Inability to Cope

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.

He knows too much.

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

Swine Flu and Latin Loneliness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew remanet solus. *** Alone, Andrew remains

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

Music as a Cure

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

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

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

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

I feel better already.

Loneliness & Despair on a Tuesday Night

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

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

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

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

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

God help me.

Latin, The Girl, and the Trip That Never Is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domine misere mei.

Filling the Void with Rum, Porn, and Warcraft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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