It's like 1:51am and I can't believe I have been on E2 for hours now. Worse then that I can't believe that he could just not call. I really thought we were friends. Or maybe it was me thinking I could trust him with my deepest thoughts, emotions, and feelings for him. It isn't like I want a marriage or even a commitment right now. Just someone to spend quality time with. I always thought that person should be your best friend. Or at least start out as good friends then if something happens you can prepare yourselves to remain friends. Famous last words....Oh well!
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."Hunter S. Thompson
I have been (I am a broken record) busy at work. This is mainly because Boston has still been cold. BUT, things are getting better. It has been warmer than freezing all week. (I still have to wear a jacket, but that is mainly because I am a wimpy Texan.) Today was nice enough so that most during most of my walk I carried my jacket...but still had to put it on after about 30 minutes. Since it is so sunny, people have seemingly come out of the woodwork.
I've managed to get all of my taxes done...I paid about $500 less than I expected on my federal, and ended up getting a surprise! refund on my state taxes. Still...it hurts to write the big check.
You'd think that I would get over it by now, but I renewed my dislike for our local subway. The T can be like a roller-coaster... start, suddenly start, go quickly around a curve...suddenly stop. Creeking all the while. And why must the train be constantly crowded to the point where there are never enough seats?
We had no idea what was gonna end up happening this evening. One of us had expectations, and one of us was just trying, trying her damndest to keep a blank slate and now we find ourselves sitting here, all sorts of ratty, but feeling much better off than we did in the beginning. And that's not even what the boy is feeling.
Oddly, the biggest lesson we're walking out of here reminded of: Baltimore is just a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad, Really Bad, Bad Movie....
tiffany? are you scared yet?
We've passed the torch.
Okay....me again......Um.......whew! I'd tell you, but I don't think you could even begin to comprehend it. This HURTS....but it's going to be okay. He's going to be okay.....she'll make sure of it. And I'm going to be fine. IF I CAN DO THIS......anyone can.
But I'm leaving now, as this is how things play out.
She's a good girl, Ms. Dee.
love you.
Greetings from South Plainfield. As they say, New Jersey is here, wish you were beautiful. It seems like every time I come up here, everyone else goes down to Baltimore to play. Is it something about me?
I'm feeling very creative without anything really specific to talk about, so here's some daylog glue dedicated to Easter.
Some questions that have crossed my mind today:
If you're reborn, then go back to being athieist or to a hedonist depravity, are you redeathed?
Contrary to popular opinion, the two aren't necessarily synonyms. As a recovering Christian still trying to get along with my family, Easter and Christmas tend to highlight just how beliefs and perceptions change how people treat you.
When Templeton and I were talking about that last night on #everything, I wasn't looking forward to the Easter morning service. But, it turns out that church was actually pleasant. I felt very extroverted this morning and I got a chance to show off my new car to a bunch of people that have known me literally since I was born. It may not have filled the promise of spiritual fulfullment, but it was a fun social event, and it made my parents happy.
All in all, it was two hours I consider well spent. If church always made me feel that good, perhaps I'd go more often. It's too bad I bore easily.
The second question, the one on everyone's mind:
How is Jesus doing?
Who knows. I'm not really sure how I'd feel if I knew that thousands of people were running around doing what they do in my name like they do in his. I hope he's a good sport.
According to my friend Jabba's Christmas rant last year, if Jesus would just get him a new job, a new apartment, a new girl, and a new drug connection, his work here would be done.
Of course, that that would still leave me without a new DVD player, which can't be right. I mean, gosh, Jabba's not going to get anything if he doesn't start thinking of people besides himself. Damn it.
I'll leave you with my solemn tip of the day. No matter what they tell you, the single-click buffer paste is not your friend. And neither are its unfortunate victims, after you misfire. Save yourselves! Disable single click buffer paste under X Windows!
You'll thank me one day. Honest. If only someone had warned me last night.
Happy Christ on a stick day, everyone.
I just now figured out why I hate my job..and I wasn't even trying...
And that's really what sucks...Whatever you do, it's expected of you...however much...no gratitude...the pays not great either
...
Due to a strike of Translink employees in the Greater Vancouver area I have been doing an uncharacteristic quantity of walking recently. A couple of days ago I plodded 32 kilometres, which is a lot more wear than my feet are used to. Generally I would have employed my bicycle, which was in the shop undergoing repairs at the time. Travelling the route by bus I tend to curl up in the back with a book, while the rigours of predicting the movements of automobiles occupy my mind when on two wheels. The mere monotony of foot-after-foot, however, is practically automated reflex, leaving me at the risk of boredom without sufficient distraction.
Boredom while crossing a bridge can be a dangerous thing.
So I scrutinize my environment, looking for inconsistancies and errata - evidence that it's all a mock-up designed to fool me into believing that other people live around me - and artifacts of other people's lives to convince me of the frightening complexity of the simulation. I take a particular and perverse desire in graffiti and reading things I pick up off the street and more often than not, they appear as the sole constituents of my day logs.
aha! A page from a notebook!
One block later I catch a flutter in my eye and, following it, come upon another page torn from the same volume.
Another page follows after another block:
Another block, another page:
the reason for the message was because you'r coming across as a person waiting to give approval of Marks happy ness when all you'r causin him is pain & confusion. you need to know that I am very disapointed in you. Ovosially there is something going on with you in regards to you'r lack of interest of resolving what you have caused
Hours later, East Van is found to have more paranoid-conspiracy-theory graffiti and less high school sentiment. A very different but still-quite-interesting(-to-me) literary idiom.
Around the corner from home, I am issued one final guerilla missive:
in our last episode... | p_i-logs | and then, all of a sudden...
I sit and stare for hours at the wall. I don't know why so don't ask. But I do that. It helps me to pass time. When I'm bored I will sit and stare. It helps me think. Think about everything, everything that's wrong in my fucking life, everything that's good (not many things) and compare 'em. Then I cry because I realize that my life is just not worth living.
Yet I go on living it. For what purpose I do not know. Yet it feels as an obligation for me to live even though I hate it. I want my life to stop going on, for someone to come and end my life, to take it away from me. I have no purpose for being alive. So why am I alive?
Because my parents fucked up and brought me into the world. They say they want me....and maybe they do just doesn't seem like it. They rarely show affection for me.
Very little affection at all. Someone take me away from this place. Take away my life and the bitterness that I have felt. Either bring me happiness or just give me death. My life is no longer worth living. I'm lonely, I'm sad, I'm depressed. The wall has become my only friend.
By the time of Leave Home, I thought, "I can do that". By the time of Rocket to Russia, I thought, "I will do that", and so, instead of being some unhappy math professor today, I'm an aspiring renaissance scoundrel and tired coder. As the years went by, Joey revealed himself to be the R'n'R version of "a gentleman and a scholar", a passionate historian and valued co-keeper of the nebulous flame of le rock and roll, as important for the intelligence behind the noises he made as for the noises themselves.
I have this saying: "Faith is about believing in God, not believing that God." By which I mean that faith isn't simply the intellectual knowledge that God exists; I believe that my wife Angela exists, but when I say I believe in her, I mean that I love her and trust her. So it should be with God.
Isn't that CLEVER? Couldn't you just see that on a HALLMARK CARD or a BUMPER STICKER?? Boy, am I proud of that saying. Bully for me, being so witty and all.
This morning we went to the sunrise Easter service. It was beautiful. We all lit candles from the Paschal flame, and it was dark and quiet and reverent. And then during the sermon, the priest quoted Jesus:
"Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am."
And I realized then that for the past several months -- okay, let's be honest, we may be talking about something that's been growing for years -- I haven't believed that at all. Scripture teaches that Jesus took our sins to the Cross with him so that we may be released from them. Jesus took my fear, my guilt, my shame, my anger, my anxiety, my failures, my abuses, and lifted them off my shoulders. They aren't mine anymore. They were nailed to a piece of wood two thousand years in the past, and with His death they were forever eradicated.
In their place He leaves His love and His peace. These things are to fill the Christian's life and flow out in the form of compassion toward others. We can do this because we know in our hearts that we can trust God to keep his promises, because he loves us fiercely and wants us to be with Him.
And that is not where I am right now. I have stopped believing that any of this can be true for me. After all, I'm petty and weak-willed, self-centered and lazy. The things I've done in the past come back to haunt me again and again, and each time I am appalled at what a bastard I can be. The knowledge of the depths to which I can sink, and the degree to which my good intentions fail me and others even today, has become the defining factor in my life. The peace of God, I think, must be for others. It can't possibly be for me. That, ladies and gentlemen, is my new faith. Here's how rooted in me it's become: knowing that I have a history of alcoholism in my family, I actually considered taking up drinking this past week just to help me cope with my daily stress. I mean, how stupid is that? It was practically a panel out of those hilariously dumb Jack Chick comics. "Jesus can't help me -- maybe I can find the answer in beer!"
So the words from the pulpit fell on me like a ton of bricks this morning. I realized that I spend all of my time wrestling with -- what? Not even my actual faith, but the idea of faith. I grapple with what I believe to be the Big Questions and manage to completely miss the point of this entire exercise, which is that Jesus died for ME. In the passage the priest quoted, Jesus flat-out ORDERS me not to worry about the state of my soul, or anything else for that matter. How could I possibly have missed that?
Repentance was the call of John the Baptist, a poor translation of the Greek word for a turning of the mind away from the old and toward the new. It's time for me to let go, and to truly repent.
Thanks to iandunn for starting the wheels turning.
It's sad that this is even notable. I went to work at 8:00 this morning and was happy about it, even though I am the antithesis of a morning person. One of my co-workers dressed up as a giant bunny, and handed out candy and balloons to people. Everyone at my work had nicknames today, and it showed up on our clock-in slips. The sour girl at work was called "rotten egg", one of the psycho Nazi-like managers was the "energizer bunny", and I was called the "playboy bunny". I had the pleasure of receiving this name only because I asked if I could wear my playboy shirt to work for Easter, because it had a bunny on it. Even the general manager got into the spirit and wore bunny ears today. I love holidays, even though it is only Easter.
Today didn't feel like Easter. I almost missed church..I ended up running there so I wouldn't be as late. I felt like if I missed church, that I would have missed Easter altogether. Maybe it didn't feel right because it's my first holiday away from my family, or because I didn't get an Easter basket (I don't really think this is it), or because this is the first time in over fifteen years that I haven't gone to see or participated in an Easter musical. After I got back from church, I had dinner and talked with my boyfriend online. I started on the homework that was due at 7:30 tomorrow morning and realized that I hadn't gotten *any* homework done this entire weekend. So much for being productive with my roommate and friends away for the weekend...
Roommate update: not only does she have strep, but now she has mono too! :(
printable version chaos
Everything2 Help
