Saturday, November 28, 2009

Maybe I'm not gay. Maybe I'm just a nice person. Assholes.

There are a few people on the internet who thought I was gay at first. I'm trying to figure out why.
Maybe it's because I write "<3" to girls who give me the same sentiment.
Maybe it's because a lot of people on the internet I associate with are gay.
Maybe it's because I'm not a complete tool of a male.

Any ideas?

Friday, November 27, 2009

I had a weird-ass dream last night revolving around a certain musician named Imogen Heap.

I found myself in a strange and very large and spacious building. The building had floors that were twenty feet high or taller, and the hallways all had open ceilings, like at a shopping mall or something. The rooms all had glass walls forming a plane of windows between the rooms and their adjacent hallways. Some of these rooms were offices of professors, so I was apparently at some educational institution for music. For some reason or another, I was required to work on a musical project to turn in to Ms. Heap, as were many other people in the building. I had a partner I worked with in a room on the second floor, but my partner refused to be cooperative. We had until the beginning of her performance in the great hall on the second floor to finish our projects, and time was quickly running out. After a while, I gave up working with this douchebag and I ran down stairs and up other stairs to get to the concert hall to see the performance. At this point is when I woke up.

Possible real-life origins of the elements of this dream:
1. A couple days ago (in reality) I was trying to figure out the notes to "The Walk" by Imogen Heap, and I found out that the song was actually in Eb minor, the most obscure and confusing key signature of all 24 major and minor key signatures, instead of F minor, in which I was trying to originally figure out the song. I found this immensely frustrating, just like the douchebag partner I had in my dream.
2. Imogen Heap was just in Chicago earlier this week, and I resented that I didn't make any effort to go to the performance.
3. "The Walk" has been stuck in my mind for the past few weeks.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

If I were a Dog

I'll TELL YOU how my fucking Thanksgiving went.

I live four separate lives right now. One is at college, one is at home, and one is with my high school friends, and one is on the internet. The one I live at home is a sick, twisted bastardization of what I expected it would be as a child. The few friends I had remained in contact with made wrong turns in their lives. This made me expect Thanksgiving at home to be awkward.

We had our family friends from across the street come to our house, since my relatives are people we don't keep in contact with. But I like it better this way anyway.

I expected it to be awkward, but it turned out all right. We laughed about our experiences in school, and everyone got along great, as we always do.

We finished dinner at about 5PM. We gave our three dogs a little bit of everything that was on the dining room table, because we love them and spoil them. After this, we were joking around when my dog Mophie (originally named "Sophie") started yowling in pain. We rushed over to the family room, where she lay moaning.

Both families gathered around her petting her and trying to comfort her. We scrambled to try and find out what was wrong, but about 40 seconds later I was comforted to find that she stopped grieving. Little did I know that I was supposed to be the one grieving at that point.

Her tongue hung out of her mouth.

She stopped breathing.

The two dads and I rolled her onto a beach blanket, and she was carried out.

My mom, an avid animal lover, took it the hardest by far.

It ruined the rest of out night. But I started thinking--if I were a dog, what would I want as the last thing I do before I die?
I would want food. GOOD food. Like a Thanksgiving dinner.
Well, that's exactly what happened. So I guess if she had to go, this was a good time for her to do it: right after eating a Thanksgiving meal.

RIP Mophie 11/26/09 5:12 PM

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

They're there.
Everywhere I go.
The people who don't matter.
The people who both A) have no confidence in their own ability to judge what is socially acceptable or not, and B) don't know that the best thing is to just be accepting of people who are different, and that there are no criteria people have to fall in line with to be accepted. These are the people who follow. They don't feel like they know what's cool and what's not cool. And it's not because they're bad judges. It's because they don't know that they shouldn't be judges at all.

I was going to room with these guys I made friends with at school. I didn't really have many other friends other than them. So I clung to them. But as I clung and I hung out with them, I grew continually more wary. I was beginning to learn that they...were people who didn't matter.

Most of them were followers. But a couple of them were leaders, or rather, misleaders. Every exclusive clique has them--the people who make the judgments of who is acceptable or not, with their own sets of fictitious criteria upon which they evaluate outsiders.

In particular, this group had one ringleader, who so happens to be one of the most judgmental people I've ever met. He seemed to be confident in his idea of what was socially acceptable or not. This confidence was only stupidity, though, not only because of his high standards, but because he HAD ANY standards. When he set forth the name "Club 10" to our group, I should have known how exclusive he was based on the usage of the word "club." But now I get it.

Other than this ringleader, the others were all mostly followers. Since they didn't have any confidence in their own judgment of what is cool and uncool, they relied on the ringleader's judgment. It's not because they were assholes that they decided to be as exclusive as the ringleader. It was just because they were weaklings. Since they felt that they didn't have the capacity to judge people properly, they relied on Mr. Ringleader to do it for them. In fact, some of them are actually nice guys. But they're weak on the inside, so they listen to the ringleader.

I never thought that I would see behavior like this after junior high, but I sure do. In fact, it's horrendously common, and rampant even. It's ridiculous. There are so many people who just follow. They follow because they don't trust their own judgment about what's cool and what's uncool, and they don't realize that THEY SHOULDN'T EVEN BE CHOOSING TO EXCLUDE PEOPLE AT ALL. Some people say "don't judge me," but what they really mean is, "I know you're going to judge me, but don't hold a grudge against me based on any of your judgments." That's akin to racism, sexism, and other "isms" of the sort, even though it may be on a smaller scale. Don't hate people based on their character traits. Hate them based on their bad dispositions.

I think that maybe people follow others like this because THEY aren't socially aware enough themselves. They don't realize that they shouldn't be closing themselves off to people just because they're "uncool," because they're the very same people who do the same. They exclude people, and then wonder why other people won't talk to them for a certain trait they have. DON'T THEY REALIZE WHAT THEY'RE DOING?

This activity goes on on the internet too. There's a character, and he's upbeat and the life of the party. Other people begin to cling to the character. These people together form a group. The character makes a lot of judgments based on who is cool and who is not. The other people follow his judgment. But then the character starts hating on someone that one of the followers actually values as a friend. Is the follower strong enough as a person to stand up for his friend? Chances are, no, he's not. Who would you rather be friends with, in this case? The character, or that guy who is your friend that Mr. Character was hating on?

I actually got into a situation like this in college, and the choice was clear to me at the beginning of this year. I chose the obvious choice. I picked the people who were being hated on. I rarely talk to anyone from the group anymore, because I realize how they function now. They may not realize it, but I do. And it's stupid, like the semi-geeky table of guys at my junior high school who never branches out to any new friends. But they talk about their video games, and make the same tact-less jokes over and over until you get sick of them. I mean, sure, inside jokes are fun, but at some point YOU NEED TO TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. SOMETHING RELATABLE. Whether they notice it or not, they reflect a social failure. They fail at connecting with other people outside the group. They fail at realizing that judging people is wrong. They fail at recognizing that they are being followers, led by someone with a worldview that is greatly flawed and needlessly exclusive. And they fail at being their own individuals.

The internet is also full of people like this. People who use the internet for socializing are often people who fail at meeting people face-to-face. And these are typically the same people who are too weak to take action in the case of being individuals and renouncing other people's judgments to determine who their friends are independently. And these are the people who don't know not to judge people and exclude them. And these are the people who create bullshit criteria of "what's cool" and "what's not cool" to judge whether or not to accept them as people. And so they call each other out on each other's character flaws, which aren't really flaws at all, and then they start fighting with each other. As this happens, the people like me who know not to judge people so harshly sit back chuckling with our metaphorical buckets of popcorn watching them tear each other apart. Either that, or you know, they just awkwardly cease to talk to each other. Actually, the last thing I just said is a lot more common. If people are too wimpy to make decisions independent of one another's, they're also too wimpy to tell each other off.

People on the internet act very strangely. Cowards have an extreme advantage on the internet, because the interaction isn't face-to-face. You know, cowards. People who never let their true character shine because they're too afraid of other people's judgments. And they're afraid of other people's judgments either because they're just timid, or because their true character SUCKS and they know it. The people who's true character SUCKS and they know it include people who troll on the internet, people who drive aggressively, and people who go to sports games just to scream at and irritate the opposing team and its fans.

The internet provides all sorts of opportunities for cowards. They can hide behind alternate identities, or even remain anonymous if they want. With this anonymity or false identity, they can do any manner of annoying, belligerent, and denigrating things to people without being recognized. There are people who LIVE to watch other people get pissed off. The internet is a harbor for people like that. We like to call them "trolls." But what we're really talking about is people who are cowards and who are looking to be detrimental in small ways to people so they can derive some sort of sick fucked-up satisfaction from it. It can be from poor treatment as a child, or from a lack of parenting, among other things. But no matter what the reason for this psychological malfunction, it's fucked up, it needs to stop, the people involved need to grow up, and it pisses me off.

The people I was friends with in college included many people like this. It's kind of funny how all of these psychological immaturities come together in the same people. It's like they're all correlated.
Well, I'm going to bed. Let me know your thoughts on this, too.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Greetings, oh people who matter.
There were two girls. I hugged one of them. Then the other pretended to punch me in the face jokingly. But there's a subconscious reason for every action we do. She wanted one too. I think she digs me.
I'm fucking stupid.
I've been on this bus struggling to think of something to do to pass the time as I have my internet-less laptop and nothing to do, and in trying to excavate an idea from the far depths of my mind, I didn't think to write anything! I can write anything wherever I go; all I have to do to put it on the blog is copy and paste! DUH!
Whenever I first open my laptop, my immediate instinct is to click directly on Mozilla Firefox. I've done that at least twice so far, not even considering that there IS NO FUCKING INTERNET ON A BUS. I think I may have an addiction. Perhaps I need help.
I'm not sure why, but I ended up in a short traffic jam on Interstate 57, about 10 minutes south of Interstate 80. For some reason, there is a traffic jam at this location about half the time I pass by it, and it's not even a busy or heavily-populated area. I don't know what it is about that place that always gets it all jammed up.
I should have downloaded an arsenal of music to listen to on the bus as opposed to the smattering of a beat the douchewagon behind me is blasting through his headphones. They're probably ear-buds too. The ear-waxy kind.
I don't know how much literary merit these musings bear. I don't know how much I care about how much merit they have. I guess I do care somewhat. I DO need to manipulate these words in the best way that I can so that the thoughts that you think are in my head based on reading this match the actual thoughts I have in my head as closely as possible. So I weave and stretch and move and bang these words into place so that what's in my head ends up being very similar to what ends up in yours. The only problem is that there are infinitely many ways to do it.
There's an annoying kid three seats from the front who keeps asking stupid questions, the epitome of which is "Are we there yet?" I feel like responding, "DID YOU SEE THE BUS FUCKING STOP? 'NO?' WELL THAT MEANS WE AREN'T FUCKING THERE YET. USE YOUR TWO GODDAMN EYES."
In my desperation to find something on my computer to keep my attention, I found a folder I made called "Old mementos." (A couple of obnoxious Harley drivers sped past us just now. I hope they die. Anyway,) In this folder I found the products a tactic I've used to combat insufficient self-esteem that may come my way: conversations I've had on instant messengers with girlfriends I've had in the past.
Sometimes I feel like no one is capable of loving me--hey, we all do at times (for some, it's just more frequently than it is for others). But then I look back at the evidence I've recorded. Hell, you might actually like to try it yourself. It helps you to remember all of the wonderful things you've experienced in your life.
There are some conversations I've saved that are pretty much useless. I know I've had girls I've considered to be mistakes. You don't know until you try it, and I tried it...And it turned out like shit, for some of these girls. Those are the conversations that I don't care to look back on. Some of such conversations are in there. But there are others...MUCH better ones.
So I looked back at those. And I wondered what the hell happened to end all of them (because obviously I'm single now). Some were my fault, some were the girl's. But it's interesting to think about the passion that you felt, the passion that you know is real, and the passion that you thus must be capable of expressing in the future. Fuck, if I've done it before I can do it again. That gives me hope. I wonder if any of you do the same thing.
I should be arriving at the station now. Instead, I'm about 10 minutes away.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

It's too late. But my roommate isn't here, and I don't feel like going to sleep. Thus, I am going to write a bunch of shit in here again. I look back on some of my old posts and realize that HOLY FUCKING SHIT THEY'RE FUCKING HUGE. But you'll listen, won't you?

Should I really care if you want to read all of the musings I write in here? I don't think so. Theodore Giesel p.k.a. "Dr. Seuss" once said, "say what you think, and do what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." If you give a fuck, you give a fuck. And if you don't give a fuck, you don't matter. And if you don't feel like reading this whole thing, I understand that it's a long investment of your time. So don't read all of it. If you do read all of it, I'll assume that A) You REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY like reading, or B) You're obsessing over me and that creeps me out. Stop, please.

There IS a girl I know who really really really likes reading. And she's amazing at it. She puts all of her kindergartener classmates to shame. I don't know if I should write her name on here, because there's a thing called confidentiality and I'm supposed to maintain it as required by my employers, whoever they are. A bunch of people who write a bunch of mandates on paper and give them to people who like killing trees. Whatever.

She used to be shy around me. She thought I was intimidating. Here comes the guy over six feet tall. No one's really sure why he comes here. But he takes the kids outside, one-by-one, like the admitting room into a doctor's office. Not just any doctor's office--the kind with needles. Maybe he uses a syringe to stab kids in the forehead and inject liquid knowledge.

The first time we read together, the first book we looked at wasn't a story. It was a series of words with a picture above it representing the word. Normally, what I'd do is ask the kids what some of the words were, and what letter it started with--we'd use it for letter sounds. THIS girl was reading every last word, breezing through with no mistakes. She went on to read some storybooks. Flawlessly. I was happy. Not only had I found someone whose skills were impressive-- I had found someone like me.

I read Charlotte's Web front-to-back when I was three years old. That's what my mom tells me, anyway. I guess I sort of remember it? The English language was like a puzzle to me--a puzzle I HAD to solve. I wouldn't rest until I got it right.

And now here's this girl. Way ahead of the rest of her class. I could tell she was bored. I had been in her position before. She had little opportunity to move ahead of her class, though she was very capable of doing so. She was bored, like a puppy in an enclosure in an animal shelter waiting for a home. I had to do something.

Some carry iPods with them wherever they go, but I always have a notebook with me. I love to write, and I love to give my neverending thought a place to manifest itself in the real world. I like to explore things that can be seen on paper, like geometry, maps, songs, poems, prose, and whatever randomness that can be written.

On the bus, where there are only strangers to potentially comfort me, I open my notebook and turn to a blank page. With a mechanical pencil in my hand, I sit there with my open notebook and I'm comfortable. I feel safe, safe from the danger of having ideas that spontaneously come to my head become lost forever because they were never written down. Sometimes I won't even write anything, but I'll just be sitting there, thinking. But I'm comfortable.

When I go to the elementary school, I bring a bus schedule and one of my notebooks. I noticed that the smart girl was having trouble with words with double vowels, like "ea" and "ou" and "oa." So I wrote down some words in my notebook and asked her to read them. If her class wasn't going to lead her to make progress, I certainly was going to try to.

As we read more and more, she began to like it more and more. She felt like she could finally be free to be herself, as opposed to trying to dumb herself down to someone she wasn't while she was in the classroom. I know what it's like to be confident about what you can do, and feeling like showing the world what you can do. I want all the kids I tutor to feel that, including her.

Now, she's all smiles around me. She waves, and we actually have somewhat of intelligent conversations. Yes, intelligent conversations, and she's only six (or almost six). I say this because she structures her sentences intelligently and carefully. And when she expresses friendship toward me, I feel that it's because I did something for her.

I'm just glad I could help someone and that I could do it well.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

I learned two things from two people last night (as in one from each person).

But before I continue, plug: http://tinychat.com/welcometogoodburger This is the name I intend to keep on my tinychats, at least until I get bored of said name.

The first:
I always thought that there were certain friends of mine that I influenced, and they slowly became more like me as time went on. I wasn't sure what to think about people looking at me and trying to become more like me, because, well, I'm not so perfect. I used to think that certain people liked what they saw in my personality, and they wanted to take pieces of it and make these pieces part of their own respective personalities.
Now I know that what I thought was mainly wrong. I wasn't influencing others to become more like my own character, I was merely making them comfortable expressing those pieces of their own personality that were like mine. They weren't taking from my basket of personality traits; they were only looking at some of the things in my basket of personality traits and saw that some of the traits in their own baskets were the same as some of those in mine, and thus they felt comfortable sharing the ones we had in common.
I know that there's sort of a refreshing feeling you get when you find that some unsuperficial trait that you have, some piece of your individuality, is the same as someone else's. It gives you a confident feeling about the random musings you have come up with. It's kind of like doing your math homework and then comparing your answers with one of your classmates. Chances are, if you and your friend both got the same answer, you must be on the right track.
This knowing that you must be on the right track can also apply to the feelings and thoughts you have everyday in a social context. I was elated to discover that my friend Dave was into writing music for RPG-style video games. It's somewhat of an interest I've had, but I thought it was weird until I met someone else with the same interest, especially when he actually writes the music and does an amazing job of doing so (many of his songs are on iTunes for your listening pleasure). I've had a lot of strange opinions that I've come up with, but many of them have been validated by other people I've connected to, and nothing beats the feeling of finding someone else with your same quirky interests and thoughts. Because that's when you go "FINALLY! MAYBE my thoughts and ideas aren't total shit after all!"
So now I realize that I wasn't influencing people to become more LIKE me, but they were just no longer holding back their personality traits that are like mine because they had a series of revelations in which they went "OMG Paul and I have something in common, and now that I know that there is someone else with this same personality trait as mine, I am going to make it known that we have this same trait AND I am not going to hold back this personality trait anymore!"
Specifically, I'm talking about Dave. I always sort of thought that Dave, coming from somewhat of a religious family, never swore. But when he's around me, he does sometimes. I didn't know if he was observing my propensity for swearing and wanting to become acquire such a propensity, or if he just had the propensity to swear hidden deep inside of him and I didn't know it. It turns out, that the latter option was the correct one. And I should know that Dave, as a thoughtful guy, should have the capacity to invent his own personality based on his own perceptions of his mental tendencies with flying colors. It's not like I could have doubted that though. I should have realized that he was just being himself in the first place, and that he was only letting himself to be free to express his inner more obscure personality traits after seeing that I had the same ones.

2. It's important to take charge of your own personal situation within broader social situations. In other words, if you're thrown into a large group of people, figure out what you believe would represent your own interests and the people around you like the most, and then go fucking do it! At least that's what I should be telling myself. This is because I'm more into having a small number of close friends rather than a large bunch of acquaintances. I'm not into big parties--I'm into learning about people, one by one. Everyone is a mystery, though sometimes the mystery is more easily solved with certain people. Hell, some people don't have a mystery to solve (cough superficial cough). But people with mysteries interest me greatly, and I want to get to know them.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

I'm not sure how legitimate it is to make the judgment that getting an amount of sleep divisible by three hours is the best way to wake up refreshed and feeling positive. All I know is that my average night of sleep isn't going to yield such an amount of time sleeping unless I cut it down to a flimsy six hours. At this point, I have to stay up until 2AM for that to work, because I wake up at 8AM. I may be able to pull this off because me roommate is absent at the moment. FOR THE GOOD OF SCIENCE I WILL PARTAKE IN THIS EXPERIMENT! Getting to know my sleeping tendencies is always a good thing so I can make healthy decisions in the future.

So yes, mom, I am actually trying to convince you that I am making myself healthier by staying up later. XD

This weekend I went to an opera. It was a new experience. I learned that Mozart operas are a lot like Linkin Park. The intensity is high, but it's ALWAYS HIGH; MONOTONOUSLY HIGH. And thus, even though it's stimulating and involved, it's BORING. And ALL THEIR SONGS SOUND THE SAME. It gets old after about 15 minutes (or 15 seconds with Linkin Park).

Other things I did: Watch a movie, play Age of Empires 2, and spend over 2 hours straight in the piano room. In doing that last one, I started figuring out a third Imogen Heap song by ear, "The Walk." I had already figured out "Hide and Seek" and "Come Here Boy."

Monday, November 9, 2009

Welcome to the revamping

I WANNA KNOW WHERE THE GOLD AT
I-
I WANNA KNOW WHERE THE GOLD AT

Sorry. I was just jammin' there for a second.
I tried to focus I REALLY TRIED. And I still feel underconfident about this exam tomorrow. I hope it all goes well, because I am going DIRECTLY to bed DO NOT pass go DO NOT collect 200 dollars after I write this blog post. And spellchecker is underlining "underconfident" in red because it's not actually a word, but FUCK YOU MICROSOFT I USE MY OWN DAMN DICTIONARY AND MERRIAM AND WEBSTER CAN EACH GO FUCK A CACTUS.

ON that note...
I think our apartment for next year is reserved for us to sign the lease! YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY PARTYYYYYYYYY Me Dave and Zac. Aww yeah. Shit's gonna be SO cash.

I realize I never expounded on the second thing I learned about myself in that last bit. I also realize that as this blog is associated with the name "paulthemapguy" which reflects my minuscule internet persona, this blog may be easy to find by way of stalkers. Oh well. If anyone is that desperate to find out more about me, this is a treasure trove, or even better, an avalanche. I like the "avalanche" metaphor better because it implies that this blog can easily be overwhelming to someone who doesn't know what he or she is getting into. So it fits.

To all of my close friends to whom I can trust the knowledge contained within this blog, welcome, and realize that you have been chosen. You have reached a certain threshold of trust that most everyone else hasn't. Feel free to read all of this from here on out, as long as you don't blatantly expose this blog to ANYONE you know. And since I can trust you with the knowledge herein, I'm sure I can trust you to keep your mouths shut about this, too.

This is for me to vent, and it is for you, in case you want to keep up with what happens in my life. If you ever want to ask me "what's up?" here is your answer (and "not much" is never an adequate answer, contrary to popular belief). This is for you, the true friend, because you deserve it (unless you're one of the mofos who stumbled upon this site by chance, in which case GTFO).

The next post is an extensive one.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Things I've learned about myself

Jesus Fuck, it's been a long time since I posted something here. But I need to throw something out there for only my close friends to know.

Tonight was the annual barn dance, a night full of friends, dancing, chatting, and awesome. I learned a few things about myself tonight.

1. I am not materialistic
2. I have become colder as I have gone through experiences in which something terrible happens
3. I don't know how to handle being in limbo between friends and dating, and I need a decision one way or the other

Evidence:
I am not materialistic. I invited Erika to come along on the barn dance, and since she wasn't a resident of my dorm which sponsored the activity, she had to pay $5. I just covered her and bought her ticket. She asked if I wanted $5 to compensate. I told her I didn't care, and she didn't give me the $5. This is weird, because she would usually be more persistent in paying me back. I think she was testing me to see if I would resent declining her offer.

I have grown to expect everything due to all sorts of table-turning debacles I have witnessed in my life, and this has made me colder. I spent a good 10 minutes nonstop spilling my guts out about three friends I had that did things to themselves that turned their lives around, whether for better or for worse. One joined the marines, ditched, fled home, then fled to Canada in lieu of pursuit by the U.S. government. He could have served 18 months in the brig if he was caught. He recently married a Canadian woman, with the intent of becoming a Canadian citizen. Another friend has just been declared pregnant suddenly, and is going to give the baby up for adoption. And it was someone who always seemed to me to be very tame and reserved. Third, another one of my friends traveled far to his relatives' place of residence with a complex developed in his mind that he needs to somehow turn his life around. He proposed to his girlfriend and has never told me the news, though we used to be best friends. And he has submitted paper work to the U.S. Air Force and will be called in within the next 6-8 months, having always known the tragic debacle that happened to my first friend.

Yet somehow, I wasn't appalled by any of it. I've always accepted that I'm not very good at predicting things. But when people make terribly large changes to their lives that I don't agree with, I figure that it'll be their loss in the long run. Some people don't have the capacity to learn in any other way but the hard way, and still others seem to never learn.

I talked to the girl who got pregnant on the phone, and for some reason, I didn't even ask her how the hell she managed to get herself in the situation, nor did I reprimand her for doing so. I don't think I need to tell people when they fuck up. If they do fuck up, they should realize it, and rectify their personal ideology so that they make sure never to fucking do it again. If they don't realize it, then they're fubar: Fucked up beyond all repair. If you can't realize when something goes wrong, then you're done for. This is because learning happens in three ways: Learning from mistakes, learning from observation (of things other than mistakes), and learning from being told something. The first is "the hard way," and the last two are "the easy way." Apparently, she didn't learn the easy way. So she had to learn the hard way. But if you can't even learn the hard way, then there's no way for you to learn. And if you can't learn, then you'll just keep doing damage to yourself. The girl, I'm sure, is learning the hard way. She's learned so much in life, I know. I can't wait for these 9 months to get over with, and I'm sure she can't, either, with an intensity that I can't even imagine.

Whether you're learning the easy way or the hard way, you should always make it a point to learn things about yourself. I always try to learn things about myself--that's why I record things in my blog and through my videoblogs. And I try to learn these things about myself so I can correct the things that I don't like and make sure to emphasize my strong points. My friend who fled the Marines was not proficient at learning things about himself. I know this, because this guy was intolerant of any authority above him, especially those who were relatively less intelligent. I knew him since second grade--in junior high he would cuss left and right, and get detentions left and right just for being rebellious against teachers he didn't like. One time he slammed his locker saying "Damn locker." A teacher he wasn't particularly fond of walked by and asked him what he said. He repeated the two words right back to her face. She gave him a detention, and he shrugged adamantly. My mother actually asked him to his face if he had any fucking idea what he was getting himself into. The Marines' training camps were places where absolute idiots would scream in your face orders of various kinds, and no matter what they were, you, the trainee, had to comply. This was EXACTLY the situation I knew he wouldn't be able to stand. So how could I, knowing him, have expected him to be able to stand months upon years training under the very conditions he was notorious for rebelling against? And sure enough, he deserted his training camp near San Diego on an Amtrak train back to the Chicago area, and days later he fled to Ontario.

I guess the lesson here is that you can never determine your purpose in life if you never continuously take notes and observations about your own true character. He made a failure of a decision because he failed to recognize his own rebellious and adamant tendencies. This lesson also applies to figuring out your own brain. I personally know that I am a visual, spatial, mathematical thinker. I know that I like maps, and this is tied in with the modes of thinking I just wrote. I know that my purpose in life should take advantage with my enhanced ability to think visually, spatially, and mathematically. Therefore, I have accordingly made the decision to study civil engineering. It fits me, and I know that it fits me because I have been trying to figure myself out since I was a small child. I'm lucky that I knew to figure myself out at such a young age, because so many people--adults, even--don't realize how important it is to try and figure out how their own minds work. Instead, they just try to follow popular culture, and try to develop their own personality based on the norms suggested by society. These people are the tools.

There are tools, and there are the people I define as "nerds," with the nerds being the people who are genuinely right in the world. They are enlightened, and they know that who they are on the inside isn't determined by what anyone else tells them. They embrace their true character, and they don't give a shit what effects society could potentially have on it. I know this because the nerds are the ones who have passions that are unique, and they thus have unique talents and abilities that not everyone has. And I know that these are the right kinds of people, because without them, we wouldn't have any of the conveniences we have today. All of the things that you haven't invented, created, or conceptualized in your lifetime that exist today, were created by nerds. Most likely, you don't know how to build a computer. You don't know how to design a spaceship. You don't know how to blow glass. These things were all created, invented, and conceptualized by people who are smarter than you in their respective fields: the nerds. And without them...where would we be today?

Yet for some unspeakably wrong reason, people condescend toward the nerds.
That doesn't make any sense, does it?

You know you're talking to a tool when he or she acts condescendingly toward people who have unique interests. I've learned this over the years. Everyone knows I'm that kid who likes maps. I've gotten mixed responses from people on the topic. Some tell me "that's SO COOL!" Others look at me as if to say, "why the hell would you do that?" It makes it easy for me to tell who my real friends are. Friends are people who support you, and like you for who you are. And the right people are the ones who are accepting of people with unique interests, because, as I said before, the people with unique interests are the ones who create, invent, and advance society forward, thus serving a purpose in this way. So, by sharing my strange interest with potential friends, I easily sort out the right people into the category of eventual friends; i.e. the right people are the ones who become my friends, and the inverse.

What we should all do is try to learn those things about our true character. This way, we can know which of our tendencies are negative and negate them, and we can find out our positive tendencies as well so we can take advantage of them, manifest them, and serve a positive purpose in the world. It didn't work for my friends I mentioned at first, but just know not to do what they did. Do what you can to serve a better purpose, and make the world a better place. I sure am trying.

This is my religion. I have no formal religion, and I intend never to partake in one in my lifetime. These are some of the ideas I live by. This is one of the books of the New Testamant, except in my religion. It's part of my personal Bible.