Saturday, September 29, 2012

Upon a Dark Horse

New movie review for Dark Horse at Contents May Settle.  The reviews themselves are a work in progress, but I'm having fun with practicing them.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Mic Check


The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
It wasn’t just that the cave was cold, it wasn’t just that it was damp and smelly. It was the fact that the cave was in the middle of Islington and there wasn’t a bus due for two million years.
Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.
He was stranded in prehistoric Earth as the result of a complex sequence of events which had involved him being alternately blown up and insulted in more bizarre regions of the Galaxy than he ever dreamt existed, and though his life had now turned very, very, very quiet, he was still feeling jumpy.


 -- Life the Universe and Everything, Douglas Adams

Lately, it's been hard to explain what's going on in my head without sounding like I'm crazy.  I've been through some serious changes in identity recently, and it feels in many ways like I'm still adjusting to it all.  To paraphrase the quote above, even though my life has calmed down from some craziness, I'm still feeling pretty jumpy.  As much I would love to be instantly adaptable, my brain and body suffer from the same limitations and programming defects as the rest of you mortals and it keeps wanting to return to old habits and resists new ways of thinking.  But, as mentioned in my last post, it seems a little gross, or at least self-indulgent, to talk about it anymore.  This becomes increasingly clear the more I read OTHER writers droning on and on and on about becoming who they are.  Sometimes I think personal development is like that dream you had last night.  Fascinating to you, less fascinating to someone who wasn't there to feel it all with you.

This was most recently brought home to me in a review mentioned in passing for the book How Should a Person Be.  The work in question is an auto-biographical pseudo-novel about a young artist exploring the question written in the title.  The reviews seem to indicate it's something you're going to love or you're going to hate, but the extreme antipathy in the negative reviews is interesting to me.  I've been seeing a lot of grumbling about 20-somethings droning on about who they are, and what they're going to be, and to just shut up and pick something already.  And to some degree, I get that.  Who cares what you decide to be?  All people really care about is if you're going to be a dick about it to the people around you in the process.

On the other hand, this is a pretty interesting topic.  Haven't we been asking this question in one form or another since we gained sentience when we found that Monolith?  Isn't the appeal of religion that it answers that question simply and lets you get on with life?  Anyway, however tedious the individual stories of personal growth may seem from time to time, I am, in general, happy that people are at least self-aware enough to ask the question, even if they must drone on about it.  And I feel that people asking it at a younger and younger age can only be a good thing.  Because in general, I think most people are going to come back to, basically:  I want to feel accomplished, and I want to feel like a good person who has friends.  Not necessarily in that order.  

Which is a long way of saying, one of the things I've been thinking about is who I want to be, and I understand if this question is really of no particular interest to anyone but me.  And of course, for me it came back to:  I want to feel accomplished and I want to be a good person, in my own definition of those things.  What defines a good person we can leave for later, but "how do I feel accomplished?" has been weighing on me.  What is the perfect intersection of my potential and my passion?  I initially thought it was science (physics/astronomy), but have been seriously second-guessing that decision of late.  That feels more like the career I was expected to take, than the career I was really passionate about.  I regret nothing about the degree itself, and the critical thinking and problem-solving skills gained from it, but I can't believe I never noticed how little passion I actually have for the nuts and bolts of science until just recently.

So, if what I've done hasn't been working out for me as well as I'd like, what should I do instead?  I feel like a teenager all over again trying to figure it out.  And my thoughts return to the grandiose delusions I never completely left behind in my teenage years, just let slumber all those years I was in the closet.  And now, waking them up and looking at them in the light of day, it astounds me how much of an artistic sensibility  I seem to have.  I am good with numbers, and occasionally employ logic to good use, but most of the things I seem to want to MAKE are artistic in nature.  I want to write poems, and novels, write music to make men weep, draw faces, paint portals to other worlds, to share what I've learned about life, the universe and everything the best I know how.  I want to make something beautiful and share it with you.  Of course, I have no idea how to monetize any of that in a way that would enable me to live comfortably, although I assume it's unlikely, whatever grandiouse delusions may briefly cloud my view.  I think it's enough, for now, to recognize that I want to do it, even if I never share it with more than a few people.

Neil Gaiman once said, more or less, that we owe it to each other to tell each other stories and I really agree with him.  So, for the time being, I have contented myself, more or less, that I will continue to plug away at the day job, but will start trying to develop my artistic skills in my off-time.  And while I have vague plans to take an acting class, a drawing class and possibly a dance class at sometime in the next year and see how they feel, what I REALLY want to do artistically right now is play piano and write.  There are days when all I hear in my head is piano music.  And mornings I wake up and sit on the couch reveling in ideas for a new or existing story.  I have stories to write and songs to play that give me a rush of emotion just thinking about them.  I feel, as I think about how they would go, what I would want the reader/listener to feel as they experience it and I have no idea if I can ever actually make that happen.  But I badly want to try.

So, for the time being and as long as it suits me, I am going to work on developing the skills necessary to translate my feelings into a song or a story that might be worth sharing with someone else.  It's going to be boring for a while while I work through the basics of the forms, and lord knows I'm going to have to keep the grandiose delusions and corresponding ego in check, but I think it will ultimately be rewarding if I keep at it.  I am just really very curious to find out if I am capable of  playing a song worth listening to or writing a story worth reading.  And honestly, I think it's time I found out.

So, who do I want to be?  Among some other things I hope to be a musician and a writer.  And somewhere in there, a good person, with friends.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Status Update - input parameters

The altercation with the objectivist pick-up artist got me thinking about the purpose of this blog.  Among my many grandiose delusions was an idea to build the readership of this blog somehow by relating bit of things I've learned since coming out of the closet, which, I think, is quite a lot.  Which isn't to say I learned nothing in my depressed, closeted years, but the difference between what I think I know now, and what I thought I knew then still sometimes staggers me.  And then, I am further staggered to realize just how much it is I don't know yet.  So, you know, lots of staggering.  But what I said to the opua applies to me as well, who am I to be telling anyone else how to live just yet?  Wouldn't any advice from me be more compelling coming from a guy who's been awake and thriving for a decade, instead of just waking up? Probably, in fact.  Which is probably why this blog has a readership of about 2 (hi handsome!).  In any case, the taste the opua's blog and modus operandi has left in my mouth has left me wanting to make ANYTHING but that kind of blog.  So I've ruled out one possibility:  I am not here to be your guru or sell you my shit like it doesn't stink.

I am here, I guess, to share what I think I know, but you can take it or leave it.  Because I am also partly here to process my thoughts by writing them out orderly.  And believe me, I actually do most of this properly offline in my own notebooks.   But I have, and will in the future, sometimes decide that I want to write it out here.  It's not that I think my thoughts on anything will necessarily help you, or that you should do just what I write about doing, because that's not my decision to make.  Some things I might just want said, and out in the world because I think they are important ideas.   Mostly, I'll share these things because I want to be better understood by the friends who read this blog, or at least paint a picture of where I'm at.  So if someone hasn't heard from me for a while, they can take a gander at one of my semi-coherent posts and go, "ah, I see.  He hasn't called because he's been crazy."

I definitely have an opinion about Things, of course.  And the more I wake up, and the more I use my critical thinking skills to process my life instead of passively letting it carry me along, the more I have to say about these Things.  And while the ongoing midlife crisis that emerged from my coming out process hasn't yet rolled to a stop, I am still making progress and figuring things out.  One of the important things I've figured out, for a variety of historical reasons, is that I have just about zero tolerance for manipulative bullshit from other people.  I don't like it when people try to define myself or my purpose from the outside.  I don't like it when people mislead others for their own benefit.  I don't like it when people tell me up is down and then fall on their fainting couches when I call them on it.  I don't like people who slap me in the face (verbally or otherwise) and then get huffy and condescending when I'm not nice about it.  I especially don't like other people wildly projecting their issues onto me and everyone else instead of admitting that the problem they might be having is with themselves (something I am guilty of more often than I care to admit).  And I will not hesitate to call bullshit on these things when I see them.  And these things make me angry enough that I have a hard time sugar-coating them, even though that generally gets better results.  I don't like getting called on any of this stuff either, but I'd rather get called on my own odious bullshit then have that stench stinking up my relationships indefinitely.   So, occasionally, on this blog, I'm going to call some bullshit out.  Even if it just amounts to screaming into the ether.

What I'm going to try and do less, not that you could tell from this post, is use this blog as an online diary.  I have notebooks to whine into if I really need to.  And increasingly, it has been occurring to me that I might process my stupid shit better by writing it into stories, and posting those on Contents May Settle.  That way, I get my emotions processed and thoughts examined and at the end, I at least I have a story that may be worth sharing with someone, as opposed to self-indulgent complaints which, in my experience, don't go over so well as dinner conversation.

As for my delusions of grandeur, I will try to leave them a ways behind.  I have ambitions still, yes, but I mostly just hope my friends read this blog and understand more about me.  Beyond that, I'm not here to develop a following.  And if I do, I hope it's because, after a couple or more years of hard work, I've written stories people want to read, music people want to hear, or programs/apps people want to use.  Even then, that's just the potential aspirations for this blog.  If it only ever acts as an echo to the real and meaningful life I am starting to build, which will hopefully be rich in other ways, if not in money and fame, then it will have served it's purpose.


Monday, September 10, 2012

Status Report: Working

*twisting knobs*
*increasing coherence*

So I was directed to this article  over the Twitter machine, and I have some thoughts about it.  His assertion is that we all owe the world massive amounts of productivity, and must, to make our fortune and be worthwhile people, work a 14-hour day, abolish the idea of weekends and just work another 2 14-hour days, and really get things done.  We must also stop watching movies, except maybe documentaries, those we may watch.  We are allowed high culture such as an opera or symphony once a week, because those are done by similarly high-achieving people and are therefore acceptable.  We must never let ourself slow down, so if we have a success at work, we don't take too long to celebrate, just pump our fist and keep going.  This, according to the article, is what we all must do to be productive, happy, and people he would personally find worth talking to.

The first mistake this article makes is wildly projecting the author's problems and mistakes onto his audience.  Not everyone spent their life gambling and traveling the world leading, by his own account, a very privileged and wealthy life on winnings, and then having a crisis of identity at age 30 about producing things.  Therefore, not everyone feels the need to work 14-hour days to make up for what they perceive is lost time.  Neither are all of us objectivists who worship at the alter of Ayn Rand.  This is all the author's problem.  And he's coping with it admirably, but the idea presented in the article that this is our collective problem and we all need to do just what he did is false.  Everyone's unhappy life imbalance is arranged differently, they all require a different solution to find their own future happiness.

Saturday, September 08, 2012

Status Report: Meet the new H, same as the old H

*adjusts dials*
*flips switches*

Hello?  Is this thing on?  Great.

Operation "change into someone else completely overnight" is going just about as well as you think it would.  Monday and Tuesday were fairly successful.  Which was then, of course, followed by a massive cascade failure of motivation and discipline for the rest of the week.  I remain committed to "collapsing the waveform" though, however difficult.  I'm trying to limit the universe of possible me's to the one I so desperately want to be and am not.  My attitude probably needs adjustment of course, I'm just so frustrated with myself right now.  I keep trying to develop new habits and keep actively sabotaging myself out of, I believe, complete cowardice over changing.  I am, and have been for far too long, comfortable in my misery, apathy and purposeful lack of achievement.  I mean, I know the brain gets comfortable with its chemical balances, and actively resists changing them, but this is ridiculous.

I have been under the persistent delusion that coming out of the closet was what I needed to fix for my life to suddenly move forward with purpose, drive and satisfaction.  And don't get me wrong, coming of the closet was VITAL to my sanity.  It's just been dis-enheartening to realize that this is not the end of my struggle.  For one thing, I seem to be fighting some form of learned helplessness I picked up somewhere down the line, probably back as a kid.


Tuesday, September 04, 2012

Approaching Event Horizon

*********INFINITE H CONTROL SYSTEM******************

ENTER USERNAME:  PARALLEL H 7164

*********GOOD MORNING H 7164, WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU?*******

1) SURVEILLANCE FEEDS
2) STATUS REPORTS
3) ORDER PIZZA
4) COLLAPSE WAVEFORM
5) THERMONUCLEAR WAR

> THERMONUCLEAR WAR

**********HA HA HA, WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT TO DO?*********


1) SURVEILLANCE FEEDS
2) STATUS REPORTS
3) ORDER PIZZA
4) COLLAPSE WAVEFORM
5) THERMONUCLEAR WAR

>  COLLAPSE WAVEFORM

***********DO YOU REALLY WISH TO COLLAPSE 2 REALITIES?  YOU WILL ONLY HAVE [INFINITE] REALITIES REMAINING  . . . *******************

1) Y
2) N

> Y