I Want to Write

I want to write, but I keep getting ideas that are only half-ready as I'm about to start. So now I've got a few dozen half-ideas in my head, all vying for attention, and no clue where to start.

Ok, not NO clue. I'm starting by writing this and hoping it gets the ball rolling.

On a totally separate note, this iPhone app is none too shabby for blogging, if one couldn't get to a computer. Still not as good as my laptop, though.

Crush

So, I've been thinking. I have had way too many crushes that never went anywhere. Maybe by some people's standards, it's a much more normal number, but to me, it's downright sad. The worst part is that about half the time, I've found out after the fact that the girls liked me at one time or another (though I rarely know if it is at the same time I liked them). Some people would say to be happy for friendships that those crushes have grown into, and I am, sort of, but there's also this nagging feeling of "Dammit, why didn't I say anything?" I think Randall Monroe illustrated the sentiment of my fears best. Apparently, he also illustrated what is ultimately the situation on both sides, though that prospect still baffles me.

Now, in real life, I know that things don't work like this comic implies. The Neurotic Little Stick Figure imagines a worst-case scenario. But real life is bad enough. Because for some reason, I seem to get up the nerve with girls who aren't interested (I can still say "girls" because I was still in college last time it happened - from here on out I think I'm culturally obligated to call any new crush a "woman.") When I tell these particular girls that I am interested, they typically "let me down easy." The first time was the worst. I told this girl, Kim, that I had liked her for some time, and I asked her to come to my highschool homecoming with me. She told me she had already made plans with friends. This pattern repeated a couple times, with me asking for a date and her dodging it by already having plans. Finally, I asked her to be my girlfriend on, fool-that-I-was, the day before Valentine's day. She asked if she could get back to me, and again, being a dope, I told her that was fine, genuinely hoping for a good outcome. She did get back to me the next day, and explained that she just wasn't attracted to me. This would have been fine if she had stopped there - I have never considered myself to be terribly physically attractive. I had just always hoped my personality would overcome that. But she didn't stop there. Rather, she went on "but it's not a physical thing. It's more of a personality issue." I'm pretty sure she went on, but the thundercrack of those words and the balm of the intervening years have faded anything beyond that sentiment to total obscurity.

As I say, that was the worst. Since then, rejection has just been a polite "I just don't think of you that way" or "I don't have time for a boyfriend, and don't expect to anytime soon." Still not the best responses in the world, but those were infinitely better than to say that the thing I expected to overcome my difficulties was my difficulty all along.

Good Taste/Bad Taste

It bugs me the way people talk about taste in media (particularly music). They act like the rule is you either have good taste, liking good music and hating bad music, or bad taste, where you either don't care about or dislike good music and love bad music. Most people think, or at least talk as if they think, that it's impossible to have both. Well, it's possible.

I have good taste in music: I like the Submarines, the Weepies, Maria Mena, the Beatles, and half a dozen others you're even less likely to have heard of than the first three I named. And there is some music I cannot stand, like Taylor Swift's "Love Story" (addressed briefly here). But there is some genuinely BAD music I like. For example, I think Nickelback is incredibly fun. I'm not saying I "enjoy them ironically," whatever that is supposed to mean. I just like listening to them. I know they lack compositional talent. The song "Nickelback sucks" demonstrates that by pairing "How You Remind Me" with "Someday." They have the exact same chord progression and remarkable similarities between the two videos. That doesn't change the fact that I like them.

In summary, just because someone has bad taste in music, doesn't mean they don't have good taste in music, or vice versa.

Nightmares

I have a semi-recurring nightmare.

In it, I have finished college (or, when it started, I was in college), but my highschool has contacted me, saying that my diploma is invalid because of some irregularity or other. Sometimes I had forgotten to take a required class, and they just now noticed. Other times, some teacher or another had faked their degree or missed something that would have made the class count. At least once, I remembered having agreed to putting off this one requirement until such a time as I was free. The bottom line is, I need to go back to highschool for a semester and get this taken care of.

This is not a terribly disturbing nightmare. Perhaps it is only an unpleasant dream. I just know that I always have this panic of going back.

It doesn't help that after graduating, I've been living at home and still cannot find a job.

Demons

My Senior year of High School, I worked for about three months at Meijer. One day, one of my coworkers—a self-described "pagan"—went around asking people whether they believed all demons were evil. Most of the self-described Christians, agnostics, and atheists who worked there gave a tepid "I guess" or "I don't know." She smugly pointed out that they hypocritically condemned what they did not understand and did not understand what they believed. When she asked me, I did not know yet that she had asked my coworkers for their thoughts, or what answers she had received. Our conversation went a little like this (not word for word—it has been four years):

PAGAN: Do you think all demons are evil?
ME: Yes.
(PAGAN descends into sputtering rage at my certain and confident answer, babbles about being self righteous)
ME: Wait a minute... what do you mean by "demon"?

At this moment, I realized that she and I did not agree on our terms. I took demon to mean fallen angel. It's very definition meant that it was a being which saw God in all His glory and turned against Him. She did not have the same definition, as her answer demonstrated:

PAGAN: Any kind of demon!
ME: No, I mean...
PAGAN: Take a succubus for example. It has drains the life out of humans by having sex with them. Is it evil?
ME: If such a thing really exists; yes.
PAGAN: How can you say that?!? It's only doing it to survive! That's like denying a person the right to eat!

Here, again, we were hitting a wall in our conversation. One from which it did not recover, as I was called away shortly thereafter to do my actual job. However, I know how I would have responded: Angels, fallen or otherwise, are eternal beings. They don't die. Demons, therefore, do not need to feed to survive, whether on libidos or Fritos. It would be ludicrous for a Christian to respond any other way to her questions.

I suppose I'm thinking of this because I've been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately. (I just finished Season 6, and haven't seen it before, so please no one who reads this ruin Season 7 for me.) It's gotten me thinking a lot about different things: occult, demonic, magic, and mythic. I've done a lot of considering lately. Most of my thoughts are unimportant, and I will keep them to myself for now. I may have follow-up posts, however, wherein I discuss individual ideas in greater depth.

Emotional Experience

When I applied to Los Angeles Film Studies Center, they asked for a narrative of my most emotional experience. The following is what I wrote, with minor changes:

In my junior year of high school, I met a girl I'll call "K" (whose name I will omit for the sake of her privacy). We were both on our high school's forensics team, and were both of the intellectual persuasion. By this, I of course mean that we were smart and knew it, with (I am ashamed to say on my part) varying degrees of humility. Throughout the course of the semester, we became as close friends as I was with anyone during my pre-collegiate years. Much of our time was spent preparing for or going to speech competitions, and so we spent much of our time in each other's company. She was phenomenally talented and immensely kind to everyone to whom I ever saw her speak. I admit I may have even had a crush on her, but I never acted on it. Then, at the end of the year, she transferred to a private girls school and we lost touch with one another.

Throughout the course of my senior year, I would send K an occasional email. I didn't say anything special, just some updates about who had done what that we both knew and the sort of things I was up to. I knew that her new school's curriculum was much more intense than mine, so I thought nothing of it that she didn't really respond to my emails. Perhaps this was mere foolishness, perhaps self-delusion. Whatever the reason, I kept sending her emails every month or two for the first half of the year, then began to get less frequent. One day in the spring, I realized I hadn't written her in a while, so I sent her one last email. The act did not seem significant to me at the time.

A day or two after I sent that last email, I got a response from my not-so-long lost friend and was elated at the fact. I opened the email reply to my message and was horrified at what I read. It has been nearly four years, and those words were not “burned into my mind,” but the general gist of her message was. Her message essentially said: “I thought ignoring you was enough to send the message. Apparently not. I do not want to hear from you. I do not care how you or anyone you know is doing, and I hope you never talk to, write to, or in any way contact me again.” She expounded upon this theme for well over a page of writing. Likely, she thought this necessary, as I was too “dense” to pick up the subtleties of being ignored and so might miss the direct point as well. While I did not understand her reasoning, I respected her decision and so immediately deleted her from my email contacts, instant messenger, and any other list of contacts in which she had previously appeared.

For many people, this would only be a strange occurrence and perhaps slightly disappointing. But I have always had a fear of rejection (a full discussion of which would take well over a the allowed length of this essay on its own). I am reluctant to use common platitudes and metaphors, so I will not describe her message as a knife in the chest. That is exactly how I had described it at the time, but I have since thought back and realized that the feeling was nothing at all like a knife. What I felt was not pain, or sadness, or anger. It was a sort of internal reordering. The best I can think of to describe it is the way I imagine a surgery patient would feel after having had an appendectomy. Something of which I had not been normally aware had been taken away from me.

What was even worse than the feeling, however, were its aftereffects. I cannot make myself make first contact with any of my high school friends. Those with whom I have reestablished contact already, I may call, but the fear that they too will without explanation or reasonable provocation demand that I sever all ties between us grips me with all its might. Those who have not contacted me I have simply lost. Thankfully, there is such a disconnect between my high school and college careers that I do not have this problem with my college friends who have graduated or transferred. I am reluctant, perhaps, to call unsolicited, but I still do try from time to time, and most often my efforts are rewarded.

I have felt stronger emotions than this unclassifiable feeling K gave me, both before and since then. I have not, however, had any event trigger such a long-lasting shift in my emotions. I may never be free of her influence in my life. This strikes me as perhaps the greatest irony, that in trying to sever ties between us, K permanently won herself a place in my heart as the friend who didn't want me.

One might wonder what prompted me to post this now, over a year after I wrote it. The truth is, I recently googled "K"s name on a whim and found out where she goes to school. I still respect her decision, and will make no attempt to contact her. I'm just nostalgic, and a little sad.

Twenty Three Years of Madness

So, yesterday was my twenty-third birthday. It was somewhat interesting. I don't like this blog to be about my life so much as it is about my thoughts, but birthdays tend to make people think about their lives, so I'll call this post a toss-up.

Two days ago, I took my guitar out of its case for the first time in months and decided to genuinely practice. (For those who don't know, I don't ever claim to play the guitar — I practice. I'll call it playing when I can goof off and still not sound like crap.) I spent a while working, but then I remembered that my fingers were no longer calloused and decided to stop. With luck, I'll stay with it this time and end up actually playing the guitar.

Also recently, I started telling a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story on my facebook, run by popular vote. My hope is that this will motivate me to keep up with writing more (and possibly increase my audience, and provide me with feedback — lots of pluses to this plan).

I could go on, but I honestly feel this is better left short and sweet. I feel like I'm being more productive and responsible. Now if only I could find a job...