Andrew's Labarynthine Thoughts

Where Philosophy Gets Fun

2010-03-29T05:21:00.001-07:00

We / I interrupt your regularly scheduled shitty stories to bring you a short philosophy blurb.

"A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." - Francis Bacon

I've been listening to the work of Alan Watts, a Zen Buddhist philosopher and ex-Episcopal (Anglican) priest, etc. I've enjoyed it because for once it isn't a debate over idiotic modern questions like evolution or atheism. The smartest philosophers in the world are not Atheists. They aren't generally Christians either. Usually they hold to either Pantheism, a form of Deism, or some kind of Eastern religious tradition.

My favourite philosophy is philosophical theology or religious philosophy. I find it much more intriguing learning about Islam and different Mystic views and then analyzing them by the light of reason, than hacking it out with a 20-something ex-Baptist who is angry at everyone, and thinks Richard Dawkins is the messiah. That's not real philosophy. It's like my fellow Brock students who think they're Buddhists, but don't actually believe that the Dalai Lama is an incarnation of God, don't believe in Karma, and believe in the self, etc.

Comparative religious study is fun. It's like that line in Hamlet "there's more in Heaven and on earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy".

The last fun thing about real philosophy that makes it fun, is that I don't have all the answers (yet). There are many more questions that I come to where the answer I have (St. Thomas Aquinas' answer usually) isn't something I've actually come to know for myself. Living is the thrill of the realist philosopher because life is where the theories of philosophy encounter the testing ground.

Story (7) - A New Home

2010-03-27T11:07:00.000-07:00

Karl woke up with a headache. The light was way too bright, and he still smelled, not having showered in a while. What the hell had he got himself into? Slowly things started to click. He was in Virginia, he was in the process of shaping a life around a computer game. His new friends were possibly the weirdest people he'd ever met. Gord, a middle-aged ex-military carpenter. Ben and his mom, 2 random Jews living in the Old South. Strangest of all were the 2 Asians, one which didn't even speak english.

He decided to check his emails. Overwhelming fear. There was an email from his boss. The email explained that he had been fired (Karl remembered he had put his address on his resume).

Breakfast was interesting. Dewey and the Asian girl were up and looked like they could've been going into a job interview. Suits and propriety. Karl's stereotypes of Asians were definately being reinforced by this experience. It was the three of them. No one knew where everyone else was, Gord's truck was gone. Trying to make things less odd, Karl tried to strike up a conversation with the serious businessman sitting across from him.

Apparently they were both from Vietnam and had worked in Japan for Sony. They were contacted by Ben through a forum. (how else do gamers communicate?) D thought that it would take less than a week for them to get things up and running.
Karl asked some questions about Vietnam and let them know that he was from Canada and thus didn't take part in the "war of American aggression" as they called it (or so he'd read on Wikipedia the night before).

More interesting news: the girl was something van something, which meant she was the French Catholic minority in the country, many of them left after the war, hence the Japan thing. It was all starting to make more sense now. Karl tried a bit of his high school French. It worked. She began speaking way too fast for him, using a very different accent. "je n'ai pas vite avec ce langue, je suis tres ugh.. ma francais est terrible" she got the general message. Her face turned back to the cereal, clearly disappointed.

Karl decided to have a shower after breakfast, it was akward being in someone's house who he barely knew, eating their food and using their bathroom. It was like a strange version of Goldilocks.

While Karl was getting out of the shower the door opened a bit. It was Ben telling him that they were back from somewhere Karl hadn't heard of and had bought groceries and some electronic stuff. Not knowing what to do really, Karl just said 'great' and was shocked at both the etiquette and the excitement of this kid. He really wanted to get this game up and running. Hosting them was like a game to Ben, all of his dreams had come true, without any of the crap beforehand that most of them had endured before making the decision to come States-side.

As Karl walked into the living room he was greeted by Anna (ben's mom) and was surprised to see and hear another guild member. Ben was on skype talking to their Scottish off-tank. She was as amazed as everyone else seemed to be that this was really happening.

Gord was calling from the yard for Karl to come out and help him.

*** 1 hour later ***

While Ben and Dewey were trying to set up the server, with the occassional help of Van (which Karl now called the Asian girl, as he hadn't been able to ask her name) who seemed to drift between the two camps.

Anna, Karl, and Gord were outside in jeans and fitted with leather gardening gloves. Gord was giving them all the battle plan as they attempted to clear out the barn. Karl was glad to have something concrete to do. People might think he was lazy for being fired and skipping work, but really it was meaningful work he sought. In this case, there was a clear goal in mind.

They went to work fairly quickly, and were making good time. The place had been useless for a long time, and Anna was glad to have it cleaned up. The thing Karl loved about the work was that they were doing it the easy-stupid way. Instead of slow and careful planning, they just shop-vacced the floor, put a giant cheap carpet on the floor, and begun placing bunk-beds inside. The place had electricity and by night time, they had beds, a freezer, a table with their laptops, and of course, an important selection of posters up inside. It was the coolest fusion of dorm-room, camp cabin, and internet cafe that Karl had ever been in. They had a digital project to watch movies on the wall, an old tv and some consoles Gord had brought, as well as various other utilitarian features. To most adults, or to the cast of those designer make-over shows, this place was an utter failure.

It was a scene that didn't belong. A somewhat ugly rag-tag room, with occupants to match. They didn't care, Karl enjoyed not belonging together with these people.

The final touches were put in place when the guild assembled inside and decided on a name (Dewey translated for Van, who was in quite good spirits as well). In the end, they had quite a selection of possibilities, ranging from the boring HQ and Base Camp, to the nerdier "New Norrath" (The name of the land in Everquest) and "East Virginia Common Lands" (East Commonlands is a popular EQ hangout). Finally, they agreed on a Tolkien reference: New Valinor.

After attempting to make popcorn on the wood stove in the barn and failing miserably, they used a microwave. Very appropriately, for the first night in their new home, they watched Lord of the Rings (with French subtitles for Van).

Karl kept having the same feeling over and over again. Disbelief. What a peculiar place he had arrived at. If it had been any other day, he would've just gone home, but now, less than a week since that fateful missed day, and Karl had found a new home. It was all too much to keep thinking about, and he eventually drifted off to sleep.

Story (6) - Contact

2010-03-07T19:45:00.000-08:00

After the door opened and Karl began hearing their voices things were much better. He found out that his host Zee's real name was Ben. Everyone also began calling him Karl, which was close enough to his avatar (Kast) that it proved easy to remember.

Ben lived in what Karl would've described as Jewtopia. The inside of the outwardly run-down home was immaculate. Clean carpets, giant landscape pictures of Jerusalem and scenes from all over Israel, a minora, and a nice selection of books on Yiddish, to Zen-Judaism to Israeli history to books with Hebrew titles. As for Ben himself, he was perfectly average, brown curly hair, glasses, probably 17-18, and a Ramones t-shirt. Ben was the most normal of the crowd though, and wasn't alone in this Hebrew home, three others had already arrived.

The second person whose hand Karl shook was that of Gord, 'Corporal Gordon James'. Looking at him Karl didn't think he belonged in the scene, but after a little while, Karl began to imagine that there never was a place on Earth where Gord would seem to fit in. Immediately he recognized the voice of the group's Ogre Shaman, always very easily excitable and optimistic, but Karl probably imagined he was a 20-something who lived in his parents basement like most of his other online friends. On the contrary, Gord was a unique character. He found out that day over their initial ice-breaking group beers that Gord had been a soldier specializing in communications during Desert Storm. Though the closest he actually came to the action was when a bomb went off beside the office he was working in. He was the first to call in the medical team and secured the area - which is where he got his rank of Corporal. Karl thought it was kind of silly that he took so much pride in such an arbitrary event, but realized he shouldn't say anything. More interesting than this pseudo-glory story, Karl found what Gord left out to be more informative. It seems that after Gord saw the civilian who died from the bomb on the road and did his duty that day, he requested to leave and received an honorable discharge. Since then he had worked in renovations with some friends of his fathers, all the while becoming more and more addicted to EQ - like the rest of them. Gord hardly looked like a 'war hero' at 6 feet, 40 years of age, and some 300 pounds, he looked more like an out of shape, balding, ex-professional wrestler. Aside from this seemingly adult exterior and life, there was something child-like in his excitement and talk about anything from the most trivial aspects of 'the game' to boring details on how long it took him to drive to Fredericksburg from Ohio.

The two other people were Asian and very quiet. When they didn't say anything beyond 'hi' Karl wondered if there was issues. As it turns out, they weren't members of the guild and when Ben looked at them it he appeared to be quite pleased with himself. The girl was probably 20ish and the boy looked like he was 18. Ben explained that they worked for Sony in Japan and had since been fired from their jobs as GMs and game programmers. They saw our guild's messageboard online and that we were planning on starting a new server, and they thought that they could possibly rebuild some form of the game with their knowledge and maybe make some money charging the other near-suicidal EQ addicts who had been desperate for any return to Norrath possible.

While Ben seemed to think this was perfect and that it would save him alot of time programming, Karl felt uneasy about it (as did Gord), there just seemed something wrong with the guy. There was no way, Karl thought, that he could have been a GM, he was still a kid.

Aside from the awkward vibe that "Duong" gave him (Karl desperately held back laughter after hearing his name, and Ben suggested they just call him Dewey), there was a much more real problem they had to deal with. Dewey spoke a bit of broken English, but the girl spoke none. She sat very quietly on the couch drinking some tea and looking suspiciously from one face to the next.

It all seemed very odd to Karl. It wasn't like he expected. So far, no work had gone into rebuilding the game, as Ben had his SATs to write and very little time as it was approaching the end of the school year. Gord had been staying in his truck like Karl and been planning a way to turn Ben's barn into 'HQ' (headquarters) for them. This all seemed much more normal and easier to understand than the Asian couple sitting together speaking in a hushed language as Dewey probably informed her of who the newcomer was.

There were so many questions left, but Karl felt peaceful as they sat down for dinner that Anna had made them. He wondered what Ben's (fairly young) Mom thought about all these weird visitors. Obviously she was ok with it, and she seemed to enjoy cooking for them and cleaning. Anna seemed very interested in Karl and asked him questions all about himself and his family. She even talked to him about Spinoza a bit, after finding out he himself was a budding philosophe. Apparently she was a writer of some sort, and her husband had been a photographer from Israel. Once she had referred to her husband using the perfect tense Karl realized he must have died and began imagining all the middle eastern violence he'd seen on TV (only to find out later that it was a car accident).

As the 4 north americans chatted away and the 2 asians sat silently (at least they were smiling now) Karl was in for the last surprise of the day. Before they got up from Dinner, Anna raised her hands and extended them towards Ben and Gord on either side of her. Ben took one and after much hesitation Gord took the other. Eventually they were all holding hands, and Anna closed her eyes and said a prayer. It seemed fairly normal to Karl, excepting the few references to 'Adonai' and 'Shalom' for the strangers at the table. When they finished Karl out of instinct crossed himself as did the asian girl. Karl, ever the Canadian, worried that he might've often Anna and Ben, but they didn't seem bothered or even to notice at all. But intrigued by this connection both Karl and the girl now were staring at each other in wonder. It was as if suddenly they had discovered they were long lost relatives, that indeed they might've spoken the same language after all, in at least some way.

***

Gord lit a cigar outside as he and Karl sat on lawnchairs and looked at the stars. After a few minutes Ben's vicious dalmation stopped barking long enough for Gord and Karl to have a great chat about Winston Churchill, and then a long and serious discussion about how long it would be till they could log on again. Gord had some great plans for the barn, and indeed had already bought a bunch of supplies for the job. They agreed to join financial forces (Karl was oddly glad that Gord didn't have much more than he did) and Anna said if they fixed up the old barn, they could stay there as long as they wanted.

Once again as night set in, Karl crawled into his truck and turned on some music on his laptop. As Schubert played him to sleep Karl decidedly put out of his mind all the strange people he had met in the day and all the strange things he'd learned. Eventually he drifted off to sleep.

Inability to Cope

2010-03-01T06:48:00.000-08:00

We interrupt the crappy stories I've been writing for a real blog. In the words of my friend Jenn: 'shit just got real'.

2 days ago I was overcome by this.... mood?/spirit?/feeling? I don't know what it is. It's like fear, but it isn't the same as fear. Maybe it's just depression again. Anyway, there's like 3 different things causing it and they'll just be boring details to anyone but me.

But I just thought it'd be hillarious/interesting to analyze my reaction to it, it'll be an interesting test of human nature/my nature.

When I began to get this - let's just say 'fear' (even though it's a little inaccurate) - my first reaction was to pray. Then nothing happened, so I tried porn, etc. nothing happened, so then I tried eating, nothing happened. Then I tried some legitimate stuff like exercise and homework, etc and that helped a little. But then all of it got alot worse and so I just started watching every episode of Top Gear and every movie my friend gave me on a burnt dvd. I tried going to Mass and praying more but everyone just wanted me to be optimistic. (I hate contrary advice. My old psychotherapist said that if I'm having a bad day I should just tell people 'I'm having a bad day'. But people don't get Stoicism like that anymore.) Then when I was at my wit's end I tried to just drive away, but I ended up at home. Then I tried to call my brother Jer, my last hope in the world. But he's out in the bush, so I can't call him. So then I just sat on the couch, unable to move or study anymore, blankly staring at the tv screen.

So this morning I resolved to face all of my problems head on. That lasted for about 34 seconds. So I just watched Fast and the Furious (all the Top Gear has put me in car mode), and I'm wearing my Rosary today, I don't care what people say. And I am kind of shaky. I just want to become a monk or a priest in like Arizona or Tokyo or something, and have to be around people I don't know and don't understand. Then no one will bother me. I want like an item list of things I have to do, and I want it to never be longer than 10 things. Like: clean room, walk to chapel, say mass, hear confessions, eat breakfast, go for a long walk, learn a bit of (insert language), eat dinner, teach someone something maybe?, go to bed. A very simple life, a contemplative life.

I want to get rid of everything. I don't want to be where people know me. No one will be able to say: 'that's just crazy ol' Andrew'. I want the food to taste bad and the bed to be uncomfortable. I want to have many moments a day when I meet Hispanic or Asian people or pseudo-criminal people whom I don't understand and can't relate to, and then try to grow as a person until I can reach deep enough into human experience to relate to them. I'm fucking crazy. I don't know. bleh.

...

the worst part is I know - come friday - I'll have all the assignments done (probably just barely pass some of them) and they'll be a new manifestation of these same problems. It's all a cycle, it's all a rut, I'm like a train set on tracks and I know where they're headed and all I can think of is how kick-ass it would be to have freedom like a car...

once again I find myself just trying to survive, just trying to get through today, and hoping. Hope is all I seem to ever have. If I run out of that, I'm scared to think of what will happen.

Story (5) The Arrival

2010-02-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

Karl was amazed by how immediate and seemingly uncaused it came. Like morning wood Karl suddenly was overwhelmed by the desire for 'the game'. It was completely irrational, he hadn't played for a while and he'd been fine. Actually, embarrassingly enough, he'd thought partway through Pennsylvannia, it would be awkward if his guildies had it up and running and he didn't even want to play it. It urged him to play, reminded him of the problems of real life he would shortly encounter. There were parents to be talked to, apologies to be made, savings accounts to run out, eventually the problems Karl had run from would come crushing down and without the game, he'd have no shelter. Ironically Karl turned up the Rage song "No Shelter" which was playing as he drove towards the goal.

The self-talk began: 'Don't worry about it man, you'll get there and they'll have it all set up and everything will be back to normal. The guild is waiting for you, just get to Fredericksburg and we'll be fine.' Karl thought to himself. A quotation from a more popular Karl was floating around in his head: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." Ever the philosopher, Karl began to think it over, Marx had been wrong in a classically modern sense, which left the postmoderns of today feeling distant. It was the problem Karl himself was now facing. 'what if I don't want the world? what if - to cite James Bond - the world is not enough? what if a man finally freed of his chains finds the chains more comfortable than the scary world around him?'. Karl didn't want the 'real world' - like great philosophers before him, he was seeking a world beyond this one. For Plato it was the real of the Forms, for Karl, it was 'the game'. It seemed more real to him as he began to shake with craving for the game, more real than his 3 wolf t-shirt or the interstate flying by, or the Rage music now blaring.

Slowing down and pulling off the highway for some coffee would be the safest thing to do. As he arrived in a random Virginia starbucks he was overwhelmed with how this place too felt like a gateway to escape. Marx would've decried it as the height of Capitalist decadence, and Karl had to agree, that there was something about this place. The ultra-clean environment, the soft jazz, the businessmen and metrosexuals, and the blonde baristas all gave the place the look of a refuge. If Hitler dreamt of a coffee shop this would've been it. Again Karl's thoughts had interrupted the task at hand. Finally, remembering what he was to do, he called the number his GM (guildmaster) put on their forum. As the other line began to ring, Karl realized he only knew the character name his friend used, which was always the same, but was worried it would sound weird to use IRL.

"Hello" said the familiar voice of Karl's Tank 'Xzynog' (pronounced Zee-nog) sounded.
"Hi.. it's Kast, I'm looking for Zee... ?"
To his relief the awkwardness ended and immediately the conversation began rolling. Karl received final directions from Z which he pretended to understand -he'd just follow mapquest- and then finished his Carmel Macchiato.

The only thing Karl was worried about was the smell. He hadn't showered in days and it was noticable, luckily driving cross-country to see friends from an MMORPG is one of the few occasions where stinking is normal.

Within three hours, Karl had arrived. It did not look anything like he'd imagined. Though in fairness, Karl had imagined an antebellum plantation complete with porches on both stories and for some reason a confederate flag. In reality, it was a small house just outside town, and past a few fruit stands/markets that looked operated and lived in by Mexicans. The old white paint was peeling off the wooden siding, and there was a step missing from the front door that made it kind of a leap. As well an angry looking dalmation was tied to the dilapitaded barn-like structure near the back, and it barked as if it would eat Karl at first glance. Aside from that and some flies, it looked a bit deserted. While he began philosophizing on the situation Karl decided he had to disagree with the great Scottish poet who wrote "Suspense is worse than disappointment.". Evidently, Robert Burns had never seen this place before.

Story (4) Morning Bath & Diet Root Beer

2010-02-24T12:34:00.000-08:00

Bath. The picture that word gave to Karl was a Roman city in England followed by that movie with Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates. After the picture of the word Kathy Bates arrived in Karl's minds' eye, he promptly returned to looking around at this small town in New York state. He'd never even heard of it yesterday and today here he was. 'Lewis and Clarke would be ashamed of me' Karl thought.

Sleeping in the truck had worked out fine. Karl took pride in his truck, a 95 GM pickup he'd bought off a guy who just retired from the warehouse. It had character and Karl like it because it was so unlike everything he stood for. He was not a working man, did not move large tools or steel, and yet every time he saw it and realized it was his, he felt a small swelling in his chest and had a remade self-image. It was what Karl could potentially be, not what he was. Everyone else just thought it an ugly waste of gas and money.

After trying his idealistic plan of going wherever the wind may take him, Karl realized that there are alot of dead end streets, and that drivin in circles takes alot more time than he was prepared to spend on such an endeavour. Thus with a heavy heart, he yielded to mapquest at 8:33 AM on the first morning of the journey. (http://www.mapquest.com/maps?1c=Bath&1s=NY&1y=US&1l=42.336899&1g=-77.3181&1v=CITY&2c=Fredericksburg&2s=VA&2y=US&2l=38.303101&2g=-77.4608&2v=CITY)

6 and a half hours. The first emotion Karl felt was anger. It seemed like such a short journey. Any normal person could make the distance in one day. 'bet Dad could make it there and back to Scarborough if some diplomat was trapped there' Karl pondered angrily. This was his quest, it was supposed to be epic, and now looking that all he had to do was head south for a while, it seemed to make it appear trite. Originally he was worried his family and acquaintances would be overwhelmed with fear at his bold escape, now he worried they'd not worry at all.

In any case, Karl got onto another highway and headed south. As he merged into the left lane still deep in thought the overweight orphaned philosophe laughed to himelf. Knowing how easy he could get lost, it would probably take Karl a week to arrive anyway. Turning on the CD player and singing along to his embarrassing mix of 'guilty pleasures' (Avril Lavigne, Blink 182, and Weird Al) Karl faded away into the world of music and remembered a line from an equally embarrassing book: "a music...a magic beyond all" (Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone). But gay wizards aside, music really did bring calm, it reminded Karl of the most revolutionary action of all in life - when there is nothing left to look forward to - gratitude. To sing along happily to every sad moment in life had been a goal of Karl's. If we're all on this great Titanic, better to go down playing music with the band than give in to fear and despair.

At Williamsport, Pennsylvannia Karl stopped for food, fuel, and nature's call. Inside the gas stations' mini-mart, while the attendant pumped his gas he looked at the great assortment of choices. Mountain Dew, Doritos, Hostess cupcakes. It was practically the ingredients for a LAN. Then as a beautiful red-haired girl stepped into the store with her stoner boyfriend Karl embarrassingly replaced all these items with their 'healthy alternatives'. Diet root beer, cheese flavoured rice cake chips, and sugar free gum. Ultimately these others didn't notice - and neither did the cashier, busy watching a sporting event of some kind on TV.

As Karl drove off he was ashamed of himself. Not that he saved himself from a potential heart-attack and/or bad breath (doritos do that), but because he gave in to the will of the herd, he sacrificed his own choice for the arbitrary judgment of others. This was the mortal sin of philosophers, Nietzsche would be ashamed.

Knowing that this line of thinking would lead to despair Karl began to think about 'the good ol' days'. He remembered LAN parties with all his nerd friends. The chief topics of conversation being: would you rather have force powers, or a time machine, and similar existential quandries.

From St. Genevieve high to undergrad days in TO, Karl had a solid group of guys. Once a month they'd all assemble at someone's place for their communion of nerdiness. Of late the group seemed to disappear, and Karl's guild had to pick up the interpersonal slack that he craved. But when the old gang got together, they still drew pictures of their school teachers to throw darts at, discussed the fates of the popular kids, and took solace in the past, that indestructible record, always available for the one with the strength of heart to look back on better days.

As the son set, Karl pulled into Hagerstown, VA. He had crossed the state line. After eating dinner at Applebees and receiving many confused and derisive glares from servers and fellow diners alike, Karl found another dead end road. It was surrounded by trees, and Karl parked his truck and set things up. The back seat was leveled off from the many blankets he had shoved ontop of his suitcases on the floor. Getting comfortable he opened his laptop, emailed his guildies to let them know of his impending arrival, and began to watch the fifth element. 'Time doesn't matter, only life' Fr. Vito Cornelius reminded him (and Bruce Willis) and Karl didn't feel embarrassed that he was 27 years old and sleeping in a pickup truck in a town he'd never heard of, heading to the 'great LAN in the sky' to meet his friends of 5 years for the first time.

Karl was enjoying Nostalgia, he was enjoying a life with only the vaguest of self-determined goals, no impositions or obligations, the joys of the past, and the bright promise of tomorrow.

Story (3) The Border

2010-02-20T07:58:00.000-08:00

Karl had a map of every state saved on his laptop, only 5 minutes and he could use his mobile internet hookup to connect anywhere for mapquest, googlemaps, or any other tool created for geographically-challenged folks like himself. Paradoxically, he also promised himself that they would not be used unless in most dire necessity.

The State. That sounded wrong to Karl. He had been instilled with the proper respect for legitimate authorities, and he never committed any grossly illegal crimes, but one thing Karl hated was government. As a philosopher he got some of Locke's theories about 'sacred property rights' and as an R.C. he got "Rerum Novarum" and the warnings against 'godless communism', but at a soul-level, he didn't believe in State authority. Not a violent one, nor a revolutionary one, but an anarchist nonetheless Karl was; like the Amish really.

It was with this intellectual frustration, coupled with the natural fear of force that had Karl worried as he approached the border. In these moments of life where one feels stress, it's to Tradition that a man flees, what their father taught them, what they've learned in life right or wrong. So from previous Authorities based on seemingly ridiculous claims, Karl began to worry/pray: 'Please don't be a woman, women are always tougher, trying to assert their power, please let the guard be right about to leave the shift, please let me say something funny that will put them at ease, mention religion and they'll leave you alone...' and in this manner Karl continued to hope.

However, as it always seems to, the Dark Providence of Fate ordained that Karl should get a young female border guard, on the first day of her job, with a supervisor, and little traffic behind him. Perfect. Now there was nothing left for Karl to do, he didn't even have a real story planned out.

---

"Passport or valid photo identification please" ordered the faux-bold young lady
Karl handed his passport over.
"Citizenship...?" - the girl mumbled and immediately looked to her supervisor who informed her that this was the first question and that she was supposed to ask it before. Karl didn't know what he was supposed to do, as she now had his passport and could clearly tell his citizenship as well as all the 'important' facts of his life. The awkward silence could be cut with a knife, the young guard was flustered, and the supervisor was called away from the booth to deal with some other more pressing issue for the moment.

Against all his will, knowing he should focus, Karl began to silently ponder the idea of the passport, 'Kierkegaard said "if you label me, you negate me" , and what is a passport but a series of labels, the tightest definative box of all the data the world at large thinks is worth knowing about you, and-' his thought was cut off by the realization that she had asked another question ('purpose of your trip?'), trying to sound professional and stall as she looked for a script, or some list of protocol to save her from real human interaction.

Idiotically Karl said "Did you know what Kierkegaard said about labels?"
Utterly baffled she looked back at him scowling with disbelief.
"sorry, nevermind, not important.. um pleasure - that's the purpose of my trip - I'm just going to meet some friends" Karl stuttered.
"He said 'if you label me, you negate me'... it's in Wayne's World" She replied, almost trying to hide the fact that she knew, and yet still confused as to why he asked.

Further awkward silence. Cars had begun to line up behind Karl, stress built. The supervisor hurriedly returned and inquired as to her success and she straightened up and affirmed her work. He absent-mindedly handed Karl the passport and they began talking.

Miraculous. Miraculous was the only word Karl could think of as he drove away. They didn't ask him why he was going (shamefully, and ridiculously: To play a video game), how long he was staying (potentiallly: indefinately, which would've insured his swift return home), or who he was staying with (truthfully: an ogre shaman known as "Kastinkillz" who he had called 'Kast' for 5 years now). Things were looking up in an extraordinary way.

Out of respect and reverence Karl went to the only place he could think of right now to celebrate his successful transition from the lands of Queen Elizabeth II to the American Rebels, a nearby shrine he had been to with his on campus Catholic group.

It was 4:14 PM and as he pulled in, everyone seemed to be leaving Fatima shrine. He greeted the priest, was shriven, and lit a candle and said a prayer for his safe journey beneath an image of Papa JP II, the great philosopher-pope.

To many, Karl's behaviour would seem indescribably odd, insane, or just contradictory, but alongside "The Game" (as he liked to call Everquest), there were two things that always made him feel whole: Catholicism, and Philosophy.

Karl came from a background that always seemed normal enough in multi-cultural Scarborough where he grew up. He was adopted as an infant, and would never have known except for the clear racial difference. His father was an Indian Diplomat with a wonderful English accent and a classical education, he taught Karl to read younger than all of the other children at school and would quote political theorists from Aristotle and Hobbes and Rawls on any occasion. That is when he actually was in the country, which was rare as he was always travelling somewhere.

Karl's mother was the complete opposite, she seemed to lack a passion for anything. She had a long German lineage to which Karl owed his name (after his mother's grandfather who had been some kind of Army official in the Weimar republic). Though her marrying an Indian man, and his father's marrying of a Saxon woman, meant virtual exile from most of their respective families. All of them except Karl's maternal grandparents with whom he lived, scorned them for their 'unnatural' union. Karl could never understand how his mother, this passive and silent woman, who seemed so much a stranger to him even after all these years, had at one point possessed enough passion to defiantly act in love. It was a mystery.

And then there was Karl, with no shared genetics or heritage, physically and linguistically an Anglo, adopted into these two confused cultures and lives. Perhaps this confusion was why he felt at home in the racial hodgepodge of Catholicism. Certainly, it was why he fell in love with Philosophy. Karl thought of himself as Socrates had once, "neither Athenian nor Greek, but a citizen of the world". And like Socrates, he had spent his life trying to fulfill that ancient command inscribed on the temple of the oracle of Apollo at Delphi: "KNOW THYSELF"

As the sun set and he pulled into a rest stop - not even halfway through New York State yet - Karl was joyful. Anticipating for the first time in a long time, a new beginning, and in typical nerd-tradition he hummed the Star Wars theme and pretended he was on Tatooine as he stretched and watched the sun go down. That is, until some cute girls pulled up in a car next to him and he abruptly finished it.

Story (2): Life and Work

2010-02-14T19:14:00.000-08:00

Karl hated driving, normally. There was always pressure to get somewhere on time, always the fear of driving down the wrong road. always. He knew that if he could just drive, using only a compass, with no particular route in mind, and if he could master his fear, then another nail could be removed from his coffin.

***

Ever day since graduation, he'd felt the nails being driven in. Masters in Philosophy, summa cum laude from University of Toronto. When you live in Scarborough, it's not much of a commute. Most of the people Karl knew lived within 30 minutes of his house. His life was there. A teaching assistant, living in his grandparents basement. Mom and Dad travelled so often they decided to just sell their house altogether. They'd come back every once and a while, for the holidays. But otherwise... it was Karl, and Grandma (Grandpa was on a respirator, and senile as well).

This life Karl had come to know consisted of minute intellectual scraps he had with his self-proclaimed Buddhist, and newly liberated atheist undergrads. A few papers to mark, a few classes to prepare for, and such life went... for a while.

After cut-backs and staff changes, one day the budding would-be professor found himself without a job in academia.

***

It's amazing how quickly things slip through your fingers sometimes, and sure enough Karl was working at a Warehouse job packing skids of industrial cleaning supplies. He was told that he should be grateful in this economy for a job at all, his father reminded him, and according to mom some 'real' work would do him good.

As a metaphysician Karl knew only too well the dichotemy between every day life and the 'real world'. Moreover as a philosopher he also found the maxim of Aristotle -that physical labour degrades the mind- to be the reality of his life.

The more cleaner he packed, the more his anticipation grew for the mind numbing recreation he planned after each shift in the trenches. From 5pm to midnight he worked 4 days a week. As soon as he scrubbed his hands clean with the grainy orange soap at the end of his shift he would look in the mirror, and even though nothing had noticably changed, somehow it seemed like he had earned another day's work of value in the eyes of family and the world at large.

After he journeyed home and cleaned up, Karl would enter his 'real world'. If Plato was said to have his head stuck in the clouds, Karl could be said to have his in the computer.

Everquest had a reputation for being addictive, ever since he was 13 Karl had played this game. A massive multiplayer online role-playing game where (previously) thousands would play online together, it was the original, though popularity had waned of late. It had become such an important part of life, sometimes the everyday world of experience with it's fake smiles and formalities seemed to Karl like the game.

Comfort. The massive cushioned chair called to him amidst the immaculately cleaned game space. This corner of Karl's room was holy to him in the proper sense of the word. It was 'set apart' , it was the last safe place on earth, the balance that kept life all together. Once Karl even noticed that occasionally he would silently shed a tear of joy as he sat down and deeply exhaled all of the day's issues. He had a mini zen garden and everything for loading times and logins.

As he logged on at quarter to one, he was reunited to his friends. From Seattle to Memphis to Glasgow, Karl had his online fellow raiders. It didn't matter that they had everything they wanted in-game. It didn't matter that hardly anyone played anymore, nothing mattered but their companionship. The voices of these people, the jokes and personalities, the community they had was real. Even if their characters weren't.

After the hours of laughter, sometimes serious conversation, and alot of silent space filled only with the occasional sound effect or sigh of a friend, Karl would log off. Stumbling next to his bedside shrine, he would mumble through the Rosary in Latin, make the signum crucis (Sign of the Cross), and gaze one last time at the icon of Mary before blowing out the candle and passing out in bed.

In lecture once Karl had heard that Bishop Berkeley said that it was more important for Heaven to exist, than for us to be there. Thinking back on it later, he felt his online home was much the same as Berkeley's Heaven. As long as it remained, the foundation of life could not be moved. Even in the darkest hours of work, or the lonely dinners with his elderly warden.

***

But obviously since Karl found himself with 2 packed suitcases and a passport in his trembling hands, the foundation had moved.

Twelve days before the incident in the parking lot, the proverbial Krakatoa occurred for Karl. Sony had declared that they had gone bankrupt, and as a result their games would be offline - possibly indefinately. There were many tears and angry complaints among the guild. Genuine fear gripped these people. After all, their particular gaming group or guild (cleverly called 'zeno's zealots' - it was a philosophy joke Karl had made up) had been around for almost 5 years, and many had been playing -like Karl- for over a decade.

One of the guys in the group had a large house in Virginia, and he promised he'd be able to make his own private local server. If we could all get to his place, we could all play together and things would be just like old times. The strange thing was, none of them knew each other 'irl' (in real life), but the offer still stood, for any willing to brave the trek.

It only took 5 days for Karl to finally crack, it was decided, he would go to meet his guild. When your life falls apart, you have to begin to piece it together somewhere. Karl didn't know about philosophy, or family, but he did know one thing he couldn't live without, his community.

"We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend." - Robert Louis Stevenson

Beginning a Story

2010-02-13T13:13:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to write a story recently, and I just decided to start writing rather than continue planning and failing to actually do it. Here is the terrible rough draft:

The Empty Parking Space

Karl went to work. That's what everyone thought he did, though he got angry about it and sometimes acted melodramatic over something so simple, so everyday. As he drove by the Chevron station he noticed the gas in his tank dangerously low. 'fuck it, if I'm late for work what does it matter' Karl thought. Taking himself far too seriously Karl filled his tank and drove to the warehouse. He looked at the clock. 5:03. Knowing he had 3 minutes left before he would have to deal with a supervisor in order to begin work he shut off the engine and looked in the mirror.

Dead eyes, dirty baseball cap, 3 chins. Karl didn't recognize himself. Perhaps - he wondered, being the philosophical type - perhaps I'm not myself.

'what doth it profit a man if he gaineth the whole world and yet lose his soul?'

At 5:07 Karl was not on the shop floor, he was gone. No one would notice for 10 more minutes. No one would worry for 20. No phone calls would be made for 30. But it didn't matter. Karl was gone, and no one would've predicted where he was headed or why.

With the window down and his arm out catching the breeze he was free. Life and all it's cramp pettiness and mundanity had prepared to make the killing blow, but something happened which Fate itself could not see. Karl had gotten up, he had survived. The empty parking space was the only difference it seemed, but how great the difference was for a man starting over again. It might've been an empty cell

(to be continued)

The Strangers in my Life

2010-02-08T16:29:00.000-08:00

I just finised reading, for my existential philosophy class, a book called "The Stranger" by Albert Camus. Camus was a famous existentialist atheist and this is one of his 'great' works. The one thing I like about the Atheist existentialists (probably the only thing I like about them) is their logical consistency / systematic thinking. For them, there really can be no knowledge beyond your own personal experience. Thus for them, God is dead and irrelevant because to some extent reason is dead. Theorizing about the origins of existence are meaningless, indeed for them, life itself is entirely devoid of meaning.

It's disturbing to me because the story is all about a man who believes in nothing. He doesn't really believe in love, he doesn't care about God or anything metaphysical at all really. He doesn't feel anything when his mother dies, when a woman proposes to him, when he kills a man, or finally when he is condemned to death. Complete and utter apathy. In the novel the chaplains and lawyers can't understand how he has no desire for anything else, just life without any meaning or hope.

Now there are many non-Christian and even some atheistic worldviews that DO posit meaning to one's life or at least existence, and with those people a dialogue is possible. If a man loves his wife or even money one can have a discussion about values and meaning, etc. But if a man is utterly apathetic and detached from everything, there is nothing one can do.

I've met some people at Brock this year that have scared me in this way. They have terrible things happen to them, or be heartbroken, but none of this leads them to any questioning. They don't even hate God or life - which I think is preferable to indifference. They just are, they aren't looking for any answers.

It all reminds me of a character I greatly admire, a man who is the complete antithesis to Camus' 'stranger'. Socrates, the gadfly of Athens who asked the great questions about life, justice, goodness, beauty, etc. He ended up dying, but one of my favourite quotes from him is: "the unexamined life is not worth living". I tend to agree with him, and so I am still having difficulty dealing with people not content to even participate in life. People who just subsist. It reminds me that -as people from St. Augustine to Eli Wiesel have said before - that the opposite of love is not hate, it's apathy. Apathy is like Darkness. It's the absence of anything.

cookie-cutter neo-darwinians/Dawkinites, University Buddhists, Drunken Hedonists, and God-Hating Atheists are all normal figures in university life. But Camus has shown me my greatest fear in his novel. If you want to know what life looks like in post-modern atheism, feel free to read the book. I guarentee you'll be looking for meaning anywhere after it.

I'm Fine With Unpopularity / Peer Pressure

2010-01-23T20:28:00.000-08:00

I don't know how, but tonight I actually learned alot about myself. I think the 3 causes of these changes that I noticed are: 1. Going to Counseling, 2. Accepting Aristotle/Thomas into my brain, 3. Becoming Catholic (I know everyone's sick of me talking about it, but it will be really brief I promise).

Tonight, I was guilted into going to a party I didn't want to go to. It was with a bunch of friends from my Mennonite high school. The birthday boy is an atheist and all night he was provoking conversation about God and/or Atheism. But to my surprise, I didn't take the bait. I just accepted him as he was - not to say I thought he was right or anything, but I felt he needed time and space and that it wasn't worth arguing about right then.

After everyone was finished at the bar we were seated in, they all wanted to go to another bar. I felt that I was done, I'd had a great time, but didn't wan to go to this new bar. Everyone started guilting me and trying to persuade me. The nicer folk tried to make excuses for me ('he probably has to work in the morning'), and one friend even used Religion to taunt me "it's because we aren't Catholic isn't it!" (I enjoyed this ridiculous red-herring, along with people shouting about Ireland). But I thought - what would Aristotle do/what will make Andrew most fulfilled. After pondering this I thought, going home will be the happiest choice. I didn't owe any obligation or responsibility to anyone, I had been nice to everyone, so why did I have to go out afterwards? The short answer is: I didn't. So I just refused, I just said no. I decided not to lie and make excuses, I just said it plainly that I didn't want to go. So I left.

I remember my counselor once saying about depression 'if you're sad, just say "I'm sad, and that's ok, so what?" So tonight I just said "I don't want to be cool, I don't want to go to another bar, and that's ok". It was classic peer pressure - my friend caved and went with everyone else (though I think he was just chasing a skirt). But on the drive home I had an epiphany: I don't need to be cool, I never will be cool, and that's ok. I have facebook quotes from 18th century Tory MP Viscount Henry St. John Bolingbroke, and the medieval philosopher Boethius, that's not cool or normal. I'm 275 pounds give or take some, that's not normal, that's not cool. I have depression that comes and goes. And I'm Catholic - which to cite Evelyn Waugh just makes me completely different from the surrounding world. There's nothing normal or cool about me, and I'm just accepting that. ... Maybe that makes me cool...

The Invisible, Uncreated world of Being, Makes More Sense than the Material World of Becoming

2010-01-21T10:46:00.001-08:00

Plato, Kant, Thomas, Augustine, and Jesus all posited a (post) hellenic worldview whereby behind everything in the physical world, there existed ideas, the non-material, the noumenal, God. Something Other, something not like what we see. From our life experience and our own human being/existence, we know that Being must exist.

Plato posited that there was a realm of the Forms whereby every essence existed in a non-material state. This means that when I use the word "is", the concept is a universal one that people can actually understand. The fact that no one can define "Being" is proof that we use in every language concepts that are beyond our explanation.

Crazily enough one deity is rumored to have said "I am who I am" - interpretted by many as "I am Being", and that for every human being, it is possible to say of this deity "in Him we live and move and breathe and have our being".

If Being (invisible world) is the whiteboard, Becoming (visible material world) is the writing on it. Without Being, Nietzsche rightly said, we can only speak in verbs. There are no nouns. You are not essentially anything, you are an accidental cluster of atoms constantly in flux until you die.... oh, and by the way. You weren't caused.... figure that out.

Accepting that all of existence and your own personal life does not follow logic (because logic necessitates causation which would require an existant non-material 'spiritual' entity to have created time and matter), accepting such a worldview would mean that everything is meaningless, there is no truth, there can be no true emotion between people. There can only be chemistry and biology and physics, and again remember none of those sciences can follow any pattern as this would imply logic or meaning. That is one alternative. It's as I've said objectively illogical (as it would be since logic doesn't exist). It's rather like a paranoid person who says all the world is conspiring against them, and then another person trying to explain to them that this is not true. The more the rational person explains, the more the paranoid person believes they are vindicated. (I stole that one from Chesterton).

For the rest of humanity, that isn't ready to kiss away Love, Meaning, Human Rights, and Reason, there exists another possibility in the invisible world. That's personally why I'd rather be a Platonist, or an Idealist, or an Aristotelian, or a Thomist, or a Jew, or a Deist, or a Muslim, or a Christian, or a Morman, or a worshipper of the Flying Spagetti Monster (provided he was immaterial) than be a materialist.

For the philosopher, Materialism is a joke, the phrase "the material world is the only reality" disproves materialism (language implies reason, which implies non-material principles, more "invisible" reality). Similarly a "God's eye view" of the world that claims God doesn't exist is impossible, as it would be a universal statement in a universe without universal truth! (oft repeated but true nonetheless).

Thus one can say "I don't think the (realm of the Forms/God/Noumenal/Ideal) exists" but the statement must be understood as an illogical claim, based on either emotion or unjustified opinion.

Humanities: 1 , Material Sciences: 0

Beauty and the Beast, Existentialism, and Love

2010-01-16T06:28:00.000-08:00

I was woken by my cat at 6:15 this morning and couldn't go back to sleep. So I brought my bedding into the loft and watched Beauty and the Beast which my brother's wife had left at our house. No not the new remastered edition, the old VHS. I hadn't watched the film since I was a kid when it was released in 1991, and as usual my memory served me quite accurately, though of course some parts were surprises again (I forgot what a douchebag the beast is).

Anyway, the movie while arousing my interest, didn't satisfy my desire to find some deep message. I thought for a while about the admixture of modern pagan and romanticized post-christian humanist values and thought this could only be disney's doing. So I read the original (dubious as any claim to originality a fairy story can have), by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont (http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/beauty.html) it was short, but much better than the film. I liked the Thomistic 'moral' of the story

"come and receive the reward of your judicious choice; you have preferred virtue before either wit or beauty, and deserve to find a person in whom all these qualifications are united." -spoken to Beauty after her choice of the Beast and his transformation

It reminded me of the biblical story of Samuel/God choosing David based on the virtue rather than appearance.

"And it came to pass, when they were come, that he looked on Eliab, and said, Surely the LORD's anointed is before him. But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart." - 1 Samuel 16:6-7 (KJV)

Of course to me, there could be two much more interesting tales which I'll outline here:

1. The Handsomest and the Hag - a story about a handsome man who falls in love with an ugly woman. To be fair to the ladies, the story is usually reversed, and women are still seen as having to be attractive. (For a cartoon Belle was pretty hot). Imagine a reversal of what I like to call the King-of-Queens-syndrome, where we always have the fat ugly guy, and the beautiful girl. I don't know how people (myself included) would react to a story like that.

2. A Tale of Two Uglies - a story about two ugly people who remain ugly and learn to love each other even if they aren't attracted to each other. At the end, when they both realize that they still love each other even if they're both ugly, no transformation takes place, and they live average lives.

Although to the credit of the film, the fairy story, and my other ideas, the one transcendent truth coming through each, is the idea that loving something makes it lovable.

For example, there is a girl in one of my classes at Brock, whom upon first glance was rather ugly. Her ears were big and uneven, her voice squeaky, and she had no chest to speak of. But as I got to know her and listen to her ideas and life, suddenly I found myself attracted to her. Admittedly, not overwhelmingly, and certainly not in a true love type way.

In taking an Existentialism class, this is one thing I am appreciating the most. We put meaning on objects we conceive. When I look at a piece of bread, I conceive it as food. When I look at a consecrated Eucharistic host, I conceive it as the Body and Blood of God. Very divergent meanings for empirically the same accidents/appearances.

This is what love I think is most like - no wonder they talk about love potions and spells - it is deceptive, it doesn't follow appearances. And in this post-Christian culture, it is perhaps the only gift of grace that people have certain faith in. This is a beautiful revelation/reminder to the Christian as the apostle tells us that Love is the greatest (1 Corinthians 13).

and now that I think of it, you could make a great WoW version of the movie with a Tauren male and a Human/Blood Elf female.

What Exists? The Senses and Reason? Thomas, Berkeley, Kant

2010-01-13T07:55:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to figure out whether I believe the world actually exists because I see it and experience it with my senses (Thomas Aquinas/Aristotle/Realism), or whether I think it exists and so it exists, and that the only real thing I can be sure of is that I think, and so existence can only really be linked to thinking. Thus for universal existence, there must be a mind conceiving of the world all at once (thoughts in the mind of God) (Berkeley/Plato/Exaggerated Realism).

To me exaggerated realism leads to neoplatonic and protestant errors in it's emphasis on the mind, whereas empiricism is kind of baseless (why should we trust the senses) and leads to existentialism and postmodernism (which might not be a bad thing, I'm still figuring this out).

Where this is relevant is kind of funny. I was walking around Brock yesterday and I saw a girl bending over with alot of cleavage and I wondered if that was a thought in the mind of God, or a sensical discovery. I am starting to appreciate the physical world of phenomena and senses more and more (not in the way mentioned above per se), but just trying to sit down and actually experience life. To realize my body is ME and that I'm actually travelling at ridiculous speeds on a rock spinning in the universe. Realizing that this life we live now is so important and beautiful, but at the same time - as Pascal says - "the most fragile thing in the world".

The more I read about Immanuel Kant, the more I like the guy, obviously he has some problems, but his theory is that we experience, and then we reason which acts kind of like the final sense (if I've understood him properly). As I watch home movies of me as an infant and realize that I wasn't reasoning yet, I think it shows that Berkeley is out and that it's either Thomas or Kant or someone else I find. Kant said something that I've been thinking about for a while now to see if I agree with it: "to be is to do"

Any Thoughts?

Work Ethic - Why I Like Marxism

2009-12-30T13:27:00.000-08:00

"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

2009-12-18T10:42:00.000-08:00

"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

2009-12-11T18:45:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-05T20:56:00.001-08:00

"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.

2009-11-26T21:13:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-26T12:55:00.000-08:00

“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

2009-11-23T06:55:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-21T20:34:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-20T13:41:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-15T04:18:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-08T09:34:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-06T11:57:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-04T11:40:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-04T11:24:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-03T18:38:00.001-08:00

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

2009-10-21T12:44:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-08T08:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-24T21:59:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-24T05:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-23T08:49:00.000-07:00

(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

2009-09-23T05:02:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-22T21:15:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-15T20:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-15T18:23:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-30T20:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-27T13:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-25T19:51:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-08-25T19:15:00.001-07:00

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.

2009-08-21T08:21:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-21T08:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-10T19:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-10T12:23:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-29T12:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-27T18:37:00.000-07:00

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).

*******
*******

BUT

*******
*******

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

2009-07-04T21:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

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'

2009-06-01T06:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-30T10:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-26T10:16:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-05-26T09:06:00.000-07:00

^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.

2009-05-26T06:43:00.000-07:00

I like this poem.

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

Everyday

2009-05-21T07:31:00.000-07:00

"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?

2009-05-18T16:11:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-09T10:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-07T18:35:00.001-07:00

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.

Unfathomed Sorrow and Music Great and Terrible

2009-04-21T14:06:00.000-07:00

"He governs the flowing of all waters, and the ebbing, the courses of all rivers and the replenishment of springs, the distilling of all dews and rain in every land beneath the sky. In the deep places, He gives thought to music great and terrible; and the echo of that music runs through all the veins of the world in sorrow and in joy; for if joyful is the fountain that rises in the sun, its springs are in the wells of sorrow unfathomed at the foundations of the Earth" - J.R.R. Tolkien in The Silmarillion, describing the god/demi-god of the sea: Ulmo.

"Melkor hated the Sea, for he could not subdue it." - Silmarillion (Melkor was a god who rebelled against the One God ie, the Satan figure).

I like this description of the ocean and the insights Tolkien creates about the divine, that from the same springs joy and unfathomed sorrow arise. A biographer of Tolkien once said that after his mother and father's deaths, for John (Tolkien) the crucifix remained the prime symbol of human existence, and reminded him that no life could occur without suffering, for God to become man it meant suffering, and so even at the moment of greatest victory - Christ's victory on the cross - there always remains sorrow.

It reminds me of a story of a man whose son had died long before him as a young man. The Author wrote that perhaps the scriptures say that no one can look into the face of God and live because he is so full of sorrow. We would see the infinite sadness and die.

For some reason I love that image. It's terrible - I really don't know why - but it reminds me of Jurgen Moltmann's comment that "A God who cannot suffer is poorer than any human being".

Theologically it's untenable, and I don't really believe it, but in my heart I tend to enjoy the anthropormism of such thoughts, they reflect the OT well when it says that "God regretted that he made man" etc. I think that emotion and suffering give us meaning in everyday life.

But I like Tolkien's writing because it gives you a sense of the greatness, the glory, the majesty, the Mysterium Tremendum of the entire Universe and the incomprehensibility of the Almighty, and the pettiness of humanity. About how man always wants to conquer, to fight for significance, but how much bigger the forces are around him.

Tolkien gets me through alot, he's one of my favourite authors, and Roman Catholics.

I love his phrases like "music great and terrible" - it reminds me of listening to classical music on a piano in a thunderstorm, or sitting in a small room in my house late at night listening to CBC radio and an opera or a symphony or a Nocturne.

You can get through life when it is great and terrible, it's monotony that kills us.

I love the term mysterium tremendum it comes from Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy (which I really want to read) but I found a quote from his book that reminds me of all that I've been trying to say, he defines the great mystery as:

"The wholly other, that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible and the familiar, which . . . fills the mind with blank wonder and astonishment."

He says when people think about God, grace, salvation, etc the person,

"feels a something which captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often to the pitch of dizzying intoxication"

That's my spirituality I think, that's why I love the stars, that's why I love reading the Pantheists and Deists and Enlightenment philosophers, that's why I love Tolkien.

"Down below the broad, roaring waves of the sea break against the deep foundation of the rock. But high above the mountain, the sea, and the peaks of rock the eternal ornamentation blooms silently from the dark depths of the universe." - Rudolf Otto

Today and the Serenity Prayer

2009-03-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

I've had quite a few weeks of essays and seminar leading, and other school crap, etc. Today I finished my Essay on Obama and Hillary with less than 40 minutes to spare. It was cutting it close, but now I can rest a little.

This morning I woke up and my first thought was 'today is going to suck'. I then sat there thinking for a while. Why would I choose to live if today is going to suck. I decided that I wasn't going to let today suck, sure it was stressful, but I'm just trying to be happy about doing things. I try to remember that life isn't that bad, and that I will have fun again, but most importantly that even if things do go badly, that's ok, life isn't always fun, it isn't always overly joyous, but at the same time, I can be content, I can be optimistic even if things aren't great.

I've been thinking about school and work tonight and possibly buying the WoW expansion tomorrow to start it up again, but I've been trying to think honestly that if nothing else goes right in life, I'm still going to have to find a way to be happy about today, and maybe I should try to be happy without 'quick fixes' like material possessions, video games, food, etc. Maybe I could just be grateful to be alive and enjoy myself as I am right now. All of this sounds extremely trite and simple, but I'm still trying to just live this way, so for me this was all revolutionary.

I'm not an alcoholic but I still love the serenity prayer:

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;

Enjoying one moment at a time;

Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;

Taking, as He did, this sinful world

as it is, not as I would have it;

Trusting that He will make all things right

if I surrender to His Will;

That I may be reasonably happy in this life

and supremely happy with Him

Forever in the next.

Amen." -Reinhold Niebuhr

I was going to analyze the lines I like, but I realize that every line is awesome. Today I'm thinking about the line "That I may be reasonably happy in this life". Still finding my daily Eudaimonea...

I'm going to have to memorize this, and read some of Niebuhr's stuff.

Jones-in' it for some WoW again...

2009-03-27T06:02:00.000-07:00

Last week in American history seminar a girl next to me started talking about how she was going to play World of Warcraft as soon as she got home and how she was having a LAN with her girlfriends. I felt like I had landed in some gamer's fantasy (girls actually playing WoW - "dry land is not a myth!"). Anyway I proceeded to tell her how long I'd been clean (From world of warcraft) and then my TA joined in saying he quit too, and everyone around the room started to go off about how they had all played WoW and either were still addicted or had cleaned up and moved on. But there's still the faint glimmer in my eye when it's mentioned lol.

I found these screenshots on my computer and I've started to get the old craving again, it's comin' back. I'm also done school in a few weeks and so my grades won't be an issue (my average went from 72 last year when I played WoW to 82). I still have the game Everquest sitting in it's package upstairs - I never even bothered installing it. But these screenshots reminded me of amazing times I had in Azeroth. It's actually kind of strange, because some WoW moments I would almost classify as some of the funnest times of my life. The other day I was thinking about Heaven and then I saw a girl playing WoW infront of me in lecture on her laptop and I thought - it's strange that my view of heaven is that it will be less fun than that game. It's as if I have the Blizzard creators higher than their Creator. So maybe I need to just imagine all the fun and good times I've had and make that sum a glimpse of Heaven.

This picture is from a guild raid that we did on Redrock Ridge where we camped on the roof of this building and I chain lightninged people and NPC's it was absolutely hillarious. Of course, apparently this is now bannable, which is ridiculous, but w/e, just another way blizzard ruins the game.

Aristotle talked about Eudaimonea - fullfillment/happiness, I distinctly remember last summer having put in a hard days work for 8 hours, worked with a friend and had a fun time for most of the day, and then coming home and sitting at the computer desk to play WoW while listening to some classical music. Months later when I read Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics I thought those kind of happy fullfilling moments where nothing is wrong with the world. I also think about sitting looking at the stars, etc. Good ol' Aristotle, I think he'd be a gnome mage. I wonder if I'll start playing again.... Blessed Virgin Mary pray for me!

Integrity and St. Thomas More - A Man For All Seasons

2009-02-13T21:43:00.000-08:00

After finishing an essay last night, I picked up a book my mom gave me to read. It was a play by Robert Bolt called "A Man For All Seasons" and tells the story of Sir/St. Thomas More, Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor who remained a devout Catholic and refused to take the Act of Supremacy (http://www.britainexpress.com/History/tudor/supremacy-henry-text.htm). The oath means admitting that Henry's marriage to Anne Bolynne is valid and that Henry is the Supreme Head of the Church in England. More refuses because the Pope and Christian law state the contrary ('what God has brought together let no man separate', etc).

The whole theme of the play was "everyone has a price" and you gradually see every character get bought off into either submitting to the king and saying the oath, while not really believing it, or betraying their friends for money. In the end the story revolves around Thomas who refuses to say anything at all about the marriage or the Church of England and uses his silence as his legal defence.

It's interesting that the play mentions how even though More is silent, his morality and firm conviction and refusal to sell out, actually bring pain to King Henry VIII and he orders him to be dragged to the tower until he officially committs treason. But More is a master of English law and gets out of it every time until finally with no evidence, they have a trial and sentence him to execution anyway. His own friends who he was helping out in the beginning of the play end up being those who witness against him and sentence him to death. It's interesting in the end because Thomas was so committed to following his conscience that everyone thought he was a fool and should just give in. At one point, his friend the Duke of Norfolk, shows up and displays a list of all his friends and everyone in England who've all signed the Act of Supremacy and Norfolk urges him to sign it, and I love how More responds:

Norfolk: I don't know whether the marriage was lawful or not. But damn it, Thomas look at those names... You know those men! Can't you do what I did, and come with us, for fellowship?

More (moved): And when we stand before God, and you are sent to Paradise for doing according to your conscience, and I am damned for not doing according to mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?

Cranmer: So those of us whose names are there are damned, Sir Thomas?

More: I don't know, Your Grace. I have no window to look into another man's conscience. I condemn no one

I like that More doesn't even play the saintly moral high ground card here, he just says that he refuses to go against his conscience. He says later when his daughter asks why he stays in the Tower of London (jail) instead of just mindlessly signing the Act of Supremacy and coming home. She doesn't understand why he must suffer to be a hero. More responds:

~~~

"If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly, And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all...why then perhaps we must stand fast a little - even at the risk of being heroes" (p 84)

~~~~

In the end of his trial, once he knows it's been rigged, Sir Thomas says:

"What you have hunted me for is not my actions, but the thoughts of my heart. It is a long road you have opened. For first men will disclaim their hearts and presently they will have no hearts. God help the people whose Statesmen walk your road" (p 95)

The movie V for Vendetta describes Integrity as that last inch which no one can take from you. Even though the play isn't literally true, the events are and I hope that I might one day have the conscience and integrity that St. Thomas More had.

I wrote to a friend the other day "I would pray that God lets you know what's right, in my case my conscience has always been clear, I've never had to pray to know right from wrong, I've only had to pray for the grace to do what is right, and rarely have I chosen it". I think the conscience is an immense gift from God and I need to rule myself more by it than I do currently.

For the scene from the Tudors see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP-DYiJfw6g&feature=related

Gratitude and Worry

2009-02-10T20:18:00.000-08:00

Today was supposed to be a day of work, I'd spent Monday as a day of work, but Tuesday is normally my day of rest, my sabbath if you will. But tomorrow (starting in 40min/Wednesday) I have 2 mid-terms which I've studied for an incomplete manner. I've not read all I had to read, and am relying on my memory from lectures alot. I should've studied more, but I didn't and it's almost midnight. I have an essay due friday morning that I was supposed to write most of today...I didn't. I read the sources and wrote 1 of 7 pages. My mid-terms are worth about 20% a piece so they are quite serious, and my essay is a quarter of my mark, and is likewise serious. So academically, in the traditional sense of the word, today was a faillure, and I could suffer greatly tomorrow for today's laxity.

But if I'm honest with myself, I'm not actually worried. Rather, I'm a little worried, but my worry is overwhelmed by gratitude. I'm so grateful today to be alive, indeed now it seems that excepting my occasional overwhelming moments of hatred and despair, the grand theme of my life is gratitude. I got to sleep in today, I went for a run, I got to eat, and read cartoons and watch a bit of a movie I love and rest. Sure my back hurts tremendously as I lay here (I pulled something running), and I'm a bit nervous about tomorrow, but other than those fleeting pains, I am still feeling good. I read today about life in Mississippi in 1964, and about how when blacks went to register to vote they were usually beaten and then charged with disturbing the peace for screaming (I wish I was joking or exaggerating). One black man holding a peaceful protest got shot dead on the lawn infront of the city courthouse by a member of the State Legislature, and no charges were brought against him (and even though no charges were brought against him, the State declared he was acting in clear self-defence). .... my life will never approach that horrible (God willing), and this is today's lesson from history. The lesson that justice and rights are not a given, but that I've been blessed to be in the top 5% of humanity. So I think of the love of God and get on my knees before I go to bed, I cross myself, and thank God for all of his graces. Because above the worries that will bother me day in and day out until I finally breathe my last, I think I should be grateful, rather than troubled.

Dreams

2009-02-08T22:42:00.000-08:00

There's a line in a movie I love that's "let them rest, for in dreams we enter a world entirely our own, let them climb the highest mountain and swim in the deepest ocean" (HP:POA). An apologist once said to me the in the post-modern era man is not content to survive in or conquer the world, but wishes to create a world of his own. I think dreams are a perfect anti-thesis to that statement. From the beginning men have dwelt in the world of their own dreams, and I'm assuming some people have more meaningful dreams than I do (they usually either don't make sense, or terrible things happen in them). I love the story of Joseph and how he interprets dreams to see God's will. In our modern world it would be like reading Tarot cards for Jesus. Absolutely ridiculous and offensive to the standards of today.

Sharks sleep one half of their brain at a time and so they never stop going . .. . I wish I could rest both of my brains, but it's interesting that when we sleep we are sub-conscious, we are actually not there. Though I've insulted people in my sleep and responded to the question "Andrew are you asleep?" with "Yes and I'm arguing with you in a sub-conscious state!(sarcasm)" Am I morally culpable for that? I hope not, but people still blamed me. It's like when I made anti-semetic remarks in my sleep and Lance slept outside our room... craziness. Maybe everyone else is dreaming of wondrous fantasy lands while my dreams are anti-semetic, insane, and horrifying visions. It reminds me of Hamlets Act 3 soliloquay "To die, to sleep, aye theres the rub, for in that sleep, what dreams may come?" (I did that from memory at 2am - hurray). I have the terrible Hamlet dreams.

Maybe thats because I have awesome day dreams. Today I had a great one that was set in Australia...but thats another story. Pleasanter dreams than my normal fare I wish you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9AE8QQfx_E

Guernica: Picasso and the Spanish Civil War

2009-02-06T08:41:00.000-08:00

So I watched something on the history channel a while back about famous bombings where many civilians were killed, and alot of it horrified me. There was one bombing in the Spanish civil war that was terrible. Thousands were killed and even in the rubble they were bombed. I just found out Pablo Picasso painted a work called "Guernica" (which I think was the city's name) about this event and I think it's interesting how for the first time in my life, I've actually understood a painting from the modern period. I think it's a landmark event, and that I only understood it because of that history channel program that was about it which I saw first. I'm an auditory learner.

Things I really want to do today but won't be able to

2009-02-06T08:06:00.000-08:00

I've been wanting to update this blog more frequently but I don't ever seem to have anything insightful or funny to say, so i'd try this. In History we have to examine lists of all the crap people owned and then tell about their life. So if historians of the '2008-(whenever it ends) Depression' they might use this for kids to be forced to read. Plus I just feel better about myself if I blog, because then if I die today at least I know that my thoughts were out there to annoy everyone.

Read or Watch Distopian themed things:
1. Finish reading Orwell's 1984 - everyone keeps reminding me about this classic that I got for my birthday which I really need to read, but am only on like pg 35 or something. The guy is fixing a sink.
2. Start reading Huxley's 'A Brave New World' - my mom gave me a copy of it last week - she had to read in college and was cleaning up and thought I'd like it.
3. Re-watch Logan's Run - I haven't watched that movie in a long time.

Exercise and Meditate (in the Christian and/or Hindu sense not the Neo-spiritual New age way)
1. so I really love the forest, if I was a pagan I'd probably worship the god or goddess of the forest, but fortunately my ancestors killed all of those people so I don't have to do that. But I'd like to go on a walk in the woods and just think about life, and realize that it's so much bigger than me, and that I am a tiny speck in the Universe, and yet am the recipient of divine Caritas(latin word for love/charity - a merging of Agape and Eros)
2. Read some Carl Jung. He's a swiss psychologist who was not a Christian but more of a Hindu living in a Christian world (a bit like Ghandi?) and I was just reading a summary of his ideas the other day and about how we might all be like islands thinking we are all unconnected but really under the surface we are. some atman-y word or something from Hinduism (my favourite wrong religion). I'd also like to read his commentaries on Christ's life or Revelation, or read about how he talks about the power of symbols. I've become a firm believer that symbols are VERY important and that they give people meaning (the cross or the trinity for me).
3. Go for a run and instantly feel like I'm being proactive in delaying my inevitable death.

Friends or Family
1. More than anything on this list, I would love to hang out with my brothers today, I miss them alot, and I think if I found out that this afternoon I would be chilling with Jer in Smithers, BC, or that the three of us were gonna play Goldeneye, I think if I knew that, my life would be radically happier.
2. I always enjoy a friday night with Dan, Kish, Steve, Roberts, Rowan, James, or others and just kick back and watch some crap movie and drink some vodka. That'd be entertaining as well.

Marriage

2009-02-04T20:09:00.000-08:00

As a kid and a teenager I always assumed I'd get married, but in the last year I've actually for the first time thought about the probability that I will be single or celibate. I have to say that marriage doesn't seem as amazing in many ways as it used to. Everytime I thought about marriage in the past the selling points were always 'sex' and 'someone either bringing in money or taking care of your stuff'. Now it's just amazing to think of someone actually sticking around with you for your whole life. If anyone was ever stupid or crazy enough to want to marry me, I'd know they were probably the wrong person.

When you get married to someone it's not like things necessarily get better, you get all their baggage, they get all your baggage, and you're both weighed down with each other's problems, but you also get each other's strengths. I was thinking about this today when my friend Jewey was describing how to stack up World of Warcraft Arena teams and how you want to usually have a Tank and a Healer, or a DPS and a hybrid healer. It's strange to think about marriage as an arena team. I think that so many marriages fail because people marry someone exactly like themselves... and unless they're both shamans or paladins, it's not going to work.

Yep, that's Holy Matrimony in the land of Azeroth and real life.

groaning spirits

2009-01-28T18:19:00.000-08:00

"In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words with out a heart." - John Bunyan

"The best prayers have often more groans than words." - John Bunyan

I think these two might be the same passage but translated from middle english differently.

"the moment we get tired in the waiting, God's Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don't know how or what to pray, it doesn't matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That's why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good. " - Romans 8:26-28 The Message/Eugene Peterson

Two shocking things first, 1. Yes I actually did use the Message - my perenial enemy, but sometimes Peterson just does a better job. and 2. I'm actually updating this blog again, normally I only do it when I feel really depressed.

These 2 passages really hit me tonight. Bunyan's idea which I find a commentary on Romans, that sometimes the groaning of our hearts and spirit are prayers to God.

Tonight a friend called me who I love a great deal, like one of my top friends in the world who I would die for, and as I thought about how much I missed them my heart groaned in prayer. I feel like my spirit prayed to the Spirit of the Lord that I really want to see them again. It was a soul-longing (to use J.K. Rowling's phrase). And so tonight I'm reading and praying and just realizing how much God loves us and is intimately connected to us, that when our hearts groan, he's the first to hear it.

I love the Holy Spirit, he's cool.

Goodbye Nietzsche

2009-01-06T20:46:00.000-08:00

The above pictured man is the kind hearted, G.K. Chesterton, Genius Extraordinaire, Defender of Christian Orthodoxy.

This is the super-fucked up Friedrich Nietzsche - The Hero of the Nazis, and all around Douchebag, scum of the earth.

I was reading "Orthodoxy" by G.K. Chesterton today and it is AMAZING. He completely refutes the ideas of Nietzsche. I only wish someone would've told me about him sooner. I've been trying to come up with these arguments myself because I didn't think anyone else out-thought him in print at least. Wow, good freakin job G.K.

"Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words: as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard, fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, “beyond good and evil,” because he had not the courage to say, “more good than good and evil,” or, “more evil than good and evil.” Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, “the purer man,” or “the happier man,” or “the sadder man,” for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says “the upper man,” or “over man,” a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers. Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce. And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists, who talk about things being “higher,” do not know either." - Chesterton in Orthodoxy

He is destroying Nietzsche's claim that he is himself beyond this Christian view of good and evil, when Nietzche is really only establishing his own system of good and evil which he likes more. Every value he advances has no inherent value. Lust, violence, and the will to power are Nietzsche's ideal characteristics. But Why? Nietzsche isn't offering us anything new about humanity he's just trying to shock us. Amen Chesterton. Did I mention Chesterton was a Catholic? Booyah!

Enjoying the Day

2009-01-01T10:43:00.000-08:00

I'm just sitting here enjoying the day and celebrating my liberty. I have another 10 hours or so in the day and I'm doing well. I'm reading all about Hitler and the Third Reich and the history of Germany etc because I've never read about it alot and never found it super interesting, but it really is. Then I think I'll put on some pajamas when everyone leaves and read some Roman History by Gibbon. I might watch the Empire Strikes Back or a Bond film, but I will enjoy my day and decide not to focus on anything negative. Praise the Lord.

This Last Year

2008-12-31T22:59:00.000-08:00

"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

2008-12-27T05:30:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-21T20:42:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-19T11:39:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-18T13:23:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-13T13:38:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-12T07:33:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-12T06:53:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-04T18:42:00.000-08:00

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!!!!

2008-12-02T07:55:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-01T20:33:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-01T10:32:00.000-08:00

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.

Bittersweet Symphony

2008-11-28T22:11:00.000-08:00

So tonight my friends and I went to see the Rick Mercer Report taped and it was really hillarious. We had alot of fun and we went out to the Old Spaghetti Factory and rode the go train. It was a nice break after writing 57 pages of essays this semester. We basically just made gay jokes, talked about women, and ate. It was fun. It was much needed.

I was making small talk with the CBC elevator girl (who I thought was attractive and probably my age) but I remember looking around Toronto and thinking there are a ton of people here...If I spent my whole life just trying to get to know each person I would fail at it. That actually gave me some hope in that I realize that there are lots of people in the world and that I will find new friends.

I realized how depressing this blog was and figured I needed to write about something happy. For me though life is an overwhelmingly long and sad process and happiness is those beautiful moments in between when everything seems ok. I was driving home listening to "Bittersweet Symphony" by the Verve and that was really good, I had my hand out of my window and just felt the night air and heard "It's a bittersweet symphony that's life". Very true.

Lost Friend

2008-11-27T13:12:00.000-08:00

I've had to say goodbye to Old Friends alot. England was terrible for that, constantly saying goodbye to people I loved immensely. I don't miss that part at all (plus I still kind of live it). ....this is going to sound so gay.... oh well, maybe it will garner some attention then....Today I went through my facebook friends and I found a guy I'd been friends with in Grade School. We had a ton of fun. He was one of those people that you just really want to be around and try really hard to impress or just hang out with as much as possible. We went to different high schools though so we never saw each other much after that. And in all honesty if I was as big a dick back then as I am now I can see why most people would happily say goodbye to me.

But man I missed him today. Like if I could do anything tonight it would be just to go to his place and have coffee and talk about life. I really want to catch up and try to restore things. I know it's idiotic as I haven't known the guy for about 6 years. But today I was basking in the infinite sadness of losing a friend. I'll probably never get to know him again, I know tragic things have happened in his life that I wasn't there for. I didn't help him through any of it. I mean I wasn't really obligated as I hadn't seen him in years, but I wish I could have, I should have done something.

I sent him a facebook message today, I've tried it before and he never responded. It figures really. Happens alot to me. If I got a creepily personal message from someone at 4am that I hadn't seen in months or years, I'd be scared too. Actually let me correct that - a normal person would be scared. I would almost cry with joy that someone was thinking of me at 4am.

I have barely enough faith for myself right now but I'm going to pray for him, and maybe in some infinitely small way I could help him. Man if God were really my dad I would just ask him if he could arrange something between us (now I'm really starting to sound Gay).

God I miss that guy, and the worst part is that it seems like nothing could ever fix things. It's not like anything terrible transpired it was just time and distance, but I'm starting to see that a broken friendship is a terrible thing. It's so bad that it almost makes it not worth having friends.

Albert Schweitzer once said "Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory". In some ways I think he is right in that happiness is fleeting and most of life sucks but we just have to move on. Maybe I should just take his advice, I meant he won the Nobel Peace prize....but he was also a Lutheran... damn I wish I was a Lutheran...

3am Movie

2008-11-23T03:25:00.000-08:00

I awoke at 3am thinking initially it was much later. My body was awake and I had a terrible taste in my mouth. So I threw on pajamas and walked downstairs to get a glass of orange juice. I felt a little better. I was bored so I poured myself a bowl of cherios and went into the loft. I watched a scene of the movie Falling Down with Michael Douglas. It is a funny / good movie, but I really wasn't in the mood. There's alot of porn on at 3am even on normal channels but it didn't seem right to watch, as in a few hours I'd be standing at the front of a Church ready to be 'accepted' (whatever that means)..

So I turned on the movie American Beauty as it was still near the beginning. I'd never seen it before, I just knew that I wasn't allowed to watch it as a kid because it had nakedness - the most shameful and affronting thing to God known to humankind. But I knew it'd be edited for Tv, so it'd be a good choice.

I figured I'd drift off to sleep as I watched it because it was 3am after all and Kevin Spacey is the most boring guy in the world. But as it turned out I became enthralled with it, and I really started to get into the story. It won oscars for a reason apparently, and really showed a funny glimpse of American life. I feel most like the dad in that movie, I don't know why really, but I think it is his brutal honesty and the fact that he never hurts anyone and is generally a weak character.

I was even shocked by the ending and the whole theme of latent homosexuality in homophobics, and about the fact that life should never be normal. There was a repeated line in the movie, 'the worst thing in the world is to be ordinary'. hmm. I'm not sure I've had enough time to reflect on the philosophy of that statement, so I won't make a judgment call yet.

There was a scene where this loser guy goes to the girl's (who is supposed to be loser-ish but I thought she was really quite attractive) house and says 'if I told you I had to leave tonight would you come with me' and it was amazing how a person's heart stirs at that sort of thing. There is something so absolutely alluring about just running away from all of our problems and going somewhere on a whim. It resonates with the soul.

In any case, I'm still sitting hare at 6:35 in the loft thinking about the movie which was really well done, and thinking about what my life should be like. In world religions we heard a quote from a Rabbi named Josiah who said "When I die, God will not say to me, "Why weren't you Moses?". He will say to me, "Why weren't you, Josiah?"'.

.... (these dot dot dots are here to imply time for reflection)

I thought it was a very poignant lesson which tied in with the movie. It's one of those times that you know is significant even if you can't exactly say why or how.

Lothlorien

2008-11-22T06:43:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Lord of the Rings again and I just came to this passage I love:

Merry: "if I had known what the world outside was like, I don't think I should have had the heart to leave it.

Haldir: Not even to see fair Lothlorien? The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with with grief, it grows perhaps the greater. Some there are among us who sing that the Shadow will draw back, and peace shall come again. Yet I do not believe that the world about us will ever again be as it was of old, or the light of the Sun as it was aforetime. For the Elves, I fear, it will prove at best a truce, in which they may pass to the Sea unhindered and leave the Middle-earth for ever. Alas for Lothlorien that I love! It would be a poor life in a land where no mallorn grew. But if there are mallorn-trees beyond the Great Sea, none have reported it."

Peace/Pax/Shalom

2008-11-21T12:40:00.000-08:00

Pax Tecum were the words heard and spoke by Catholic Christians throughout the middle ages and all the way until Vatican II in the 60's. Peace be with you. Jews say Shalom, and Muslims say Salaam Allah - the peace of God.

It is an ancient greeting in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For the Jews it was tied to Shalom, the concept or blessing to have peace in every area of your life. Peace in your relationships with people, peace with God, and peace with the Earth. Today I felt a few moments of great peace. Life has been very stressful and very up and down. (Just look at the previous post written just over 12 hours ago). I found this video on youtube that makes me feel peaceful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP6CGbeX14A - it's a guy playing on bass immaculately, one of my favourite pieces of music (yes it's from Zelda) here's the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xCp6ngH_mQ

After a stressful day I like to listen to these songs or classical pieces and close my eyes and just forget everything and be lost in the music. I think that's what I understand Nirvana to be in Buddhism and Moksha in Hinduism. It's just peaceful. I'm glad Jesus said "My peace I give you". Because I need peace and a sense of shalom and pax in my life. I have to work soon, but I'm just taking a little while to relax and have peace.

Pax Tecum Mii Amicum - Peace be with you my friends.

Terrible

2008-11-20T23:13:00.000-08:00

It seems like no power in earth or heaven can fix what is broken inside of me. I don't really understand it anymore. I am so incredibly alone. By the way, if you're alone don't listen to "How To Save A Life" by the Fray...it doesn't help.

I have this deep feeling that life will continue to only find meaning in small struggles and that arbitrarily progressing and writing papers and stressing about driving tests and dentists is the only thing that gives me a purpose at all. I've prayed so much, I prayed most of my shift at work tonight. I feel like someone has died, I feel like my life is a funeral procession. I looked at houses in the newspaper tonight on break at work and realized that I will never own a house, I will never be married, or have children (unless I get really sad and lonely and adopt a kid and ruin his or her life as well).

I have a few options I was thinking over as I've talked to all my Christian friends who seem to be doing ok (by the way in a twist of fate after enduring all of the hatred and deciding to convert, it seems God won't grant me the joy of religion either, I find myself HATING Catholicism.). And all my friends are much more pure than I am, they can read the bible and live it. I can only listen to it and either not enjoy it, live it, or believe it. Damn liberal theologians like Marcus Borg for trying to destroy my faith which was all I had left.

Anyway, once again I find myself sitting in the east wing of Cottrill manor in my bed waiting to fall asleep. As Hamlet once said (quoting from memory) "to die, to sleep, perchance to dream, ay there's the rub, for in that sleep, what dreams may come?"

There is so much wrong with me I have no idea what to do... a friend called me and told me about all of his accomplishments which were encouraging and done in a good spirit, but in the end I just realized that I am not like him. I am reprobate, unregenerate, alone. My greatest wish is to some day sit reading this with my life in order shocked and horrified that I'd ever write such a thing and make it public no less. But it doesn't matter, no one reads it anyway, and even if they do, what do you say to the person who's memorized the answers they've given him for years?

Prayer

2008-11-13T07:18:00.000-08:00

I should be writing on my theology blog if it's about God or Religion, but I post on here because I know nobody reads it and I can get out my really personal thoughts.

2 days ago a friend asked me to pray for her on the phone. I don't remember how to pray to God the right way anymore. I don't even know if I believe in prayer. I have all the arguments and logically I can accept it, it's just personally I don't know if I think God even likes me, I've abused our friendship too much. (Now's where protestants will attack me) But I've been praying to the saints alot recently. I mean I believe they're going to him anyway, but it just seems easier to talk to a dead person than a deity. So I've been praying to Our Lady in latin, I feel like a medieval peasant so it just seemed right.

Ave Maria, Gratia Plena, Dominus Tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui Iesus. Sancte Maria, Mater Dei, Ora pro nobis pecatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis, nostrae.

I'm terrified about so much in life right now, I have so many essays - I don't know how I'm going to get through it. I gave up World of Warcraft. I have a drivers test that i'm scared about too. I'm so angry at life in general, I hate it, I hate me. I feel so incredibly weak and scared about everything.

I was listening to the radio yesterday night and heard the story of Abraham and Jehovah Jireh - the Lord will provide. I just hope he provides me with some help or angels or something and with a hope and reason for living (and again if someone does read this, you probably know that i'm too cowardly to commit suicide, I'd just never do that). But I would like my life to mean more than struggling to survive, please those around me, be thin, and get a piece of paper (history degree).

Chris Hedges

2008-11-03T11:19:00.000-08:00

Chris Hedges is smart, he has alot of good points.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdl_xNMTYvs

Self-Loathing

2008-11-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

Obese comes from the Mid-17th century Latin obesus , past participle of assumed obedere "eat until overweight" according to my dictionary.

I am one of the random Canadian statistics of Obese people who are apparently making up a huge portion of the population (though I don't really see them anywhere). I was thinking about this -as always- today at Brock. No one likes fat people. It's just a general premise in the world. Sure Kevin James or Chris Farley maybe not, but the vast majority of them, people hate. I don't particularly like seeing them either, even though I'm one of them.

It reminded me of a text we were reading in history class by Thomas Jefferson - slaveowner, racist extraordinaire, and co-founder of the United States. He writes: The negroes wish they were white as it is universally known that we are superior, even as the orangutang would prefer to be a negro. - and other things like that. It's interesting that many times people would really hate themselves today and all through history.

St. Paul says according to old Wycliffe's reckoning that "no man hated ever his own flesh, but nourisheth and fostereth it, as [and] Christ doeth the church." (Eph 5.29). But I got news for you St. Paul, I hated mine own flesh.

Then I realized, even God hates fat people, according to old Ezekiel 34:16 "I will destroy the fat...I will feed them with judgement" (he uses such great puns when he plans on destroying someone, it's like Bond one-liners)

So basically it's actually a virtue for me to hate myself. I can't believe how utterly detestable to every principle established by human or divine law. I was trying to think of things religions have in common today in lecture and I thought, all of them together could point to me and say 'this man has wasted his life - don't be like him'. That would certainly be an interesting proposal.

I genuinely drag everyone down, I am the dead weight of society. The other night I watched "the beach" with Leonardo Dicaprio or however you spell his name. Anyway, there's a scene where a guy gets bit by a shark and he keeps getting more sick and is coughing all night etc, and so the people just drag him out into the middle of the woods and leave him for dead. Then they all go back to their commune and play beach volleyball and have a fun day. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I am that shark attacked guy.

It's no one's fault but my own after all. I mean I started out in this life and made bad choices, and then God saved me at Capernwray from alot more and by the end I was on my way back to health and wealth, but then I screwed it all up by my own choices. So here I am today at 1:43 PM on November the third. I'm laying in bed, barely fitting into my clothing. I finished an essay last week (twice - had to rewrite it) and now I have 4 more due that I haven't started.

What's the point in trying to go on. I can already predict the future. I will struggle through a stress filled month, live in more sin, eat more doritos, play more world of warcraft, and then find myself in another state of severe depression 20 pounds heavier and even more hopeless than before. Life will continue to spiral downwards until I actually do have a heart attack or something and finally die, and if I'm lucky that will be it, and I'll have peace and quiet and rest from my own iniquity.

It would take a miracle on the scale of the Resurrection of Christ for life to turn out in my favour.

World of Warcraft

2008-10-27T06:05:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been playing WoW again. There are infinitely better things to do with my time, like exercise or ministry or schoolwork. But I just got to the point where I could no longer find happiness in life, I could find joy in Christianity, but not a fun kind of happiness. So I started once more. I've played probably like 5 characters so far, I can never pick just one. I'm tempted on many days to just pick one and delete the rest, even though i've literally spend weeks ingame on some of them. I think my 61 Priest has like 16 days of playtime. I'm now restarting with a blood-elf hunter.

But why would I play Wow? what makes it different. Here are some answers, not all of them are good or healthy, but they're just thoughts.

Escapism - I'm so tired of life and the stresses that I've lived with for so long, that at times I just need to escape. This is the reason many people drink or use drugs, and in many ways those are more socially acceptable, but Mennonite and Baptist backgrounds die hard and I doubt I'll ever use either.

New Reality - The pre-modern man struggled to survive in the world, the modern man discovered and conquered the world, and the post-modern man invents his own world. Given these 3 options I would choose the modern world. I would love to explore and discover things, but i'd like to be in shape as well. My brother Jeremy is to me the hero of this modern period, out in the wilderness and on the edge of civilization, if I had it in me, I'd like to do the same thing.

In WoW I can enjoy the best of Post-Modernity. The world of warcraft is full of new and exciting places to see and things to do, I can find my own friends from all around the world and have a ton of fun living as a brave new explorer in a brave new world.

Pure Fun - at the end of the week, I can usually (this week excluded) just jump on and have a ton of fun. Last night is an example, I just jumped on my Shaman and rode around on my wolf through an Alliance (enemy) area, and I found other low level players and would kill them in one shot and then dance on their corpses and ride away. This is entertainment for me.

I like playing games, and as I said it is a horrifying thought that I have spent this much time in a fake world doing essentially meaningless things, but when faced with the reality of life that to have fun in this world I would have to diet, exercise, face all of my problems, try alot harder, pass my G test (which I'm still ignoring) and go into new and scary situations. OR I could jump on a game and get almost all of the same enjoyment. Sloth is a sin, but it is the reality of my life, and thus I play World of Warcraft.

WoW

2008-10-22T04:14:00.001-07:00

I'm playing my 61 priest and 50 shaman again...

Alone

2008-09-06T07:55:00.000-07:00

I took myself out to see "The Dark Knight" again the other day. I don't think most normal people go out to movies by themselves. I drove home without the radio on, not wanting to listen to Joyce Meyer talk about 'the flesh', and also feeling that solitude was what the occassion called for. It only took 14 minutes to drive home, but it felt like an eternity, it felt like being God watching evolution take place, knowing that in some small way things were progressing, but also knowing that it would be a long time before I would have anyone to talk to.

I guess the dogma of the Trinity kind of eliminates my 'lonely God' model, maybe if I functioned in a Trinity my whole life would be an outpouring of love as well.

I was at work the other night and they gave us even more stupid uniforms, weird red hats that look like the kind Anglican Seminarians wear. I saw a girl I worked with who looked really cute, smiling and laughing and talking about going to a party. I am not like that person. I don't go to parties. Post-Modern Fun, and I seem to have a philosophical/moral difference, and can't quite see eye to eye on principle. So once again I felt by myself, not looking particularly cute in my red hat, just looking as one co-worker who hates me described it 'as a big cherry'.

I've always conceived of God deistically in a way, that he was huge and utterly different than us, it was somehow influenced by Reformed theology that nothing I could do would appease him (sola fide) and thus Catholicism is offering new challenges to me. It teaches more firmly the dogma of the Incarnation, the idea that God "pitched his tent with men". It teaches an ongoing sacrifice for sins in a sense and that we can participate -as the body of Christ- in the work of the cross by suffering. It is scarier to think in that way, that as Gladiator says "what we do in life, echoes in eternity". Atheism is the cowardly faith really, it's much easier to believe we are a pleasant mistake. My personal phrase or philosophy used to be "don't worry, you are to insignificant to do anything really terrible". So maybe loneliness is a great comfort and a great despair.

I try to think of a bible verse everyday for work to meditate on and think about all day.

"God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity/nature" (Wisdom of Solomon 2:23)

Weak

2008-08-26T15:08:00.000-07:00

My teeth are terrible. With no exageration I probably have gum disease and gingevitis. I have to go to the dentist tomorrow for the first time in 2 years. Not since Grade 12 before graduating. I am terrified. . .

This is when I realize how weak I am. How I am in complete pain right now because of the pain in my mouth (from flossing). I am reduced to silence and fear. If I am amazed by any of my abilities, it is my ability for pride in a way. I've not really ever been proud as in feeling great or better than others, but when I realize my sheer weakness, it's amazing that I ever feel strong in any way. All it takes is a minor affliction and I'm back to fear and trembling..

Money

2008-08-25T14:20:00.000-07:00

St. Paul writes to his padawan / bishop in training St. Timothy that "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil". Today I had to listen to parents argue about money. I realized as well today that I hate money. People at Capernwray were so taken aback when I told them my dad owned a plane and that we were rich that they thought I was lying. Probably because I don't spend much money, and I've never viewed money as mine, since my parents can take it whenever they want with no questions asked.

So basically I realized again that the monastic life is strangely and in some ways even more appealing. I truly hope that God will strike me dead before I have to argue with someone I love about money. I have to leave for work in ten minutes to earn money. I don't care about my money, it will all go to school, which will lead to nothing, it's so meaningless and traps so many people. In my principles - not my everyday life example - I believe it is better to be homeless. I believe the bible says 'blessed are the poor', that's a very old Christian virtue which has been lost by the Sodom and Gommorah in which we live (remember the sin of Sodom was neglected for the poor according to Ezekiel).

I saw "Into the Wild" the other day, I'd read the book years ago. I always liked when he burned all the money he had. I've wanted to do that. It is the ultimate sign of faith I think, and of worldly renounciation. The Government controls so much, and in our idolization (if not worship) of money, I wonder if the greatest incidences of Caesaro-Papism are not left in the pages of the East-West schism but are in our Post-Modern world.

God help us all from this root of money which so easily ensnares the world.

Weight

2008-08-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

Our Lord once said "come to me all who are heavy burdened and I will give ye rest" (or something to that effect, somewhere around Matthew 11:28). Lately things seem so heavy. I've gained huge amounts of weight since Capernwray and even since last year. I'm 270 pounds. That is downright disgusting, sometimes before I eat, I pray "Father forgive me for what I am about to do" as I make the signum crucis.

Sin also weighs down. I confess my sins to God, but I am constantly haunted by Jn 20:23 and know that I may very likely remain in mortal sin, and the threat of eternal damnation. I try to cry alot, remembering St. Ambrose quote about the 2 regenerating baptisms, that of water, and that of tears (contrition).

I read the promises of Scripture (rom 6:4) I think of St. Paul's rejoicing that we have the Spirit which will save us and lead us into new life, but I feel the dead weight, the death of sin, which haunts me at every turn. The utter inability to do what is good, to love God, to love my neighbour. I often wonder if I am the only student of theology who might think he is damned, even though he believes all the right things, and can extoll and exposit the Word of God and lead others in the path he is too weak to walk himself.

Again the weight of it all carries me down. I know all the verses, I know the theology of liberation, I know about the Cross and the Resurrection, but life seems so far. I feel like a ship stuck on a rock a few miles from a lighthouse, I tell the passing vessels where the light is, I know where the light is, and I want to go where the light is, except I can't, I'm weighed down to much to sail.

I am a great coward. It appears so easy to live right, and it is the just requirement of all who bear the name of Christian. But it seems I am too unregenerate, too burdened, too lazy, too fat, and in truth, alone.

abnormal

2008-07-26T20:35:00.000-07:00

I am very abnormal. I was offered a job for more money at a better place for more hours today, but I really don't want to take it. Why? who on earth would want to work at Sobeys. ... I guess, me, would be the answer. I am afraid of almost everything, and I dislike change. I just try to exist with as little struggle as possible. I hate work, and the reason I hate it is because it's unpredictable. But now Sobeys is predictable and I want to stay there. I am comfortable, and I have enough money, and I have some friends there. But the person who offered me the job is going to be pissed.

Today was one of those days that, if suicide wasn't a mortal sin, I would totally drive my car into the lake or jump off Brock tower or something. Wow I hate my life right now. What an ungrateful bastard I am.

I'm Not Sick But I'm Not Well

2008-07-07T12:03:00.001-07:00

I actually found a song with meaningful lyrics and here they are. The song is by Harvey Danger, and the song is called "Flagpole Sitta". I like it because it reminds me of Total Depravity and that inside we really are pretty fucked up. I also think it's interesting about how he sings he's in Hell just in this life. I feel like that all the time. Lots of the lyrics are just stupid punk crap, but some of them are really good.

I had, I was in them
I was looking into the mirror
To see a little bit clearer
The rottenness and evil in me

Fingertips have memories
Mine can't forget the curves of your body
And when I feel a bit naughty
I run it up the flagpole and see who salutes(but no one ever does)

I'm not sick but I'm not well
And I'm so hot cause I'm in hell

Been around the world and found
That only stupid people are breeding
The cretons cloning and feeding
And I don't even own a tv
Put me in the hospital for nerves
And then they had to commit me
You told them all I was crazy
They cut off my legs now I'm an amputee, goddamn you

I'm not sick but I'm not well
And I'm so hot cause i'm in hell
I'm not sick but I'm not well
And it's a sin to live so well

I wanna publish zines
And rage against machines
I wanna pierce my tongue
It doesn't hurt, it feels fine
The trivial sublime

I'd like to turn off time
And kill my mind
You kill my mind

Paranoia paranoia
Everybody's coming to get me
Just say you never met me
Im running under ground with the moles(Diggin big holes)
Hear the voices in my head
I swear to god it sounds like they're snoring
But if you're bored then you're boring
The agony and the irony, they're killing me

I'm not sick but I'm not well
And I'm so hot cause I'm in hell
I'm not sick but I'm not well
And it's a sin to live so well

I love the lyric "and it's a sin to live so well" I feel like that all the time. Last night I was thinking, today 28 000 children starved to death, probably almost a hundred thousand people died, and I'm still alive. How utterly ungrateful. There either is a profoundly important reason we're all alive, each of us, or the world really is going to Hell in a handbasket.