Work Ethic - Why I Like Marxism

"The work ethic has become obsolete. It is no longer true that producing more means working more, or that producing more will lead to a better way of life.
The connection between more and better has been broken; our needs for many products and services are already more than adequately met, and many of our as-yet- unsatisfied needs will be met not by producing more, but by producing differently, producing other things, or even producing less. This is especially true as regards our needs for air, water, space, silence, beauty, time and human contact. Neither is it true any longer that the more each individual works, the better off everyone will be. The present crisis has stimulated technological change of an unprecedented scale and speed: `the micro-chip revolution'. The object and indeed the effect of this revolution has been to make rapidly increasing savings in labour, in the industrial, administrative and service sectors. Increasing production is secured in these sectors by decreasing amounts of labour. As a result, the social process of production no longer needs everyone to work in it on a full-time basis. The work ethic ceases to be viable in such a situation and workbased society is thrown into crisis" - Andre Gorz (in a quote I lifted from Wikipedia, lest anyone think I read alot of political theory)

The one thing I like about Marxism that Capitalism doesn't seem to offer is a reason why I should keep working when there's clearly enough already (though to be sure I think both systems flawed, though Capitalism much less so). There's probably 20 grocery stores in our region, and we have cars. If we didn't have cars then I'd see the multiplicity of grocers as meaningful, but as such, I see it as useless that I have to go tonight just so that competing grocery stores can be open.

So True

"In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we eventually learn that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished" - Karl Rahner

This reminds me of C.S. Lewis' quote where he says that if we were created for the finite, then why does it feel so empty in our soul? Why does everything scream for an ending if there is no ending?

Busy-ness as Quasi-Virtue

I haven't been in depression lately so I haven't posted as often on here - usually I have less interesting thoughts when I'm functioning 'normally'. But I was thinking about tonight and how I had nothing I had to do today. I just sat around, I read a bit, the most enjoyable part of the day was doing my laundry and making my bed and cleaning my room. I mean, I hate doing those things, but it made me feel like a human again after sitting around all that time. I look forward to moving out again so that I am forced to take care of myself, because as I act and remain busy, even though it frustrates me, it's good for me, and in the long run I enjoy life alot more.

I think sitting around and not doing anything is probably the worst thing for me. I am hopeful that I'll probably do my Master's and Doctorate (God willing) in some far off land where I have to worry about bills and shop for groceries, and work, and be ridiculously busy.

Perhaps being busy is a quasi-virtue. It's a habit that helps me sustain other beneficial habits. I know the longer I'm at home, the less virtuous I'm becoming. I anxiously await busy-ness, because only when there are bad things in my life, can I enjoy the good things and be hopeful. When everything is fine, it seems to be a slow downward path, the path to Hell really. And as good students of the Greeks, we all know that Virtue is the path to Happiness / Eudaimonia.

So if you're immensely busy and stressed and you barely had time to read this, perhaps you should consider it a blessing. And perhaps I should read this again next time I'm bitching about how busy I am. In the mean time I'll be loafing around (until work tomorrow) and reading Evelyn Waugh (a MALE R.C convert like myself) or possibly watching a movie.

A Great Quote

"We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their faces away." - Walker Percy

(A Southern Catholic author, God rest his soul)

He knows too much.

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck. - Jean-Paul Sartre

Thoughts Before Work Tonight

“Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.” - Simon Schama (pictured above making cheese soufflet in his home)

I had a fine day today. I went to Tim Hortons, had Chocolate milk, listened to a good lecture by a genius historian (Prof. Sainsbury) and then had an actually good Latin class! craziness. Then I had a great lunch, and when I came home I decided I needed my Simon Schama fix so I lay down on the couch and watched him compare Ireland and India. He even talked about Thomas Babington Macaulay whom I had researched without remembering Schama talked about him.

Now I'm just waiting to go to work. It's been a good day, but it's weird having the fear of work and prospective essays looming over you. Then I realized: this is my life. I'm only viewing it on a daily cycle though. Like why should I relax the day before I work if I just have to work the next day? ANd I'll have to work my entire life, so really this, "just get through it" attitude is really the bane of my existence. What's the point in toughing out your entire life?

When I think about History and Schama and the job of a Historian I constantly think about how many people have gone before me. The Romans had a phrase we translated in Latin the other day. It was "to go to the majority", and it meant 'to die'. They saw the majority as those already dead. Schama said 1 million Irish died in the potato famine of the 1840s and 5 million people starved in India during one famine. 6 million people, dead.

...

What were their lives like? What did they think of God? What did they love and hope for?

I guess we'll never know. And one day I will 'go to the majority'. And people like Simon Schama (and myself) will write essays about me as one of the beleagured multitude. They'll try to place me into a group that all sought one clear goal, that fit somewhere. Whether I'm a proletarian wage slave who died working in a grocery store, or one of the many morbidly obese Canadians of the post-modern period who died from heart faillure due to excess, or one of the 'faithful departed' in a liturgy (better than unfaithful departed).

...

What kind of an account will I give for my life? I can picture it now: "Hi... I'm (name), I was of the (religion) faith, does that mean I'm in? ....Yes that's correct, mhmm glutton, lustful, etc yep. ... Ya I guess I was a Capitalist? is that bad comrade? ...oh I see...well I only shopped at Walmart because it was so cheap, though I guess that doesn't count... alright ... Ya I only did that with one girlfriend ..." and then the questions get even weirder "... well ya, I preferred Charles I to Oliver Cromwell ...but you do remember what he did to Ireland... oh you saw that on my facebook" It's so unimaginable to think of such an epic ending to such a transitory life.

So little of life is epic, so much of it just the drab everyday. So much isn't about Ideals, but rather endless compromise.

...

If I believed in reincarnation, I'd just do whatever the hell I wanted. I know that's kind of against the point, but seriously, it'd be like being invincible. It reminds me of when the Romans had trouble fighting the Germanic tribes because they believed in the immortality of the soul so strongly, they had no fear of death.

...

Plato makes a pretty good argument for the immortality of the soul.

...

well I guess I'll get ready for work.

A Parable For You

Imagine a place called "normal". In this strange village everyone would wake up earlier than they desired, to prepare to journey to places they didn't want to go. For each prospective journey they would all dress in clothes they didn't actually find comfortable or functional, but rather they would select vestments from a spectrum of rigid conformity known as "Fashion". Then imagine they paid to translocate themselves in a manner horrifically destructive to their own environment so that they could go to work in a place they didn't want to, for longer than they wanted, with no one that they liked. Their twenty-somethings would go to the 'school' where they would pay to be forced to do things they didn't want to do, and occassionally learn, if only, by accident. Their overlords would yell at them but were no longer able to hit them, and so only psychologically degraded them. The establishment that had instituted these 'schools', "the kirk", was hated and derided in them. There had been a great rebellion against it called 'the enlightenment' and so at the basis of all they were forced to go through, there was no underlying purpose anymore.

Basically, I hate the way the world functions. ... I miss the Middle Ages & Renaissance... then you could go to cities and have a lively urban environment, or you could choose to be a rural farmer. You could get one coherent education which was actually based on LEARNING rather than getting a piece of paper or doing homework (an American invention I hear). I would've lived in an italian city-state given another shot. Been like the people in the merchant of Venice, forcibly baptizing Jews, and living the high life.

Although I'm sure I'd find things to hate about that era too. ...

C.S. Lewis said that we always thing the light is on the other side of the hill or just around the corner, just not where we are, and so we live in the Shadowlands.



Rant over.

Anarchy, Life a Joke?, and Thora Birch

I talked with my dad about politics tonight after dinner. It was the first conversation we've had where we didn't fight since January. I didn't say it, but I finally realized that I'm basically an anarchist or at the most a socialist when it comes to State authority. I think the institution of the State is a joke. What pretended authority could it have? I actually think Monarchies have a better claim to sovereignty than Democracies. If I could find a Catholic Monarchy I'd be set.

...

At work today my co-worker who is an Atheist said that his girlfriend always gets angry at him because he laughs about serious things. He said 'I laugh because life is a joke. You're born, you do what society tells you to do, and you die.' While I disagree with the philosophy I found it very honest. It reminds me of American Beauty, and the Comedian from Watchmen.

...

Tonight I watched a bit of American Beauty. What a fantastic film. I have many favourite parts, but one of them is the conversation between Jane (Thora Birch) and Angela (Mena Suvari):

Angela Hayes: Jane, he's a freak!
Jane Burnham: Then so am I! And we'll always be freaks and we'll never be like other people and you'll never be a freak because you're just too... perfect!



...

Out of interest I went to see what Thora Birch is up to these days, the news part of her website was last updated in 2005...4 years ago.

She has a discussion board to talk about herself. The most recent comments are viagra ads someone has spammed, followed by 2 people talking about the last time they had a new picture of her. It's pretty creepy.

But I successfully found people more lonely and pathetic than I am. I wonder if Thora Birch ever checks her website and finds these few pathetic fans hanging on, I wonder what she'd think of them.

She's an interesting character too, from a German Jewish family, named after Thor, the Norse god. And her parents were 'adult film stars'.

I bet she'd be an interesting person to have a heart-to-heart with.

I found out that 'heart-to-heart' comes from the Confessions of St. Augustine. The Latin is "cor ad (cor) loquotor"... I think?

Essays, Sartre, and looking in the Mirror

I have 3 essays due in the next lil while. Today I skipped class to write one so that I could finish it. I have 1 page so far (double spaced)... that was the result of 20 minutes of actually forcing myself to write. Then I went to go see New Moon, and now I'm back.

... The last 2 weeks I've been going crazy because I'm not able to force myself to work. Colbert once said in an interview where he talked about a bunch of his family dying in a plane crash "any threat they could make seemed pretty silly", in regards to his teachers for not finishing his work. He said that all education needs fear to work. I think I'm losing the fear. I'm not going to pretend like I'm independant or anything, I'm definately sure I'll suck it up and finish all these essays. Hell I'll probably get 75-85% on all of them. But I just feel like I'm starting to not care.

I feel like I'm an actor in a play about my life, but that I've got so tired of acting that I'm starting to get out of character, and people around me are starting to get scared/disturbed. I talked to a friend the other day about Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous post-modern atheist. I've only read his wikipedia.

Lance told me his ethics were based on the principle that as long as you can look at yourself in the mirror, you're ok. The only ethics are self-preservation and self-esteem I guess you could say in his model - as opposed to most atheists who stick with Utilitarianism.

I haven't done anything evil really besides the usual.

However, on the drive home today I couldn't look myself in the mirror. I don't really know why. I think it was because I had just seen so many beautiful people around me. It was almost eerie. Like living in a movie. I was grossed out a bit. The other day I was at the Dentist and I kept looking at the pictures they had of all the perfect people with perfect teeth. I started laughing and the hygenist looked a little puzzled. I didn't tell her why I laughed, but it was at the pictures, I didn't belong there. The Dentist told me about how my tooth was dead and I pre-empted him (because he'd told me it 6 months ago with the same severity). He listed a series of surgeries I could get, I told him they could rip it out and I could get the gold tooth I've always wanted.

...silence...

some people have no sense of humor. Anyway, he looked a little worried and said something about getting a second opinion and left. Then I looked at myself in the mirror and smiled. I started laughing, thinking about the giant gap in my teeth. Thinking about how it would continue to make me look even weirder. It was a weaker version of the hysterical laugh I had before.

at least I'm not as ugly as Sartre, no wonder he was an advocate of 'free love'.


I read a bit about Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ (Jesuit) and his philosophy/theology/phenomenology. He fused Catholicism with Evolution and argued that the world is being drawn towards God the 'Omega Principle' in a constant state of becoming/evolution which will culminate in complete redemption. He was criticized by the Church, but eventually garnered some respect. He's a love-hate person in the Church, much like the Society (Jesuits) itself.

.

I think I'm moving away from the Omega principle. I'm devolving. I'm becoming more and more lost. I read Sartre's idea about being trapped by your own freedom, I kind of feel that way right now.

...

i've just wasted another hour that was supposed to be for my essay. FUCK!

...

I wish I could go drinking with Simon Schama or watch some mythbusters, or get stuck in an elevator with Kari Byron.

A Dream I Just Had

So normally my dreams are too weird to record, but this one I felt had too many characters I knew and seemed fairly easy to understand, so I quickly wrote it down (I just woke up), and thought I'd post it. Here are my summary notes:

My best friend Dan and I, go on a double date with 2 girls (apparently they went to Eden - our high school - a few years after us). We arrive and my girl kisses Dan...even after they tell her it's not me, and then shakes my hand awkwardly. Her dad (who looked exactly like my ex-girlfriend Sarah's dad) tells us that we should try and act funny ease the situation and tells me to do something funny with a bowl of snack mix he hands me. I throw the bowl into the air, no one is impressed, and I have to crawl around picking up every piece. Neither of the girls seem at all interested, so Dan and I start watching movies (we watched Goldfinger for some reason) and I fall asleep.



I wake up, go upstairs, and find the girl I was supposed to be dating doing homework and looking bored and mildly angry. I feel like a total faillure and we leave. Dan tells me that I was making gross/weird sounds in my sleep while we watched Goldfinger. I tell Dan that Goldfinger is 'that kind of a movie after all' (I have no idea what I meant there). A guy I work with picks us up in a some Asian drag racing car. He drops me off at Eden (where I went to high school), and it's day again now, I cry on the sidewalk and everyone walks past me like the guy in the parable of the Good Samaritain...except no Good Samaritains show up.

hah. what a weird dream. Oh well, it turned out alright for Dan, that's something.

Hysteria

All I know about it other than the fact that it's a Muse song (and a good one at that) is that when people have it, they laugh an insane laugh, which might just be in movies...

Anyway, for the last week, I've been alone for so long that sometimes I think I'm going crazy and forgetting how to interact with humans. I've been arbitrarily bursting out in disturbing laughter over nothing as well. ...

Oh well, at least if I go crazy I won't have to go to work or write essays anymore. And if they let me bring some Tolkien I'll be fine.

Names

I've been thinking about names recently and what it means to be 'branded' with one. I tried to Latinize mine. Andrus Petrus Cottrillus in the nominative (I made Andrew ; Andru so that it was a 4th declension noun, there's now 'ew' ending nouns in Latin).

I was looking up names I saw in the Twilight Saga, and found the meaning of some like "Esme" being the old French for "To love". When William the Conqueror came from Normandy and destroyed the Anglo-Saxons and English was codified as a language, many concepts indescribably in Anglish/English just simply adopted Old French words and placed them in the language (because the Normans spoke Old French). I found this interesting as my decendents were Norman serfs brought over to England with King Bill the first there.

Celeste (heavenly) & Rosabelle (beautiful rose)are good Latin names I like.

Some Boethius

Boethius was an early medieval philosopher and was thus heavily into Aristotle and Plato as well as the Church Fathers probably. I really want to read his work "The Consolation of Philosophy" and whilst trying to find a copy online free (I couldn't), I found this beautiful excerpt:

"So sinks the mind in deep despair
And sight grows dim; when the storms of life
Blow surging up the weight of care,
It banishes its inward light
And turns in trust to the dark without.

This was the man who once was free
To climb the sky with zeal devout
To contemplate the crimson sun,
The frozen fairness of the moon --
Astronomer once used in joy
To comprehend and to commune
With planets on their wandering ways.

This man, this man sought out the source
Of storms that roar and rouse the seas;
The spirit that rotates the world,
The cause that translocates the sun
From shining East to watery West;
He sought the reason why spring hours
Are mild with flowers manifest,
And who enriched with swelling grapes
Ripe autumn at the full of year.

Now see that mind that searched and made
All Nature's hidden secrets clear
Lie prostrate prisoner of the night.
His neck bends low in shackles thrust,
And he is forced beneath the weight
To contemplate -- the lowly dust." - Boethius "The Consolation of Philosophy"

Everyone says I'm like Sam from Lord of the Rings and apparently most of Sam's proverbs came from Boethius. Hence my interest becomes evident

Martin Buber & the Exclusivity of Love/Relation

Martin Buber proposed in his book "I and Thou" that true relations (in common english it would be the word 'love' but I hate to use the word because he defines love as something wholly different, and the english word definately has lost most meaning). ... although after Bill Clinton "relations" became a terrible word as well.

Anyway, his theory is that in order to for love to be meaningful it must be exclusive and must involve reciprocity. At first I disagreed, but now I'm thinking he might be right.

A Cold Walk, Twilight/New Moon, Wikihow, and Unfinished Homework

I was home alone tonight and I sat down to watch Top Gear with some Butterscotch ice cream. When I looked down at myself. I was feeling particularly obese, so I threw my ice cream out...all of it. I went through the act in my mind to evaluate it ethically. It was objectively a bad action (wasting food) but the motive (moderation) was good and the situation was good (I'm already morbidly obese). So I figured it was ok to do.

I've been reading Twilight and now am half way through New Moon. This officially makes me gay, I know, but I think it's just because the books are about love and beautiful girls and stuff, and I'm desperately lonely (in the words of SNL jeopardy's Martha Stewart). But they've been making me think I really need to find a girlfriend again. It's been a year and 2 months since I last kissed a girl and that's far too long.

In my sudden bout of self-hatred I did 2 stupid things. I went to my bathroom to try to throw up (I could never be bulimic if I don't even have the willpower to diet don't worry). And then I decided that instead I should try and exercise (so that I could get a Bella of my own). I put on my rosary, and went for a walk in the freezing cold. I prayed a pseudo-St. Michael Chaplet "O God make Speed to Save me, O Lord Make Haste To Help Me, Glory be...etc." x ? , as well as some of my usual painfully honest and blunt prayers which contain far too much Anglo-Saxon.

I finally got home and my legs were tingling from the friction and yet freezing from the weather. I read some more New Moon - a terribly depressing book , which isn't helping my recently returned Depression.

So then for some reason I looked and saw that I had twice as much Latin homework as I had thought. So I just decided to put it off, and looked on WikiHow for how to find a girlfriend.

One thing I think was hillarious, they kept saying "be confident" and "be yourself". What if your personality is self-deprecating and unconfident. Eh?! riddle me that !

Anyway, I think it was a waste of time as I already know how to talk to girls, and I think I'm pretty charismatic, it's just that if I was about 100 pounds lighter, wasn't Catholic / dogmatic, and cared about meaningless pop-culture stuff, i'd be fine. But I am all those things, so it doesn't seem like anythings going to happen for a while. I should probably get up and do my Latin.

Oh but 4 good things happened (so that it's not all depressing)..

1. I had an amazing talk with my philosophy prof about St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotelian Metaphysics, and Post-Modernism (the fact that those things excite me are a perfect example of my aforementioned unpopular interests).

2. I openly disagreed with a girl on Religion in the American Revolution and argued it was a Presbyterian revolt against the CofE and she actually said she respected my opinion and was glad I challenged her. A kindred spirit! (I bet she has a boyfriend).

3. I got to have lunch with my best friend today.

4. I got to have a good meeting with the Roman Catholic asst. chaplain and we discussed the faith and what I was learning from the Newman Club, and he treated me like a person/end rather than means to something.

Well. Another week chasing Eudaimonia via women, weightloss, and wishy-washy teen literature, as well as western philosophy

Swine Flu and Latin Loneliness

I wrote out a journal of random thoughts I've had over the last few days, perhaps I'll post it one day, but since it involves alot of personal names of people I won't put it up, but sum up the geist / spirit of what I wrote using 3 events/themes. And I promise: I've deleted all the Theology stuff.

I was in Latin today and my nazi prof was being her typical power-tripping self and catching kids unaware who didn't do their homework. I get really lonely alot, and sometimes irrationally fearful at Brock, and so I always "fantasize" (if that's the right word and doesn't carry too much sexual association) about girls sitting next to me in class. Well a girl sat next to me today and we were actually really close together. She was sneezing the whole time and coughing into her jacket, and as it turns out she had swine flu. I realized as she kept coughing that I had the strongest desire to rub her back and ask her how she was holding up. But then I realized that a: Nazi prof would freak, b: she would look at me and be awkward, c: that's the last time I'd ever have someone sit next to me.

This feeling of loneliness increased to the point that I actually wanted to hug this swine flu girl. Crazy as it sounds against all reason in a rare moment of pure emotion I almost tried to hug this girl whose name I could only guess at. Suddenly my Conservative Victorian Baptist upbringing kicked in and I moved a few centimetres away from her and resumed staring at the clock and avoiding the Latin SS/Gestapo...

I asked her how she was at the end of class and stuff but I think she just thought I was more of a creepy stalker than a concerned co-human.

I hate myself, I wish I looked and acted welcoming to other people. I wish I could be the person others feel compelled to hug and actually spread some humanity, compassion, and charity (love/agape) to our overly synthetic world, but it appears my lot by Providence to remain the desiring rather than the fulfilled, the becoming rather than the being.

I went home, read some theology, ate some chocolate cake (which is just compounding all my problems), felt guilty and self-loathing because I ate it, and sat down to blog.

Andrew remanet solus. *** Alone, Andrew remains

'All the girls in every girlie magazine can't make me feel, any less alone. I'm reaching for the phone, to call at 7:03, on your machine I slur a plea for you to come home.' - Deathcab for Cutie

Idiocy of Human Limitations ; Fall ; Time

Time is a strange thing, in St. Augustine's Confessions he basically envisions walking out onto a plain and imagines that in the open air around him etc is all time (ie. somehow not linear but 3 dimensional). I just butchered that insight.

Anyway, I have a 2000 word essay due tomorrow that I've barely started and I'm a bit worried. I don't WANT to do it, and I have to work today so I'll be up most of the night I'm sure. But still I find comfort in thinking: Time will be defeated, the time will come when I hand in the paper and it's all over, done. Time passes so quickly and sometimes I think my life is just trying to rush through time only to realize that I've lost it.

I wish I could enjoy every moment, especially Fall/Autumn, it's so beautiful. The trees and the corn fields, it's my favourite season. I only got to take 1 or 2 walks and they were awesome, but now I'm noticing too many of the leaves falling and realizing I've wasted another year's chances. I like looking at things from a different perspective, I like laying out on the ground and looking up at the sky and thinking about how big the world is and how stupid all of our human obligations are. For example: Today I have to go to work in 38 minutes, I then have to hand in my history paper in 24 hours 38 minutes. But that's all human responsibility and obligation, biologically, I could just sit here on the couch. My work could call, I could get fired, my prof could email me and say that I failed the course, but that's it....that's it.... I'd still be sitting here at 12:01 on friday and nothing would have physically affected me. In no way would I be in danger or hopeless.

I like remembering that. I wish I could levitate, if I could levitate/fly I would quit school right now. My World of Warcraft priest could levitate where you would hover about 2 feet off the ground and you could jump off cliffs and just slowly float down.



I think it'd be so wonderful to just quit everything and slowly float around on a beautiful October day. I dream of that freedom WoW simulated, to just have endless free time, to be autonomous truly, to only fear about real life dangers not something as synthetic as work or school.

I'd like to cash out everything from my bank account and wander from town to town enjoying every moment, because one day my time will end, and I'll die and that's it. School, work, money, even family, will be nothing. Just my soul, just God. that's it.

(I'd also prefer travelling to WoW cities which are probably much cooler than real towns, case and point:)



To roam and chase after Eudaimonia and to love and to hope, this is what feeds my soul. Not essays about American History and Deli work.

A Cool Picture

This is a picture I really like of the Cologne Roman Catholic Cathedral, we were learning about it in history class and how it apparently took like 500 odd years to build...

Three Good Things

Yesterday after class I didn't want to get home earlier because I would have to study for Latin, so I drove her home. It was the first time I'd been in her little area during the day time and it looked alot nicer. (It was the strangest thing though, it was the first town I've seen without a Church). Anyway it was a nice drive home and I was listening to Weezer's Red Album. I really like Heartsongs (I think it's called that) and 2 other tracks I don't know the names of. But the country lanes were really nice and peaceful, I felt like I could drive anywhere and was free for a little while.

I got my haircut and it was SO weird having someone get paid to in a shallow sense a. Care about my appearance, and b. Be personally and physically involved in my life. I didn't think I'd ever get lonely to the point of having the girl cutting my hair be a good point in my day. But such is life. It was only like 10 minutes, and the girl was ugly, but it was just so strange. Now I know why prostitution is probably such a long standing tradition.

Last night I went for a walk and the stars were really bright, but it was almost pitch black out. I did a rosary as I walked and it was really calming. Also when I got to scary parts of the walk it reminded me of what real instinctual danger feels like and made me realize how stupid worrying about school is.

When you focus on your life and just the immediate present at certain moments in your day with all your energy, it's almost scary how "real" life is. But on the flipside of that, it's amazing how much I can drift through life just thinking and having my body on autopilot.

Hopkins Poem & Thought on Nature

(Felled 1879)

"My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering
weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew-
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will made no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene." - Gerard Manley Hopkins

He was a Roman Catholic poet and convert from Anglicanism. I like this poem, it reminds me immensely of Tolkien and the sort of awareness of urbanization that British academics were developing at the turn of the century (19th-20th).

I was just thinking the other day thought that no matter what happens to me in life, I will always be glad to think that Nature will go on. The trees are the true sovereigns of the world. When they're all dead, we will all die.

Another School Year

If you're tired of reading depressing things you can skip to the heading "Good part"

Sad/Depressed/Critical Part
I find it funny as I walk down the halls at Uni and look at girls faces because they always have this look of disgust when they see me. Like, not openly, and maybe disgust is too strong a word, perhaps disdain is a better word. They'll be smiling with their friends and walking as if they're modeling something and then suddenly they see you and their expression changes. It's like when people see a "differently abled" / handicapped person. They will immediately try to cover it, but there's that initial disdain. It's really kinda sad, but I'm sure I do the same thing.

That's the worst part ^ . When you realize that there's something terribly wrong with the world, only to find out you are an equal part in it.

The other thing is how girls dress. I swear that it's like they're trying to get you to look at them inappropriately. It's as if their own objectification is the goal...

I dress weird. I realize because one of the guys in my group of friends dresses weird and we laugh at him, and now I realize, about 80% of the time, I dress the same way. I have these giant ugly golf shirts that I wear. The uniform colours of them just accentuates the curvatures of my body. I used to look at my dad's friend who wore these types of shirts and think "wow, that's ugly" and then one day I realized, I was wearing them.

When I speak in class, I'm usually the mouthpeice for a dumbed down version of St. Thomas Aquinas. Whenever our teacher asks what we think about something, and all my cool-looking classmates start giving Nietzschean answers (which aren't original, but everyone thinks they are because they sound "rebellious", and then I give the standard Medieval Christian answer, and everyone becomes visibly antagonistic towards me. It's amazing to me how much I can love something Aristotelian and Catholic philosophy and how much other people can hate it.

Good Part
BUT - lest you think this is all depressing: I have the most beautiful drive to school everyday. Now this will sound stupid, but, it's true, it's an awesome stretch of country road to get to school. That's my favourite part of university I think. And the Newman Club that I joined this year is alright.

Life, WoW, and More Eudaimonea Cravings

About 3-4 months ago I quit playing World of Warcraft. When I used to play there'd be days where I would run from my car to the computer. I had the coolest system in the world worked out one time my parents went on a trip. I brought in a giant comfy chair and then got blankets and food and had my laptop and my PC set up. It was like Heaven on Earth. The sad thing is, that I'm not exaggerating the emotions I felt. Complete escape. Porn is nothing by comparison. WoW has left a hole in me in a sense. Not in terms of gaming, but something bigger. It's acceptance, friendship, community, entertainment, excitement. All of these things, through a game. No wonder it's so addicting.

After I would get everything done for school and work etc, and then go home, I could play and it would be Eudaimonea/Happiness. I am constantly searching for it, but at times I'm just trying to minimalize pain and gain a few shadow pleasures (to speak in the Republican language of Plato), but tonight I'm craving Eudaimonea. I need to escape from the grim reality, I need a new beginning.

But I'm just going to go to bed instead, and hope for the best, and maybe one day I'll find something else to give me Eudaimonea.

Music as a Cure

When I get depressed certain songs help. I've already posted a ton of zelda songs I like listening to, so there's no use in posting more of that.

A song that I've savoured for the last bit is the blue danube waltz by Strauss:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CTYymbbEL4

One of my favourite games from childhood was called Earthbound for SNES and this is a theme from it that I played on a piano in England all the time. It's a part of the soundtrack of my life:

here's a remix of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQMsr3fStwE

I feel better already.

Loneliness & Despair on a Tuesday Night

In an episode of SNL's Celebrity Jeopardy satire they put the words "I'm so terribly lonely" in the mouth of Martha Stewart.

In a song I listened to recently the words were sung by Deathcab For Cutie "all the girls in all the girlie magazines won't make me feel, any less alone"

My favourite poem since high school (when we read it in Fahrenheit 451) ends with these words

"...the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night." - Matthew Arnold "Dover Beach"

On nights like this I usually agree with him. I just want to go to sleep and never wake up again.

God help me.

Latin, The Girl, and the Trip That Never Is

I switched my courses tonight for Brock. I decided to take Latin. I HAVE to learn it eventually for a masters in history or theology, so it was only a matter of time. Personally, I would've liked to put it off for a couple more years.

Languages are a funny thing for me, because I love them, I love the idea of speaking another language or reading it. But mostly Latin because it is the language of our history, the eternal langua Romani (Language of the Romans). I feel impowered when I know another language, I feel as if I could be a whole different person. For me, language is a many splendoured thing. But in honesty I suck at Latin. I tried alot, but never came up with enough effort to master the material. I hated the tenses and the necessity of precise endings, etc. I'm terrible at Latin, and so I'm conflicted, it's as if this door is open in front of me, and everyone tells me (including myself) that if I just tried hard enough I could get through it. But at the same time I'm weighed down with sloth and grammatical ignorance and I can't make it through.

There's a girl I saw tonight, the chances of her reading this blog are minimal so I don't mind posting it. Though it would be a typical chapter in my life if she saw it this one time. Anyway, this girl I saw tonight is a genius, and we have everything in common. I can't think of a time when I've been more foolish than when I tried to ask her out. It might possibly be the dumbest I've ever been. It was generic, obvious, and awkward. I was heart-broken for a while...actually I don't know if I have a heart, but I was very upset. In any case, she is not at all interested in me, but whenever I see her it's like the open door. I have this beautiful image of how happy I could be if we were even just friends, but I can't seem to make it. Again I'm weighed down and in my mind I keep telling myself ('it's your own fault' just like Latin). It makes me hate myself as I look at my gross unshaven gay-tee, and my morbidly obese sized t-shirts. I want to speak Latin, I want people to like me, I want to run again, I want to be healthy and suave and fit.

Finally, I have a trip that got postponed again, it's the 4th time now and I'm furious. I can't ask my boss for the 4th time to reschedule me. I'm so angry at my parents. It's totally out of my control, and it shows how little they respect me or my life. But obviously if I can't do anything right, why would they?

It's painfully clear to me what my Summum Bonum, my greatest good, is. To love myself enough to start running, to love my future enough to study Latin night and day and ace the class, and to then win the affections of the girl and live much more happily, for a little while at least.

God if you're listening, please help me. But I'm never as certain about anything as I am that I will fail. I will drag myself through latin, possibly dropping it, failing, or barely passing. I will embarrass myself infront of the girl and focus her annoyances on me into dislike, and I will remain the same blob, sitting in bed, crying out to God, crying out on this blog, crying out to the no one who is listening. Such seems my life.

But maybe everything will change, maybe I will acheive my Summum Bonum, that I will feel Eudaimonea. That small pathetic hope lives on somewhere in the cynicism and pessimism of my soul, and that is why I will wake up tomorrow, and read a chapter of my latin book, and go to work, and try to eat healthy. In the hope that everything might change. Tolkien taught me hope, and I don't know whether to blame or thank him for it.

Domine misere mei.

G.I. Joe Review

I was taught in American history that G.I. Joe was started to help the army recruit me into the general infantry and to make daily tasks of military life at the lowest rank seem action-filled.

This movie was basically driven by 3 factors:

American-style Violence
I'd like to refilm the movie shot by shot and just show all the civilians (and 1 polar bear) die. The cars that are choreographed to spin and blow up, and the babies and families inside dying for a vaguely liberal cause that just seeks to re-establish the order of America as military power #1. Imagine a popular action film where France was the dominant military power in the world at the end. It would be seen as a horror-movie. Any non-Anglospheric country is a bad guy if it isn't humorous and stereotypical or in bowed subservience to the altar of Washington.

For a country in a war (Iraq) where over 1000 times the amount of native civilians were killed as a result of the formal cause (september 11th, 2001), you could see how this movie functions as an apologia. By making America the perpetual good-guys you can kill Parisian civilians in graphically entertaining ways and it doesn't matter because it's all for the 'greater good' which is American perseverance.

I think the greater good would've been non-violence. If the Americans never bought the weapons that the movie was centred around, none of this would happen. If everyone on earth, or at least a large portion of people just refused to fight unless it was just, there would be no international arms trade to villanize on screen. (Ironically America is the world's largest international arms dealer which is conveniently left out).

The Bad guy of G.I. Joe was an arms dealer who sells weapons to both sides, AMERICA sells weapons to both sides, HELLO! Iran-Iraq war anyone? ring any bells?

Cleavage

I'll put it this way, I searched Sienna Miller on Google and I couldn't find a picture clean enough to post on here.

Since when did supermodels with abnormally large bust-sizes join the army, and since when does the army allow women to have shoulder length, perfectly styled hair?

Technology

This of course is the West's favourite new god, from the iPod to GPS to "nanomyte war heads" Steve Jobs is the Muhammad of the 21st century. The whole film had strange super-technology that deified the humans who use it. It empowered them in a pseudo-Nietzschean Overman-esque way that makes people think materialism is fun and exciting and that man is the measure of all things. Cancer in the film was destroyed by the technology and the G.I. Joes had super-human / evolved human powers and were pretty much invulnerable. Life is frail, and the thing 21st century man still fears most is death. But unlike the other generations he is failing to think about it at all. Technology is the new god that can save him from whatever fears he places in it's trust. This is not only untrue, it's idolatrous.

Such was the film which will probably be followed by numerous sequels.

I'm still waiting for a movie about St. Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle or "Virtue Heroes" who captivate the audience with their Prudence, Temperance, Wisdom and Fortitude.

Cowardice

"The power of evil men lies in the cowardice of the good." — St. John Bosco

I am such a coward. Lord deliver me.

Gay Grocery Day

I work in a grocery store and I despise working on Sundays. As a self-righteous Christian I always like to be at church to make sure everyone knows that I'm holier than them (sarcasm but also a bit of truth). But such is life, that as a student I have to work sundays. It's amazing the people you see in a grocery store at different times on any given day.

Sunday mornings are usually pretty dead there, but the demographics are more noticable. For example: Homosexuals shop on sundays. While I am in Canada and we're more liberal socially (should read: intolerant to traditional morality) there are more homosexuals around and in public. Toronto (gay) "pride parades" are (in)famous. As a side note I wonder if they'll ever have parades based on other deadly sins (Pride is one of the 7). I guess the Lust parade would be mardi gras, the gluttony parade would have to be short (to make sure not to exercise too much), and the sloth parade would never make it out the door. Ok, my soliloquay is over now.

Anyway, so Gay grocery day I think is sunday, specifically sunday morning. I guess all the gay United and Anglicans shop on other days of the week, but the aside from them, all the homosexuals come grocery shopping sunday morning.

It makes sense if you think about it. Because they wouldn't probably be going to Church (except the Anglicans and United as I mentioned) and would obviously want to put Church out of their mind, so why not get an annoying obligation like grocery shopping out of the way.

I usually pray for every one I see on sunday mornings (not just homosexuals) that they would come to know Jesus and join his family (the Church), and consequently leave their life of sin - as all of us are called to do.

I also think that it's weird when they kiss - the lesbians don't (only on TV), but the guys do.

My atheist friend who worked with me HATED the gays, like REALLY hated them. I could tell you stories of the stuff he did, but I won't (I wouldn't want this blog to be too exciting). It was then I realized that it wasn't just Abrahamic religions that condemned them but also Plato, Aristotle and Natural Law.

It's unnatural, in terms of the Natural Law tradition it'd be called "disordered". Anyway, this wasn't supposed to be a tirade against homosexuals. Lord knows they suffer enough from every side. I just think it's interesting that we (Christians) get blamed for a universal reality ("homophobia", I wonder if fear of murderers would be a psychological disorder "nekrophobia").

A running joke at work is: ask Andrew what his views on Homosexuality are. I always respond: I'm not legally allowed to speak them, as it is now Hate Speech. And then everyone laughs about it because they know my views, and assume it's because I'm Catholic (I heard my Presbyterian, Anglican, and United church co-workers talk about how "homophobic" conservative Christians were on my lunch break). But from now on I'm just going to say:

According to Aristotle, the soul of man seeks the good, virtue, and ultimately happiness because these are a part of it's nature. Homosexuality goes against the nature of the soul. Ergo (therefore) it's wrong.

No one carries Gay Marriage picket signs with Aristotle.

Where Buddha and St. Benedict could agree.

Buddha described suffering as coming from a human desire to constantly grab onto things, the best translation I've heard is "Thirst". We are always thirsting after things and filled with desire, and this is our problem.

St. Benedict the father of Monasticism agreed with him in a way. He talked about the distractions of the world, and how only when we separated ourselves from it could we be free. I don't know if St. Bendict actually said those things, but I know that's what monasticism taught.

So in a sense, Buddhist and Christian monks agree with the greek philosophers as well, that we need to stop thirsting after what Plato called "Shadow pleasures" which were the vices, reflections of the virtues.

This draws me to monasticism.

Van Gogh, Happiness, and Work

You (dan, the only guy who reads this blog) will notice that my new profile picture is Vincent Van Gogh's Red Vineyard. I've had a thing for vineyards recently and I've appreciated Van Gogh alot ever since I learned about his life.

He was a clergyman who tried to cheer people up who were destitute coal miners. But he couldn't help them there (he thought). So he began to paint pictures of their toil and sadness so that others would be motivated to help them. But then he succumbed to depression and madness himself.

That is my oversimplified and probably wrong summary of Van Gogh's life. It is what I remember learning about Van Gogh, which teaches me something about myself. It is a warning not to allow yourself to be completely immersed in trying to bring about complete temporal/earthly happiness

Going to my gurus, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine I read on this issue:

"A certain participation of Happiness can be had in this life: but perfect and true Happiness cannot be had in this life. This may be seen from a twofold consideration.

First, from the general notion of happiness. For since happiness is a "perfect and sufficient good," it excludes every evil, and fulfils every desire. But in this life every evil cannot be excluded. For this present life is subject to many unavoidable evils; to ignorance on the part of the intellect; to inordinate affection on the part of the appetite, and to many penalties on the part of the body; as Augustine sets forth in De Civ. Dei xix, 4. Likewise neither can the desire for good be satiated in this life. For man naturally desires the good, which he has, to be abiding. Now the goods of the present life pass away; since life itself passes away, which we naturally desire to have, and would wish to hold abidingly, for man naturally shrinks from death. Wherefore it is impossible to have true Happiness in this life.

Secondly, from a consideration of the specific nature of Happiness, viz. the vision of the Divine Essence, which man cannot obtain in this life" - St. Thomas Aquinas "Summa Theologiae" First Part of the Second Part, Question 5, Article 3

To translate as best I can Sts Thomas and Augustine say that basically while we can be happy in this life, we can't have complete happiness for 2 reasons: evil in the world (our ignorance, unhealthy appetites, bodily problems/sickness) and because true happiness is seeing God/ The Divine Essence.

For their vision of Heaven is the concept of "The Beatific Vision" that is, seeing God's essence 'face to face'. It's like looking at a beautiful landscape or a sunset or a piece of art that is so beautiful you completely forget about yourself.

I agree with those two, that sounds like heaven. I suck at art, but I'd like to say I appreciate some art, because it makes you do that (lose yourself, the literal meaning of extasy).

Today I have to go to work (in 20 min) and I'm nervous and despairing as usual, but I woke up today like everyday, seeking happiness. And the biggest part of today's work will be avoiding the error of Van Gogh and the error of myself. Trying to find complete happiness in temporal things. I need to align my understanding of happiness not with my ignorance and lust and inordinate bodily desires, but with the summum bonum, the greatest good, the divine essence, and the virtuous life.

If I can get through today by seeking happiness there, and not in the places I naturally (or rather unnaturally go), i'll be one step closer to Eudaimonea, that is fullfillment and happiness.

The Importance Of A Good Professor - Teaching Thomism

I'm looking forward to this year at Brock University for a few reasons. One of them is to be taught by a good professor. I get the 'religious status' of every professor I have. Most start off with a quote from Nietzsche and it's easy enough to figure them out. But I've had a few great exceptions.

One prof I had was Leonard Ferry, I don't know if I'm allowed to mention him on this blog - I doubt he'll ever read it - but through the course of the year I learned a great deal from him. He taught us "Ancient Political Philosophy" which was code for "Aristotelian Moral and Social Philosophy". He challenged all of our (myself included) modernist assumptions about ethics, he taught us from a Natural Law perspective (something I'd never encountered before Catholicism) and when I heard him quote Aquinas I got suspicious. Normally they don't let conservatives of any kind into liberal public universities, but Ferry had snuck in it seemed.

The problem was I had been beaten down by secularism at university. He was another philosophy professor, and I assumed a Nietzschean. So when we discussed the Republic, I used my modernist (or post-modernist) criticisms in the hope of scoring brownie points. He rebutted everything I said with Thomistic philosophy, and I knew then, that this was the smartest non-atheistic (I didn't know he was Catholic yet) philosopher I'd ever met. I soon learned through the grapevine (Mel) that he was indeed a Romanist. His teachings on Aristotle (and by continuation - smuggled in Aquinas/Christianized Aristotle) mixed with the scholastic epistemology I had learned from my Grade 12 philosophy prof made it so that I was ripe for conversion to Rome.

This good professor made us read 2 works of Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, and The Politics) and I read both in a course of a few days. Aristotle hit me like a ton of bricks, he was a genius, and (best of all) he could prove the existence and value of virtues without resorting to God. I could use reason alone to prove the natural law.

I remember how much this changed my life when I was at a "Focus on the Family" event at my parents Baptist church, before I had entered the Catholic Communion. It was called "The Truth Project" and was basically teaching presuppositional apologetics - apologetics that take for granted that God exists, and that the Bible is true. As everyone looked around the room satisfied with the state of things I was trying to stop myself from laughing. "If someone believes God exists and that the Bible is true, aren't they already a Christian? and isn't the only purpose of apologetics, conversion?" No one got it. We were on different frameworks. They were on divine command ethics, I was in virtue ethics. They had "Answers in Genesis" to 'prove' God, I had the Summa and St. Thomas' Five ways (and at that point Descartes).

Speaking of Descartes, Dr. Ferry also ripped apart all my Cartesian theism which had got me through 1st year, and after the course was done and I'd read through G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" I had safely executed the Cogito, as well as a completely uncritical acceptance of Reason alone.

Aquinas, Scotus, and other scholastics always warned about a trust in reason alone, something the Reformers reacted to, but that's another issue. Anyway, that is how I got a Thomistic (Or possibly just Catholic) basis for what I believed.

I've found Aristotelian Thomism to be the most ingenius thing. Although my catechesis has made me pretty Molinist (Catholicism is obsessed with foreknowledge...), I'm really hoping to figure out some more Thomism, and hopefully read some Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain.

Professor Ferry also taught me that those Thomistic philosophers helped pioneer the UN Declaration on Human Rights. pretty cool.

Bulimia, Melodrama, and the new Talisman

You know your life is fucked up (to use the Anglo-Saxon tongue) when the thought comes to you "I wish I were bulimic". My carnal life is fed by two fires of overconsumption: lust and gluttony. Or what I like to call, the "uncool" sins. Drunkenness and Pride would probably be alot more fashionable. But by the grace of God I am what I am, to rip St. Paul's words out of context.

I know I'm doing better with lust when I am filled with self-loathing because of gluttony (by this I basically mean that I'm obese, I don't think I commit the sin in the manner of the Romans). So today I was thinking about 'trying' bulimia. But I didn't. Mainly because a friend of mine used to be, and she coughs up blood now. And secondly because I pictured myself sitting at the doctors , fat as ever, and having him tell me I have a stomach disorder because of it, and that strangely enough I was the only fat bulimic person on earth. By this I mean: even in my vices I cannot seem to suceed. I'd find something else to hate myself for, it would just go on and on.

So I didn't throw up, as usual, it was all talk. I'm a classic academic, melodramatic, overeducated, and self-centred. I never do anything, because by God's grace if I was a "doer" (or an American) I probably would've blown my brains out long ago.

I have to go to work now. I always get scared before work. It reminds me of George Orwell describing bording school where he wet the bed and was punished. He said that he had never achieved such fervancy in his prayer life as when he prayed before he went to bed those nights. I have a similar fervancy before work. Yesterday I put my rosary Lance gave me in my pocket, it actually made me feel safer. I'm going to do it again tonight. I guess I am a superstitious romanist now. oh well, as John Lennon said 'whatever helps you through the night' and/or deli shift.

Sadness, The Chartists, and Isaiah

Since last night, things have been going terrible. I feel like my breath was. Last night I ate cheddar flavoured chips and orange juice, and a hot dog, when I woke up, my breath was so terrible I could taste it. That’s how life feels right now. So what could I do? I tried reading some Christian books but it felt hypocritical because I was in sin. I had very little sleep (I was up till 4am) and so I decided to lay down and watch Simon Schama.

Simon Schama is like a father figure to me. He’s a famous historian, very well read in the bible (he alludes to it every few minutes), and his modern liberalism makes me envious of his beliefs which I cannot share but in some ways admire, as a Conservative Pre-Modernist living in the modern liberal world.

Anyway, he was talking about Victorian England and the Chartists, they were middle-class and poor people who sought to make England a Democracy, and to go back to the rural world of medieval england. MP Fergus O’Conner was a leader of them, who after being turned down by the British Government decided that they would compile their money to buy plots of farmland and to move out of the cities into the countryside.
So they moved to Great Dodford, and farmed even though they had no experience. Their motto was “do or die” and some of them managed it. Schama says summing up this movement:

“what seemed to count for most was making a home not a revolution”



It was about taking back a proper life, not necessarily changing the world. There’s a verse in Revelation that tells us to “come out” of Babylon (the world). The Chartists remind me of that. Their dream to quit being ‘machines’ in industrial Manchester is something I understand after seeing Manchester. My Cottrill ancestors moved from Manchester in the mid 19th century as well to Hamilton (which I think is about the same if not worse). But it’s funny to think as I wait to go to work, that this same dream seems to reappear over and over again in us Anglo-Saxons. The desire to farm the land, to get away from the cities and machines. It’s a dream I see in every page of Tolkien. And come to think about it, it’s the image of the perfect New Earth in Isaiah, and it’s something that maybe one day I’ll get to partake in, if God has mercy on my soul...



“For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice for ever
in what I am creating;
...
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.
No more shall there be in it
an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
...
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labour in vain,
or bear children for calamity;
for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord—
and their descendants as well.
Before they call I will answer,
while they are yet speaking I will hear.
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent—its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
says the Lord.” – Isaiah 65: 17-25

I'd really like to have my own vineyard where I enjoy the work, and where God answers before we ask questions.

I still feel sad today, and I'm sure tonight will be terrible at work, but maybe I'm a bit more hopeful now. Maybe one day that vain hope will materialize into a New Zealand adventure, I was looking at schools and jobs and religious vocations there last week...



This is a New Zealand Vineyard, perhaps I may have one on the New Earth...

All Too inHuman & The Story of a Girl

If you don't feel like reading all this post just skip to the "BUT"

We have our extended family visiting our house this week (all the Mennonite Brethren folks). I used to be able to talk with my uncles and aunts about theology and my future as a preacher. But now that I'm of the 'peculiar Roman Catholick religion' (as Rabbie Burns would've said - ), no one asks me about anything or talks hopefully about my future.

In that same Roman faith there is a philosophy that is popular among the Pontiffs. It's the idea of "the full human person" or "the intrinsic dignity of the human person". It's the idea(l) that everyone who is born has intrinsic worth and value just because they are in existence. It's what Seneca and St. Thomas Aquinas said when they gave us the choice between "Being a beast, or being a human". The modern neo-Darwinian socialist materialist positivist atheism of today seems to treat us like we're beasts rated on our ability to contribute to the world (by us I mean morbidly obese grocery store workers and other valueless people).

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BUT

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Tonight after a long shift at work I was about to walk out as usual without much hope to my house to sit alone in the slanted room (I'm making the story a little melodramatic). But then a girl I work with asked me to help with a recipe and supplies for a meal she was making for her boyfriend, and so we went around getting the groceries and talking and then we drove home (she followed me 'cause we live on the same street, and i drove crazily). I then realized, as I listened to Radiohead and waved goodbye, that I felt like a human being.

Obviously I'm not telling the story to predict a 'deeper' relationship (she's like 5 years younger than me and in a relationship, and I'm just a creepy deli guy). But the reason I wrote it was because it was an example of someone just treating me like a human being, like my opinion was at all important, and that I could contribute something.

Anyway, that's my pathetically boring post you've wasted your time reading. But sometimes I wonder what life would be like to always feel like a human. Gah, all this introspection - blame St. Augustine and his Confessions, he started this Western philosophical phenomenon. Blogs are totally a result of him.

Music is a window

I've been inexplicably listening to the song called "Mondo 77" by Looper or "looper 77" by mondo or something here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc57lu5GC90

It's kind of haunting to me. I listen to it and it remins me of the inverse of an experience I had in life.

so 2 years ago almost to the day my friend Jenn and I were dropping a friend off at Heathrow airport in London. We left our hotel in "little Mecca" and got on some subways and eventually a bus headed for heathrow airport. It seemed to take forever and I thought it might be the last time I saw one of my best friends. I remember the sickness to my stomach that I felt, I remember the ungodly hour (it was about 1am) and she had to sit alone all night in the airport waiting for her early morning flight. I remember Jenn and I taking buses and subways because we were too cheap for a cap, they ran about 50 quid and we were a bit poor. So eventually we got completely lost on the London bus and ended up in a bad neighbourhood at 3am and Jenn wasn't wanting to talk to me out of anger for something. Finally after sitting next to a guy with a prostitute and seeing a bunch of police who told us to get out of the area if we didn't want trouble, we sprang for a cab. I remember driving back to our hotel in the 3am streetlight and the total fear and lonliness I felt.

When I listen to this song I imagine the evening but if I had rather seen it as an adventure, if I had felt invincible and courageous as we explored parts of London most tourists never saw. I imagine Jenn and I looking out the cab windows singing songs and laughing and pointing at landmarks and the cab driver shaking his head in confusion.

Sometimes life looks better in retrospect.. I had everything to lose back then, and I've lost almost all of it, and I happily remember that scary night, and wonder at times what life would be like if I were an adenturer, fearless, if my life had a techno soundtrack and occured against the London Skyline in the dead of night..

The Counsel Of The Wise

I recently finished some counseling which was very helpful, though my problem isn't solved, I'd learned all I could from my counselor. I've been amazed at how many ways it helped me, though my problem still remains, and I began to think, 'imagine what life would be like if I always had a mentor person around'. I bet I'd be a new man within a year.





I was watching "The Empire Strikes Back" today and thought about how Luke had Yoda, and Obi Wan had Qui Gon, etc, and realized I was an apprentice without a master.

It's amazing how different the priorities of the world are. If I could rebuild it, we would have masters and apprentices, knights and padawans. So many mistakes that could be avoided if we only had accountability, an extra person thinking.

I read in Ecclesiastes the other day this line that has been stuck in my head in the whole "two are better than one" passage. King Solomon says "Woe to the one who falls and has no one to help him up".

It Keeps You Runnin'

So when I was at Capernwray I used to run because of the Shema Yisrael which states we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. It was this and the verse "physical exercise availeth much" in 1st Corinthians. So strangely the most exercise I ever did was religiously motivated rather than for health reasons really, though that was there too.

So I remembered that, and I've been ralking again - run walking. It was always my method. I start running and when I can't breathe I start walking and then when I can breathe again I start running, and repeat. I've felt so much better since I've started though, Endorphins are Mother Nature's heroin.

A Good Weekend, Existentialism, and Chocolate Chips

I figured I should put something up that wasn't depressing.

Yesterday night I went to see Night at the Museum 2 because my mom forced me to go with her, but to my amazement, it was actually really good. Amy Adams captured the historical amelia very well. Ben Stiller was very Jewish and quite funny. It had alot of funny things in it and history.

Then today I had a delicious cookie. I think it was the best cookie I've ever had in my life, it was an existential experience filled with meaning I can no yet fully comprehend. It was chocolate chip.

I'm now sitting anxiously writing down a list of my sins as I do an examination of conscience. I haven't been to confession for 6 weeks. I'm hoping I am absolved without a hitch - I know I will be - but still there's always the anxiety coupled with exhilaration when you experience the sacrament of Penance, like the prodigal son, I go with no expectations, hoping the father will forgive me, and then experience the joy of absolution (hopefully - unless i've committed a very serious sin which then has to go to Rome to be dealt with - yes they actually do that >.< ). After all this I'm going to dinner at my brothers, and right now I'm passing time reading St. Thomas More's Utopia which I'm finding quite Socialistic to my enjoyment.

Remembering I'm A Creature

It's amazing how life works. I had just written in a previous blog post that I was super depressed and lonely as a human, and that I wished to be like God, and to be removed from relationships and just have peace in solitude. Little did I know what I would be shown next....

So I've been waiting for hours for a phone call, so I decided that in my depression I would pick up a theology book. I started reading one of my favourite authors thoughts on the Garden of Eden and Original Sin and the Human Condition.

"at the very heart of sin lies human beings' denial of their creatureliness, inasmuch as they refuse to accept the standard and limitations that are implicit in it [ie. Moral Law]. They do not want to be creatures, do not want to be subject to a standard, do not want to be dependent. They consider their dependence on God's creative love to be an imposition from without. But that is what slavery is, and from slavery one must free oneself. Thus human beings themselves want to be God."

This perfectly summarized my situation psychologically, strangely enough he had me pinned. But wait there's more!

"Human beings who consider dependence on the highest love as slaver and who try to deny the truth about themselves, which is their creatureliness, do not free themselves; they destroy truth and love. They do not make themselves gods, which, in fact, they cannot do, but rather caricatures, pseudogods, slaves of their own abilities, which then drag them down. ... sin is, in its essence, a renunciation of the truth."

It's the Christian thesis that man is man, not God, cannot be God and will always be at unease while he is trying it. Real peace comes from submission to God which is submission to truth. We want to be alone and independent and autonomous, but the theologian goes on to show how original sin makes this impossible.

"all the sins of history are interlinked....no human being is closed in upon himself or herself and that no one can live of or for himself or herself alone. We receive our life not only at the moment of birth but every day from without - from others who are not ourselves but who nonetheless somehow pertain to us. Human beings have their selves not only in themselves but also outside of themselves: they live in those whom they love and in those who love them and to whom they are present. Human beings are relational, and they possess their lives - themselves - only by way of relationship. I alone am not myself, but only in and with you am I myself. To be truly a human being means to be related in love, to be of and for. But sin means the damaging or destruction of relationality. Sin is a rejection of relationality because it wants to make the human being a god."

So in short he's saying that since Eden, humans have wanted to be independent, masters of their fate, gods, but that it is impossible, and that human beings are actually not fulfilling their purpose in such endeavours, and that on the contrary, to be relational is to be human. This goes against all of our Western Individualism.

He then summarizes our experience of original sin by saying that:

"At the very moment when a person begins human existence, which is a good, he or she is confronted by a sin-damaged world. Each of us enters into a situation in which relationality has been hurt...Sin pursuess the human being, and he or she capitulates to it."

So our whole lives we experience this relational damage and we develop around it (capitulate to it).

"But from this it is also clear that human beings alone cannot save themselves. Their innate error is precisely that they want to do this by themselves. We can only be saved - that is, be free and true - when we stop wanting to be God and renounce the madness of autonomy and self-sufficiency. We can only be saved - that is, become ourselves - when we engage in the proper relationship. But our interpersonal relationships occur in the context of our utter creatureliness, and it is there that the damage lies. Since the relationship with Creation has been damaged, only the Creator himself can be our savior. We can be saved only when he from whom we have cut ourselves off takes the initiative with us and stretches out his hand to us. Only being loved is being saved, and only God's love can purify damaged human love and radically re-establish the network of relationships that have suffered from alienation."

So basically, we have to go back to our original purpose, to be slaves to God as it were, to be dependent on our Creator. But the constant effects of sin make us want to be alone, do things our own way, by ourselves. Even society - Liberalism - is built on the proposition of human freedom and autonomy.

He then moves on to describe Christ:

"Jesus Christ goes Adam's route, but in reverse. In contrast to Adam he is really "like God". But this being like God, this similarity to God, is being a Son, and hence it is totally relational. "I do nothing on my own authority" (Jn 8:28). Therefore the one who is truly like God does not hold graspingly to his autonomy, to the limitlessness of his ability and his willing. He does the contrary: he becomes completely dependent; he becomes a slave. Because he does not go the route of power but that of love...The cross, the place of his obedience, is the true tree of life. Christ is the antitype of the serpent...The cross is the tree of life, now approachable. By his Passion, Christ, as it were, removed the fiery sword, passed through the fire, and erected the cross as the true pole of the earth, by which it is itself once more set aright. Therefore the Eucharist, as the presence of the cross, is the abiding tree of life, which is ever in our midst and ever invites us to take the fruit of true life. This means that the Eucharist can never merely be a kind of community builder. To receive it, to eat of the tree of life, means to receive the crucified Lord and consequently to accept the parameters of his life, his obedience, his "yes", the standard of our creatureliness. It means to accept the love of God, which is our truth - that dependeence on God which is no more an imposition from without than is the Son's sonship. It is precisely this dependence that is freedom, because it is truth and love.

May this Lent help us to free ourselves from our refusals and our doubt concerning God's covenant, from our rejection of our limitations and from the lie of our autonomy. May it direct us to the tree of life, which is our standard and our hope."
- Pope Benedict XVI "Sin and Salvation"

Yes it was the Pope, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who wrote these words. To me it was absolutely amazing a Godsend. I hope you can get it, and that some of the wonder I feel about it all, reaches you as well.

May you be dependent on God.

Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness.

^that's an album by Smashing Pumpkins that my brother lent me in high school, but it was too depressing for me so I only listened to it like twice.

The last few weeks have felt like nothing but a long line of people yelling at me, and a long line of of opportunities that I've had completely failed. I feel like an extra in my own life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra_(actor). Or like the villain at least.

In the movie Star Trek, Spock's dad says to him as a child 'you're perfectly capable of determining your own destiny. The question you face is, will you be the hero of your own story' and I sometimes wonder if I'm the hero of my own life, I don't think I am. Maybe if Leonard Cohen wrote my life story I would be (he's an ecentric, depressing author).

I find it interesting how beauty is so fleeting. As Canadian rockers, Our Lady Peace once said immortally, "happiness is a fish you can't catch". That's it! I feel like I'm in an Our Lady Peace Song! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8HcIu1z2OE&feature=fvst ....well at least I've figured that out.

I'm just ranting and complaining again because I have to do something, I feel like life is so infinitely sad that I can't even handle it. I mean, it's just contrasted really. It's infinitely beautiful as well. There are some moments that are so amazing that it makes the darkness around it seem so bad. If life was just constantly sad then we wouldn't even feel sad, we'd just feel normal. The "problem" is that it can be so good.

When everything is good, who has the time to write blogs!? you're too busy enjoying the goodness. I guess life has to be so dramatically up and down, that's a comfort. I bet it's the only way we wouldn't go crazy. I guess some days I just wish to be God then. Not in the power hungry, totalitarian way, just the being at peace with existence way. I'm constantly diseased. DIS EASED, dis-eased, un-ease, dis-ease, Ease meaning comfort, normalcy, etc.

Anyway, right now I miss my gradeschool friends, I hate myself for not keeping in touch with them, I miss my capernwray friends, I hate myself for not keeping in touch with them, and at the same time I don't want to be in touch with anyone, I just want to lay in the grass forever and be at peace, or drift in a boat in the ocean. Solitude can mean peace sometimes. But so can friendship.

Some Daily Auden.

I like this poem.

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/w__h__auden/poems/10079

Everyday

"God himself took a day to rest in, and a good man's grave is his Sabbath." -John Donne

People always ask me what's "new and exciting" - as a student of History and Theology, they should ask me "what's old and exciting" but I doubt they'll ever start that, modern man is obsessed with the Via Moderna, and I'm choosing to blame Luther for that. Anyway, as I thought about my life I thought I might as well just write down an archetypal day of my life /Platonic Form of Andrew's life, and then it will be easy to imagine what I do, in case anyone is wondering.

Waking:
Normally I wake up immediately worrying about, or complaining about, something. But I've noticed that in a strange way it comes from optimism, I'm always looking for something to hope for, something to move onto. Then I'm struck by the harsh reality of the present, the most difficult of places for me to reside in. I find I innately put all the faillures of the past and all the worries of the future onto all the iniquities of the present. I wake up each day I stumble over to the mirror, I feel frustrated, as if I was put at the end of a starting line in the race of life. The only way I move on is to remember that everyone is running a meaningless race, and I don't have to win, I don't even have to compete, I can just walk. So I force myself to remember thoughts like:

'Andrew you don't seem to think you are good enough today, not thin enough, too lustful, etc. On the day that you die, you will not be good enough. So get over it. You may die today, so calm down and just start walking. "death smiles at us all, all man can do is smile back" (Gladiator). Live in the realm of today, slowly practice the virtues, fear God, experience Eudaimonea'

'none of the affairs of man are large enough for great anxiety' - Plato's Republic

or Psalm 139

or some Aristotle about being virtuous

Then I can move onto the rest of the day.

Work:
I always pray before work because as they say there are no atheists in foxholes, so I feel about work. I've always hated and feared work, and anytime someone mentions jobs, employment, or work, I think of the line "Imagine a Boot Stomping on a Human Face Forever" from Orwell's 1984. I hope that changes someday. Anyway, I just try to survive at work.

Peace/Shalom:
Usually on the drive home as I listen to a piece of classical music, or have my hand out the window, or see a really green tree or flower, I feel at peace. The tender reassurance that I am not that important, that I will end, and flowers and music and breezes will continue and overshadow all the dark schemes of human work which destroy every natural bliss.

Friends:
If I have the emotional stamina after the rest of the day, I'll call my friends, or check my email. Recently it's been really hard for me to be able to get through everything, so I've been neglecting this area. My friend is getting married in a week, I haven't bought him anything, I haven't sent him anythign, just told him I can't fly out for his wedding. I just can't deal with it right now, I love and support him, but I have a low emotional tolerance or something.

Reading/Tolkien/World of Warcraft:
This is the part of the day I yearn for most because I can't be at shalom all the time, if I could, I would yearn for that, but such is the reality of life. These activities are the escape from the rest of existence and yet in them I feel more alive than in anything else during morning or work. I can be somewhere else for these precious hours, one day work and mornings will consume all of this time and I'll be forced to live merely for the temporary daily moments of peace and Church.

Church/Mass:
This is the 3rd best time of the day/week - Sorry God - where I arrive early in the large Cathedral and feel all my guilt build up from over the week as I look at the crucifix and remember that God's most defining moment was pain and death and that this was the path he chose for us, and in that truth, I too can live and die. I haven't been able to take the Eucharist recently because I can't get to confession (I work saturdays and priests seem to only allow confessions on saturdays in our diocese), but when I do take communion, it's always an awesome experience. I enjoy the Mass because it reminds me that whatever goodness I have comes not from me as an individual but from me as a member of Christ's body, from the group, the Church of Christ (Now confusingly monikered the Roman Catholic Church - it's a long story). I usually find the same peace here, in prayer, on my knees before the mysteriously present God, the Mysterium Tremendum. But then the idiotic priest or the uneducated Catholic says something dumb and gets me angry for the rest of the day.

Evening:
When I get to my room at night I'll cross myself and pray the Pater Noster (Our Father), Ave Maria (Hail Mary), and the Jesus Prayer (Domine Iesu Christe) in latin and then read some Harry Potter and go to sleep. I usually have nightmares, and in the last month I've woken up screaming twice.

Then the whole thing starts over again.

"Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money'. Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.' As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin." - Epistle of St. James, Chapter 4, Verses 13 to 17

I love this passage, it reminds me that I have to live today, without boasting, remember that I am but a mist, and to do the right thing, this is the path to fulfillment and life everlasting.

Who Should You Be?

I once watched a movie with the famed rapist and actor James Dean, it was called "Rebel Without A Cause". The plot revolved around a stylish high school rebel who ironically was not much of a rebel. He wore a leather jacket but was morally rather Puritanical. He semi-killed a guy and then wanted to confess to the police, but his parents said he shouldn't. His friend was nicknamed Plato. So basically he was an emotional teenage Socrates in a leather jacket. I forget how it ended, I think an innocent member of a visible minority got shot and 1950s American society was restored to it's natural equilibrium. But as I sit here 'wallowing in my own obesity' (a phrase I used alot in high school) I wonder how rebelious James Dean was in said film. He was fairly rebellious to stand up for some kind of Aristotelian virtue ethics in a Utilitarian world. Anyway, I was thinking, who are we 'supposed to be', according to our culture.

I think there's two simple answers to this much asked question:
1. the american dream - young, healthy, optimistic, attractive, successful - be all those things, live in suburbia, etc.
2. the anti-american dream - young, healthy, rebellious, attractive, independent. - this would be the "Into the Wild" type of thing where the young man goes off on his motorcycle and fights "the man" and "society".

Those are the people you "Should" be.

But what kind of a person "Shouldn't" you be? Here's my list
-Ugly and/or Fat and content with it
-Disabled
-Opinionated
-Pessimistic
-Lazy
-Awkward
-Insane
Imagine Louis Anderson in a wheelchair with the multiple personalities of Rush Limbaugh, Whoopie Goldberg, and the Wrestler Goldberg.

and you could add Jewish to the list, because apparently everyone I know (except me) hates Jews.

And then I looked in the mirror and realized that i'm alot of the things nobody likes. So I was thinking I should start a club or something of unwanted hated people. But they'd all hate each other so much that it'd be problematic. But it could be called like "The Corpulant Fraternity of Lost Souls" and we could wear capes and stuff, and wallow in our numerous faillures and social flaws.

CFLS wants You!

Star Trek Thoughts

Last night a friend and I went to see the new Star Trek movie. At first I thought it was going to suck because I'd always associated the words Star Trek with all the things I hate about nerds/gaming community/ppl who are higher levels than me in Warcraft. But I was absolutely amazed at how good a movie it was, I highly recommend it. I think I liked it for entirely different reasons than most people though.



My favourite scenes were on the planet Vulcan where Spok grew up. It shows his education as a child and a few glimpses of their society. They're a society completely based on logic and not emotion. There's shots of kids reciting math equations - to which I told Teresa "If there's that much math in the future, count me out" - right next to kids answering questions on moral philosophy. Each of them is kind of being tutored. Apparently on Vulcan as in the Corruscant Jedi Council there is still enough tax dollars going into higher education for people to be trained personally. (maybe that's why they're more advanced than Earth!)



I liked seeing the statues they had built and the culture that was fairly believable. If other planets have people devoted to Western/Logical Philosophy and Reason, that gives me hope for Earth's philosophical relativism, and Nietzschean Barbarism.



So ya, that's where Star Trek led me heh. Also the guy from Harold and Kumar (Harold/Asian guy) was in it, and the guy from Shaun of the Dead. I recommend seeing it. Live long and prosper.

Filling the Void with Rum, Porn, and Warcraft

lol I thought that blog title would grab your attention, yes both of you reading this.

I just realized that I haven't had a girlfriend since August, it's coming up to a year now, but I've tried not to think about my utter loneliness. I've enjoyed the bachelor life and I'm enjoying it now by serving only myself - one of my favourite things to do. But I've been noticing more and more often how much of a void there's been in my life.

First of all, to get it out of the way, I've always been told that everyone has a God-Shaped hole in their heart which only Jesus can fill, well I've filled that with Jesus and his Eucharistic presence. So if there's a check list for my life, God could be checked off. But Aristotle taught me something else, that life is really about finding Eudaimonea - Happiness - Fulfillment, and while I'm obligated to say God is enough, blah, etc, in all honesty, sometimes he isn't. Leonard Cohen once said he believed two things about God - 1) that he is alwasy imminently and transcendently present in every moment of your life, and 2) that we become so used to this that sometimes we feel an incomprehensible chasm between us and God. I agree with his Zen Judaism there.

But back to the main theme. Just a warning that this is probably the most embarrassing thing i've put on my blog, and if my co-workers read this, please don't think less of me. But I work with beautiful, young, girls, who would never spend evenings with me unless obligated by the job and money, etc. Anyway, we ran out of paper towels tonight so they started using my back to wipe their hands on. It was basically a derogatory thing which was pretty simple and non-sexual, just like someone giving you a back rub. The creepy thing was how good it felt. Feel free to leave the blog now if you're grossed out at the thought of this, just click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJfH-pzXWHw

The weird thing was just that a girl talking to me tonight and rubbing my back made me feel like a human again, it was like some kind of relational/human void was being filled. If you're struggling to get what i mean just think of every book Donald Miller ever wrote. That's what I mean.

As I've been going to a Protestant Counselor for a while now trying to sort out my addictions and I'm amazed at how many things I try to fill the voids in my life with. I feel like a junkie trying to go from one high to the next. I've been doing phenomenally better recently with all these things, but at the same time it makes it worse when it all comes back.

So tonight, now that i'm home I don't know what to do, there's one person I call whenever I get depressed (it's the last person I kissed as well) but I don't know if she feels like dealing with me tonight. So I'm just going to finish my rum and coke, and play some world of warcraft. I wish I were in the middle ages so that I could go to Vespers and take the Eucharist. But I'll have to wait till sunday. I hate that I can't go to confession except on saturdays either, and I work saturdays. Christ's Church sucks at times, but is still really awesome.

Shalom to you, may the correct things fill the voids in your life.