intellectual indulgence

How my life is like a game of D&D (or I am the 20 Sided Die)

2009-07-17T17:17:00.000-07:00

I often feel like the twenty sided die. When it comes to rolling initiative I can fall anywhere from critical failure to the absolute motivation of a natural twenty. Certain endeavors give me a natural bonus because I find them more interesting. Right now I'm critically failing on completing my errands but my initiative on self-expression is extremely high.

The concept of the will save in my day to day life also seems to be a gamble. Sometimes I have amazing will power: don't eat that cookie, don't drink too much, don't succumb to your feelings of lost love, don't say emotional things your logic knows to be incorrect. Other days I'm rolling terrible will saves, falling prey to the injuries of gluttony, intoxication, the dangers of repetition, and the embarrassment of wearing my heart on my sleeve unnecessarily. Like my 20 sided alter ego, I never know exactly where my will save will land.

Same goes for fortitude saves. Sometimes I have it and can withstand any obstacle sent my way. Other times the smallest incident will crumble me. It seems as arbitrary as the rolling of a die.

Then there are concentration checks. Can I maintain my concentration in melee? There is the melee of D&D battle but there is the melee of everyday life: school, work, friendships, relationships, and projects. Sometimes it seems that these things are all battling with one another not noticing the accidental damage I'm incurring during the melee.

As a character I don't have a very high armor class. I take too many negatives for pride, sensitivity, stubbornness, and over analyzation. Its easy to hit me and my low reflex save makes me slow to counter-attack, being more likely to internalize and try to understand why I'm being attacked than actually do anything about it.

I'm more of a healer than a fighter and I probably have more ranks in charisma than anything else. As much as I can read people though I have no sense of motive or alignment and it often leads me into trouble.

Every time I level I become more skilled and more knowledgeable but just like in game are are new challenges with each level that seem to be more difficult than the last. I can gain many levels but certain challenges make me feel and appear to be lower level again. Certain challenges, like relationships with other people, tend to have special guidance in their shots because they nearly always hit me even after I think I've gained more armor and skills. Its like a magic missile to my feelings, not necessarily able to critically damage me but definitely sending some hit points.

Say I wanted an old job back where I felt I left on good terms and found out one stupid mistake was viewed as an error of judgement and seen as a trust issue, that's about 5 damage points on the roll to trust, 5 on the roll of pride in work ethics, 5 on the roll of sensitivity to judgement by other people. A full nights rest though and I might be left only with those 5 points of damage to my sensitivity to judgement by other people.

For me, drawing and writing are kind of like cure light wounds potions. Enough creativity and I start to regain a few confidence points. Friends and partners, as much as they can cause damage, also act like cure critical wounds spells or potions.

The D&D campaign itself can compare much to life. You're on some kind of quest which isn't always clear to you. Within this overarching quest you have many adventures and misadventures. You have your main party which shares in the adventures but can change over time adding and losing members. You meet many others along your ways but they do not join your party. Some of the others you meet are great sages or skilled in ways which they impart to you. Some characters you meet are evil or terrifying and you may do battle with them. The game can seem meandering and pointless at times but you know the Dungeon Master has something in mind for you and your party even if you don't know what it is.

Sometimes the monsters and zombies and armies I face in D&D seem tamer than the things I face in real life. Life doesn't have the same set rules you can follow (though one can make the analogy of people playing the same game with different editions". The other big difference being that I could quit playing the game of D&D at anytime whereas quitting the game of life is a lot more dire and though not impossible, not a very good choice. The imaginary world created in my D&D game will last on though even when my character dies just like the world will continue when I am not here anymore.

So despite the variability of where I will roll, I just need to keep learning skills and bettering myself so I'm not affected in the same way. I will continue to level up and face challenges. My alter ego may be a twenty-sided die, but whoever heard of being able to play a D&D game without one, variability, probability and all.

growing up

2009-01-29T18:07:00.000-08:00

What happens when you reach the point where your peers say you're selling out and adults say you're just growing up. You don't want to "grow up". What does that even mean? I know plenty of 50 somethings with jobs and kids, but they still get wasted at the bar every night. Are they grown up because they have bills? I have those too, and I don't want any more of them. Are you grown up when you have kids? Because I've had friends having babies when we were sixteen and they sure as hell weren't grown up.
At this point though, you look at your life and you find yourself afraid of doing things you might enjoy or find exciting. You long to drop out of school, stop working, and just grab the next train. Other people do it, why can't I? Why am I afraid of getting caught? What do those ramifications mean? Why am I afraid that I just wouldn't be able to do it? I love being in school, but its the beginning of this long future equation. First I finish this school, then I go to that school. And since I've spent all this time and money and hard work on school, I better damn well get the job to pay off the bills. So I'll keep spending time and working.
I've seen the alternatives, I've dreamed myself in the alternatives, but in the end, is my middle class indoctrination too strong? Can I let go of stuff, of status, of pride? Maybe, but I still find heirarchies exist everywhere and nowhere will I be more something than anyone else. I just don't have that kind of personality. I'm too square for punk and too punk for squares. I can't ask advice from anyone else. I think I know what I want and then I see it, the antithesis to my college counterparts. Those some would look down on, but to me, their dreadlocks and patches and overalls and packs reminding me of the freedom and potential that life has. The way of living not by your means, but by others. Living on the excesses of a wasteful society and forming your own community. To some, this means being the dregs, being lazy, self indulgent, leeches on our society. But what is our society if not leeches of the people?
Less high-mindedly, they just look like they're having fun. At what point did I stop having fun getting drunk and trying to ride tall bikes around? When did those friends who were so much fun to me, seem like they were going nowhere and I should probably do something else? And then I get to this point and realized I hated their fun because I'm not having much. I might not be able to be as crazy as other people? But there needs to exist those people that will make you remember to not take life too seriously.
For now though, I'm not sure where I would go for life advice. To those who tell me to give it up and return to the fold of fun and day-to-day survival and the freedom that comes with it? Or those that say the freedom comes in the end, after hard work and accomplishment? To one side I say, is there freedom in nothing when you do live in a society like this? Are you never hindered by your history or finances? Or to the other, is there an end? Or is it always just hard work and the societally constructed illusion of reward. For now, the illusion seems more real than reality. Maybe, I just escape reality in the pretense of future reward, hope in future comforts.
For now I'm just in between. Professors don't count me as an adult but everyone's telling me to be an adult. So do I just get the responsibility without the privilege? Maybe this is why no one wants to grow up, its not just the generational angst and conceitedness I always chalked it up to.

unstructured political rant after watching Gonzo

2008-09-15T19:36:00.000-07:00

There can exist no disappointment without hope. I feel about American society the same way that I felt about learning that Santa Claus did not exist. Till the ripe old age of 11 I maintained that Santa Claus at least existed as a spirit of Christmas. I defended the jolly fat man long after everyone else had lost faith till one day I realized the commercial hoax of it all. America represents the spirit of Christmas, the opportunity, hope, and faith and then you realize the jolly fat man is really a bunch of fat old white men in suits commodifying and commercializing our way of life. Everything has a price and comfort has become worth more than ideals.

How can we as the American youth not care? What is the nostalgia that we feel for times of which we were never a part? We idealize the revolutionaries of the sixties and commend their ideals. The civil rights era accomplished many of their goals but by no means all of them. Because our parents won some battles, does that make us complacent to let that be the status quo? Or is it their failures that daunt us. Yesterdays revolutionaries are today’s middle and upper classes. Bob Dylan is a millionaire living out the comforts of old age opening up for other artists to an audience that once looked to him for inspiration and now just for entertainment. Our parents gave up on peace and love and got credit cards. The further we moved from the post WWII surfeit and away from our agricultural and hometown roots, the more “leisure” we had, the more we wanted. In this struggle for leisure, we lose it.

Work hard for your leisure items, your tv, your car, your wardrobe. If you can’t afford leisure then you’re living an incomplete life. You should probably work harder so you can have more leisure. Or was it Reaganomics that destroyed us? Did that pestilence of a human being so demoralize the attempt to fight back that we gave up? I can’t say. I was born the year of Reagan’s second inauguration. Was it Reagan himself that so deterred the radicals and activists or the fact that Americans accepted Reagan’s bold faced lies and unsympathetic views on human rights and social justice? At what point did money become more important than quality of life? I thought that money was supposed to improve quality of life.

I don’t know what started the initial decline in faith in our system, but I know I have none. I look at the political and social climate of my time. There’s plenty to protest. There is a baseless war similar to Vietnam. The U.S. no longer produces enough to be self sufficient. Jobs are out-sourced, 3 million citizens are disenfranchised from felonies alone, racism run rampant, schools fail miserably, suicide and divorce rates skyrocket. The list could go on. I know though that I watch the civil rights era footage and wish my voice could be heard in the same way.

Now we have only the illusion of a voice. Go and protest, but then it will be permanently recorded. You could potentially get tasered by police or attacked by their dogs. Even worse you could get cited for trespassing, conspiracy, terrorism, assault, criminal mischief or at the very least when you stand your ground for the right to free speech you could be cited for the failure to disperse. This will then go on your record so I hope you don’t want to be a teacher, judge, public official, or many other jobs. Or you could also be intimidated by the futility of it; we no longer have media to tell the truth. Instead, the police are trained to wait for a media break to break up protests without having their tactics seen nationally. Instead of being seen as an integral part of the democratic process, protesters, demonstrators, radicals, or just those of a different opinion, are demonized and scandalized. The media has learned to make them look sensational and meaningless. Even if average citizens don’t respect these fringe opinions they need to remember to respect that this makes a democracy. If everyone doesn’t have a voice then democracy no longer exists.

Maybe part of the illusion was shattered when millions of people voted in 2000 and the majority of them voted for Al Gore, but because of the Electoral College (or maybe the influential cousin strategically placed) we got George W. Bush as a president. He managed to re-open a war that his family and cohorts started and use it as an excuse to enact laws which impinge upon American freedoms. He had the audacity to start bombing Iraq when it was Afghanistan who had bombed one of our American institutions. And again, the worst part was to watch Americans accept this as right. To rub it in, Bush was re-elected. So is it a wonder that our generation feels a little useless?

We watched our parents’ only get so far ahead then give up. We watch our voices get censored and go unheard. We feel the effects of numbers taking the place of human beings, of bottom lines having more significance than human lives. So many of my friends despise this country and the way its run. But we couldn’t despise it and be so disappointed if there were no hope. Even if the disillusion happened very young, at one point life seemed full of so much more possibility. That’s part of America, growing up thinking maybe you could have a chance to be rich and famous one day. Nobody tells you that life is a bell curve and most of us will turn out average. But average should not mean struggling this much. It should not mean having unaffordable education and an absence of healthcare. It shouldn’t mean being satisfied with microwaves and televisions and being entertained.

TV is like the soma from Brave New World. It’s the drug that pacifies this nation and feeds us false realities. For all of the educational good it does it also kills us slowly.

There are so many things that I think are wrong with this nation. Everyone has different ideas about what they think is right, but everyone knows that something is wrong right now. We are a fast disintegrating nation and our empire is crumbling just like Rome before us. We’ve stretched ourselves too thin till we can’t see the edges anymore and we don’t understand how it all fits together. We make short term fixes but don’t solve the long term problems.

I personally feel that everything needs to be overhauled. The education system needs to change as does the welfare and housing system. The healthcare needs to change. Jails and the judicial system needs to change. The economics still force blacks to be towards the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy which in turn makes black males the highest prison population. That then seems to me like a new disenfranchisement. The society needs to be shaken from bottom up but how do we do that, especially when no one cares.

Tonight I watched Gonzo, the Hunter S. Thompson documentary. He really believed in something and had something to say about it. I’m not nearly so coherent or educated. This midnight rant has no supporting evidence other than what I know in my own head. I’m not sure what needs to be done to change things, I just don’t understand why people don’t care anymore. I don’t know what differences there are between now and the sixties. Is it that we don’t have a generation to rebel against? Is it that ex hippi parents are indulgent in their children’s potential radicalism in the knowledge that they will someday grow out of it and become yuppies like them. This then nullifies the attempt to rebel against the norm because the rebellion itself seems normal and pointless. I’m going to have to ruminate on this further. I don’t want to be one of those people that just rails endlessly without having any facts. Granted this is just an unstructured rant, but I wish I could write something that would really inspire people. To what though, I don’t know. I just know that we’ve lost our enthusiasm and only know nostalgia which doesn’t change anything.

fun times

2008-07-18T10:21:00.000-07:00

So I move back to Pittsburgh in a little over a week. I am really excited but I have to say philly has been treating me so well.
Yesterday I had an awesome adventure day. I took my track class at the velodrome in the morning which is always fun and exciting. We were doing 1k sprints and my time improved by 9 seconds with the flying start as opposed to standing (I think I know a weakness now). Though the drive is slightly annoying, especially with traffic like yesterday, having Sam as company makes it feel like I'm just hanging out for the most part. I couldn't have asked for someone better to motivate me with these classes.
When I got back to the city I met a friend at the Art Museum for my first foray into the Philly Art Museum. Somewhat funny for someone who worked at the Carnegie as long as I did and was so often seen to be wandering the CMA halls from high school onwards as a general space for clearing my head. Then we rode bikes to Devil's Pool, another famous philly haunt I had yet to experience. The ride was rather grueling with uphills in 95 degree heat after the rigorous morning on the track. When we finally got to Devil's Pool it was beautiful, cool, anddddd already filled with half of philly. That being said I still thought it was really fun and in a way even more definitive of Philly. Whats a philly experience without the people? The teenagers were competing with one another doing flips off the rocks and diving in. When I finally got in the water it was so cool and refreshing. I was such a wuss though and only jumped off the lowest rocks then sat in the moving part of the creek. Then we rode back into the city via forbidden drive and trail.
Later on in the evening I met up with a pile of some of the most awesome kids in Philly to see the midnight opening of Batman: The Dark Knight. So epic! So incredible! The joker was the joker as he was always meant to be. The things he said resonating in me about the fine line between genius in madness. I ask myself those questions all the time, is there logic in chaos? I think technically no, but is anarchy chaos? Because anarchy is to me somewhat logical. I felt sad that Heath Ledger can't give any more amazing performances like that again... its time for lunch i'll continue this later.

babies

2008-07-11T10:36:00.000-07:00

This morning I went to the coffee shop and my friend was there with her new baby. It made me incredibly happy. I feel like many of my friends do not want children and are almost disgusted by the thought of them. For me, babies (especially ones born into the d.i.y. scene) are a source of hope and encouragement in the world that so often is dark and pessimistic. I feel like many people that have children can be slightly depressing. I hate to judge but there are children for whom I feel terrible. There are people that have children that are financially, physically, and emotionally unable to care for them. Those are the children that end up in orphanages and foster care, violent or uneducated. People will continue having children regardless of the overpopulation of the planet and lack of resources. So for me, seeing someone having children that will imbue them with the idealism of the community which we have created is inspiring. The naturalness of new life is inspiring. And the thought of the bond between parents and children is inspiring. It is strange to think of molding a child in your own image, a weird pseudo god position, but who else would you mold them after? If you like how you live your life wouldn't you try to teach your child the same values? I'm not sure what is different about imposing the values of the punk community versus christian ethics or mainstream materialistic society except that I feel that punk ideals aren't necessarily imposed to much as made available. I feel that a child raised to be conscientous of their surroundings, of the food they eat and where it comes from, the energy they consume and its sources, the superficiality of the clothing that they wear, and the idea that who they are as people is infinitely more important than what they own is a well informed child who can in turn makes its own decisions. If at some point the child decides to become a corporate banker, well, they at least have the information of both sides to make that decision.

More personally, I know that someday I would like to have a family and kids. Initially I said, fuck that, fuck the establishment, fuck breeders, fuck institutions, fuck western christian rituals of acceptable mating practices. But theeeen, I moved to Pittsburgh. I realized that having a long term partner is something that I personally would like to have, not because its the socio-norm but because it is the type of relationship in which I feel most comfortable. I long for that security and sharing of life. I feel that within the stability of a good relationship one can grow in many other directions because a certain part of one's personality is fulfilled so they are no longer concentrating on seeking that. And for kids, as I've explained above, I can't think of a better way to subvert the system than to have kids and teach them the things that you have learned after years of experience. They are the future. I know that sometimes I feel that having kids would be terribly selfish, that I would be bringing children into suffering and bequeath to them an immensely fucked up world. But can the world be saved? Can it get better? Not if everyone gives up on it. If people do what they can as much as they can little by little throughout their life and through the generations and think of the world as an ongoing project, then things can change. The world has always had its problems and there has always been a handful of individuals standing up to the mainstream rule makers to create the world in which they wanted to live.
Basically, babies make me think about the world, but more than that they make me smile regardless of whatever dire thoughts are going through my head. So congratulations to my friends who recently had kids.

metaphors

2008-06-23T15:26:00.000-07:00

I'm like a piece of broken glass. People have mixed feelings about broken glass. To some its a shiny treasure that they find in the street and to some its just trash to be thrown away. The conscientous type might want to recycle it. Depending on how you hold it the glass reflects all colors of light. Some sides of it are smooth and pleasing to the touch. But the edge that is broken is sharp and dangerous. It can cut you before you realize it. The glass itself is also fragile and can be broken further. People will wonder what the broken piece of glass was like as a whole, what was it, what was it for. If the glass is broken enough times it just becomes sand. But with the intensity of flame sand becomes glass again. New, whole, without sharp edges, a different shape formed of the same material. But for now, I'm still just a piece of broken glass.

Dreamscapes and non sequiturs on food

2008-05-29T15:06:00.001-07:00

PART I:

I wonder about the settings that happen in dreams. There are certain settings in my dreams that have recurred over the years but I don't recognize them upon waking. I wonder if these 'scapes are from my far past, or based on the past but altered by my mind. Some of these 'scapes feel so absolutely comfortable that I wonder if they are places I have yet to go. I wonder if some of these dreamscapes are places where I am meant to live and be happy at one point in the future.
It feels like that cheesy movie line, "I've met you before, once upon a time in a dream." Except its not love at first sight with a person, its the feeling about a place. I just wonder if I found these places past or future if I would recognize them out of my dreams.

PART II food non sequitur:

On another note I have been cooking a lot lately. There is not much intellectual about this except that I've been thinking about food lately. My favorite dishes of the week have been simple but delicious and using a lot of recurring ingredients:

1. Sauteed sweet potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, and tofu glazed with maple syrup, soy sauce, ginger, and garlic over brown rice.

2. tomato soup with tofu and kale, seasoned with some red wine vinegar, vegetable bouillon, ginger, garlic, and chili powder

3. spinach salad with tofu and carrots, homemade dressing of yup same old, red wine vinegar, olive oil, ginger, garlic, sea salt, and black pepper

There seems to be a general connection. Since I've stopped drinking I've had more energy to ride more and start running in the mornings again. The more that I exercise the more that I like to take time and eat healthy foods. This puts me in an all over better mood than I had been in for a while and makes me feel more motivated in general. Yay for cooking. I might attempt pierogi again this weekend.

Flying

2008-05-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

There's something about flying that I've always loved. It seems to put the world into perspective when I am starting to forget. I look out the window at the patchwork quilt of human civilization and nature spread out beneath me. The people are invisible in their little homes, offices, cars, and little worlds. I step outside of my own head for a few moments to realize the billions of individuals on this planet equally as wrapped up in their own lives. Each person with their individual worries, pain, and suffering as well as joy, excitement and love. I realize the trivial nature of day to dday existence but also respect that this is what makes human life. In a few hours or maybe a few days I'll be sucked back into my own existence, forgetting the intricate webwork of daily human lives as it can be seen from so high up.
I also think of the people I have just met on my travels. Right now they are a brightly colored reality in my mind yet soon to fade to a blurred flash in my memory. I wonder which of these friends, people taken out of their own contexts and put together during travel, will remain friends. I wonder if we actually will stay in touch, who will become a better friend with the passing of time and who will fade in a pleasant amalgamation of my memories. There are certain people I meet in traveling that make me wonder, what if? What if I lived where they do? How would my life be different? I wonder if my new friends and I could be best of friends.
I don't know. In a way, traveling looses inhibitions. There is nothing to lose. If you give yourself away at all you have the chance of gaining a new friend, new perspective, new possibilities. If it doesn't seem right you can go home and not worry about awkward consequences.
As I get older, I become more reserved. More and more I hate to find and let go. I'd rather stick with what I know and preserve my dignity, my secrets, my feelings. The openness with which I used to display my emotions no longer seems endearing, but a handicap.
In a way though, I think I am most comfortable in discomfort. I'm always happiest while traveling and most distraught when feeling confined by obligation. When confined by obligation I again start to fear loss. Whereas with traveling, I anticipate the immediacy of each moment and its passing.
Flying in the airplane I imagine the moments happening beneath me, all of them. The mother feeding the baby, the teenagers enthralled in first romance, the lonely widower, the fighting siblings, the battered woman, the suicide standing on the bridge. I imagine the intersections in all these lives that people don't even notice. And I know that when I land and face the reality of work, decisions, social interactions, and romantic obligations I am going to forget that these lines are intersections and universal instead of my own personal imprisonment. If only I could retain the perspective of flying so high.

Addendum: As the lights of Philadelphia started to spread beneath the plane I felt a sudden excitement and thought, I'm almost home. Then my stomach lurched, my mind corrected itself, This isn't home. My overtired brain kept going downward as fast as the plane, I realized, I don't know where home is anymore.

Accountability

2008-04-24T11:44:00.000-07:00

accountability: : the quality or state of being accountable; especially : an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions

The dictionary definition of accountability doesn't really take everything into account. Accountability to me means being responsible for ones own actions. There is accountability in relationships, friendships, ethics, the workplace. I feel like my generation is very unaccountable. People are very quick to displace blame, to not own up to their own actions, to lie inadvertently or blatently, generally anything but stand up and accept the consequences of their own actions. This concept of accepting consequences also falls into my personal definition of accountability.

to be continued

Possession

2008-02-26T09:27:00.000-08:00

Possession: 1 a: the act of having or taking into control b: control or occupancy of property without regard to ownership c: ownership 2: something owned, occupied, or controlled : property 3 a: domination by something (as an evil spirit, a passion, or an idea) b: a psychological state in which an individuals normal personality is replaced by another

I've been thinking about the human need for possession a lot lately. Some people are better at superseding this feeling than others. Maybe not everyone is as tied by possession as I am. I realize that there are many levels and meanings of possession though.

First there are material possessions. One wants and wants and wants. And it seems that one might 'possess' the object of desire just to desire beyond that.

Example 1:I remember my first bike in the city, a perfectly good Specialized Mountain bike. But I wanted a fixed gear, so I got one of my friend's old conversions. I was sooo excited! For a little bit I loved riding around on that thing. Then I wanted a nice 'real' track bike. So I finally got my bareknuckle. It was amazing, I loved it. Then I wanted a road bike. I said, then I'll have it all, a mountain bike, a track bike, and a road bike. I found an amazing Bianchi at the swap and I was enamored with it for a while. Until I wanted a lighter, higher tech race bike. So on and so forth. Here I am, 5 bikes later still coveting more and nicer bikes.

Example 2: I really really wanted to live by myself so I busted my ass and moved into my own apartment. My apartment is very nice. But now, I wish I lived in a house and that I had a basement and a yard. I wanted cats, so now I have three cats but I want a dog too. I realize that at my present income level and the amount of time that I have, none of these things are possible.

This brings me to the concept of possession within relationships. How often is it said of a person that they 'possess' a certain quality. Or its said that a partner is possessive of their other partner. In a way, all relationships 'possess' possession.

A relationship is the relation connecting or binding participants in a relationship Relation being defined as an aspect or quality (as resemblance) that connects two or more things or parts as being or belonging or working together or as being of the same kind ; specifically : a property (as one expressed by is equal to, is less than, or is the brother of) that holds between an ordered pair of objects

In most relationships one expects loyalty, fidelity, honesty, care, love. It could be stated as one expects to possess all of these things of another. So the line between possessing aspects of a person and possessing their emotions and possessing them becomes blurred. To possess a person is to enslave them. I don't know if you could say that you possess one's emotions. Someone expresses their emotions to you. But as intangible... not objects... non-material ideas, things, entities they are not to be possessed. I feel that possession implies concreteness and nothing about human emotions is concrete. This then implies that possession of a person within a relationship is impossible.

So then why do we try to possess people? We start out thinking that an other's companionship is sufficient. Then we want their fidelity, thinking that what they have is ours. Then we want their love. We add relationship terms that define a level of possession. This is my boyfriend (aka back the fuck up), this is my husband (yes, forever) this is my girlfriend, etc. Even with exes, one says 'that's my ex' which implies a level of possession on this higher level than a normal friend. Each level of intimacy brings expectations. This is not always the case but I've seen it happen to many people many times.

Without realizing it people start to feel trapped. They feel as if they're losing themselves and they don't know why. They're very contented in their situation, they have good relationships. The idea of possession doesn't even enter their mind.

I'm not saying its always a bad thing. Maybe just linguistically it feels like a loaded word. I relate to Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being I only paraphrase, but he states that some live for the lightness of being and their values lie in being unfettered while others find value in the heaviness of earth and its obligations. At some point it all becomes relative to the person.

A friend asked me, 'should you have what you want or should you want what you have?' I said you should want what you have. There are always more things to want in the world. We live in a big, comfy society. Even when I complain of my debt and expenses I still have a house, clothes, and a job. Its easy to not want you have, to overlook what you have. Its harder to really appreciate the things that you have and stop coveting things that are unnecessary. And when you think about it, how much is necessary?

That brings me to self-possession : control of one's emotions or reactions especially when under stress : presence of mind, composure In the end, the only thing you really have is yourself. Its the one thing that you will possess til the end. And really, your body possesses you. You will get old, you will die, you do not own your health, or your emotions. One only possesses so much control.

Conclusion, there is not ultimate or concrete possession so the attempt of possession is futile... will explore further.

temporal distance

2008-02-21T10:25:00.001-08:00

I've started this blog as some sort of ego masturbation for all of those internal intellectual debates that really lead you nowhere. I am giving in to my existential morbidity and the fact that there are certain melancholies and introspections in which I truly enjoy indulging. Hence the title of this blog being intellectual indulgence.

Today I'm thinking about temporal distance. I'm twenty-two years old, what for me is a long time is not necessarily a long time to someone else. To me, a two year relationship is a long time. It is 1/11th of my life. My dad has been dead for 11 years or 1/2 of my life. I lived in Pittsburgh intermittenly for a combined total of 17 years or 17/22 (no prime number reduction). I've lived in Philadelphia for 8 months or 4/133 of my life. If I measure things proportionally of their individual existence to my lifetime existance, is that how I determine temporal distance? There's always the irrationality of emotions. Certain times feel longer than their actual duration because of the intensity of their emotion. Relationships can feel longer, friendships can feel longer, times of living in certain places can feel longer. My lack of emotional ties to Philadelphia has made my almost 8 months here seem like no time at all. Whereas my three years of consecutive living in Pittsburgh seems like ages and ages because of the amount of experiences within that timespan. Even though relatively I have lived here 2/9ths of the time I lived there.
Does duration give credence to importance? Or can you have that importance without the duration? I have a hard time trusting without the experience of time.

I think that human beings generally struggle with time. There is never enough, there is too much. Its one thing that we cannot master though we try. How many science fiction novels have had as their subject space and time travel. Or traveling through space based on some wrinkling, slowing, or renting of time.

Regardless of one's feelings of the duration of time, it still passes consistently. I would like to learn how to measure my time more objectively.