schwarzinexile

A realization

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 07:30:58 GMT

So far as I know, I haven't had a day off of work since I got back in July. No wonder I feel stressed out, burned out, and vaguely incompetant lately.

Bleah.

Sun, 11 May 2008 07:44:40 GMT

I'm kind of tired as I write this, so...this may not make a whole lot of sense.
I'm getting kind of annoyed with myself lately, on account of the fact that I feel like I'm pretty weak as far as Christianity goes. That is, when the topic of God, Jesus, etc., comes up in conversations in real life or on the internet, or anywhere, or I have an opportunity to bring up the subject of God, I've kind of been dodging lately. And I'm not sure why.
My spiritual life lately has been rocky at best. I find myself drifting away from God for no particular reason, slipping into bad habits and drifting away from my good ones. I barely read the Bible anymore. My prayers are short and shallow, and mostly have the attitude of, "I don't really deserve to ask you for anything, but, um, if you could kind of overlook my general suckiness and maybe do something along these lines..." which maybe isn't an entirely bad attitude to have, but still, I'd like to be more comfortable with my prayer life, better equipped to actually communicate with God, let him work with me and change me. Instead I'm sort of shrinking away from the light, cowering in the darkness.
In some ways, I feel worse about myself than I have during the times when I haven't been a Christian. I feel dishonest, like I'm always hiding something. I'm either hiding my failures as a person from other Christians, the few that I meet, and acting like I'm way stronger than I am, or I'm hiding my Christianity from non-Christians, or giving mealy-mouthed answers when they press me on it.
I wonder sometimes why anyone can really put up with me. I need to develop a stronger backbone.
I've drifted around quite a bit since I came out to Washington. Part of my motivation for moving was to see what kind of person I'd be if removed from peer pressure in general. I've been sort of surprised to see how dark I can get inside. For the most part I've tried to appear positive, upbeat, and friendly to those around me. I've developed a nasty habit of trying to tell people exactly what I think they want to hear. I'd probably do well to take to heart some of the advice of Schopenhauer regarding honesty and not caring what people think of me.
So here's a little bit of honesty.
I spent a month in November and December basically determined to be a non-Christian. I threw away every belief I had and decided to start from scratch. I quickly decided not to be an atheist, because atheism is essentially pointless and doesn't strike me as being particularly plausible. I toyed with deism, because this one girl I know online seems relatively bright, and she's a deist. But I found it rather dull. It was at about this time I began investigating some of the more interesting Middle Eastern and Asian religions. I skipped most of the more common ones, figuring, there's really no point investigating any of them too much, since I've already wrestled with them for apologetic reasons, and found them wanting. Hinduism and Shintoism were a bit more alluring than most, because I'm cliche and Asian like that, but I eventually pushed them aside in favor of Zoroastrianism and Mithraism, stuff like that. I examined Christian arguments and found them horribly lacking. I couldn't really accept the historicity of Christianity. I was essentially dissatisfied with almost every religion and philosophical system I encountered.
I held on to this non-agnostic uncertainty (I believed in God, just didn't really know what form he took and was determined to rationally evaluate all claims to see which proved the most legitimate) up until I read a Shusaku Endo book called "The Samurai". It presented, in vivid terms, a picture of Jesus, poor and hated and despised by the world, who rejected power and made friends with the weak and friendless. It was something I knew about, something I'd maybe heard all my life, but didn't really know, somehow, or maybe had forgotten (I sometimes read stuff I wrote 10 years ago and find something that makes me go, wow, this kid had it kind of together compared to me. He knew stuff I don't and said stuff way wiser than most of what I say now. What happened?). But anyway, this picture of Jesus rather shook me. I almost began crying as I read it, riding home on the Greyhound bus, but fortunately I managed to avoid it, because public spectacles are unseemly.
Anyway, so now I found myself in the odd position of actually loving Jesus, a phenomenon that has occured, to be totally honest, only rarely in a life spent mostly worshipping Protestant God. I don't know what exactly that means, except maybe that I have a tendency to overlook Jesus in my efforts to serve him. Moving onward, I then read a Hindu Bengali writer named Rabindranath Tagore, who, in spite of his adherence to a different religion, had a strangely Christian view of God, and professed a deep fascination with Christianity and considered it the source of the power and goodness of the West, at least until he went to the West on a spiritual pilgrimage, coming back, apparently, disappointed.
So at this point the last bits of my resistance to Christianity fell apart and I reaccepted Jesus for the 40th time or whatever, because I'm horribly unsteady like that. I tried to find God via logic and argument, and found he'd made a backdoor by way of self-sacrificial love. Funny how that works. :\
I'm gonna leave off on this for now, because it's really freaking long. Hopefully I'll have time to continue this depressing and probably needlessly self-indulgent saga of repeated failure and assorted shortcomings.
Or not. Now that I think about it, excessive public confession is among the worst and most obnoxious forms of narcissism, I think. So maybe I'll turn this into something a bit brighter, more optimistic, etc., and have it be a brief chronicle of something or another...redemption and whatnot, you know? And Jesus. All that stuff.
Incidentally, if anyone from Young Adult group or Turning Point reads this, I miss you guys. You were strangely helpful to my spritual growth and, for the most part, my overall level of happiness, probably moreso than I really knew at the time.

Someone agrees...

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 07:51:51 GMT

I deeply sympathize with this sentiment.

Warning to those concerned: link contains swears.

So it's Easter morning...

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:04:33 GMT

And somehow I wound up reading a "KJV is the only God-inspired English version" website.
ARRRRGGGHHHHH!!!!!!
My poor head hurts.
Oh, by the way, POD is Satanic. So are the New International PERVersion and the Church of Christ. And, um, the Alexandrian Greek manuscript is corrupt. And it is apparently of the utmost importance that the words "impute" and "propitiation" are included in the Bible. Oh, and since "James" is the English word for the Hebrew "Jacob", the validity of the KJV is proved by Psalm 147:19. Because it has nothing to do with the Hebrew poetic style (of repetition of concepts) and the fact that Jacob is a synonym for Israel.
And although Ronald Reagan consulted with astrologers, since he liked KJV, he's a swell guy. And it evidently doesn't matter that King James was gay.
Also, atheist support for the KJV=a sign that it is good. Atheist support for anything else=a sign that it inspired by SATAN!!!!!!!!!!!!
People who speak nonsense and claim to be doing the work of God frustrate me.

P.S. Helping the poor is communist. The important thing is to bring up hell at least four times in every sentence. It's inside a volcano, in case you were wondering.

Conversation vs. Small talk

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 08:00:28 GMT

I noticed recently that I haven't had a real conversation in forever. My life is full of small talk and monologue, and I'm always either at work or somewhere else where I can't really say what I really want to. As a result, I live most of my life without really saying anything important. Thoughts come and go in my mind, and I don't really have anyone to bounce them off of or discuss them with. Basically I've been reduced to nothing but sarcasm and math instruction, punctuated with the occasional rambling blog post or e-mail, which I suspect is either annoying to or ignored by the intended recipient/readership. It can be rather depressing.
The problem began I think even before I moved out to Washington. Even then it seemed like all the meaningfulness was falling out of my life. There was a stretch when it felt like every night was full of deep, rich discussions between me, Kim, Amber, and Rachel, and even though Kyle and Briana were really little, I had cool conversations with them, too. And at young adult group, there were additional deep thoughts and such floating around.
It might seem like I've turned into this sad, nostalgic person who lives entirely in the past, but that's not really the case. I've had frequent interludes of happiness since I moved out to Washington, although I will say that the brief depressions they alternate with seem to be more severe than when I lived in Wisconsin. I'm also more irritable than I used to be, I think because I don't have anyone to vent at. Rachel doesn't like telephones, so I can't talk to her. Amber and me tend to have a lot of dead air when we try to talk. When I talk to Kim, the only subject of conversation is a certain boy, which sucks, because Kim's personality used to be so three-dimensional, and for a long time she was the ideal sounding board. It seems now like no one really has anything meaningful to say, like we're all trapped in our own little isolated worlds, disconnected from the higher realities.
The sad thing is that I know it's mainly my fault. I was always the one who was the most eager to strike out on my own, to separate myself from the group and establish an identity of my own. And I guess I've done that. Generally, I'm told I'm patient and hard-working, and sometimes that I'm funny or smart or whatever. But honestly, I don't really care. Compliments are nice, but they don't really do anything to make me happy in the long run. Because I don't think I even care what people think of me anymore. I'm glad if I make them happy or make their lives easier in some way, but that doesn't really do much to help me.
I want to say something, to have my ideas picked apart and criticized, or at least listened to. I want to talk to people, really normally, without having to pretend to be someone or something I'm not or having to try to give people advice, which is probably the thing I suck at most in life. People ask me what to do in a given situation, and I'm like, clueless. Because real life is not something I'm particularly good at. I'm tired of talking about weather, and school, and plans, and things that aren't going to happen.
And I suppose I could find a good church somewhere, and maybe that would help. But I'm afraid I'd just get the same shallow, one-directional babbling there as I do everywhere else. I don't know. Maybe I'm just overly demanding or whiny or something.
This is kind of disorganized and ranty, and probably a little selfish, and I'll probably regret writing it tomorrow, but whatever.

Well, kids...

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 05:22:54 GMT

Looks like I've been admitted to TCC as a student. I'll be taking statistics this spring.

Strangely hypnotic...

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:03:40 GMT

That boy needs therapy.

Fun Sentence of the Day

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 07:46:12 GMT

"The Warramunga entertain the same opinion of this part of the person, for they place the foreskin in a hole made by a witchetty grub in a tree, believing that it will cause a plentiful supply of these edible grubs."

Thank you, Sir James George Frazer, O.M.

This is funny...

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 06:06:57 GMT

st00pid

Today's adventure...

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 08:29:46 GMT

At the MARC:
(Johnathan is off-duty and playing a game on the computer. Priscilla enters)
Priscilla: "Whatcha doin'?"
Johnathan: "Math."
Luther: "It's linear algebra."
Johnathan: "I'm following along with the computer. Making sure it doesn't make mistakes."
Priscilla, pointing at an object onscreen: "What's that?"
Me: "It's set theory. That belongs to the set of things to be destroyed."
There is a flurry of onscreen gunfire.
Luther: "Now it's the null set."

Reinvention

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 04:26:23 GMT

Bored with who I've been. Not sure who I'm going to be next. We'll see what happens.

Notebook, Monday, Sept. 3, 2007

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:58:54 GMT

Read GEB & listened to music.

Walked to Walmart and got a pillow and a sleeping bag.

Got some food.

Went to bed.

Notebook, Sunday, Sept. 2, 2007

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:56:21 GMT

Hung around most of the day.

Went to a party with Sean.

Got to drive for the first time in weeks.

Notebook, Saturday, Sept. 1, 2007

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:55:07 GMT

No work today! Slept till 10:00, which is pretty late for me lately.

Went down Meridian looking for food.

Watched part of Face/Off with Sean.

Napped.

Woke up for a while and used computer.

Went to bed @ 2:00 having given up hope of finding a church-at least for now.

Notebook, Friday, Aug. 31, 2007

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:53:04 GMT

Woke bright and early and went to work at United Rentals again. Cleaned out the inside of the building.

Ate at the company's employee appreciation picnic thing. Felt out of place.

Was given a free hat and t-shirt, 2:30.

Made it home at 8:00 PM or so. Got paid today.

Had the house to myself, cause Sean's at a party. Played on the computer again.

Notebook, Thursday, Aug. 30, 2007

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:49:48 GMT

Awakened during night by air mattress deflation.

Went off to work for United Rentals. Cleaned all around their equipment yard. Was abandoned by AllStaff and forced to fend for myself.

Took a series of buses and made my way to South Hill around 8:00ish. Ate at the mall.

Walked home talking on the phone to mom and Kim. Became drenched with sweat.

Got home at 9:30 after about fifteen hours away. Played on the computer until 12:30.

Notebook, Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2007

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:46:14 GMT

Worked all day ar All-Pak. I felt very accomplished.

Got home and called Sean about moving in.

Moved into new house. Bought air-mattress cot thing.

Notebook, Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2007

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:44:24 GMT

Went to Walmart to get money & beverages & shampoo

Had a job interview @ 1:00. Not sure how I did...I don't generally know how to gracefully get through them things.

Went to the library and played on the computer for a couple hours.

Ate at KFC.

Notebook, Monday, Aug. 27, 2007

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:41:57 GMT

Got up insanely early again & got to work almost on time.

Woman at work was raising an enormous fuss because she didn't have any tampons. It got to the point where it was kind of entertaining. Not so much because of the situation, but because she wouldn't shut up about it.

Met a guy from Montana named Jesse. He was talking about G.W. Bush and the New World Order.

Talked on the phone with Kim and Amber until pretty late.

Notebook, Sunday, Aug. 26, 2007

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:38:37 GMT

Did almost nothing the entire day.

Watched the polygamy show on HBO. It was weirdly fascinating.

Notebook, Saturday, Aug. 25, 2007

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:36:15 GMT

Spent the day walking around. Found a nice little land with a path and things in Federal Way.

Went to Tacoma and wandered the town all day.

At the bus stop I met a 16-year-old girl with all manner of interesting problems.

On the bus ride home I was heartily razzed by a black man about my heritage. The whole bus was a-hootin' and a hollerin'. The girl, MacKenzie, was also included in the man's jibes.

Notebook, Friday, Aug. 24, 2007

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:32:37 GMT

Arose bright 'n early (4:00 AM)

Began walking to bus stop-wanted a drink, so I looked for a convenience store. Wrong turns got me a bit lost, but I eventually spotted a 500 bus and pursued it to the Federal Way transit center. On the way, a girl gave me a breakfast burrito. Her reasoning: she thought I should have it. Free food! Woot!

Got to temp place at 5:45. My car didn't arrive until 6:15, and then we wound up driving out to Kent, back to Federal Way, then back out to Renton. I didn't get to work until 8:00.

Felt very industrial at the beginning of the day, but the monotony of miscellaneous hand work left me a little numbed by the end. But I made like fifty bucks today, so that helps a little.

Had a bit of a money scare, but things worked out.

Notebook, Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:26:06 GMT

Changed hotels- I now live in the abyss known as the New Horizon Motel. Had to wait three hours for a room to open up.

Applied at temp agency in Renton. Shoulda done that sooner...looks like I've got a job.

Saw a white-crowned sparrow.

Talked on the phone to everyone forever.

Notebook, Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2007

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:23:33 GMT

Did laundry.

Went to library & looked for jobs.

Checked out potential room-it was in an unfinished state.

Got ride back to Day's Inn from Sean (Shaun?). Saw accident-a van hit a bus.

Met driver of wrecked van on my way downtown-helped him find his way on the bus system. (!)

Called other Craigslist ad. Room seemed ok, I guess.

Notebook, Tuesday, Aug. 21, 2007

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:20:40 GMT

Rose early with many plans.

Went out to check out an apartment.

Took the wrong bus and irritated the driver. Gave up on buses and walked...and walked...

Found a library. Used the computer.

Walked some more...

Got home & got called by a potential roommate.

Lying in bed, watchin' a movie about the Yankees. Most of my plans haven't come to fruition.