Community of Loss

Things are bad. 

I am tired of pretending. 

There is no doubt in my mind.

It is hard when about 5 people you know are having a swell life and everyone fucking else is not. Life is always hard. People have to die, that is a part of life, people will always lose people they care about. But in this life you can lose people you care about before death and that is the saddest of all. 

We spend our short amount of time here judging and sometimes avoiding people we care about. Sometimes we avoid them because they hurt us or lie to us. We need to learn to see their vulnerability. We need to understand that when people lash out and hurt us it is because someone or something is hurting them. 

People don’t feel good from hurting other people. You have to be loving to other people to get the oxytocin chemical flowing so people should be good at that. But when someone never learned how to do that and can’t make the oxytocin sometimes they learn to rely on other brain chemicals that have a similar effect. Or other ways to get chemicals in our brain that feel like love. Drugs that effect our dopamine and serotonin are common in legal and illegal forms. 

People fall in love with anger because anger gives you an adrenaline rush. I know it well. Now that feeling gives me intense anxiety. I know the momentary feeling of power for tearing down another human beings emotional core. A damaging blow to their energy. In the long run you will wind up wasting all your own energy. 

You can only focus on love or hate at any given moment. Most people can’t have angry emotions and loving at the same time, you are in a constant balancing act between one and the other. But we also have a choice in some of this. Most of it is learned behavior. You can learn to be angry and judgmental towards others and give yourself that adrenaline rush. But you can also learn to love. 

It takes two to tango though and so many people live in worlds of anger that they don’t even know they are filling in the void with something other than the love drug. So many people taking pain killers. Or antidipresants, benzos, stimulants, food, exercise, any obsession you can name because they are lacking in love. That is what people want, connectedness, community. 

Where does my skin stop exactly and the air begin? 

We are mostly water, but we are mostly nothing as well. 

It’s all how you look at things. 

How we look at things isn’t something we are born with, we learn it all from other people. None of us are alone no matter how alone we feel sometimes. Those of us that thrive do so because we have community, whether we choose to see its existence or not. Many a privileged person doesn’t see how the people they know from where and whom they were born to directly effects their lucky lifestyle. For some it was the time they were born in, certain generations had more free government programs available to them in the start of adulthood than others. 

We are all in debt. 

Everyone is working as hard as possible. 

Humans need recreation and connection and cooperation. We can not thrive and accomplish to our maximum potential when we push ourselves too hard. We will burn out, there is no perfect. This culture just replaces the burnt out worker with another to waste away. 

It is so much nicer to want to understand or help everyone you meet. I notice I need my space from people a lot. I take on their feelings. Their insecurities becomes mine. I am not an insecure person. I tend to feel very intensely the emotions of the person I am with, which is why I only like to go out sometimes. 

I have always been prone to completely zoning out to the point I no longer hear or see what is going on in a room, I’d say this happens the most when I am reading and writing, phone and Alphasmart3000 included. I grew up with quite and extensive family as an only child. I had many cousins on two sides of a family with many different aunts and uncles as parents.  I know what it means to belong to a community of people, someone accepted me as one of them at some point, even as weird as I am. 

As I’ve gotten older I’ve had to lengthen distances between people I care about and myself, because I can’t directly help them. Being myself even bothers them when all I want to do is to connect with people. I want to know everyone’s story. The internet is perfect for me, all the information about someone’s life journey without all the feeling their emotions involved. So I can get to know far more people that closely. It has been an invaluable tool. 

I’ve always made these very personal one-on-one connections with people. I am not big on hanging out in crowds. I always wind up off to the side talking to one other person. Do we all do that? 

It feels weird when I talk to a group of people. So many emotions going on. I find I turn into a clown and make jokes and fill any uncomfortable silences. I hate uncomfortable silences. It took me a long time to learn to talk just enough that people feel comfortable and have a lot to say back so that they will tell you their story. 

I never realized how much growing up in and working in a hair salon shaped who I was until I wasn’t there for a long time. How many things seemed normal, shaping how people appear, never talking about subjects that offend, always being ready to entertain people. 

Things were so intense I am completely burnt out. There are a lot of things hair stylists are privy to that not everyone is. How society is doing, what kind of personal image insecurities everyone has, what they watch on T.V. even though everyone pretends they don’t watch much T.V. 

A friend and I noticed that the other day, how frequently people say they do not watch much T.V. And yet you know millions of people are watching T.V. We have statistics about it. It is on. They may watch movies or sports but there are commercials and it is media and there are advertising dollars in the show and it is in everyone’s living room. If you don’t have a T.V. you probably have the internet, you can get a second hand T.V. for cheap and free DVDs from the library and dirt cheap VHS from any second hand store. Everyone uses and experiences entertainment and recreation. 

Stop judging other peoples choices of how they spend their free time from work and their money, those are not your choices to make for them. The only thing you owe other people is love and sometimes forgiveness but always support. Even if you can’t be around someone because their suffering will only drag you both down they have to know you are rooting for them. 

Everyone has to make it on our own. We have to pick ourselves up and do it. No one can do it for us. But the only people who can do it are those of us with love and support from other people. We have to know that someone believes in us. Anyone really, once you find one your community will always expand. 

It makes me sad when someone hates me, even if I don’t need them in my life at all. It hurts me when people I don’t even see anymore judge me. I don’t know why and I know it shouldn’t. So I personally believe it is hurting all of us. 

Who doesn’t have someone in their life telling them that they are not good enough? Boss, spouse, mom, dad, brother, sister, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, lovers? Everyone is being judged by someone they care about. 

It is the silent suffering under this weight of financial burden and debt that rests on every one of us. If you are lucky enough to have not have a misstep of loans or credit or illness yet be prepared because almost no one gets out of this sick sad world the way it is without some sort of loss worse than the natural course of death humans were so accustomed to for so long. Many people leave without passing on their wisdom and what they have learned to others. 

We should be sharing as we go. Lessons are experienced time and time again until they are learned. This goes for individuals and as a culture.

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
- George Orwell

Society of Ideology

Things feel bleak in America. People are actually scared about the “government shutdown”. The media stunt political ploy. They are squeezing poor women and people who really need help while mildly annoying the Tea Partiers so they have something to rail against Obama about. 

We are all tired of it, we feel like we have no control over it. But we do. We all need to look around and see what we can do. We need to figure out our contribution to the worlds problems and try and minimize our impact on the negative and learn how we can expand our reach into the positive. Violence will always create more violence. We need to start using our words.

I’ve been void of things to write about. Well that is a huge fucking lie. The world is full of things to write about. My own federal government has been “shut down”. Sort of, they closed all the things we liked and kept up all those necessary defense contracts. 

I’ve got all these ideas swirling in my head. I don’t know what to tell people anymore. 

The first step is to be well educated in history and sociology. It helps to know all the basics of science as well. However none of that will help you make any sense of the world as it is because it isn’t designed to make sense. It is designed to be as confusing and frightening as possible so no one knows what the fuck is going on. Really, that is the goal. If they can keep us all in fear they can keep their lavish lifestyles. While the lower classes pour their blood, sweat, and tears into their work and their lives and barely get by at the end of the day. 

Almost everyone I know is suffering extreme stress, often from lack of money after being done paying all the bills but also from social pressure to conform and just "let it go". We pay more for utilities than we should, we pay more for food than we should, we pay more for transportation than we should, we pay more for shelter than we should. The primary problem is that the owners of those for profit ventures don’t give a damn about their customers or what they have to say because they don’t have to anymore. 

Television and streamlined media has us all fed exactly what we want to see and hear. Just docile enough to control, but still active enough to have productivity up 22%. What do we produce anyway in America? Weapons? Food for other people who are too busy working to feed themselves. 

The world is full of too much stuff and yet we keep creating more. Buying more, thinking of ways we can sell more so we can be in on the profits. That is a part of the game, give everyone a small tastes of the rewards, make us all feel we are slightly privileged, just one step away from that magic moment or that magic idea that puts us on the fast track to fortune. It doesn’t actually work that way. 

There are such wide chasms between each of the classes that it is easy to keep us hating one another. God forbid you are sick mentally and physically because then you are the one bringing society down. Don’t be too rich or we will hate you our of jealousy. Don’t be too poor, why don’t you just work harder and get an education? People have lost the ability to relate to situations that are not our own. Perhaps because we don’t read as much fiction. Sitting around “doing nothing” is a waste of time. God forbid anyone should see the world through someone else’s eyes thanks to an artist. 

Television just sells primarily one vision of the world. The white upper class one. Not the world of the wealthiest, the world below them. The world we are supposed to strive for, the life they sold us with too many Super Sweet 16 and Cribs episodes. What they don’t have at the end of cribs is the statistics of how many new money celebrities wind up broke and bankrupt because they can’t maintain the lifestyle of the wealthy once they aren’t in the spotlight. 

Dynasty families don’t let athletes and musicians in on decisions that sway the world. They have to have some stories of people coming from the slums to become super stars, Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z, Britney and Christina, if you are talented enough we will hand you a pass into the world of the rich and famous. But that is all it is, a pass. It doesn’t come with actual power to effect changes you want to see in the neighborhood you came from. You can save yourself but you can’t save everyone else. 

I don’t know anyone personally who doesn’t worry about paying their bills. Even people with steady incomes couldn’t survive if they suddenly lost their job or even just a few weeks of pay. There is no job security. All the workers rights people remember having are gone. All the rights we have to personal freedom are gone. Google and Facebook can tell you exactly what we like, they have compiled extensive marketing data on all of us, so they can get whatever is left of our paycheck at the end of paying the bills. If you are lucky enough to have anything left. 

No one speaks up in their daily lives. Everyone talks about the weather or major sporting events, or even fantasy sports. Who the fuck decided fantasy sports should be the way ANYONE wastes their life away? I support people’s right to spend their moments of life anyway they choose. I completely support recreation and games that are also fun athletic activities. I will never understand how we got to the point where not only do we worship sports stars as gods and talk about that relentlessly, but now we make up realities for these teams and players and pretend that it matters and effects us. We waste a lot of time and energy on things we were raised with and never question.

Now people talk minimally about politics, “can you believe the government shutdown?” But whatever they say was put in their mind for them. Whatever they already believed Google sent them results that match what they will like and agree with. When it comes to TV we watch what we agree with and then we parrot those talking points when in casual conversation. We don’t live in a society of ideas. We live in a society of ideologies. Set rules we want our realities to abide by. We need to get back to believing in change and possibilities. We do the same things with politics, sciences, and religions that we do with sports. We all have our own teams.

Everyone Falters

I feel miserable. So maybe I can write now. I’ve been in a slump, a block, facing a brick wall. I was happy. Today I am bugging out. Not really, not entirely. It is just windy, cold, and rainy. My fingers hurt really bad. Perhaps I’ve been picking at my fingers since I haven’t been picking my brain for ideas. I always try and figure out why? I don’t think the why is that simple. 

I am tired of being told how to present myself to the world. Many people have offered up suggestions I haven’t asked for. Maybe what women need more than suggestions on how they should be is support for being who they are. I don’t like to talk about being crazy. I don’t feel crazy but I often feel persecuted. Not in a paranoid "everyone is out to get me" sort of way. Just in a, it is not acceptable to live my life and be who I am sort of way. It makes me disinclined to want to talk to many people. 

Writing is when I am trying to talk to the most people at once. Lately I’ve tightened my circle, kept all the vultures at bay. You can’t say a lot without hearing a lot of grief. You could always just ignore what I have to say as most people will. I really don’t know why we are so unforgiving of our own flaws when we all have them. 

We are sold images of unrealistic perfection and expected to live fulfilling lives trying to obtain them. We never can because they are not even real. No model in any magazine is unedited. Everyone on television is wearing make-up. Not just actors and actresses, news anchors, interviewees, everyone. Many women wear make up every single day. They never leave the house without it. They brush their teeth and do their hair and make-up before their husband or family awake. 

I called make-up my war paint when I was in high school. I wore it when I wanted a protective shield from the outside world, to keep from showing them my true colors. I’ve been upset about the state of what it means to be a woman, to be feminine in any way really. There is a war being waged against women and children. We have campaigns against bullying in school but we bombard our children with unrealistic expectations of themselves and their reality. 

We don’t teach them with what we say; we teach them with what we do. They see us judging our friends’ emotional struggles and appearances and they do the same. They see it on television. Their parents emulate that behavior and worship reality T.V. stars, so why wouldn't they? 

The television is not to be regulated the same as a toaster. The television controls the cultural consciousness. It is everything that we are, at the same time a projection telling us what we should be and a reflection of who we really are. 

I can never help myself but to imagine this world from another point in time, sometimes before and sometimes after. I imagine this world from another creatures’ perspective. What do we look like? How do we appear? That is the real question of appearance, not our individual flaws but how we organize as a society to help correct those flaws. 

Everyone falters, except sometimes those born of privilege. I tend to believe even most born of privilege falter, they just blame it on someone else, unlike how the lower classes are taught to always blame themselves. Everyone I know is suffering some form of illness or financial distress. Everyone I know. I fear even some of the ones who say everything is fine are suffering worst of all. 

I fear I project that onto people. I don’t want it to be my negativity that shapes the way of the world. I don’t think I have that sort of power. I know how I want things to be, but I can see how they are. I can see the world I believe is possible and won’t come for generations from now. 

It is hard to be here now. Everyone still childishly believing that violence can ever breed anything other than more violence. Whenever I want to talk about these things, media and how it shapes the world we live in, I am told I just want to argue. I don’t really like that word. I don’t really like to argue. 

I question things all the time, almost everything. I question everything other people say and do but also everything I say and do. Nothing is ever fully answered. At the same time there is no way to continue conversation without questions unless people are just shouting ideas at one another. 

I like joking too. Joking is underrated. Joking, not to hurt other people, can often create bridges of communication with even the most different people. Everyone has lost their sense of humor. Things are too stressful. God forbid a woman curse too just like a man, that’s not funny! "Why are you so angry?" It must be because I am such a militant feminist. 

I think people underestimate how much I use humor to deal with all the fucked up things I know about. I can be funny and enjoy life every single day and still know the reality of what most people, who are not me, are suffering through. People who act like knowing the reality of the world is too much for you or your children to handle fail to realize the privilege that is involved in not being one of those many people suffering. You should care, you should appreciate that only by pure luck of who you were born to, do you come across the privileges you do have. 

Most people fall somewhere on the scale. Some do worse than us and some do better. We should not be comparing lives. We should appreciate our lives and try to help others because that is what makes us feel good. 

Drugs and money also make us release intensely good brain chemicals. It would be better if we could learn how to feel good from loving one another and connecting instead of from chemical reactions from random stimuli. That is why we have so many “my strange addictions” that we have a reality show, problems with our mind that have manifested within our physical selves. 

There is a very popular fallacy in modern science right now. That the mind can be sick and the body can be sick and that the two are usually unrelated. But that isn’t true. Our sciences should not be separate. They are all separate languages to describe the same ideas. Like different religions, different branches of science believe their way is the right way to describe all that is. 

Science used to believe in superior races, eugenics was popular just 100 years ago which is not very long. We shouldn’t assume everything science says is true anymore than we should believe everything religion says is true. We should take in as much information while we are alive so we can and draw our own conclusions and contribute what we have discovered for everyone's benefit. But if we are to make progress first we have to stop judging each other for our failures and start supporting each others’ talents. 

You cannot learn anything if you are never wrong. You cannot succeed if you have never failed. The only way to never fail is to never try anything you are uncertain of. All of the things we do not know live outside the bounds of certainty. 

Wolves Lie Among Us

I’ve been spending a lot of time at the library. I rarely get any reading done because everyone is so fucking loud and I can’t focus. I was going to say it is only in the children’s section when we are there so my son can go on the computer and I sit nearby. But it’s not, even adults talk loudly in the library when they are self important, tutors, sometimes parents of tutors. Kids are usually not the problem unless they are rolling around on the floor or god forbid takes their shoes off on the rug and then they are not the distraction it is the annoying librarian yelling at them for being kids. 

When you see a kid acting out look slightly further and you will see their disconnected parent. Kids really just want attention. Another reason I get no reading done when I am there with Zack, he stops his reading to ask me random questions or tell me something funny he reads every 30 seconds on average. The library is a good community place. Anyone and everyone are welcome. I notice a lack of respect for it sometimes, people who’ve never been to a library, that one or any one, before. Even the librarians aren't respectful of how awesome libraries are as a societal accomplishment. Free information for all is a beautiful thing.

I know this world is wrong. I live in a very safe community. I’d say aside from the ultra wealthy that have security systems in their daily lives, as safe as you can get culturally. I did the most terrifying thing the other day. I let my son go to a public men’s room at the library, while I was slightly out of view, I would see him when he came out but couldn’t see the hallway or the door. Why should this have been such a fearful thing to do? I was GRIPPED WITH TERROR. But he is old enough to go take a pee and come back without getting lost or wandering off. But we both looked unsure. That’s not right. 

It is partially a product of rape culture. Can’t let a child be in a bathroom with grown men. Do I think like that because I am a woman? I think men also think like that, in fear for their children not themselves. Is that a symptom of rape culture? There is also the stranger danger fear we had instilled in us as children that if a child is out of an adult's sight for just 30 seconds or more someone will snatch them away and we’ll never see them again. 

How is this normal societal progression? Is there a reason we don’t trust our neighbors? In the light of day would you pick a stranger up and give them a ride? Would you let them use your phone to make a call? Would you ask them for a quarter to pay a toll or get a shopping cart? Why do we fear strangers? 

Why don’t we trust our innate abilities to judge who is safe and who is not? It is because wolves lie among us. We have dressed wolves up in $2000 suits from Armani and we treat them as kings of a financial language no one else understands. No one else understands because we are not selfish by nature. Otherwise it is very easy to understand the world of venture capitalism.

People are designed to have a positive chemical response to altruism. Helping other people literally delivers a dose of the chemical that is mimicked by heroin and oxycodone. Oxytocin, the love hormone baby. We are hard wired for cooperation. People who screw over the tribe for the good of themselves should be the ones considered mentally ill, not the ones who are sick because of this sick society. 

I realized the other day that at one point in history there was a treatment for people like me, crazy women, political commentators, naysayers; it was called electric shock treatment. And when we went on hunger strikes in protest we had feeding tubes shoved down our throats. Feeding tubes are torture. Shock treatment is torture. These things used to be standard practice. It is sometimes good to remember, we have come a long way. 

There are still far too many people in the world suffering. But this class, the working class has never been so well off in the aspect of available information and technology. We may not have enough money to go anywhere but the global world is at our finger tips. We have in our hands a lot more power than certain people want you to think. You tell me about your pork chop mashed potato dinner, and that’s great, it makes food insecure people like me really hungry because it looks delicious even though I know it’s full of nasty GMOs. 

ANYWAY, I’m glad that my family has not shunned me and locked me away in some hellish institution for embarrassing everyone because that was a reality at one time. If I was a housewife of the 60s I could just take some Valium and take a nap. I feel like Xanax plays the same role in our society of quelling dissent. I am not a big fan of barbiturates. In my experience they don’t make me feel less anxious; as a matter of fact they don’t let me feel anything at all. 

Only one thing cures fear. Having nothing left to lose. Seeing the bottom. Realizing how many things could set your life’s goals back but continuing on no matter what because what else are you going to do? The alternative is worse, the alternative is nothingness. Maybe everythingness, but it isn’t life as we know it that’s for sure. 

I want my son to live in a world where he can explore and be trusted to return. Kids used to roam the neighborhood because kids love to be social and they need the exercise. Now they are chained to the schedule to participate in activities. Now they are all locked in their houses primarily connected by electronic devices. Just like us. We are all on our schedule. Can’t miss a day of the schedule. Work is important but more importantly the pay from it. Can’t miss any days of school or you have to make up the work and what if you get sick and actually NEED to miss days of school? 

Children want to talk and learn together, that is the reason they comply with the senseless rules of school. They like to be and want to be together. We teach our children well how to ask to go to the bathroom. I don’t see how that should ever be necessary. The industrial revolution, can’t get off the factory line, gotta stay, can’t pee. Pee and shit on schedule from now on future generations.

Warm Coffee Is Really Fantastic In the Fall

Blockage is the worst. Sounds like a digestive problem. It’s a mental problem. Maybe not a problem but a hiccup or a delay. Can you really come up with new ideas every day of your life? Seems a bit of a high standard. I don’t think you notice the days you have good ideas. It’s best to write shit down or record it because you will otherwise forget that feeling exactly.

I always think, “I will write that down later, I won’t forget, how could I forget something so brilliant?” And yet then it is gone. I feel like I have nothing to write if things are good. Is that why there is a tortured artist stereotype? Do we deliberately make our lives miserable or do we exploit the misery in life for the sake of art or laughter. Most of the art I like makes me laugh. Either that or it makes me cry. 

Now we waste so much artistic talent on advertisements made by people who don’t even garner credit. They hire you to do the job and decide what to pay you and if they will change it or if you did it to their standards. What is the standard in emotional availability? What is the standard of open realism in art? There isn’t any at the moment. 

The stores are overwhelming places for me. I loved to spend money as a kid. It wasn’t my money. I find even myself knowing all I do in a market overwhelmed by the urge to look at and buy pretty things. This world is full of pretty things you can have if you have money. They don’t last and they don’t actually make you happy but you can have them. 

I like to take care of and appreciate even all the silly shit I’ve acquired. Kyle and I are teaching Zack how to read a real clock on the blue LED lined wall clock we bought upon living in our first house and realizing it would be nice to have a clock that worked on batteries even when the electricity and the cable did not. When we moved here we also had a cable box with no clock which I found bizarre. We don’t have any cable again due to financial reasons but I don’t miss it. I prefer it. 

We still have the real clock and now Zack knows how to tell time. It has readable hour numbers and little tick marks for the minutes, making it a good learning clock. We didn’t really consider that when we bought it. He was one and a half, maybe we did it subconsciously. I think we just like that it lights up blue. We haven’t plugged the LED light back in since we moved the living room furniture. We should plug it in, it’s the little things. Simple technologies are worth taking care of and appreciating. After the hurricane you learn to have a working radio, a clock, and candles if necessary. 

I found out the blue light of the clock is plugged in. Huzzah! I turned it on. 

I feel like I never have enough time. Weeks go fast. Weekends go faster. Days go whizzing by. I basically have to be forced to see people. I don’t think that is normal. I never claimed to be normal. Maybe it’s just the grass is always greener. People who have a lot going on and a lot of people around want more time alone. Lonely people want to be around more people. Maybe loneliness is a perception. 

Waiting for shit, no matter how mundane makes me have the worst anxiety. Even though I know everything always winds up fine. There aren’t usually too many awful dramatic things back to back. People in my life handle things well. Better than me. I always feel like all the people I know handle things better than me. We probably just all do most of our suffering alone. Or tell few people about it. I tell everyone about my suffering. Does everyone realize when I say things like that I think it’s funny? 

People who appear fine don’t really interest me. They do ok at their job, it is easy and they won’t get fired, they make enough money to pay bills and have fun without consideration, they go on vacations and to weddings. Those people don’t really interest me. Everyone else has always interested me. Not the homeowners on Cribs. Not the parents on My Super Sweet 16. Those people are the buffer class. The class of people that keeps in touch with the managerial class and exists to fully insulate the ruling class from people like us. The Political class, the just rich enough to not give a damn about anyone but yourself and not wealthy enough to have real power, class doesn’t really interest me. 

I always feel bored in the morning. I love to sleep. I like to wake up and go back to sleep. For some reason I usually dream and remember it if that happens. It rarely does. I go to the bus stop and then I do shit all day and nothing is ever done. Laundry and dishes every day, sorting, organizing. staring at shit, “where to begin with this disaster?” 

My handheld Oreck just died, it was the saddest fucking thing. I use it a lot to clean shit. It overheated. Maybe it will work once turned off to cool and with a fresh bag and a lint filter cleaning. This is my life. 

I just want less stuff. And the stuff that remains more organized. It will happen and then I’ll be dead. Life is a constant list of things to do. I just try to stay focused on what I can do today. Once I get rid of all the clutter in my house I can get rid of all the clutter in my brain. This shit isn’t important. It occupies all of our thinking space. Worries. It distracts from legitimate problems, right in front of us. People we see all the time, people we love who we can’t afford to help or who don’t want our help that we can give. 

So in the meantime I just organize and wait. And I write every fucking day. Someday I will have something good to say and all this shit that came before it will have been good practice. 

I like my slang. I like that my slang annoys a lot of people. I know a lot of not nice people who don’t use any “bad” words. Or at least act like they don’t. 

I find if you always speak in perfect grammar of one dialect you have a harder time communicating with more people. I can’t believe I don’t know any other languages. American English is so archaic considering we stole most of our words from other languages. Why didn’t we choose the simplest spellings for words? I should probably be writing this in my handwritten pages. This is some crazy bullshit. I usually try to keep that and my complaints to the pages. 

I try to focus on a topic in the blog. I just vaguely remember while I am writing, this is the topic this one is about, and that keeps me on track. Sometimes I am just talking to you because I haven’t figured out what to say today. But in the way someone practices for an Olympic sport or dancing, or aerial acrobatics, I do this shit every day whether it’s a good day or not. 

It’s a lot harder when I’m just in my house cleaning and hanging out with my fam. I try not to write about them but I do a lot anyway. I try to leave them their privacy. That’s always my goal. I like to tell other people’s stories and not tell exactly who it is. Who is was is not the important part. Crazy shit happens to everyone is the important part even when our lives seem silly and mundane. 

The goal in life should probably be silly and mundane. The alternative is when shit hits the fan. This will probably be one of my favorite times of life. Kyle’s achieving a goal. Zack is still little enough to care we are around. I might someday be the person I want to be. I think I will always be a work in progress though. I like knowing what I am. A writer. I will just keep writing until I look back and find I’ve had something to say. 

Orwell’s Letters are new at the library. I haven’t finished Vonnegut’s yet and I have a book to finish this week and 4 after that. I read short stories and letters sporadically in the process of reading books when I am having focusing problems. I write a lot of letters lately.

That was probably the worst part about baby brain, not being about to read and to focus. Not being able to focus long enough on something that wasn’t related to your child and actually retain what it said. I did read 4 books on being pregnant and 5 on having a baby. We need to admit women need help when their babies are young. They don’t really need help when pregnant, they need to keep moving as much as possible and eat healthy. 

People would have more energy and be happier if we could all afford to eat healthy. The ground and the water would be better as a result. The plants and the cycle of water cleanse what we need. The water we drink is the same water that has always been drunk. Do we really want so much of it sitting in petrol plastic bottles on shelves or in trucks traveling across the world? 

We are poisoning ourselves and we are too stupid to know it. It has happened before. Marie Curie discovered the elements that killed her. Back then you had to separate new elements out of sediment with science. BOOM. 

We need to get back to basics. Kids today don’t know how their technology works. How does the AlphaSmart3000 really work? What kind of gadgets and gizmos inside? I wouldn’t take it apart; I don’t want to break it. It is far too valuable. It doesn’t work without a computer though. Wouldn’t work to communicate with you without electricity to send messages on the internet, FROM SPACE! Ok, I stole that joke from Louis CK. You should know that, or you’re a disappointment. 

Warm coffee is really fantastic in the fall. I drink it cold in the summer because it is hot out. The first cold days are the suckiest probably. I am already pretty used to it. By the time the summer leaves I am always sick of its humid days and fucking mosquitoes. I want to move somewhere without mosquitoes and without sweltering heat. It’s cold already and it’s only in the 50s and later 60s today. My house stays relatively warm from the shower, oven, dryer, and dishwasher; I try not to waste heat. 

I couldn’t figure out why my gas budget was so high this past year. I am super with the conservation. I cut my electric bill in half. None of us take insanely long or insanely hot showers all the time. I keep the heat really low when I finally turn it on. Last winter my dishwasher was broken and I had a guest who liked to wash one dish at a time all day long. That is unnecessary. Ok if you’re gonna rinse it for the dishwasher, fine, but if it’s dirty, let it sit in the sink or basin with water and wash all the dishes at once. At least the mystery has been solved. There are ways we can all conserve on the energy we use day to day. 

I just realized more women use the internet for social networking. I run into many female moderators. I usually can tell the difference. I think. The internet is still full of a little anonymity. But I know many females highly invested in the internet, well versed in text, email, and Facebook etiquette. Some people don’t realize these things should have social rules. Women or the feminine aspects of life because no one is entirely masculine or feminine need to be more recognized for the contribution they make to the world as it functions. We are largely underpaid and under recognized for it.

My generation created our own set of social rules because we were first, the first teenagers with instant messaging. I don’t remember a lot of anonymous bullying or just general verbal harassment. Only nerds loved computers and we all communicated through LiveJournal and message boards. We had knowledge of privacy settings and how to make sure varying levels of information were received by varying levels of people you interact with. 

I was mostly public back then, but kept stories with personal information for friends. Most of my LiveJournal friends were girls. We love to journal, we record history. We are the artists behind the scenes. We are the masters of language that have to teach and explain language to the next generation so we can try and understand them. 

The times are changing. In this world sometimes the first draft is on the internet. People need to learn to admit they are wrong. I am very good at admitting I am wrong and saying I am sorry. I don’t just plainly say I am sorry anymore. I usually want to talk about shit. And I do. 

I think we have all these internal body illnesses partially because we internalize ourselves. More importantly we internalize our stress and our disappointment. You can’t burry something down and expect it to go away. You have to get it out somehow. Some people like music or painting, things expressive but less verbally specific. Emotional language is equally expressive but lacking in the definitive feeling of language. 

When did we decide to make a word for having words? That must have been a moment right? At first someone was like, we make all these noises to call things so we can tell each other about them when we can’t physically see them, what is THAT called? I bet it was after the plant based extra cannabinoids had evolved into being. 150 million years after we evolved. 

I think quite a lot of people are suffering from anxiety. There are a significant number of people who admit it and take medication for it or do something active to combat it. There must be a silent portion that doesn’t. Shouldn’t that mean there is an epidemic of fear? I think that is part of what cannabinoid receptors are about. I’m not the only one; I have read. 

It is true that cannabis reduces your ability to feel fear. This is why teenagers who smoke do stupid things. Teenagers already suffer from poor impulse control from an undeveloped frontal lobe. Adults don’t do stupid things when they use cannabis because we have knowledge and fear. Adults understand death much better than teenagers and children. Some children understand death too well in this shitty world. As a whole, younger people have an easier time romanticizing death as an escape. Those who have encountered it know its finality and don’t ever lose that fear. Not even from smoking cannabis. 

There are other things you can benefit from losing fear over. You can work harder and do better. People have won Olympic gold medals who smoke cannabis because it makes you unafraid. A lot of adults tell me it makes them paranoid. I wonder if that has to do with the strains available because you basically have to take what you can get, IF you can get it. Really? When you can go to any doctor with chronic pain for the first time for a legitimate reason and they can hand you opiate candies. But you feel criminalized for wanting to make pot brownies or smoke a bong. 

It changes your focus from what do people think about me… to what do I think about. This can be bad when you think about how you could go to jail and it could ruin your whole life because someone said you do drugs because they saw you smoking a joint and think that makes you a bad person after they drank a half bottle of wine and took a Xanax, projecting much?

So I have a solid theory that the paranoia associated with cannabis is created by its illegality just like the gateway. If it wasn’t illegal it wouldn’t be a gateway to a world of cash drugs and heroin. If it was in a pack of cigarettes at 7-11 kids would have to be 19 to get their hands on them. Now high schoolers have a hell of an easier time getting it. Adults can drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes. Cannabis is like two bad habits minimized to one. 

Would you smoke pot if there was no stigma? Or if you never developed a habit for smoking, cook it into your food? It makes everything taste better. It helps you forget about the schedule you are on. It helps get through that one day or one moment of the day you do get to relax. Personally I think we should be relaxed every moment of the day. Does anyone actually get that luxury? When I say relax because I mean relax your mind. No one can win gold medals with their brain full of muck. 

Those people have taught their minds to focus at an early age. The human body is capable of AMAZING feats. You really can handle a lot more pain than you think. Pain is a constant. It is the force driving you to stay in motion and not be so rooted in place. People in deep meditative states even sit actively. How many of us ever sit actively let alone always? Some of us practice good posture through sports and activity. You have to make an effort to accomplish it. 

We don’t schedule life for recreation. We don’t play games on break, or even have time to think about games and the things in life we used to love to do. I think about these things. I have a lot more time to myself than most people do. But I had to force it. It wasn’t and is still not easy. I daily have to remind myself not to feel guilty for being happy. 

I can be accomplishing things and be happy because I am in motion. As long as I am in motion and moving forward I can be better than I was before. I try to stay in balance but sometimes life goes one way and sometimes it goes another. Nothing changes overnight. Even death naturally is a long and drawn out fading of someone’s time on this earth. Sudden deaths from tragedy are harder to bear. 

Even babies don’t come into this world on a day like how we celebrate it. What is the difference between a baby 2 days before birth and 2 days after? Just its location. Babies gradually become conscious. We teach them how to be from the moment they are born. They are born tiny covered in muck screaming and not being able to see. 

By the first year they can walk upright, while holding onto someone or alone and they can talk, if word formation is a problem usually their parents can understand them if nobody else can. WE teach children entirely how to communicate. If you kid is screaming at you, do you scream at your kid? How do you want to be asked to do things or taught to do things? 

I love learning new things, but I certainly don’t learn well from condescending jerks that yell at me or scorn me. I try and tell my son that he can do anything. It is going to be up to him how hard he tries. I can teach him anything he wants to know, if I can’t, I’ll find out. The internet has made the access to information so much easier. I think it should be easier still but we will get there someday. We had books for a long time before the public had libraries. 

Learning should be free. Maybe the teachers of the future will be on the internet. Maybe children could read independently and hail a teacher for a chat session with instant messaging or Skype even where they could see one another. There are too many kids per teacher per classroom and not enough hours in the day. What if we had a collective database of teachers during school hours to help kids in class who need extra help? Most children just want and are lacking in attention from adults. 

Why doesn’t ever kid in every school have their own computer? Some kids have AlphaSmart’s actually. My friend’s mom has older ones than mine in her classroom. An understated device but in the world of iPads and tables, I’m sure it seems archaic to most kids. There is a typing tutorial on this that my son likes but it is no tablet computer. 

Imagine every kid with a computer of their own to learn to take care of from kindergarten on. So many people don’t teach kids to take care of things. Shit is always broken and they just throw it away. Like somehow these things disintegrate when you put them in a trash can. 

Someday all the minerals we need will be buried in the heaping mounds of shit we have all over the world infesting the oceans and land, and then we will have to pay more people than the ones who currently do sift through the garbage of everyone in modern society for the remnants of valuable things. 

There are a finite number of resources on this planet. Like the water sitting on shelves in petrol plastic bottles. It’s all necessary in the cycle and we have far too much of is bottled up. 

Occupied. 

Like our buried emotional states and the traumas we never feel fully addressed. I have been addressing mine, who’s next? 

I am very proud of the quality of the people I keep in contact with. I don’t feel like I am surrounded by people who think like me or yes men who tell their friends what they think they want to hear instead of what they think. Being me makes it easier for people to be them. I don’t claim to be perfect. More importantly I don’t think anyone is. If you say everything is perfect I know, on some level, you are lying. And more likely you have tons of secrets just like everyone else. I suppose some people’s secret is that they have no secrets. 

The secret is the longing to do more, the most shameful secret of all. The human body is capable of amazing things but only when your mind is on board. The media as it currently stands is a sickness that has infested all of our minds. I am not alone in this. 

We need new laws about intellectual property. The computer makes it possible to find out where something was first published, the original author will have the first public posting on the internet unless the idea was stolen IRL. It seems like most intellectual property thieves would be more into copy and paste than data entry. 

Impactful images as well will someday have a date of origin most likely, the first time they were uploaded. How will future generations sift through all this information we have compiled and left behind? I am guessing we will need super computers for that. I’m sure the possibility at least is already out there. No one has tried yet to quantify the data on the internet and talk about who should own what. 

We should own our interests. They shouldn't be sold to whatever advertising company need them to sell us more shit. The internet should be our platform for communication, because it is. But we need to have a long social discussion and figuring out of what is and isn’t accessible. Should someone’s sexting really be allowed publication without their consent? 

Copyright laws currently are a joke, as are patents. The people who come up with ideas don’t get to keep them. Some corporation buys them, if they even get that much recognition. I wish there was a standard tablet learning tutorial for all kids. Not for teaching them what to think but it could be a search engine of sorts as well. So they could learn how to think, how to keep asking a new question when the last one was answered. This could be to teach how to read and type well. 

We need to get back to teaching kids how to learn. We should be tailoring things to their interests from day one. We know they are interested in everything, as long as it isn’t forced. Nature and history are interesting but everyone learns that in their own time and in their own way. Imagine they could read about anything they wanted at their level on a school based program where they were safe from awful shit that exists on the internet. 

Kids learn kindness IRL in school but they should also learn kindness towards technology. They should respect things because things are valuable and tools help us accomplish things we otherwise couldn’t. Wouldn’t it be good if kids would interact with each other silently in the classroom? We figured out how to do it anyway on the high school system, but by the time I graduated we had texting so we didn’t need the computers anymore. 

What if instead of them texting under their desk, they have a way to communicate with each other in class, or other classes around the country who are working on the same subject and are at their level? They can only not all talk at once because it is loud chaos. But kids only love school because they love to be social and they want to see their friends and talk about things. The only reason any adult may still love their job. What if they could communicate silently? 

Have it be monitored since they are children in case anything bad gets said. Make sure no curse words are allowed and things can be flagged as bullying and it would be just like what they will encounter as soon as they go to high school and college and enter the necessary world of social networking where there will be fewer moderators to weed out the bullshit. 

Bullying is rampant now without being monitored so it can’t be worse. Middle school is the worst age for it, all the hormones and changes happening for kids, finding out about reality. Now they have cell phones so they are in constant contact, never alone time to just read or write or be alone with oneself. 

By high school even the weird people have weird friends. That’s ok, that is how life should work, you aren’t going to like and agree with everyone and that is ok. Why not make it easier for kids to communicate and teach them the tools to do it instead of teach them to sit down and shut up? 

We need to find a way to teach them to be respectful since I see so many adults who cannot handle respecting their friends and family. They need to be able to express and debate their ideas and opinions. Teach them how to learn what they want to know about their interests and they will do the work of fixing the world themselves.