God or salvation or crucifixion. I trust that you guys have come to where you are through honest struggle, just as I have, and I wouldn't ask you to change if it could not be honest, just as I cannot honestly return to what I used to believe. I write this out so that you will understand me and hopefully believe me when I say that I love God and serve God and that I believe that Jesus saved me and saves me and will continue to save me.

Amen.

christianity and history

Lately I have been thinking about Christian approaches to history and interpretations of history. The model that I have been told is one of more or less linear progression leading to an ultimate ending. Linear views of history, however, have begun to appeal to me less and less, have begun to seem simplistic. Linear views attempt to order history and create meaning where there is none, and simplify actual historical causation. Additionally, the linear view of history is not necessarily one that is present in scripture. Reading through genesis this quarter, I've noticed how the stories in Genesis defy, in many ways, overarching metanarratives, how they do not fit into simple categories. When I look at genesis, I see the breakdown of metanarrative and the breakdown of linear time, where sequences of beginning, middle, and end, are replaced by cycles of journeying back to the beginning. This is true for much of scripture, where there are many parallels between individual lives and especially the life of Israel. Israel cycles through history and seems to make little progress in its cycles. I am frightened of using metanarratives to disrespect and to over simplify the events in other peoples lives or in my own, in the past or in the present, or in the future. I am frightened that Christians often use superstition as a force of historical causation, and that I'm tempted to do the same.

And yet my experience of my own life is primarily linear, where I can trace my growth and development from childhood until the present, and see significant change, significant progress. But it is also cyclical, where many events seem to repeat what has happened before. Maybe it's fair to say that the actual event never repeats, no matter what, but that the essence of the event continually repeats. I feel like it would be cliche to talk about spirals, but that model really does seem the closest to the truth.

symbolism, healing(s)

I'm a bad blogger this year.

Anyway, I've been thinking some tonight about symbolism, especially bad symbolism, especially bad symbolism applied to people. Here's what I mean: I go out to lunch with a friend, and see that they order terrible food and terrible drinks. By terrible I mean unhealthy (or worse, unappetizing). When I see this, I take that example of an unhealthy choice and decide that they are an unhealthy person. Or, my friends come to my house, to my room, and see that my room is messy, and deduce that my life is also disordered. These are all issues of symbolism. Actually, there's a fancier word for it (metonymy?) for making the part stand for the whole, but I think that even then, it's still a case of symbolism. Or, I argue, an inappropriate use of symbolism as well as an inability to really see a person from multiple angles. It's a simplification for the sake of convenience. Not that I've seen examples of that recently, but I've seen them in the past, and thought about it tonight for some reason. Other cases of bad symbolism: "what bugs you the most about other people are the problems you see in yourself." Sure, in some cases this is true, and in other cases it's completely the reverse. Bad psychology = bad symbolism.

Recently, I've also been thinking about Jesus' miracles, and their connections to the identities of those being healed. Just off of memory, when Jesus healed people, he healed them of chronic conditions. There is an instance or two of fever, but fever is a temporary condition, and most of them were chronic: blindness, leprosy, death, deafness. Additionally, many of these things have to do with the inability to connect fully to the physical world. I argue that Jesus' healings, then, involved significantly altering identity and reconnecting people to their senses and therefore to their ability to connect to the physical world. When the leper is healed, he is no longer a leper. When the dead come back to life, they are living, they can no longer be referred to in the ways they were referred to in the past.

In other news, this year has been a time when it's really hit home to me that I generally assume that people dislike me or resent me. Or, I assume that people don't like what I produce, and sometimes don't believe them when they say the opposite. I don't think this is healthy, and I don't think that I should care.

matter/self-denial/talking about God/Genesis

This weekend, it hit me that the most important question/decision in my life, and my faith, is what I do with physical matter, what I believe about it and its relations to other parts of me. I see my body now as something that is more interwoven with my "soul", my emotions, my morality, and I don't want to create a hierarchy among these things. That is where I am at with morality right now, that it is one part of me, not necessarily the most important, and that it is a mistake to base all decisions on my moral health, to the cost my physical, emotional, spiritual health and my relationships with others. In other words, I want my decisions to be based on my health in its entirety, and not simply on one part of me.

The immediate question for me is, "What about Jesus' emphasis on self-denial as an expectation of following him?" My answer right now is that self-denial must also mean denying my own moral convictions, or even to do what is, or what most people believe to be, objectively wrong. I am differentiating those two categories. I think that Christians are eager to give up their passions, their bodies, their lives, but they are very reluctant to give up their morals. Who can call unclean what God calls clean?

Incidentally, I have been thinking lately about how disrespectful many of peoples attitudes (which they think of as respectful) towards God are. It's disrespectful to speak dishonestly about God, or to speak dishonestly about my experience of and feelings towards God. I have had the Auden quote "Isn't God a shit?" stuck in my head lately, and thinking of how respectful that phrase is, when most people would think of it as blasphemous. I suspect that God's children are more concerned with this sort of blasphemy than God himself is. Anyway, this isn't the same as being nasty towards God for its own sake, or to hurt other people.

I have also been thinking about Genesis, since I've been reading through that with group. Specifically, I'm very interested in the fact that there is no dialogue between God and humanity until after the fall, where the suggestion is that it is not until sin entered the picture that humanity was able to enter into much of a relationship with God. Additionally, I'm interested in how reading Genesis reorients ideas of what is good, and what is not good, particularly God's silence or absence. When Adam and Eve eat the fruit, God is not there. They hear him walking in the garden after wards. The early Genesis account, then, suggests that God's absence is good as much as his presence is good, whereas many Christians I know interpret God's silence as sin or laziness on the part of believers, that surely if they were good enough or listened more, God would speak, and speak clearly to them.

False.

the good times are killing me

Here's what I've realized about life lately: I'm pleased with the particulars, but not with the whole. I don't mind my work, I like the time that I'm spending with people, the time I have to read, to play music, to ride my bike, but I'm burning out with the weight of it all. This is sobering since tomorrow begins what will probably be the busiest year of my life so far, and I'm feeling exhausted already. The difficult part is that I don't look at my life and see things that I'm wasting my time on, I think what I'm doing is worthwhile, it's just too many worthwhile things. Whatever, this is just repeating what I say all the time.

Without me realizing it, communion has become very important to me over the last two years. I realize this because sometimes I think about joining the Catholic church, but the Catholic restrictions on communion keep me from thinking too seriously about it. And really, I haven't looked into it at all. I just don't associate myself strongly with Protestantism. This is sort of similar to Orthodoxy, where various Orthodox approaches have been very appealing to me, but I just can't handle what I see as arrogant attitudes towards the rest of Christianity. Anyway, communion has become important to me, maybe of itself, but more about how views on communion reflect views on who Jesus is and what his relationship to humanity is. I think I see Jesus as a much more messy figure than many people do, one that is dirty with other people, and asks for that to happen, and isn't nearly as concerned with his own "purity" as many of his followers are. Additionally, views on communion reflect views of humanity itself, or what it means to be human. I don't feel the need to be clean or pure when I take communion, whereas I think a lot of people feel they need to repent of whatever sin is in their life before hand. I feel exactly the opposite, that when I have sin in my life, what I need the most is Jesus, and the eucharist is having Jesus. Similarly, I'm really doubtful that there's ever a point in life when I'm free of sin, whatever sin is, and so it's an always or never type of thing for me. I know there are verses about being careful before taking communion, but from what I've read that was talking about outward actions, and not as much an inward state of being. Also, I think that communion has become more meaningful to me because it's tangible. I honestly don't care about whether it turns into Jesus in my stomach, or any of the views on that part. I don't really need to know how it works, or if it works. I just want it, all the time, and want anyone who wants to take it to take it. That's the offer that I see Jesus extending in the gospels, and I don't think I can be more selfish with Jesus than he was with himself, I think that's disrespectful of Christ, though it's intended for the opposite.

Which brings me to another topic...I was talking with a friend of mine a while ago, and he said "...I mean, Jesus crapped, I don't know if that's sacreligious or not..." and what I wanted to say is that it's the opposite. Talking about Jesus the way he was is much more respectful than trying to pretend that he didn't experience what we see as gross or embarassing or weird human experiences. Speaking of God, or anyone, as they are, is much more respectful.

The other evening I was at a dinner party when I mentioned to someone that I was considering going into translation. When she asked me if it was Bible translation, I felt pretty annoyed. It probably isn't fair to her to feel annoyed, it's more my frustration that many of the members of my religion (maybe just my society as a whole?) question the value and importance of literature, or of stories that aren't obviously didactic. I don't want to translate the Bible, I don't want to translate moralizing stories, if I end up translating at all. The brighter language-related side of the dinner party was getting to talk for a bit with a Thai exchange student who was there.

Maybe this is part of a larger issue that I was thinking about tonight at church. I was thinking about how angry it makes me when people try to force me to make most important in my life what is most important in their life, and assume that if I don't then I'm doing something wrong, or missing the mark in some way. Bullshit.

\/\/h@t3\/3r

apocalypse

I have been thinking about the apocalypse lately, mostly about how I don't believe that God is going to destroy the world. This is, I think, the common belief in Christianity, especially with the idea that there will be a new heaven, a new earth. Even so, I don't think this means the destruction of the world.

To be fair, I haven't come to this conclusion by looking at the Bible, I've come to it by realizing that it doesn't fit with the God I know, and the way that I've seen and experienced redemption in my life, it doesn't fit any sort of model for redemption that's seen in the individual. Here's what I mean: the Bible says a lot about being reborn, about being new creations, about believers dying in/with Christ and being something new. Significantly, this isn't the same as physical death or a change in their physical being. In my understanding, then, a new heaven and a new earth doesn't mean a physically different one that has replaced the old one, just the same one that has been changed to the point that it's new.

I was also thinking lately about Jesus' parables, the parables about being ready for the return of the Lord, for the coming of the Lord. I wondered if perhaps we have misinterpreted these, to mean something that is happening at the end of the world, when really they should be understood as something that happens everyday, that we should be watching and waiting for the Lord to come in our lives. Once again, I haven't really gone back to look at a lot of the context of the parables.

But, in some ways the context doesn't determine the meaning. I'm open to the idea that Jesus didn't know what he was talking about, in the sense that he didn't fully comprehend what he was saying, even if it was true, it may not have been true in the way that he thought it was. Actually, I've just been fascinated by some theories that I've heard (hints of) that Jesus didn't really know who he was, that he was the son of God, was God, but wasn't completely aware of this. In the same way, I think that Jesus may not have been fully aware of what he himself meant by the son of man/the Lord/the son of God returning. He said he didn't know when he was coming, and his followers believed that he was returning in their lifetimes, maybe Jesus himself believed that he would return that soon. But anyway, maybe the return that we are waiting for is already taking place, and maybe the "end times" have been taking place ever since he left.

Anyway, despite saying all that, I do believe that there is a time when all things will be made right, fixed, healed, put back together, made new, that there will be heaven of some sort. I just dont believe right now that that means the total destruction and replacement of the world. God is more creative than destruction, I hope.

That is what I've been thinking about for the last week or two.

In other news, I realized today that I'm really skeptical and uncomfortable with theology and pop-psychology that claims to know what makes men happy and what they need, and what makes women happy and what they need. I guess it seems to me about as useless as trying to figure out what makes Brazilians happy, or what makes black people happy, that there's something more offensive about it than anything, something that is disrespectful of individual people. Good thing that the world is about to be destroyed and none of that matters, anyway.

whole

I want to be a whole person!

I'll get more done, I'll have more fun

Table of Contents
1. 'On Peak Hill'
2. Sexy Conversations with Men
3. Ask me in a week
4. Risky business
5. Epilogue

1. In the last two days, I've listened to 'On Peak Hill' by Stars around 7 or 8 times. I'm not sure why. I first heard this song two years ago, when some of my friends were playing the song. They weren't my friends then, but they are now. From that time until this last week, I hadn't heard the song, had never heard Stars play it, and I'd tried to find it but had been unable to. I don't know why I've listened to it so much: the chord progression is simple, the lyrics are borderline cheesy (I thought when I first heard it that it was a joke song that they'd written). Who knowz.

2. The last week and a half there has been a lot that I've wanted to write in here, and now I can't remember most of it. I've been thinking a little bit lately about my male friends and what we talked about, and I realized that I never talk about sex or masturbation or any aspect of sexuality with my close male friends, this is how it's been all the time I've grown up, it just hasn't been a topic of conversation typically. It's really strange too, because it's really unusual, if all the guys I lived with in the dorms are any indicator of the norm. No value judgments, it is what it is, I just think it's strange, and dont really know how it ended up that way.

3. I've been thinking about liking things lately. It's becoming more and more difficult for me to say whether or not I like something--an event, a person, a book, a movie--I don't even know what that question is asking really, and sometimes I get really antsy when people ask me, or I suspect that they will soon ask me, whether I like something. I think sometimes I'm just antsy because I'm forced to formulate an opinion before I'm ready to, or forced to express what I know is an unbalanced view. I was always really frustrated when people would ask me if I liked my brother's girlfriends, because I usually didn't know them very well, hadn't spent much time with them, and didnt feel qualified to say whether or not I liked them or not. I just don't think it's a fair question. With books and movies, I like to be asked about them maybe a week or a month after I'm done with them. Maybe what frustrates me is that it tends to be too simplistic, that it asks me to choose either/or, when very few things in life are either/or for me.

4. What I want for my conversations with people is to say things that I am slightly nervous about saying, and to ask things that I am slightly nervous about asking, and having the same in return from whom I'm talking to. Not necessarily "deep" conversations, because those can just end up being oppressive, more like things that people are nervous about saying for whatever reason. I just want to ask the things I actually care about and the things I actually want to know. Just not in a way that is invasive or creepy or that pushes people away, because I know there have been times when people, strangers especially, have asked me those questions, I've just wanted to get the hell away from them. I'm just tired of low-risk conversations and questions, even though they are very well-intentioned, and are probably out of desperation from not knowing what to say or what to ask. Obviously, the implication is that I need to start doing this as well.

5. The moral of this post is that vegetables left in the fridge for too long will go bad.

domestics

Right now I am sitting at Fuel Coffee and drinking an iced chai. I realized after I got this that most of the drink was going to be ice, and felt a little cheated, but I guess I can't complain.

I just moved into the house that I'll be living in for the next year, and it's all very exciting. I haven't slept in the same place twice yet (probably because I've only been there three nights). It's also funny to me that I've been there three nights, and we've already had 4 guests sleep over. I'm excited to be within walking distance of 45th and of my friends and everything else in the area. I have felt very mundane lately, like my life is taken up with common problems and common activities, domestic activities, and less with existential concerns. I'm fine with that. I feel like being boring for a while.

Incidentally, I feel pretty committed to making myself good meals, and taking the time to eat properly instead of trying to double task. I have been thinking lately about time, and being busy, and about how I feel good about this next year being busy. Here's why: the busier I get, the more I'm able to figure out what I actually want to spend my time doing and the more I can enjoy that time. Concentrate on studying when I'm studying, playing music when I'm playing music, talking when I'm talking, sitting when I'm sitting. You get the idea.

With my stomach messed up for the moment, it's been strange having to tell people why I can't bike, or lift boxes, or move furniture, or a variety of other activities. It's been weird having so many people, especially people at work, frequently asking for updates on my body. I don't really like this, I think it's one of the reasons that I don't mention my problems more to people, because they tend to bring them up too often. Once every two weeks, or a month, is probably a good amount of time. But anyway, it is important for my bosses to ask me, since it changes what work I can do, I just don't like it, though having to tell people about my problems is probably good in some way.

obstacles

I feel very discouraged about life right now.

On to other things. What I've been realizing about myself lately: In many different contexts, I view people as obstacles that slow me down and prevent me from accomplishing what I want to, or accomplishing what I want to with a lower quality product. And, in a lot of cases, I think that it's true, that there are a lot of things I would do faster, better, and with more enjoyment if I were by myself. But I don't want to view people as obstacles.

I've also been conscious lately of how little people care about a lot of what I care about or that is meaningful to me, especially my memories and my stories, but also interests in fiction and in history and God. In other words, a lot of what I am interested in talking about seems to just bore or confuse my friends.

Here are recent reflections on prayer from someone who hasn't been praying much lately (or have I? hmmm). I've been thinking lately about the faithlessness of prayer. As in, sometimes when people pray it is really a demonstration of their lack of faith in God, rather than their faith in him. Prayer is used in this way like magic, like saying the words in the spell will achieve the required result. It's not actually engaging a living being and asking for a response (or asking for no response). The more I go on, the longer I recognize this in myself, that sometimes what I need to do to really trust God is to not pray in the way that I have been shown to pray, to not pray with words, whether outloud or silently, but to keep moving forward and trust that God is already present and active. I am against Christian superstition and Christian karma, which is what I think a lot of my understanding of God and his interaction with me has been.

tired tired tired

time can move so slowly, and time can do so much

I have five weeks until my school life begins. This is sort of a strange feeling, because I thought I had more time left than that, and just that that much time has passed since school was out. I feel like it's cliche to talk about how fast time passes, so I won't.

What do I want to do with the rest of my life? That is something that I have been thinking about this summer. Do I want to write literary criticism and teach literature? Do I want to teach creative writing? Write fiction? Write poetry? Research and teach history? Translate? Play music? Pastor? Travel? Interview? All of the above? Who knows. I don't know if it's very important to try to figure all of that out right now. I think I try to do too much though, too many interests. Myers-Briggs would probably explain it.

I don't want to farm. Some people are really attracted to the idea of growing their own food, it really moves them. I'm not. I don't have a romantic view of farming or of farmers (except Tim). I try to avoid sentimentality, and that's what it often feels like to me. I will probably be in the first wave of people to die once nuclear holocaust strikes and all the people in the cities are forced out in the country to find and grow their own food. I'm just not suited for apocalyptic living.

I know that I am interested in being away from America, in warm, urban areas, and writing, and that the 2004 tsunami fascinates me and might be something that I keep going back to for the rest of my life.

you fixed my friend, can you fix me

i decided today that my summer has been pretty intense, much more intense than I would have wanted. and yet...I think back to last summer, and how often I was miserable last summer, but how now it seems like a really valuable time of healing. I think that is what is happening this summer, is that I am becoming more whole in some way. I don't say that as what I want it to be, that I want to believe that my problems are leading me to something better, I'm saying it because I see my problems leading to something better.

what a pain.

part 2

I'm tired. I'm tired of being tired, tired of my body, tired of money and people and of talking and of God and of trying to find God, tired of reading. Mostly, I think I am tired of moving around. I just want to sit still for a day, and not eat or read or do anything, and then go to sleep and never wake up again. The irony is that when I feel this way, my body gets more out of wack and it takes me even longer to get to sleep, and then I lay in bed angry. When I'm weary like this, I just want to die, literally to die, and I get angry at everything. I think that for years I have been ready to die. It's really difficult for me to imagine old age because of that, especially because what I am tired of is the one-thing-after-another-ness of life, accumulation rather than volume. Forty more years is a lot of time for accumulation.

I don't think I'm really old enough to talk about death without it seeming ultra dramatic.

I'm bitter that as much as I try to not see the world dualistically, I go through most days incredibly resentful of my body and the fact that I'm stuck in it (and stuck because of that in dualistic thinking). I don't know how to love my body, and I think that I need to. In some way, I feel like this is what I need to learn to do most at this point in my life, that for my own health (physical, spiritual, etc), I have to learn to love my body and to not be angry at it any longer.

I don't think that loving my body means eating healthier, or exercising more, although it may include that. But, too often, I think both of those are grounded in efficiency, and not in love: I will eat healthier so that my body will function properly, I will exercise more so that my body will function properly. What I'm talking about almost depends on the disfunction and sickness of the body to really exist.

On the bright side, I haven't biked since Thursday, and this is the longest I've gone in the last two months without biking. It feels good.

dream

Last night I had a dream that I was in the branches of a tree in the jungle. On the ground there was a large snake (I thought it was a constrictor.) I jumped out of the tree and the snake bit me on the side of both of my heels. I thought this wasn't a problem because constrictors aren't venomous, then I found out that it was a poisonous snake, and not a constrictor at all. So I wandered around a hospital trying to find the pediatrics department, although I'm not sure they would have been able to help me.

That was just a dream.

Over this summer, I've come to realize how much I appreciate taking different ways to get to my destination. I like to change the route that I go on, frequently, even if it's just moving one street over. I haven't been changing up my destinations as much, but that's another part of it. Sometimes I change it up to have a more pleasant--less strenuous--ride, but sometimes I have extremely inefficient, more strenuous rides for the sake of going a different way.

That was not a dream.

I've been noticing lately how much symbolism I see in every day events. I'm not sure how to take this. In one sense, it just seems like superstition, and I don't want to be superstitious. I don't know to what extent I can see everyday life as symbolic, but a lot of times I tend to reject symbolism made out of what may just be coincidences.

deconstruction

For the past two years, maybe more, I have been deconstructing my faith and building it (almost) from the ground up. I say almost because I've still been doing this from within the framework of Christianity. In some instances, this has meant that I started to act on what I'd said for a long time that I believed, but in most cases it's meant a large shift in my attitude towards myself, God, the bible, the church, and sin. So far, i'm happy with how all of this has progressed, and I feel healthier and more stable right now than I have at any other time in my life (after the age of...12?) that I can remember. I'm pleased with the direction that my life is headed. It's funny for me to say that, because I don't feel particularly close to God right now. But. I think that for real closeness with God, that goes beyond guilt and that goes beyond obligation, I do need distance, like to find what is real I have to stay away both from what is real and what is false, because it's too easy to confuse the two.

More and more, I'm becoming bothered by the idea that I owe God. Songs, people, maybe scripture, talking about serving God because he died for me, or because of what he's done for me. I want to say this carefully, but I don't think that I owe God anything. I mean this in the sense that if I really believe in God's love, then I believe that I don't need to repay anything, and that there's no way that I could. This isn't being ungrateful, I feel, I think it's basic to the way we want our relationships. I don't want someone to treat me kindly to repay me for treating them kindly. If that is their response, that's fine, but i don't want repayment. Whatever, this is all basic Christian teaching that I've been hearing since I was little. Bottom line: I don't want to serve God to repay him.

Shifting thoughts, I'm finding this summer that I can't continually input information, I have to have a creative output of some sort. I've been reading a lot, but lately it's been hard to read, not because I don't have the time, but because it feels like mental constipation, like I'm intaking all these stories and all these ideas without creating something out of them or thinking through them. I've been trying to write on everything I read this summer, and I think that has helped, but I think I need to find other, more creative ways to be creative.

I am one of you

Last quarter, I read Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" for my American Literature survey. His poem rubbed some people the wrong way because he was talking about how he was united with everyone and, among others, this included black slaves and native americans. They felt that this was extremely arrogant and probably offensive. I thought it was pretty sweet. But, while their reactions came across like shitting on a loaf of banana bread after finding a lump of baking soda inside your slice, I do think they were on to something.

I was thinking the other day about how important it is to not disassociate myself from others, and how much I need to say "I am one of you, and I will not try to distance myself from you out of fear of who I will be associated with." The balance to me seems to be not attempting to claim understanding of what it means to be a group of people, or even one other person, but to not separate yourselves from them either. I was thinking about this especially with Christianity, where there is so much temptation to distance yourselves from those behaving in what is perceived to be an immoral fashion, or distance yourselves from those who are judging the immoral, distance yourself from Christian pop culture, distance yourself from the heretics. And, there are good reasons to do all those things, at certain times, but I think I'm coming to a place where I may not need to do that, not because I've become like the people I wanted to distance myself from, but because I see something that is more important.

lessons

I read something in an interview with Jose Saramago the other day that, in a lot of ways, explains how I feel about history, but also how I feel about life, God, and the bible.

"History, really, is a fiction--not because it is made up of invented facts, for the facts are real, but because in the organization of those facts there is much fiction. History is pieced together with certain selected facts that give a coherence, a line, to the story. In order to create that line, many things must be left out. There are always those facts that did not enter history, which if they had might give a different sense to history. History must not be presented as a definitve lesson" - Jose Saramago

When I read that last sentence, it rang really true for me, and I knew it wasn't just about history. It resonated with my weariness of trite lessons that are presented to me, and the feeling that all lessons are trite if they attempt to be definitive. But it's not just the last sentence that resonates with me, it's all of it, my belief that there is no such thing as non-fiction, and the belief that all words are symbols, and that because of this there is no way to accurately talk about God, that the Bible does not contain or completely describe God.

Except...of history, life, the Bible, and God, I feel like I can make the most definitive statement about God than the others on that list. This is ironic to me because, of all of them, I think that God is the biggest, the one that is mots inadequately described through words, through facts, through the organization of facts. But "God is love" is definitive, and I believe it, even though I know that I don't actually understand what I'm saying, and I suspect that no one understands what they are saying when they say that God is love.

In other news, I'm really uncomfortable when men/women are either demonized or idealized. The levels of discomfort I experience when people talk about how great girls are is equal to the levels I experience when men are typed as sex-obsessed and sexually out of control (I don't really know how to describe the girl one, just think of it as idealizations of girls as pure or hospitable or something along those lines). On that same topic, I'm not interested in biblical masculinity. I don't care about what type of man Adam was. I understand that there are people for whom this is very important, and if it is very important to them then they should pursue it, but it isn't for me. Probably because most of the time when people talk about biblical masculinity it's accompanied with theology that I'm uncomfortable with, and accompanied by ideas that men should be strong or forceful in some way. I'm becoming much more fascinated with weakness and with sickness, and with the idea that God moves mostly in subtle ways (because he doesn't want to be seen?) rather than through showiness and through force.

Another thing: I'm uncomfortable listening to people talk when I sense that they are trying to make me uncomfortable, or trying to use what they say to be powerful and manipulative, rather than becoming uncomfortable through the content of what they're saying. E.g., girls talking about PMSing. This doesn't make me uncomfortable unless I sense that it is being brought up as a way of trying to make me feel uncomfortable, as a way of sensationalizing what doesn't need to be sensationalized. This is similar to how I feel about ministries talking about what they do. When I sense that they are trying to make me feel guilty, I am uncomfortable. Ironically, these are probably the people say that it's good to make people uncomfortable and, in a sense, they're right. But I'm talking about a different type of discomfort, I'm thinking of a discomfort that tells me that I can no longer trust the words that are coming out of someone's mouth, and not so much discomfort that tells me I need to live my life in a different way, or that I need to take action.

I hate power. I hate when people try to make themselves powerful over others. More and more, I hear 'Give up' ringing in my ears, not in the fatalistic sense, but in the sense that I need to let go, to give up power rather than take it up, to give up my claims, to give up my control, to be terribly weak, to be diseased, to die. I don't want to respond violently to people. I don't want to lie to people. I don't want to withold knowledge from people as a means of making myself stronger. I don't want to tell inside jokes around people that aren't on the inside, because this is also a means of control.

Incidentally, I don't think I can write bible as Bible anymore. Something about that capitalized word just grosses me out. I think I associate it with bad theology. I'm pretty cool with the bible, and pretty fucking sick of the Bible.

In other news, I feel like I am coming to understand my dad more and more, mostly because I'm noticing the ways that I am like him. This is a good thing.

jobs

In my limited work experience, I've found that with each new job I learn a lot of the ways I function, and especially the ways I don't function well. Working at the library, I'm learning that I don't do well with an infinite number of tasks I could be performing. I like finite jobs, where I know going in what I need to do, and then I do it, and then I'm done. Mostly, I just have a hard time feeling like I can take a break when I have unlimited work I could be doing. That is one of the reasons why I would probably be terrible at developmental work and social activism: I burn out really fast when there's no end to what I need to do. That's also one of the reasons that I love school and writing: a defined amount of work that needs to be completed in a defined amount of time. I work better with deadlines. And, whatever this means, the quality is something that I set myself, rather than the quantity.

I think that the reason I don't feel like I know my friends very well is that for many of them, I don't have a real sense of history. There's a vague outline of where they lived, but very little idea of who they were, what they did, what they liked, what their problems were, and how they've changed.

Parenthetical thought: I'm really interested in the point at which people start to share stories, not just tell someone facts about themselves, but to tell a story about themself.

Most of my friends over here, I can know that (to some extent) for a two year period, which is barely anything. My sense of my friends' history is fragmented, and it will always be fragmented, but its more fragmented than I want.

brief observations

I hate liquid soap, at least the handwashing liquid soap next to sinks. Like moisturizer, I feel like it dries me out and makes my skin unhealthy.

-

Sometimes I'm purposeful about not looking at certain information (peoples SSN, credit card pin numbers, passwords) in case I'm hypnotized by someone trying to harm them who could then harvest that information from the recesses of my brain.

-

Most of what I've been reading so far this summer has been about how people cope when what they've built their lives on has been stripped away, whether this is God, or love, or health, or science, or virtue, or the British Raj. Several of the books have made been extremely skeptical of the ability of science, legal documents and statistics to tell truth. Unintended theme to my summer reading, but I don't mind

bed time

Listening to: Madonna - Die Another Day

I read this earlier today in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it really stood out to me. I read it over three or four times:

"Ursula wondered if it was not preferable to lie down once and for all in her grave and let them throw the earth over her, and she asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications"

I'm not sure why it was so distinct to me, because this isn't a point in my life when I really feel like I'm suffering a lot, or a time that I'm really aware of how other people are suffering. Perhaps it just hit me as being true in some way, that that describes what human existence is, or at least part of it: that death is an answer to life because it signifies the end of life's persistent suffering and problems. Maybe it's just true because I have felt that desire to lie down and be done with life and done with suffering, though I feel silly saying that because I don't feel that the extent of suffering in my life is even comparable to what so many others have been through.

Which is one part of Christianity that I've been pondering recently: how we view death. Maybe my thoughts can be summed up in a question at the heart of Murakami's Norwegian Wood: is death the opposite of life? Christians speak of Jesus conquering death, and this seems very beautiful, but death itself seems beautiful to me too, and a natural part of life. Maybe what we're speaking of is that Jesus abolished death's terrors (since death is still present), and do look forward to a time when things will no longer die. The irony of this is that it's impossible for me to seriously imagine a life without death because currently, existence depends on death: the death and reproduction of cells in our own bodies and the death of everything we eat.

Sometimes I wonder what it is that is universal about human experience, what is the common bond of humanity. Often times, I think of loneliness and ignorance. Loneliness in the sense that no matter how close we are to our closest friends, lovers, acquaintances, there is and will always be a divide that prevents absolute understanding. Ignorance in the sense that humans constantly have to operate and act based on incomplete knowledge and uncertain consequences. Maybe uncertainty would be a better way of describing it than ignorance. But I suspect that suffering is another common bond of human experience.

Sometimes I think about this in the context of Jesus, that Jesus becoming human meant that he entered a life of loneliness and ignorance and uncertainty and suffering. Other times I just think the list I've acquired is true, but very sad, very dark, a bleak description of human life.

bye bye bye

About me: I've never wanted to be buff. Strong is fine, but I'd rather stay lean. No big muscles, no desire for them.

Today I saw maybe a few dozen naked people on and off bikes. This made me think of a lot of things. 1. I feel pretty comfortable supporting public nudity. 2. Bodies are sweet. Men and women bodies. I don't mean that in a sexual way, since I'm just not sexually attracted to men, but I really do appreciate bodies in general, and I'm fascinated by how they work and move. 3. It bothers me when I hear both men and women say that men's bodies are ugly, as a rule, or just not attractive. Not common to hear, maybe, but I've definitely heard that point of view, and reject it.

It's becoming harder and harder for me to understand the desire in many Christian circles to avoid certain materials because of explicit sexuality, violence, cruelty, darkness, or confusion. Perhaps I'm understanding more and more how reading or viewing those materials has helped my understanding of life, myself, God, and others, and how they've helped me to heal in some ways. I just think it's important that the stories we tell are stories about actual life, which means they touch on the dark and confusing aspects of life alongside life's goodness. Then again, some things are just trashy.

Last saturday morning I got a phone call that one of my friends had been killed in an accident. I've never had someone that close to me die before. Here's something I was talking about with one of my friends, though: it's important to not lose track of Patrick by trying to remember him. Patrick was great, and I love(d) him, but he wasn't superhuman, and trying to turn him into a superhuman figure actually reduces who he was and is just not accurate. I knew some of his darker sides, too, and love those parts of him, and I think acknowleding those aspects of him along with why he was so sweet actually honors him way more than anything else I could do. And yet...I can recognize that with death we recognize what is actually important about a person, and that the parts of Patrick that were unpleasant or annoying are just not very important in light of his death.

Happy solstice, everyone.

status update

Here are some of the issues that I'm really fascinated by right now. No conclusions, just thoughts.


Humanity. I'm really fascinated with the nature of human existence, what it means to be human. Actually, it's probably more accurate to say that I'm fascinated with the natures of human existence, and the different experiences of existence. Basically everything else I'm thinking about right now comes back to this issue.


Economics and the Environment. I was thinking earlier today that I'm really not interested in the environment, I'm interested in how it impacts human existence, especially the way that environmental degradation leads to economic (and civilizational) downfall as well as mass violence. Similarly, I'm interested in how economics impacts the environment and, in general, just interested in getting past all the economics hype to see how the world actually works, what the real costs and benefits of everything are to the economy and to existence.


Disease/Health and the Body. Actually, it's more accurate to say that I'm interested in the idea of disease, since I'm rarely looking up diseases to see how they function on a microscopic level. I'm more interested in diseased or healthy bodies as a way of understanding human experience of life, especially as opposed to morality as a way of understanding life. I'm also fascinated with human bodies, and I don't really know how to say that, since I'm assuming that everyone else will assume I'm speaking in sexual terms, but that's really missing what I want to say. But I don't know how to say it.


The other day, I was thinking that what I'm really concerend with is way, truth, and life. And I intentionally removed the preceding the from each of those words, because I'm not concerned with finding one absolute way to live, or one absolute truth. Maybe absolute life. Whatever.

Anyway, that's some of the things that interest me right now. It's funny, though, because even though these are issues that are all important to me, I'm not wringing my hands all day trying to find out how soil degradation leads to terrorism. I'm trying to figure out my friendddds, and why I feel so restless.

summer

I'm nervous for my summer. I'm nervous in two ways about friends.

1. That I have too many friends in Seattle this summer
2. That I will be lonely this summer.

I think the two are related in a lot of ways, that having too many friends will either spread me thin or influence me to disconnect myself from everyone. And I'm nervous about losing touch with my friends' spirits, with what is important to them right now, and what they're going through and thinking about and trying to do with their lives, something essential about them that often just gets missed in everyday interactions.

I want to find the spirit of God this summer in ways that I haven't before, and to know my friends in better, different ways.

dualism

Love the sinner, love the sin. That is what I'm coming to believe more and more, which is funny to me because I don't even know what it means, just that I feel it's more true than "love the sinner, hate the sin." Recently I read a letter to my school newspaper where someone was writing that Jesus didn't get in bed with sin. Immediately when I read that, I thought "Of course he did," and that that is the sort of love that Jesus had for people and that I should have for others. I don't know how to explain it except in sexual terms, and even then I can't explain it very well.

In other news, I don't think that I'm a dualist anymore. I believe less and less in a distinction between mind and body or between spirit and flesh. I'm not struggling with sin. My experience of life isn't an experience of being at war with myself. I'm not quite sure how to explain this, because there are definitely ways that I need to and want to change, and ways that I want to treat others better and love others better, and ways that I hurt people and yes, sin against them. I can recognize that and at the same time honestly say that I'm not in a struggle against sin. I also wonder if this is more towards what it means that the old me has been killed, that there is no more struggle and no more war within me.

Maybe it has to do with loving the sinner and loving the sin, that it's impossible to love myself without loving the sin. I think that one of the reason's I don't see my life in terms of struggle with myself is that I believe less and less in the division of all things and more and more in the unity of all things, and that the sinful part of me is exactly that: part of me. The more I read and experience life, the more I see the problems in dividing my existence into terms of flesh and spirit, especially when flesh is interpreted as my own physical body. I don't want to hate any part of me, even the parts I don't like. I want to understand them, and love them so that they can heal. I don't want to hate any part of anyone, I want to understand those parts and love those parts so that they can heal as well. Hate is like amputation, but love is more like healing. One is fast and crippling, the other is slow and restorative. That is what I believe.

But doesn't the Bible perpetuate dualist ideas? Yes, but also no (perhaps). A part of me wants to say that we read Paul's ideas through Descartes, who divided mind and body, and through Augustine, who had a hyperactive conscience (incidentally, I like Augustine). I think that's true, and should be taken into account. But it also needs to be taken into account that Paul was working within a Platonic framework, and that Plato had divided up the individual 2000 years before Descartes did. But I think it's fair to say we don't understand Paul as well as we think we do.

Here's what it comes down to for me at the moment: when Paul speaks in dualistic terms, this should not be read as a description of reality, it should be read as a framework for understanding reality and for understanding how sin and God can coexist. And it's a good framework, it really is very useful and has been useful for much of my life for defining my own experience with my self and with God and with sin, but I think in the end it is only a framework, and not reality itself.

Incidentally, I was at church tonight listening to a song that I've heard many times before, but I understood it in a much different way, and I felt like writing about it. The lines? "worthy...of a childlike faith and of my honest praise and of my unashamed love." The way I've always understood those lines, and probably how the writer intended them, is that God is worthy of everything, and so I should be worshipping him in really demonstrative ways because I don't care what anyone thinks. There's probably some truth to that, but I think that the adjectives are super important: dancing around during worship and evangelizing to people on the streets may be neither honest nor unashamed for me, and there shouldn't be shame in that.

I've been thinking some lately of how important it is to recognize that we understand God in different ways, that we experience him in different ways, that he guides us in different ways and, maybe the most important, that we serve him and respond to him in different ways, and that this diversity is a good thing and not something to feel threatened by. It's just hard for me when other Christians' God seems so different and in some ways antithetical to the God that I love.

Let me tell a story that might explain what I was just writing about.

Imagine for a moment that a man and a woman are about to make love, and that one of them (it doesn't really matter, let's say the man) has an STD (it doesn't really matter which one). And he wants to wear a condom to not give this disease to her, but she tells him not to. It's not even that she's willing to "risk it", it's that in some sense she wants his sickness, that she wants to be sick with him. That is the way I understand the love of Jesus (and also not the sexual policy that I would reccomend adopting, at this point). I really do think that Jesus gets in bed with sin.

centre/margin

A few weeks ago at group I was given a notecard where I was supposed to write down the names of people I knew who were on the margins, or who didn't have a voice. I didn't write anything down, because I had a lot of trouble identifying anyone. I would think of some people and then realize that they do have a lot of friends, or that they do have a voice, or that they do have people speaking on their behalf in places where they're not given a voice. I don't think I was necessarily "right," that's just what I was thinking at the time.

Since then, though, I wondered if some of my trouble in answering that question had to do with the fact that I don't know whether I'm in the centre or the margins. My leadership position suggests that I am, in some sense, at the centre, and so do all the connections that I have. But I don't always feel like that's true, and my sense of myself within those circles is sometimes at the margins of those circles (sometimes this manifests itself in physical terms where I'm consistently on the fringes of the group). Maybe it's just me, maybe it's common, but I think identity as centric or marginal is constantly shifting depending on what people I'm around and my attitude at the time. Sometimes it really is deeper than that though.

Sort of on the lines of center and margin: I read an article on white privilege today. Most of what was listed as white privilege (and I think it's pretty accurate) is the privilege of white people to avoid symbolic identities, where they aren't necessarily representative of their whole race (although I wonder if that's true in a non-white majority community). In any case, it emphasized even more for me the need to let everyone be their own life, and to listen to their individual experience.

This is something that's actually pretty important to me in interpreting literature, as well, and, I think, a point of contention that I have with other English majors. Part of interpreting literature is taking things on symbolic grounds, and there is a lot of truth that can be found there. But, it also means that human lives within stories are not allowed to stand for themselves as a unique human experience. In other words, if a man in a story is abusing a girl, the man represents all men and the woman represents all women, and the story is saying that women are subjected to male oppression. I think there is a problem with that sort of interpretation, and it's something that really frustrates me when I hear other interpretations of men or women as a whole that are based on one character.

Anyway, white privilege. What frustrated me about the article is that there were no solutions offered. The article ended by saying, "What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base" (Peggy McIntosh). This is not a solution. It is an ideal, and a value, and an end, and it is good, but it doesn't offer any means. And that is something that has been bothering me for years about racial issues, and especially about issues of white privilege: I am never offered any solutions of what I can do, especially what I can do as a white male.

But maybe what the ending is getting at, or maybe it's just the first step in my mind toward a solution, is not over-running the people who will let themselves be overrun, and encouraging people to speak who will not speak on their own. I'm keeping this in broad terms because if I'm actually serious about doing this then it's not just something that applies to race relations, it applies to every interaction I have with people. I know what it's like to know that people will let me walk all over them, and I know what it's like to do it, and to see it happen, and it's terrible. Anti-coercion, anti-intimidation, striving for weakness rather than power. And I'm not trying to suggest that non-white people let themselves be walked over, it's more just the first step that I can think of actively taking, if I am in a situation where I do have the power to run over someone else.

strangers

I just trimmed my mustache for the first time ever. I'm not counting times when I clipped it for a day as a joke before I shaved the whole thing off. I had a lot of trouble with it at breakfast this morning, trying to eat a bagel with peanut butter on it. It was time to shave.

I've noticed lately how confused I get when strangers smile at me, mostly when a number of strangers smile at me in a short amount of time. I start getting really nervous that my fly is down or that something goofy is stuck to my face.

race

Edit: I'm not really sure who I'm trying to implicate when I write these things, or what "race discussions" I'm talking about. Most of my teachers have been really level headed and I've really appreciated their input and challenges to ideas of race. I guess I'm mostly thinking of other students, or the media, or my general impressions from who knows where. And, I'm not claiming that this is the way it is: this is mostly just my experience.

Here are more of the reasons why I'm uncomfortable (or just tired) in race discussions:

1. I care about my identity as a white (therefore of European descent) American male, and have lived over half my life understanding myself as minority that experienced distinct benefits and discriminations for being white. The reason this is a problem is that, in discussions focused around race, the primary identity assigned to white people is that of oppressors. Is there historical and current basis for this? Of course. But I want to understand myself as a white person, and I don't feel like much is offered to me to hold on to when I'm offered the choice of being an oppressor or being nothing.

1 1/2. I have a deep appreciation for cultures from all around the world. The reason this becomes a problem is that African cultures are appreciated and upheld as being black cultures, Asian cultural traditions are upheld and valued for being Asian, but European cultures are rarely appreciated for being white. I suppose part of this is that groups that value white cultures are often white supremacy groups, where white culture isn't valued in and of itself, it's valued for being better than other cultures. The problem isn't that European or white cultures aren't valued, it's that they aren't valued in the context of race. People might appreciate Shakespeare, but they don't appreciate him for being white in the same way that Ralph Ellison is appreciated for being black.

2. Race is one aspect of human life that is expanded to explain an entire human experience, and this fragments a human life. I don't want to deny the extent of anyone's suffering because of their race, because of the discrimination they've suffered for being a certain race. I also don't want to fragment human experience and tell someone that they don't know what it means to suffer because they haven't been ostracized or hurt because of their race. Other people are rejected and discriminated against and killed for aspects of their identity that have nothing to do with race, and their suffering is real and also can't be minimized just because they're being discriminated against and killed on a non-racial basis. Also, I'm concerned with people as entire human beings where race is part of their experience as a whole, but it's not the whole. Asking for someone to speak as a black man, a white woman, a Thai transvestite, and only being concerned with those aspects of their identity, and to ask them to speak for every other black, white, or asian, is a mistake. It's really important to hear the stories of everyone.

2 1/2. I am pretty aware of myself as a white person, maybe after living in Thailand for so long, but I'm also used to being more or less aware of it depending on what context I'm in. In other words, my sense of racial identity strengthens and weakens throughout the day depending on who I'm with and who I'm around. If this is connected to discomfort during race discussions, then it's connected to the idea that race isn't an all-encompassing, eclipsing identity. I also understand that might just be my experience.

3. I just feel petty a lot of the time for caring about being white, that I can't voice these concerns without being petty, and without minimizing the pain of other people. But I suppose this is like having a friend who, whenever you're together, will always talk about himself and his struggles and is never concerned with yours or you or your life except in the context of how what you can do can help him. And, in this case, you really do want to help him, and you are aware that what he's faced has been more painful than what you have, but you just get tired of listening all the time without ever bringing your own life into it.

That may be really selfish (or it may not be, you decide, America), but that's also where I'm at.

Which is another reason I'm uncomfortable with race discussions: The emphasis is on ideals rather than truth, so people aren't allowed to speak truthfully of where they're at and what they're thinking. And if things are going to change, there needs to be space for people to speak honestly instead of trying to appear like they're not racist, not sexist, not bigoted (especially when everyone is racist, sexist, bigoted in one area or another to one degree or another IMO). I often don't feel like I have the ability to speak honestly of my experience, or to ask honest questions becuse people will tell me that I'm wrong, that my questions are wrong. But the point isn't whether I'm wrong or not, I may know that I'm wrong, that I'm racist, and want to change that, it just doesn't make sense to keep repeating to people how sick they are when they're in the middle of looking for a cure.

brief

brief reflections and generalizations:

1. The disappointment of spring is that as the leaves are growing back on the trees, I don't have as much of a view onto the sidewalks and paths as I used to. I have to duck around a lot if I want to see who's walking down there.

2. When I'm around people who are very quiet, I sometimes forget that their senses work. I'm surprised when they talk and I doubt that their sense of smell and hearing are fully functional.

3. Most important events in my life don't seem to be as dramatic as they should be, while I'm experiencing thom; most dramatic experiences end up not being very important.

4. People don't need my agreement or approval to be doing the work of God. They don't need to "minister" to me to be doing the work of God either. And it's very important to not get in God's way, and to not be so arrogant as to think that theological precision is as important as love for God.

5. I don't like euphemistic language. But, I do care a lot about effective communication and taking care to not use words that convey a different meaning than intended (even though, ultimately, words are too slippery to control). In interpersonal problems, I think it's hard to find true healing unless you acknowledge the true depth of the pain. I'm not using that as excuse to be an asshole, incidentally.

6. After telling a few of my friends today that I used to seriously dislike them, one of them mentioned that my disliking someone intensely (who I don't know) may be a litmus test for whether I end up becoming friends with them. That's been accurate in a lot of cases in my life.

evolution

Something I just realized is that my shift from believing in a literal Genesis creation to evolution didn't have much to do with science. It had much more to do with story. The story of development and change was something I came to believe in. The story was based on science, but it wasn't the science that convinced me.

I also just realized that I don't want to be a kid anymore. There were times when I used to want to return to childhood, but I don't want to. And if I would want to return to my teenage years, it would mostly be to have all that free time again. In general, though, I'm much happier now than I was at that time, and I've changed mostly in good ways.

Looking at how I've changed in good ways, though, I can't help but feel like that process isn't going to continue to forever (or one way of looking at it is that it will continue forever, there will just be some significant jolts). In other words, my age doesn't necessarily correspond to how healthy or wise or good or happy I am. A few weeks ago I was thinking that there would inevitably be a point where I look at my life and wonder "How did it come to this?" I dont know if that's pessimistic or realistic, if it really is inevitable or not, but I've seen these things happen before.

I used to worry that for being an English major, I wasn't really changed by the stories that I read. This was a secret that I kept pretty close, because even though I knew why I believed stories were good, I wasn't really having that experience. Lately, though, I've been so impressed with the power of story, and how much influence it actually does have on my life, and how the stories I read and hear do change me. That's a change that I think is good.

Incidentally, I also have been appreciating lately how the English major (or experiencing narrative in general?) seeks to eliminate judgment in favor of observation. Description, rather than prescription. Or maybe that's just the take that I want to have on it. I guess I know that there is a point where judgment needs to be made...but I think that point will be much more balanced and much more true when I come through a stage of pure observation. But it also really depends on what I mean when I say judgment.

I see a lot of links between judgment and fear. Listening to other people talk about how they live (the narrative of their life), I am afraid. I am afraid that either I will have to change or that I will change in ways I don't want to. If someone is doing something "good," and I'm not, then I try to find ways to justify my inaction. If someone's doing something "bad," and I'm not, then I try to find a reason for why what they're doing is wrong. This is fear, but it's fear that I feel less and less.

I feel more and more comfortable with the idea that I don't have to do everything that is "good." I don't need to lead everything, be involved in everything. I can acknowledge what other people are doing, and support that, but that doesn't mean that it's good or healthy for me to take part in what they're doing....which is also something that's been important to me as an SMC. People don't have to take part in what I'm doing. They don't need to be involved with my ideas, my events, with me.

/navelgazing

tremors

Recently, I've had tremors in my left leg. It feels like my phone is vibrating, but it's not phantom vibrations, it's vibrations somewhere inside my leg. But when it's happening, and I feel my leg, I don't feel it vibrating. Weird.

I feel pressure to write something important on here, like something that will change peoples perspectives, be illuminating, thought-provoking, etc. I will ignore that pressure. Hopefully my choice to reject any sort of lesson, moral, synthesis, or analysis will change your perspective.

dream

I wanted to write this down before I forget: for the second time this quarter, I had a dream about being stuck in an illusionary world. What I remember from last night is that I was stuck in a house, and there was some malicious woman, and there were a bunch of objects in the house that I knew weren't real (like a TV?), so I started to destroy them. I just wanted to remember, because I've been forgetting about it all day, and I'm really intrigued that I've been dreaming about having faulty vision and being caught in illusions, since that's a subject that I'm interested in in real life.

Other topic.

Tonight I told my story, and I've been thinking about it lately. It's very strange for me to think about old, painful experiences, and realize that they're still painful and that they still are having an effect on how I think and act today. I do think there is something healing in simply telling stories though, and that's how I felt after tonight. Not that things are done, but that it was a healing experience.

history

Table of Contents
1. Emotional vs. Intellectual History
2. Reflections on Narrative Theory
3. Intellectual Friendships
4. Control
5. Half Person
6. Conclusion
7. Afterward

1. Next week, I'm sharing my story at my church. Last night when I was on a long car ride, I was thinking about what I was going to talk about. I realized that what I was thinking of talking about was really only one half of my story, or one half of my life experience, and I noticed that what I was thinking of talking about was mainly my intellectual history, and that there was little or nothing to do with my emotional history.

2. But that absence fits in with how I tell my story on a daily basis, the image of myself that I create rather consciously or not by what aspects of my life I choose to talk about. And I don't mean that to sound sinister, or like I'm trying to manipulate people by showing them something other than the truth. But there is no way to completely render your life to others, or even to yourselves, and picking and choosing what to repeat is something that everyone does every day with or without sinister intentions.

3. Anyway, all that to say that I have what I would call "intellectual friendships," which sounds much more snooty than it did in my head. It basically is just friendships where I don't talk about my more visceral side or what I'm dealing with on an emotional level, unless it's what I'm going through on an emotional level because of intellectual or theoretical problems, something like that. Similarly, I don't really talk to my friends about trouble that I'm having with other people, relational trouble, and I don't usually talk about experiences in the past when I was going through relational or emotional problems.

I realize the existence of these intellectual friendships most powerfully when I actually do talk about something and my friends are shocked because either they had no idea or they're just shocked that I experience certain emotions. I guess that's funny, but it also makes me a little sad, like it makes me sad how little fun I have with a lot of my friends here.

4. One of the reasons I don't talk about these things is that something in me is embarrassed by being out of control. I don't know how to explain this properly, but I'll give it a go. I'm not a control freak, I very rarely try to control the outcome of situations, but I do have a lot of resentment when forces are acting on me that I can't control. I think that is how I think of emotions, as a force that is acting on me that I have no control over me, that I don't ask for, and that has a major influence on my actions. Funny enough, the emotions I'm thinking of aren't really "negative emotions" like hate or anger, I feel like I have much more rational control over those than I do over "positive emotions" like happiness or excitement or just having a crush on someone. It's easier for me to talk about how I used to hate people than to talk about good times that I've had. Some of the times in my life that I'm the most embarassed of are the times that I was most excited or most happy, because when I look back it just seems empty in a lot of cases. And I feel like it shouldn't be that way, and there's something very sad for me about being able to write that and know that it's true.

5. What's funny for me is that I've never been an unemotional person. I'm not an ogre or a caveman. Maybe it's just normal human experience, but I feel hyper-emotional: crying isn't an unusual experience for me, I used to listen to Dashboard Confessional, I often feel like throwing things at people, etc. I feel like half a person. Not in the sense that I have no emotions, but that half of me is relatively unknown. Not completely unknown, because there are friends that I talk to about all of this, but they're typically people that are removed from whatever situation I'm involved in.

6. I need to tell more sides of my story, and everyone I'm involved with will benefit from that, including me. I do think, though, that it would be a mistake for me to go around intentionally bringing up things that I feel embarassed about to try to live up to this principle that I've created for myself. I don't think that's healthy. It has a lot more to do with me having faith in other people and trusting the relationships that I have with them, and trusting that they actually care enough to listen. I also think there are frequent moments in my life when I think of something that I'm going through or that happened at some other point in my life, and I choose not to bring those up. Sometimes that's good, but not always.

7. I've been realizing this whole year that it's really critical for me to have faith in my relationships, in a very similar way to how I need to have faith in God for that relationship to function, where faith is trusting that God actually does care about me, or maybe that he just likes me on a personal level.