This Last Year

"We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope. " - Martin Luther King

I have had a bad year. I'm much more depressed, 40 pounds heavier, and more confused about the future. Things have been hard this year.

But on the positive side, things haven't been all bad. I've found a good Church, I'm becoming Catholic which makes me happy, I've learned more history, and I've had a good reunion with my friends. I've read lots of good philosophy and theology, and I can quote bible verses like there's no tomorrow. And I had 2 good girlfriends for a while (Though Sarah and I broke up I think in January) and Hannah dumped me after less than 48 hours heh. That sucked. alot. But anyway.

I need to remember the first quote of Dr. King though this coming year. On the way home I was thinking of all my faillures and the sad night I had of which the high was two pity kisses on the cheek from drunken girls and which the low was having a girl tell me my personality was so bad I had to have been drunk. But I can't just focus on the negative, I have to push on. So this past year has been, with good times and bad, love, and depression, and then more depression....and then a bit more. But as the Japanese say: "Fall seven times, stand up eight".

Hide-Out

This is a picture I just found again that Dan drew for me of my secret Hideout, it is a castle, surrounded by coniferous trees and it has a secret tunnel through a waterfall from which I navigate gondollas with bards playing me music and I have a cape, and of course bears with kalishnikovs.. those are essential to keep the paparazzi and UN away. yep. that's the dream... I can already hear the Weezer track to go with it - as my life's soundtrack is Weezer - the song is Holiday.

Day Off

So today was my one day off work this week, tomorrow it's back to the acid mines / Deli for me. Today was an ok day. I listened to Ravi Zacharias this morning which was inspiring as usual and reminded me of the fact that I believe in an Augustinian view of Original Sin. Then I got lost in the snow of downtown St. Catharines trying to find parking at my Church. After getting lost for 30 minutes I finally found my old parking spot. It was really different because we had the Bishop presiding over mass, and he had a really funny hat and shepherd's crook, or a 'crossier' as the French/Catholics call it. I thought God was probably laughing at his outfit which was just a copying of the Pontifex Maximus and the ancient Roman Pagan Priests. Anyway, it was a good service and it made me feel guilty which means that I'm becoming a true Catholic. I know I'm really becoming Catholic because I prayed all week for God's help and didn't get it really and then I went to mass and it still made me feel like the bad one. Which of course I am as all humans are...blah blah Augustinian worm theology orthodoxy. Anyway.

After that I had a good afternoon of watching the X-Men movies which are always entertaining, and drinking 2 litres of ginger ale. Which was probably way more Ginger Ale than I should have drunken, but you know it's almost Christmas so what the heck. I had a mediocre dinner and then watched more X-men and then Michael called and we talked about theology, church, philosophy, liturgy, and my unattractiveness compared to his smoothness with women for about 2 hours. I love that guy, it was great to talk with someone again about those things. Anyway, all in all it was a pretty good day off, most of all, because I DIDN"T HAVE TO WORK!!!@!@!@)* yay ...but tomorrow I have to. oh well. Then I sent a girl a message on facebook. I thought about her for like an hour today. I really miss her. hmm. such is life. Au Revoir to the no people who read this.

this is a strange x-men pic I found online

I have to say this might be narcissistic but if you are a person who has read this far could you please leave a comment so that I'll know that anyone is actually reading this blog. It will work out in your favor because you'll notice today's blog was especially bad. Like I didn't even put any thought into it, it was straight journaling. BUT if people are actually reading this I'll put more of my philosophizing into it. So if you read all this and you don't know what to type for a comment just put 'avocado' in the comment space.

Shalom.

Depression and The Last Samurai

Last night was the worst night I've ever had at work. I'm so tempted to make this post just a list of hyperbole's about how terrible it was, but I'll just leave it at: worst. Then I got home and told my parents about the night and they promptly left the room. Today my mom told me in more or less words that she doesn't like me. heh that makes two of us. But I'm angry all the time. And I've never been an angry person. ever. But I've gotten so angry recently, i'm like harry potter in book 5. I always hated how Harry got angry all the time in it, and I never understood it, but looking in the mirror I totally get it now. So I've decided to spend the next 2 hours and 5 minutes before a nightmarish affair at work again tonight, locked in my room wallowing in my own despair. (by this point in the post you're probably wondering why you even bother to read this. I think my blog is used by pharmaceutical companies testing anti-depresants. If the patient is still smiling by the end, then the medecine works).

On my way to my bed I picked up a book to read that I should probably have thrown out last year after Phil 1P90, "The Anti-Christ" by Friedrich Nietzsche. I had already read some Spinoza this morning -which wasn't helping my Deistic slant- and Nietzsche's biting, but partially accurate, and always entertaining attack on my religion certainly didn't help.

I'm trying to think about whether I should go through my list of the usual complaints about my life followed by intense self-loathing, or if I should write more about a movie I watched this morning. ...i'll do both, but I'll just list the first part really quick. obese, hopeless, friendless, repressed, degenerate, and lonely => it's all my fault I know, I'm Total Depraved. There. Part 1 done.

So I was watching the rest of the Last Samurai this morning and it was awesome. I think that was the best part of my day. And God do I feel like Tom Cruise/Nathan Algren in that movie. He starts off as an alcoholic haunted by the nightmare of killing innocent indians. Then there's a scene where he is standing in the middle of a battle he shouldn't even be fighting and there are warriors all around him and he's spinning frantically and trying to fend them off with a pointed flag/spear thing. And in the end he gets stabbed a bit and kills people, but his life is spared. He ends up being taken captive by the Samurai and he's beaten and bloodied with nothing at all left to live for, and one of my favourite scenes is when he is knocked down in the Samurai village and one of them pulls out his katana (sword). The guy swings his sword right at Algren/Tom Cruise and Algren just looks him in the eye as the guy stops his sword JUST short of his neck and actually cuts his neck a bit so it's bleeding. But he just is looking up at the guy with no fear of death at all, almost wanting it.

Algren has a kind of change of heart and finds peace in the village and restores his honor and becomes a Samurai kind of - he's like as much of a Samurai as Goyim could become Jews. Like I could be a Proselyte and go to Synagogue but I wouldn't "really" be a Jew. Anyway, aside from Jews not letting me in - back to the movie.



So Algren starts off this really angry guy suffering from Alcohol withdrawl and screaming all night from nightmares, and has no will to live, and everyone in the village hates him and wants to kill him. Anyway, I just feel like I could relate. Though I wish I was in Japan. Lucky Algren.



There are some things Nathan Algren yells as well that I thought were shared sentiments. At one point he screams at Lord Katsumoto (head Samurai dude) "What do you want from me!" to be answered "What do you want for yourself". As well he shouts "What the Hell am I doing here!" and Katsumoto responds by telling him that it is impossible to leave during the winter but "Until that time, you are here". Rather than thinking about why he's there he is to realize he is there and just live through it. (ok you just had to be there to get it)

I'd really like to find some peace and figure out how to become a disciplined and honorable person like the character of Algren becomes. I like one conversation that happens and Algren's insight.

"Katsumoto: You believe a man can change his destiny?
Algren: I think a man does what he can, until his destiny is revealed"

By the end of the movie Algren has come to gain a sort of family with the Samurai and returns to the village to his woman and child (that are the wife and son of a dude he killed). I love the last lines of the movie, and I hope someday I will be able to relate to them:

"And so the days of the Samurai had ended. Nations, like men, it is sometimes said, have their own destiny. As for the American Captain, no one knows what became of him. Some say that he died of his wounds. Others, that he returned to his own country. But I like to think he may have at last found some small measure of peace, that we all seek, and few of us ever find."

The Fall and Decline of Andrew's Christmas by Edward Gibbon

The other day I was complaining about how bad Christmas was last year because I was in the States and I only got 1 terrible present that my brother bought for himself. It appears my ingratitude has tipped my karmic imbalance toward samsara even further and the gods seek vengence on me. I'm working every day now till Christmas (minus sunday) and all day on Christmas Eve. ... I was so enraged. Last night at work I also had a terrible set of jobs to do that sucked so much a fellow worker looked at me and said 'man you got screwed over more than anyone'.

I'm so angry with work, I think my Ukrainian and Manchester genes and lineage must be riddled with people as abject, lazy, depraved, and self-centred as I am because I hate work in any form.

Today I threw on one of my all time favourite movies "The Last Samurai" with Tom Cruise, and of course since it is one of my favourite movies, that means that everyone in the world universally recognizes it as one of the worst movies ever.

Everytime I watch the movie I feel so inspired, like my life has this intrinsic value and that I could be everything I always dream of. That I could be some kind of Tom Cruise look-alike who can beat up people and master Buddhist concentration and control myself so greatly that they would write "Discipline" on my tombstone. But then I realize I'm just an obese Canadian reprobate who has to go to his degrading minimum wage job in less than a half an hour.

But I love the movie because it has so much in it about how life should be structured and deals with the fact that man has had such different pursuits all around the world but the central tenants of life are the same. Virtue, honor, reason, and decapitation. These are the ways humanity has excelled.

As I awoke this morning I looked at the clock and wondered what I should do with my fleeting hours of Freedom. I felt like reading, but I was tired of theology and I was feeling deistic as God had blighted me with all this work, so I picked up "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" by Edward Gibbon a fellow convert to the Church of Rome (for a while at least) and cynical deist enlightenment historian. I read these words with which he described Rome as it began to decline:

"The minds of the Romans were ... Oppressed beneath the weight of their own corruption"

I underlined the quote in pencil. Gibbon is trying to describe how the Romans fall behind in their virtue they desperately try to preserve their cherished ideals of justice, wisdom, temperance, and fortitude. But eventually they can't keep going, and it becomes painfully obvious that unlike the idyllic Roman Republic this Empire built for the liberty and justice of the world was actually now based on slave labour and oppression. Rome tried to work for good intention but ended up distracted and became exactly that which they sought to destroy.

No modern/post-modern/current historian would describe the Fall of Rome in Gibbon's terminology. His theory was the immorality led to it's destruction. Modern academics don't agree about immorality and if it even exists. That's why I like Gibbon, he just tells it in this beautiful way. I haven't read enough about Rome to know if it's true, but I know that most of the hardship in my life has come from my own immorality. God is just as the phrase goes, and he punishes me most justly of all. Now I'm off to work. Hoping to live to complain another day.

Relaxation

I've been waiting a long time for a break. I kept 'dreaming' about the day I'd be able to just relax, I've had two days and they've been medicinal. Seriously it feels like I've had an injection of goodness or something. It only seems to work in contradiction to lots of work/school though, it is definately having diminishing returns each extra day of loafing around. Though I have to say I wish I could keep a Sabbath and just have a day to rest once a week. I think we all just need alot more relaxation time. I love just sitting in peace and breathing deeply and listening to a great song like John Mayer's No Such Thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya93JWrdxFc

It's been a good Christmas gift to just relax, I think as Aristotle would say a part of the Essence of man involves rest. I mean God even rested on the 7th day (what specific part of the 14.5 billion years that was I don't know). But I was reading my Catechism yesterday and it said something nice:

"2171 God entrusted the sabbath to Israel to keep as a sign of the
irrevocable covenant. The sabbath is for the Lord, holy and set apart for the
praise of God, his work of creation, and his saving actions on behalf of Israel.

2172 God's action is the model for human action. If God "rested and was refreshed" on the seventh day, man too ought to "rest" and should let others, especially the poor, "be refreshed." The sabbath brings everyday work to a halt and provides a respite. It is a day of protest against the servitude of work and the worship of money."

Sunrise

I decided to put up a sunrise for the photo on this blog because right now I'm just enjoying the dawning of a new day. The semester is over, I've worked as hard as I could, and I am once again strongly feeling Catholic and orthodox. I feel like I'm ready again to be happy for a while and am enjoying the little bit of time I have between today and my tuesday exam, and then after that winter break.

I think I would've made a good pagan because I LOVE astronomy and planets and stars and the sun. Stars are my favourite. But I think the Sun helps me to survive. (aside from the whole heat keeping the temperature right etc) But every morning there's a new sunrise and it makes me realize that - as the phrase goes - today is the first day of the rest of your life (unless it's the day you die - as American Beauty pointed out). There is something refreshing about nature and for me something comforting about the fact that we are a speck in the universe and that the cosmos will continue even if I ended up dropping out of school or dying or anything, life will go on. That comforts me, and to quote Will Ferrell as Harry Carey - I guess I'm just a worrier. ...that's why my friends call me whiskers ... (watch the SNL clip and you'll get it).

Have a good day, may the Sol Invictus (the Unconquerable Sun - who's festival is on Dec 25) shine on you - in a purely metaphorical and unpagan way. Or just to use the phrase of the Ancients and World of Warcraft - May the Eternal Sun Shine on You.

Only In Dreams

I woke up this morning and was so angry, I had been having the best dream of my life and I thought it had come true. 2 guys who had been my best friends but are now far away had somehow ended up at my university and we all had classes together and some girl was randomly being nice to me in the hall outside history class and asked me out (that should've given it away as a dream). And the four of us (2 friends, me and mystery girl -who's name I couldn't remember) all decided to go somewhere fun and then the dream ended. It's always so pathetic to explain dreams, sometimes my friends will tell me a story from their dreams and I will just get really confused and bored out of my mind. I think dreams must be like some kind of mythological thing that only the person they are revealed to will understand them. Once God actually spoke to me through a dream, that was cool. Wow... I miss those days. Anyway, this probably sounds like nonsense, but then I began thinking about all of this and figured I should re-read the lyrics to "Only in dreams" because Weezer is apparently the soundtrack of my life.

You can't resist her.
She's in your bones.
She is your marrow
And your ride home.

You can't avoid her.
She's in the air... in the air
In between molecules of
Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide.

Only in dreams
We see what it means.
Reach out our hands.
Hold onto hers.
But when we wake
It's all been erased.
And so it seems
Only in dreams.

You walk up to her.
Ask her to dance.
She says, "Hey, baby, I just might take the chance."
You say, "It's a good thing
That you float in the air... in the air.
That way there's no way I will crush your pretty toenails into a thousand pieces."

Only in dreams
We see what it means.
Reach out our hands.
Hold onto hers.
But when we wake
It's all been erased.
And so it seems
Only in dreams.

Ya it's a good song, I don't get the whole crushing toenails thing...Rivers is pretty screwed up, marrying Chinese women and locking himself in closets...it's not normal. (I say as I recall locking myself in a closet this week in order to finish Aristotle).

But the Bass riff for the song is cool. I'm going to go play it now on the Bass I stole from Dan's brother/the one Dan lent me.

No exams till Tuesday, Life is GOOD!!!!!

Good Times this Week

Three really good things that happened this week.

1. Breakfast with Dad: Tuesday morning I got up at 6:30 so I could practice for my driving test and I was by Dad's shop so I stopped by and he took me out to Timmies for breakfast.. It was nice.

2. Tuesday Evening-Wednesday : I passed my driver's test and went to go see James Bond: Quantum of Solace with Andrea and got to sleep a bunch and had fun watching L4yer Cake and Lord of War.

3. Family Guy clip - Stewie: "I'll be almost as cool as the cheeto guy" *Chester Cheeto Cat guy listening to 'Tom Sawyer' by Rush and cutting up cheetos with a razor blade and then does a line of it. Then he screams 'there is no better drummer than Neil Peart!!!' and smashes his hand on a glass.

VICTORY!!!!

I passed my G test -just barely - and now I don't have to take a drivers test for another 60 years.

In celebration I have posted this kick ass video which was the coolest song of 1980 ...if the category was songs in 1980 filmed in a bank...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNJYHD3gjXo

I was right, bad things do give meaning to my life, I'm very happy right now. There will be the impending crash, but right now I'm good.

Ocarinas, Lullabies, and Nirvana

I'm pretty nervous about my G test but in 11 hours it will be over. Something that has helped me relax though is investigating about Ocarinas - which are like little flutes. Zelda got me thinkin' about them. I found an Ocarinist on YouTube who is pretty amazing -He's a Christian too, you can tell from his shirts and what he says about the hymns he plays. Anyway this song brings me alot of peace, I've always loved lullabies. It's Zelda's Lullaby: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyPlQJQvUC4&feature=related

When I listen to him play the songs it just makes me feel so comfortable like I'm at complete peace. I feel like Nirvana-the eternal destination (or rather lack of destination) - not the band. I was reading about Nirvana the other day which is technically not so much a place as a ceasing of everything and a peace. I was thinking about how I love sleeping and how amazing it would be to just be that peaceful all the time. When I think of Nirvana I think of floating down a river listening to a lullaby on an Ocarina. If the Buddhists and/or Atheists (they're like Buddhist universalists, in that they think everything stops at death - so everyone 'goes to' Nirvana) are right then I guess it wouldn't be so bad.

Smile at the oncoming storm

I've been off school for 3 days now. All my time by myself I have wasted, I haven't even done the stuff I planned on doing. I don't really know what to do. I've spent my pre-exam vacation up now. I guess I'll study. Well I've described my life in horrifying terms before. Most of it is spent anticipating dread or sitting alone waiting for some new dread to anticipate. When I think about how much time I am afraid (I use fear in an equivocal way, sometimes just meaning stress or worry or anxiety or frustration) I realize that my life will never be empty. I was thinking of going over the last things I was afraid of and got through. Hmm. Dentist, Essays, Work (I become very devout on the car-ride to work, for some reason it always makes me afraid).

Tomorrow I have to take my G drivers test. Driving tests for me always go terrific - by terrific I mean they induce alot of terror into my life. They are up there with Dentist and Driving somewhere far away, and airport customs in my list of fears. So I have brewed over all that could go wrong tomorrow, and all the worst things that could happen. Even tonight, I'm just hanging out with an old friend and I'm afraid because I won't know what to say or do.

But if there's anything that I've learned in all of this, it's that actually suffering and fear gives my life meaning. Perpetual loneliness does seem to happen to me, but when I'm doing things I'm afraid of there are ups and downs, unexpected good things happen as well. In short, my life has meaning in those times.

So I look at the oncoming storm of stress - (within 24 hours I'll have failed my drivers test and be worrying for the next one and then worrying about exams.) I just need to look at the storm and smile. Eventually all of this will be washed away by the peace of the grave and I can imagine long slow humming of a familiar song that will sooth me throughout eternity.