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.