Blocks of Thought

I know I shouldn't be afraid of the things I'm afraid of, but I can't overcome my fears. I'm scared of talking to people, like at school, or even people on the phone. I'm scared of others judging me. I'm scared of being a financial failure. I'm scared of cancer and medical bills. I'm scared of having a terrible job the rest of my life. I'm scared of being angry all the time. I don't want to be angry. I don't want to have a temper that snaps so easily. I don't want to be jealous of what other people have. I want to be happy for other people. I want empathy. I want to be looked-up to. I want to be proud of myself. I want to stop caring what other people think of me, but without resorting to dismissing them as human beings. I want the world to get along; I want people to stop killing each other. I want people to open their minds and stop being ignorant of the world. I want peace and relaxation. I want respect and honesty. I want to act like I think. I want to think before I speak. I want to be charming and charismatic. I want to lead people to prosperity. I want to be a genius. I want people to study me five hundred years from now. I want to write breath-taking literature. I want to influence the hearts of people. I want them to think about why they live. I want everything to slow down because I'm too scared of everything happening at once.

I don't want a funeral. I want to be cremated. I want a party instead of a funeral. I want to see what the future will look like, but I can't. I want to overcome my fear of death, now, at age twenty, before it overpowers me any longer. I want to do the things I want to do before I die. But even if I did, would that actually remove my fear of death? I'd want more, and more, and more. There's no end to human desire, yet there is clearly an end to human life. The Buddha says all life is suffering because all we do is desire. Well, I desire not to die, but that won't make it so. So we should be more like the Buddha, and we should be more like Christ, and accept our fate: that one day we will die, and even though it may be preceded by a glorious life, the world will move on. As Robert Frost so famously said about life, "It goes on." As John Keats so beautifully and concisely expressed in his epitaph, "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water."

And so Virginia Woolf committed suicide and so Earnest Hemingway committed suicide, and so many others have committed suicide, who's names we no longer remember, who's names we can never locate again; they are gone, and in time, will be forgotten. Everyone who has died, will die, has been born, or will be born, will be forgotten in eternity. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed: Hemingway and Woolf and all the Popes and all the kings and all the peasants are gone, but their atoms are not, and even though that doesn't mean we live forever, it demands the question: were we really ever here, wherever here is, to begin with?

We are no more infinite than a ham; we are no less infinite than a ham.

I came from brilliancy
And return to brilliancy.
What is this?
Kaa!

--The Last Poem of Hoshin, taken from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compliled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki

Another list, another zen story, a mess of things

A list of things I'm excited for in 2012:
--I'd be lying if I said turning twenty-one was not my most anticipated event of the next year. I guess you know where my priorities are now.
--Finally transferring out of community college and into a university.
--People will finally stop talking about 2012 Mayan Doomsday.
--I wasn't very excited for the previous two films, but I'm actually looking forward to watching The Dark Knight Rises this summer.
--[insert other stuff later]


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Muddy Road

"Tanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling.
Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.
'Come on, girl,' said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.
Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. 'We monks don't go near females,' he told Tanzan, 'especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?'
'I left the girl there,' said Tanzan. 'Are you still carrying her?'"

From Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings, compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki.


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It was like 75 degrees today.

Today's sunset was pink and very, very nice. It was striped with a light blue, like early afternoon. It looked like candy. Someone far away was witnessing that azure sky appear in the East, while my sky turned dark from the East.

Hahahaha! I just realized someone could describe something being in the East, but to me, it could be in my West, and that they're both so freaking arbitrary, it shouldn't even matter. Just like how people think the Earth is upside-down if Australian is 'on-top' of a map. I'd love to buy one of those 'upside-down' maps.

I feel like I'm wasting away from doing nothing all day. I sleep in until noon, and then go on the internet until one in the morning, then repeat the process all over again. This is not a life in fulfillment, I can tell you that. I can't wait to go back to school. I can't wait to become a big-shot whatever it is I am.

I'm constantly worried and scared by the never-ending stream of coming events.

What am I even talking about? What am I trying to say?

Surprisingly, this whole thing sums up how I feel at the moment.

Christmas and Stuff

For Christmas this year, my family and I went to my mother's cousin's (first cousin once removed, I think) apartment. It's in this huge apartment complex that's shaped like a square doughnut, and in the middle is a pool surrounded by two clean-cut lawns.

My cousins and I played Just Dance 2 on Wii. Are you the kind of person who's not afraid to make themselves look stupid? I am, and I am not. As anyone who's ever briefly met me can attest to, I'm quite shy. I'm also quite socially inept, meaning I don't know how to treat other people in social situations. I've gotten better since high school, but it's still difficult for me to hold one-on-one conversations with strangers, or generally people I'm not very familiar with. Anyway, with that aside, I can sometimes act like an idiot. I can totally shed any regard for shame and dance like a lunatic in front of my cousins (who I'm not exactly close with). I'm either on or off, I guess.

Sometimes I question whether I'm a leader or a follower. But then, why can't you be both? A leader one day, a follower the next.

Often I think about what kind of father I may be some day. I want to be like my dad. I want to have the kind of life experience he has. Maybe all older people have that level of experience, but not all of them learn from their experiences. But to have more life experience, I need to, uh, experience more of life, don't I? Sometimes I think I'm too well-behaved for my own good; I play things too safe.

I think a good father does whatever he can for his children, and I think one day I'll be willing to do that. That one day, however, is nowhere near today.

Brief Thoughts and Questions on Humanity

I was just thinking that if I could, I'd like to travel for a living. Not tourist travel where there is always a barrier between observer and observed, but a world traveler where I assimilate into different groups of people. Like a monk or something. I've never felt an Us and Them mentality--not until recently. And I feel that's true for a lot of young people until we're told by older generations that, This is how 'They' do it, This is how 'We' do it. People have different ways of wanting or achieving the same goals. Is a Canadian baby any different than an American baby? French to Brazilian? European to Asian? We're so mind-locked into thinking each other a different species that we don't see each other as related.

But then again, maybe we are too distant to care anymore. People are so damn concerned about themselves--including myself--that we ignore others. Maybe the world is too big to care about anyone else. You know, it's like how people lived in tribes and protected their tribes from other tribes and killed other people they considered enemies. Now, we have countries and continents, and so we kill other people because they're trying to hurt us, or in extreme cases, because we want what they have. So where does it end? What does it mean to be human, to act humanely, or to behave like an animal? Humans are animals; perhaps, when we separate ourselves into Us and Them, we're only doing what our instincts tell us to do--the animal instincts.

However, no other animal has ever built a hospital, or performed open heart surgery, or air-shipped millions of pounds of food to the other side of the world, or opened schools, or kept written records, or harnessed electricity, or done any of the wonderful things only humans are capable of. So then, is there a line between human and animal? Can we become more than our natural instincts and let go of our own self-interest for the sake of a more harmonious world?

List and Ghosts

Things I'd like to have happen by forty:
--marriage
--possibly children; if not by forty, then I probably won't ever have children
--a stable income that could support my wife and I; it wouldn't matter to me if my wife worked or made more money than me, as long as she doesn't choose her career over our marriage
--a house
--sense of individual accomplishment through my work
--a consistent way of helping other people
--plenty of time spent abroad
--this is not a comprehensive list

I don't know what else to blog about. I'm typing as I think.

Do you believe in ghosts? I don't, but I know a lot of people who do. Their reasons are mainly personal stories of unexplainable things happening around them. For instance, a have a friend who believes there is a ghost-woman in a white dress who walks his street every night at 2 am. Not a homeless person; a transparent, ethereal apparition that appears and disappears every night at the same time. I have another friend who thought his house was haunted because he's heard strange sounds like footsteps or doors closing. They know I don't believe, so sometimes when they're done telling me one of these stories, they look at me and go, Well, how do you explain that? And my answer nearly every time is, I can't. I can't disprove that a ghost slammed a door in your house or walks around in the middle of the night; I CAN, however, say it's very unlikely the kind of thing you think of as ghosts--namely, a human being in spirit form who can somehow physically manipulate objects--are responsible for these incidents. If you were raised in a culture that believed 3-inch-tall invisible elves did all these unaccountable things, then you'd blame them for scaring you at night. I suppose that still doesn't explain why strange things occur, but, culturally, it's just as reasonable. Maybe there are other-worldly forces that cause these things, but calling these forces ghosts is over-simplifying the problem, and leads to more fear rather than more understanding.

Ego

Today I watched football and played Xbox and used the internet. I'm kind of afraid that's what I'll be doing the next two weeks because I don't have school. I should definitely read more, and I should definitely write more--in my diary, at least. At least I'm putting time aside to write here.

One day I'll have to experience snow.

There was this guy in my fiction writing class who would be on his computer whenever somebody was reading their story. It's rude to expect people to listen to you, and then ignore those people when you're supposed to listen to them. Did he think he was better than everybody? Did he think no one was worth listening to? Sure, there were people in the class who weren't good writers, but why ignore them? Is his ego that big?

I have a big ego. I freely admit that. I'm trying to cure it, but it's difficult for me. I'm always comparing myself to everyone else.

One of the reasons I love my dad is because he has almost no ego. It's so wonderful because he doesn't belittle people and even tries to understand them. I can correct him without fear of reprisal. He admits when he's wrong too. He's self-sacrificing and honorable. He sees every one as equal. He doesn't considered himself above anyone, nor anyone above him. That's the way we should be. That's the kind of person I want to be.

This comes to mind:

"I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's. I'm sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It's disgusting--it is, it is....Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody."--Franny by J.D. Salinger

My Own Hero Journey

Golfing was fantastic. I did much better than I thought I would.

What is this feeling inside of me that wants new experiences and adventure and originality? On one hand, it may be the natural growth from childhood to adulthood: the search for a new place and identity in the world. On the other, it may be that I'm tired of living the same old boring life and want something to wake me from this monotony. You can call my old life my childhood, and you can say I want to become a mature, independent adult. Maturation is a process; it's not a magic trick, and it doesn't happen overnight. In our society, there are a few rites of passage that mark maturation: obtaining a drivers license; graduating high school and/or college; living on one's own; getting a job; getting married. Many of these assume maturation because, each to some degree, they levy responsibility on us. But not all drivers are the same, and not all marriage are consummated between responsible individuals. So even if we do all these things, that doesn't mean we're mature adults. Is that okay? Can we survive adulthood without self-dependence and will and solemnity? No, we cannot. So what happens to the person that passes through these stages, but never grows up? I guess what I'm really looking for is a threshold to break into adulthood. But I don't want to be a full adult yet. I'm caught in the middle, somewhere between responsibility and play. That is what irritates me.

The only time I've ever touched snow was when my family and I went up into the mountains when I was seven or eight. Other than that one experience, no, I've not dealt with snow. I could have lived my whole life up to now without seeing snow--and I've never seen snowfall. But why is that so surprising? I don't think many people in tropical regions have seen snow either.

Zen Story and Things

"Once a Zen master stood up before his students and was about to deliver a sermon. And just as he was about to open his mouth, a bird sang. And he said, 'The sermon has been delivered.'"--Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

There are many trees still green in California. Perennials and all that. We don't exactly have winter here either; it's more like a slightly colder autumn.

I think I was secretly jealous of my brother, who is three years older than me, because he was already using deodorant at that time.

This blog is called Veer Far Away because that's sometimes what I feel like doing: going away to someplace new. I want adventure and heroism. Maybe one day I'll find a great jacket and go on a great adventure.

What exactly is this? Is this a journal, where I record my day, or a soapbox, where I spread my ideas? It's a little of both, and has few of the benefits of either.

I woke up early today to take my Bio final. Early to me now is six or seven in the morning. I probably got a C on it.

If a person likes you and offers you a token of this affection, don't laugh at them. This happened in my Bio class where a guy gave a girl a love poem, and the girl made jokes with the people around her. The guy may have overhead; I don't know. But people who laugh at sincerity and kindness are really questionable people. If you don't like the other person, fine, but don't make fun, and don't bring them down to your level. Reaching out to other human beings takes guts.

Tomorrow I'm going golfing in the morning.

More Colors, Memories, And Jackets

Good question. Do I really want to become rich and famous? Who would mind being rich? Famous, eh. It seems like a hassle. But I would like to be a respected author. Respected by whom? I guess I'm not sure what I want yet.

I remember this one afternoon a few years ago, when the sun was setting, the sky and even the air around me was pink. Honestly, it was like my eyes were pink and the clouds were pink and when I held out my hands in front of me they were pink too. It was really cool. I noticed it while I was inside and looked out my window and saw nothing but pink. I went out to my backyard and just stood there, kind of trying to absorb or bathe in the pinkness.

Also, today I was standing in my room, and I looked out my window and noticed just how many different colors were present at the same time. I noticed the green of the grass and the trees, but those greens weren't the same; the green in the trees was lighter, like bright plastic green; the green in the grass was darker, like an earth tone. For someone who's job isn't to inspect color, it's nice to notice them.

Finally, my jacket story. Actually, the right word for it is dilemma; it's really my jacket dilemma.

In fourth grade, I always wore the same jacket. It was a black hooded jacket that fit me slightly too big. I don't what kind of material it was made of, but when it rubbed together, it was like sandpaper. The lining of the jacket was soft polyester and had planets and stars on it. It was supposed to be reversible, but I never wore the polyester side out because: for one, it was a little embarrassing to dress in neon planets and stars, and, more importantly, because the sand paper side would have rubbed my skin raw.

Anyway, I wore that jacket nearly everyday. Part of the reason I wore it so much was because I was afraid I smelled because I didn't use deodorant yet (note: did not reach puberty until seventh grade), but, more practically, because it was a warm jacket for the cold mornings. I don't remember what happened to that jacket. I think I lost it. But ever since, I've never had a jacket that I found so comforting. It may sound strange, but I wish I had a certain jacket that I wore all the time. Like an identity, you know? Some people have certain things that are exclusively them, like their hair, or their cologne. I want my thing to be an all-weather jacket. Warm and comfortable and always on me.

Todays Weather, Then A Memory

Where is this going to begin, and where is this going to end?

It rained today. When I woke up, my room was kind of blue, even with my blinds closed. It's strange that days can be different colors. How lucky am I to even see color, or have functioning eyes? This morning the day was blue; normally, it's a bright yellow. At sunset, it's coral or deepening red. I have a memory that comes to mind related to this.

I'm sitting in my car at my school waiting for my six o'clock class to start. The parking lot I'm in is nice and quiet. The sun is setting down to my left behind these tall trees; the sky is darkening and turning midnight blue to my right. In between are whispy clouds the color of vibrant pink coral and ripe tangerine orange. And when I say in between, I mean they appear close to where I am, almost like I can run and touch them. Beyond them are the hills I drive through to get home, which have expensive houses on them; they look like movie scenery, yet also look detailed and much more real than normal--much clearer than normal, I guess. It's like I'm in a tub of rainbow sherbert ice cream, only I feel safe and warm. I feel like crying between I'm grateful for my life. I think about my life and the direction I'm going. Like always, I'm thinking about the future and worry that I won't explore the world and become rich and famous, and will ultimately fail in every attempt to fulfill my dreams. That's what I'm usually afraid of, so it's no surprise to me I'm thinking about it at that time. But seeing those wonderful colors floating across the sky toward the setting sun made me hopeful again. And I thought, "It's enough to be alive and see all of this. I'm going to be okay." That's it.

Anyway, so, yeah, it rained today, and I stayed inside the entire time. I don't like driving in the rain.

Tomorrow I'll tell you my jacket story. (It's not really a story.)

The Blogger With A Thousand Excuses (for not blogging more)

I'm going to try posting more often now. I'm not guaranteeing anything at the moment, but I feel like if I start incorporating blogging into my daily routine, I might be able to pull off a post every other day or so. Not even thinking about quality at this point; they'll just be my thoughts.

Here's my prediction for the presidential election next November: Mitt Romney loses against incumbent Barrack Obama. Why do I think Romney will win the Republican nomination? He looks the most like a politician, his views are neither too conservative nor too non-conservative, and he has a lot of money. By the way, I'm not a Democrat or a Republican or a banana; I'm actually apolitical, if I'm honest.

I don't know what to write about.

I'm half-way through Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I can't make too many judgements right now, although I might criticize the plot for, like, you know, finally developing halfway through.

I'm also reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which I find extremely interesting, although a bit too scholarly for my taste. It's about what James Joyce calls the "monomyth" (don't actually remember if it was Joyce; don't quote me). Monomyth is the theory that many, many, MANY human myths/stories from all over the world follow the same pattern; Campbell calls this pattern the Hero Cycle. A modern day example of this is Harry Potter.This means that human psychology is basically the same anywhere you go. Of course, there are innumerable differences and details that can alter one's mind; but, in essence, we're all pretty much thinking on the same wavelength.

Okay.

Ask Me Anything About Human Sexuality. (That's the class I talk about.)

I feel like posting, but I don't know what to write about. This will most likely be a summary of my day.

I woke up around 8:40. Usually it takes me ten or so minutes after I wake up to actually get up--out of bed and changed or whatever. Literally ten minutes or more. So by the time I was preparing to go to class, it was already 8:55 or so, and as a result, I skipped breakfast.

Then I drove to school and whatnot. Confession: I like head-banging in my car and singing/humming/screaming to music. I'm afraid of getting whip-lash one day.

Anyway, I got to school pretty early. I've been late a lot this semester. In fact, I think I'm an absence or two away having my grade lowered. You see, every three instances of arriving late counts as an absence, and because we must sign in at the start of class, if you arrive anytime after 9:45 you're considered late. You get five or six absences before you're dropped a full letter grade. That's why I've been getting to class earlier: I don't want my grade lowered in the last two weeks of school.

I think it's funny that it's already been three years since I graduated high school. Where did all the time go? I still feel like my eighteen-year-old self; I'm still living two years in the past. Well, not exactly. I am changed, that's self-evident. I'm less edgy, not so anxious; I'm not trying to please everyone as much.

What I need is experience. Experience can teach us anything. It's like mental puberty, you know? What's so strange about puberty is that the human body becomes mature and ready for procreation, but the mind is still inexperienced. Which is why it's sad when teenage girls become pregnant: they don't know how much experience they're missing, and how their lives will change.

I've had a good friend since elementary school who is a smart, athletic, funny, charming, ruggedly handsome guy. Unfortunately, he got his girlfriend--his first legitimate girlfriend--pregnant during senior year. Two years later, they were married. And all this time, I think it's a damn shame that those two radically altered their lives in only an instant. Who am I to judge their lives now if they're doing what they want? Regardless, what I mean is, we're not the people at age 15 that we'll be at age 20 or 28 or 35 or 87--nor should we be. If we get out into the world, we'll see life for what it is through our own eyes--whatever that may mean to us. And hopefully, after we've seen all the heartache and personal struggles, and had some of our own, then, if we're lucky, we'll become better people for the world.

Why do all my posts have to have a moral? I'm so goddam didactic, like medieval literature.