Remains of the day

So this is what a dead, lonely apartment looks like.

I have been meaning to post about some incredible and some not so incredible things that have been happening. But all of that changed this weekend when my apartment flooded.  Flooded with sewage water.

I am now homeless and living at a friend's place. It will be a month before the work is finished.

Looks like I will be moving.

So I am taking a creative writing class

And it is so draining.

Honestly, it's just really intense to write short exercises amongst other creative people, have to listen to the exercises, and then do the whole process over again for nearly three hours.  Exhausting.

TOW: Living the dream

Yesterday is but today's memory, and tomorrow is today's dream.
-Khalil Gibran 


What does it mean to have a dream?  What if you didn't have any?

I have been lucky enough to accomplish many of my dreams.  I have a career path, and a great job with great coworkers.  I have an enormous amount of education, and I have surrounded myself with good-hearted people.  Pretty lucky, I am!  =)

But luck did get me to where I am today, hard work did.  I worked hard for most things I have in my life, and made good use of opportunities presented to me.  I made my own luck, and circumstances often paid off for me.  I am goal-oriented, and darn it, I accomplish goals on a regular basis!  Go me!

But sometimes you can't help but wonder…what's next?  I'm an adult, I've made my way, now what?  Where's the checklist? *frantic searching*

It was with my grandfather's death that my perspective changed.  I thought of all the things my grandfather accomplished, and while I was sitting near his bedside, I contemplated that most of those things didn't happen while he was 'checking things off a list' or 'being goal-oriented.'  It wasn't his goal to meet Charles Schultz, and have him be a personal friend.  That just sort of 'happened' as he was living the life he wanted live, playing hockey and travelling through the States.  And, universally, most of the things that happen to us in life 'just sort of happen' and we don't plan them.  Scary thought for someone like me, who needed that road-map!

Sometimes we accomplish our dreams, our goals.  That can leave us feeling empty because we don't always have something to replace that dream with.  And what we don't realize is that we're not supposed to get a new goal or a new dream immediately.  We're supposed to live our life.  And the beauty of life is in living our dreams, not accomplishing them.  We should all hope to sustain a feeling of happiness in our day-to-day lives because 'getting somewhere' in life doesn't mean each destination is a rest stop to somewhere else.  It means that we go to a destination to be there. We have dreams so that we can live them, not so we can constantly searching for something else, something so-called better.

So live your dreams.  It's a dream worth having.



 

Time is precious

I have been thinking about a lot of things this week…when i get the chance, I might put them in writing.

I am taking a creative writing class, and I might post some of my pieces here.

On Tuesday, my grandfather died

A lot of my family posted on Facebook about my grandfather, photos, some of his humour and mannerisms, and there was an outpouring of public support from friends and family.  I couldn't really bring myself to read the comments, or even some of the things that my family members posted.  I was upset at the time...and being away from family doesn't make it easier....it makes it harder.  And I can't be there....because the airport in Toronto has shut down because of weather related problems.  I called my dad, my grandmother....they understand...but it doesn't make it easier.  I want so much to be with them, to give my dad a big hug, to sit with my grandmother when she cries, to give her my shoulder if it will help, to smile if it will ease the pain.

I have been very lucky to have grown up with not two, but three amazing parents who love me and want me to grow up to be an upstanding individual.  I have been born into a family of love, a family of people who are not drug addicts, gambling addicts, in jail, or otherwise fallen into the various social pits of society, never to escape.  I come from a family of winners.  I look forward to seeing our families succeed and support each other as we grow up into the future.  

I am now an adult; I am no longer blind to the weights that adults bear during difficult times.  Difficulties faced in happiness, in illness, in misunderstandings...in the passing of missed opportunities, of ones that are missed.  Now is one of those times. I miss my grandfather, because he was family, and I loved him.  I wish I had more words, more words that could be something, something that means something to me.

My dad and my grandmother displayed the kind of strength I hope one day I might have.  The strength to love when love is hard, the strength to persevere, especially when not all is right.  It is easy to be kind when life is easy.  It is not easy to be kind when life is cruel, and circumstances are final.  It is hard to believe in God, to love what is good and right and true when the people you love are constantly in a world where nothing seems good, right or true.  Where every light is but a little dimmer, squandered in the face of consequences of living, and being born to die again.  In those kind of days, happiness and goodness only come up for air to show that they still exist, not that they have come to stay for a season.  They only appear as a contrast to the difficult times ahead.  The difficult times faced by those who choose love.  To love and be loved.  To lose.  But to gain again, as the cycle of life continues.  And happiness can begin again. 


My grandfather and I share a name.  Both a family name and his first name.  I have always felt strongly connected to him as the grandchild to carry on his name, though he was a man of few words.  He and I rarely spoke, though we did spend time together....and if we did speak, unsurprisingly, it was me doing most of the talking. I was grateful....grateful for the time I was able to spend with him as a teenager, as a young adult.  I know that not everyone gets to know their family.  I know that my grandfather and I were very different...but I loved him all the same.  And I know he was surrounded by people who loved him as he passed.  And I am thankful to still have those amazing, caring people in my life.

TOW: Stages

Every life has stages.

When I was younger, I was lucky enough that I got to live the stages of my life the way I wanted.  I had both time and energy to do the things that interested me.  I got to have extracurriculars, I never worried about food, or about not having things kids should have at my stage of life.  In other words, I had everything.

Now, at 30, things are different.  My stages of life don't match other people's.  And none of us really are on the same 'path.'  Sometimes they just intersect.

It was easy in high school....in university.  You found people like you, and even if they weren't the same, they had similar ideals, you could talk about similar things, you could discuss 'ideas.'

As an adult, I am often too busy, and people are too preoccupied to discuss ideals and ideas.  We are swept away in practical concerns, often of the kind to make a better society, in our own little ways.  We are all working the adult work of creating a history in our lives that mean something. 

My life stage doesn't match the one that society puts forward for me.  I don't have a young family, I don't have a house, and I don't have anything to show for a 'legacy' that I am building.  In other words, I seem to either a) be in a special kind of life phase b) be stuck in a life phase that some people transitioned out of in their twenties. 

I know, though, is that there will be new marriages, births, deaths, divorces (unfortunately), and new families, growing out of new situations, new stages of life for new people.  Love and life, life and love.  And then again, these stages. 

I know you can't always get what you want in each stage of your life...but it's good, I think to enjoy what you have while you have it.

I had a great thought today

And found out that I had plagiarized from a play I have never read.

The thought was about moderation, and how I don't love that particular rule because it can lead to some social problems I find common in literature I read, and so I thought, "The reason I don't like the rule of everything in moderation is because even this rule needs to be moderate.  We need the rule of moderation in moderation."

Less than an hour later, I find this in an internet article comment:

"Somewhere in Greek myth or drama, there's a scene between Artemis & Apollo that goes something like this:

Artemis: Brother, you are always going on about "everything in moderation", but very time I turn around, you're chasing a nymph around my forests! What's the deal?

Apollo: Dear sister, there must indeed be everything in moderation… including moderation."

There is a great ancient quote that I can only vaguely remember, and it goes something like:

"If anything great is written, it was first written by me."

Le sigh.

TOW: A Good Neighbour

"And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'"
Matthew 22:38-40
You know, I have had the chance to think about community a lot this week and weekend.  November has been a month for meeting new people, for reconnecting with old friends, and just thinking about the kind of people I want in my life in the future.  Recently, I have had the good fortune to meet a lot of great people in the neighbourhood where I live.  And it brings me back to think about something that has been missing from my life for a while now, and which, I never realized other people my age and older wanted.  Which was a sense of community.

I'm a little tired from the long day...but it was nice to connect with a couple people who lived in my building....and it was good to think of the future...and to think there would be good people in it. 

I have been spending a lot of time looking for volunteer opportunities which match my desires to do good for those around me.  But what I suppose I realized this evening is that there are opportunities to do good everywhere, and that people used to have communities before they had charities.  Charities only exist because communities fail, or don't exist at all.

Our neighbour is not a stranger; our nieghbour is someone who needs us, and needs us intimately.  Life is very hard as it is, and living only in a relation of one-to-one, in a relation of what I want and getting it...that's not a life.

In the coming days, I hope that I can be a good neighbour to those in the sense that I belong, and I make an effort to belong to something and somewhere, while still being myself.

TOW: Being a good person is hard

I have had a bit of an epiphany this week.

Being a good person is difficult.  But it's not difficult for the reasons I used to think it was difficult.

I think I used to think being good was difficult because I felt like I was a lighthouse being battered during a storm...I was in a waking nightmare of 'bad.'  And it took restraint to remain good.  It was a case of break versus win...and to win was only to weather a storm, not to win.

The reason it is so hard to be good, I think, is because being bad, acting badly, does not feel bad.  We judge ourselves good, always.  Even when we curse ourselves, we still think ourselves better than other people.  But if we are truly being good, it is nearly untenable.  It is a storm to be weathered. 

We have eyes made for the dark, not for the light.  Good things, not unlike a painting, are more pleasant the farther we are away from them; it is the illusion of what good means to us from far away that contributes to being bad.  The 'light' of good things is gentle when we are far from good. 

To be good means to burn, to be bad means to bask pleasantly in the idea that we are good people; good people as we do terrible things to ourselves and to other people.  As we break moral laws and codes, we still think we're good.

Being bad, most days, feels nice.  Being good, however, is work.

TOW: Possessed

Happy Halloween!

This week I'm thinking about possession.  Not the kind that refers to people's property.  But, rather; demonic possession.
 
Last week I attended a talk between several authors on possession, authors who had all written about the subject of inner demons.  The talk was ok, but I became more interested in the topic of demonic possession that is common in myths from way back when.

Demonic possession is something that goes back to the first days of the Bible, both Old Testament and new (the demon tormenting Saul, Jesus and the possessed pigs.) and even before then, I suppose we would look Hindu texts.

Demonic possession became somewhat of a subject in the New Testament and Hellenic times, and since then,  demonic possession has taken on its own kind of culture and mythology, separate from any one particular religion, though its modern origins in English-speaking culture are definitely from Catholicism, and exacerbated by Baptist thinking and the like.  In other words, it began with the New Testament, and it took on a folk mythology within Christianity that developed its own legs.  It's very creepy to look into old cases of demonic possession.

Another thing I have to say, before I get into a personal reflection, is that when I think about 'demons' in my own life;  I'm going to speak about it in a religious way, but philosophically, I'm interested in the consequences (actions, ethics) as well as the religious experience (feelings, experiences).


I don't particularly want to recount the very stupid things I have done, but during those moments, I definitely felt like I was tempted, sorely tempted in the way that is described in the Christian tradition. And I was wondering today, in a very reflective manner, if perhaps I had been possessed by something during these very moments that I am most embarrassed by. 





However, there have been times when I have felt 'possessed by goodness'.  It's funny that in both cases, it's not just feelings that accompany the acts that follow it, but specific kinds of imagery in the mind, and certain kinds of desires, something unusual to my normal self.

And so, I wonder if someone can be possessed by God in the same way that demons are said to possess human beings.  And I don't mean in the sort of speaking tongues tradition; I mean in the sense of grace.  Do the saints that exist and have existed; were they possessed as well in a way? 

Philosophically, I have a problem with the idea of doing good without freely choosing it, but religiously, I'm interested in the idea that God would take such a personal interest in us, as to 'possess us' with goodness.  Does a saint 'possess' goodness because they are possessed by it?  Is goodness a trait...or is it a result of actions?  Is goodness a trait like blue or brown eyes, or is it more a result of the action and intentions of an individual?  Is it metaphysics or is it ethics?  Can it be both if we are possessed by good or evil forces?  Could it anything but metaphysics?

I have to think about it. 

Coding

I am terrible at coding. Honestly.


I can't even get a brick breaker game to work.  It's going to be a long road (a couple months at least) to coding my game.


I'm going to bed.  LOL.

TOW: Love

Zeus said: 'Methinks I have a plan which will enfeeble their strength and so extinguish their turbulence; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.' -Plato's Symposium, Speech of Aristophenes

I have had a lot of time to think about love this week.

It's sort of something that's come to me based on some talks that I have had with friends, relatives, with myself, when praying, when walking about.

I don't know if I'll always be single.  I might some day get married, or perhaps just have a serial dating complex. 

But I like myself, as I am.  As one person.  It does make me happy.

But I also often feel like half a person.  And when I feel this way, I often reference back to Plato's Symposium.  Great, intelligent thinkers make speeches about love, in a contest to see who can have the best speech in their somewhat serious drinking game. 

Unsurprisingly, I am drawn to the myth of love.  The one that suggests that everyone has a perfect match, or something like it.  It's physical, it's real, your body fits with another body that exists.  It's a match of the physical and the ideal.

But the problem with mythology is that there's a fine line between a moral tale, and believing that someone else can complete who you are.

 And yet....love for me is about completeness, not because 'romantic' love completes me, but because the kind of love that makes you a family between you and someone else is what completes me.  I live and long for that kind of love.  Familial love to me is the most important kind of love.  A home is a beautiful thing that is only ever created by love of those around you.

I would rather have the love of family then any other one thing. I suppose I experienced a bit of a recall to the fact that I have been very luck to be surrounded by loving people.  Not perfect people, sometimes not always even very good people, but loving, committed people.  Loyalty and the ability to care about others really is rare and special quality.  We all need love.  We can't be strong without it.  Our lives are worse without it, in all its manifestations.  It gives us hope, and faith in the future.  It gives us both a grounding and a freedom from our existence.  To love is live, because what is to live without loving?

Motivational posters

Hi hi!

I'm in an inspired sort of mood for design, so I tried my hand at an inspirational poster.

So I'm 30

Yeah, it happened.


I've finally hit the next big milestone after, 19, 21, 25, 29......30.

I don't feel 30.

I certainly don't act 30....whatever that means......


I feel pretty young still inside, I think that's a good thing.  Though I suppose I don't look that young on the outside anymore.  (Though lots of people have been telling me I look 25-27, so thank you, thank you.)

I got two cards from Elizabeth and her mom, Judy, both which were kind of....I don't know, hit on that nerve I have been dealing with for the past two weeks.  Elizabeth said something interesting, that I should look at those cards (that depressed me with their 'now you're old and milestone, etc.' and 'think of all the things worse than being 30' which made me feel even more depressed, since I think about how much I would like the world to be a better place all the time.) as providing me with perspective.

What does that mean, exactly....perspective?

I have been reading a lot lately about perspective and it has been helping me deal with things that aren't going perfectly in my life at the moment, whether at work, socially, or with my family.  And it has required a lot of this word, a lot of perspective.  Nothing is final, no matter how bad things seem, it's not always the end of everything.  But sometimes when you're in the middle of something, it does feel like the end.  Almost everything seems to bring your world crashing down.  And the fewer supports you have, the less 'perspective' that tends to be available.  Everything is a crisis.

I would like to believe that with age....I will gain some perspective.  The good kind.

TOW: Wanting What Other People Have

"Envy is pain at the good fortune of others." -Aristotle

I have been going through a fairly interesting thought process as my career and life in the big city evolves and changes.  With my big 3-0 birthday coming up, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what I want, and what I don't want.  Somewhere along the line, I feel like I have been slightly caught up in wanting what other people have.  And perhaps this needs some clarification.

Sometimes I think we all feel envy, we all look at other people and say, "I want that thing that that person has," but more often than not the trap that really gets most people, and perhaps myself as well, is the idea that we want a phase of life that other people have. It's rare for us to say that we want a blender that someone else has, a car, or even house.  We would rarely act badly for things but many of us would commit rash actions for ideas, for the symbol of what a blender represents to us, what a fast car, an expensive house represents to us.  Security, wealth, status, respect, sex appeal.  These are the things that cause envy.  These are the things people will do irrational things for.

In my mind, I feel like I have been leaning in a direction.  I have been thinking very hard about the things that other people have.  It has taken a while, but I am starting to live, I suppose, a normal middle class life.  I have an apartment, I have friends, I am growing in status professionally and I am acquiring skills that will raise my overall salary, etc.  Today I think I thought about getting a dog....not because I like dogs, but because I like the idea of walking a dog, out and about.  Why would I want something like that?  Who knows, probably because I didn't have it, but someone else did.  (*I can't say that I love dogs...too many bad dogs in my lifetime.)

To me this says a lot of the nature of envy.  It's not about us wanting something, it's about us not wanting someone else to be happier than we are.

When I think about this, it's sad that I know a part of me feels this ways, even as I do my best to love what I have, and who I am.  There are times that I cannot help but feel envy.  Once and a while, I think it overtakes even the most saintly of us.   But again, it's what we do in those moments, not that we feel it.

I suppose what I have always felt is that I have never wanted what 'other people have' in a societal way.  I don't want status in the way other people have it, I don't want a white-picket fence life with 2.1 kids and a mortgage and one divorce one successful marriage and whatever else Stats Canada tells me is the norm these days.  I don't want to be or meet a standard.  That's not going to be enough for me, though I can see how it is enough for other people.

What I really want is something that is uniquely mine.  Something that is my experience, that I am proud of, that I can call my happiness, my goodness and my strength.

When we were younger, strength and goodness were given to us.  As adults, we must create it from within, to share with a world that is not always polite, kind or fair.

That injustice can sometimes create the conditions for envy.

What I really want is a world free of evil emotions, of an inner peace that I think most people search for.  And sometimes they can't help but see it in the eyes of other people, even if it's just an image.

It's that idea that beguiles us, every day.

TOW: 30

In 1 month, 4 days, 5 hours and 29 minutes I'm going to be 30.


I caught myself eating ice cream out of the pail today.


....


Someone needs to go on a diet with me before I turn 30. 

TOW: Take this personality test

Lately, when I've been in a mood, either good or bad, I've taken to taking personality tests.

As anyone can tell you, personality tests are both interesting and, at times, misleading.  Sometimes they can tell us things about ourselves that are illuminating.  Other times, it can lead us to believe we fit well within the confines of a psychological summary.  But should we take other people's perceptions of us to be the truth?  Just who are you, anyways?


The first personality test was created in the 1920s for military personnel. Before that, people measured personality by phrenology, or measuring people's skulls.  (I am sure I would come up as a narcissist based on the size of my skull.)  They also looked at people's appearances to determine personality....it makes you wonder if this is where the phrase "Appearances aren't everything" came from.

Most of us have taken the Myers-Briggs personality test, but did you know that there are many, many other kinds that are used?

• The Big Five Personality Traits test:  openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

• The Hans Enyck Test:  He based his theory on the model developed by Hippocrates, which had a scale used three dimensions: Extroversion, Neuroticism, and Psychoticism.
• The 16 Personality Factors test developed by Raymond Catell. (I won't list them all, but you can find them here.) 
• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) developed in 1939 to measure psychological balance levels.  (Not to be confused with the MMPI2)

These tests often helped psychiatrists help their patients.  But being honest, most of us use personality tests to tell us something about ourselves.  But, what, exactly?

I think many of us get a thrill out of the idea that someone can tell us who we are.  That our dispositions and feelings are classifiable, and even understandable (even if those feelings aren't rational).  We all would like someone to make it easy for us, and just tell us who we are supposed to be....or even who we are right now.

But personality tests are not a good measure of what we're all capable of.  They're a measure of our psychological state when we take a test.  We all have free will; many, many times we work against our own 'natures' and do things that surprise people around us.  There may be a model and mold, but most of us break it on a regular basis. 

Sometimes, life feels like one big personality test.  Will you be rude to someone in public, will you fight with a spouse or family member?  Would you betray a friend to help yourself?  These questions are all ethical, but they all say something about our capacities, and if you ever want to find out who someone is, ask them personality questions that aren't about themselves, but about difficult problems that affect them.  Ask a gay man what he thinks about sexual diversity.  Ask a woman what she thinks about abortion laws.  Ask a black man about the role of law officers in our society. 

There is something interesting and internal to personality tests, but they can only measure capacity; they don't measure reality.  And even if we did try and measure reality-we would probably fail to take in all the necessary factors.  We can only measure small slices of it; small pieces of our realities, and then bring it back to ourselves, to our 'personality.'

Personality is an interesting piece of social science, but it's not a rational response to how people should live in the world.  It is only the application of the scientific method to a field where persuasiveness matters as much as data.  While that has its value, we must never believe that our free will is somehow connected to our personalities.  Each of us has the unalienable right to choose, to be, and to make ourselves again.

Long week

Well, this week was an odd one, and the coming weeks are going to be weird as well, given that work is crazy, and there's a lot going on this summer.

Lots of good things happening, too, though.  It's a time for change, I think.

TOW: Things will get better

I don't have a lot of musings on this topic this week; I just believe in it.

Unexpected Day