I'm Fine With Unpopularity / Peer Pressure

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...

Some Boethius

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

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

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

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

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

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