Eyesight to the Blind

There’s a good line in the film The Brothers McMullen where a man who is in his early thirties says that it feels like just yesterday, he was in high school, and his wife replies, “No, you’re at least fifteen years too young for a mid-life crisis.” Where did the mid-life crisis come from? Technically, your forties and fifties are only the middle of your life if you’re leading a very long one, but never mind. I’ve had angst over where I’m going over the past year or so, but absolutely refuse to consider that a “quarter-life crisis”. I guess that term springs from the realization that once you’ve finished school and are trying to start a professional life, you are once again at the foot of a mountain. You can chase the brass ring if you like, but even if you do get it, you’ll look around and ask, “Is this all there is to it?” And the answer to that is no, but the real fun stuff is in between the lines. I keep fixating on that stupid Ben Stiller movie from last year, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which might as well have been called Mid-Life Crisis: The Movie, because if your idea of living life to the fullest is jumping out of a helicopter and skateboarding down a mountain, you need to rethink your priorities.

Kirk Cameron is a real asshole. That’s hardly news to anyone who has followed his career. He peaked at eighteen, then decided that rather than mature into a complex, interesting person, he would like to tell other people how to live their lives. It’s sad, and by “sad”, I mean “infuriating”. I’m not sure if he was all that good of an actor to begin with, but then again, he might have had a pretty good career had he applied himself to learning his craft and not spent all his time going on and on about how much he loves bananas. But what’s frustrating is that somebody is continuing to finance what he does. His movies make money, even if the only people who watch them are far-right Christians. How do we reach these people? Do they even want to be reached? I hate Kirk Cameron for many reasons, but the biggest one I can think of at the moment is making Piers Morgan look reasonable.

I’m trying to find the right balance between being outraged and serene. It’s easy to get burned out following the news. That happened to me when I was writing for a political magazine in college, and even though I didn’t want to write about the news, I found ways to write about it, essentially by taking a step back. The thing that’s got me angry these days is the treatment of livestock by our farming industry. Chris Christie plans to veto a bill that is almost unanimously supported by both legislators and the electorate because it might hurt his chances in Iowa, which depends on pork production. What an asshole. It drives me insane that this guy was reelected in such a landslide, because anyone who is even half-awake can see that he is a rude, temperamental, petty bully who cares less about enacting change than becoming president. (And if don’t think he was involved in the closure of the lanes on the George Washington Bridge just because there is no definitive evidence tying him to it, give me a fucking break. Seriously.) He buried his opponent, Barbara Buono (embarrassingly, I had to look up her name) in the last election, but she is a class act.

I don’t know what to do about stuff like this. There are some people who just sit back and say, “The world has enough problems. I just look out for myself.” There are also people who get very angry over the blatant mistreatment of pigs, but don’t have the tact to engage with people who might be sympathetic to their point of view. I can’t be like that. I have no use for purism, as high-minded and idealistic as I am. I do not believe that Barack Obama is a traitor to his base just because he governs from a more moderate and diplomatic point of view than the liberal firebrands like myself would like. I do not believe that the United States is an evil nation just because we kill people with drone strikes, although I won’t attempt to defend that, as it is appalling. All I know is that I have no use for people who complain about this shit constantly while doing nothing about it. Don’t just donate to the cause or whine about it on your blog (oh hi, everyone); get off your ass. I’ll do that just as soon as I figure out what it means.

I think I need to spend a little bit more time writing fiction. I decided a while ago that writing wasn’t going to be my main pursuit, just a side gig. Fortunately, it’s the kind of thing that works well as a side gig. And I keep saying this, but I really do need to get back into gaming. I’ve missed out on it for too long. There is a part of me that’s glad I’m not in college anymore. College is supposed to be a place where you learn shit and try out shit and hopefully get a clearer idea of what you’re trying to do with your life. A lot of kids seem to mistake that for being right about everything. And I probably sound old when I say that, but that’s the kicker: I’m not that much older than most college students. I remember what life on campus was like, and even then, I thought there were a lot of twits around me whose response to any kind of criticism, even the constructive kind, was, “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want.” That’s not even a response. Refusing to acknowledge the needs of others doesn’t make you sassy and outspoken; it makes you an asshole. And nothing is less humble than talking about how humble you are.

I’m trying to push my limits, to figure out just what I’m capable of. I keep meaning to take up a sport, but never get around to it. I’m not an athlete, really, but there’s no harm in dabbling. Just don’t do things because you’re trying to prove anything to the world, that’s all. The reality is that most people can’t and never will be able to play at my level. I can live with that.

Games People Play

I have a hard time just uprooting myself and moving to another place. I get too attached to my current place, even if I was the one who was trying to move all along. I’m getting settled in my new place (or at least trying to) and it’s difficult, because I keep going back to my old neighborhood (sometimes even popping by my parents’ place for a little while when they’re not around) just so I can eat at a place I liked or something. Hopefully, that will dissipate with time, because I still go by my old college town semi-regularly and, when I moved from Manhattan to Queens, I kept going back to Manhattan, often just to hang out for a while. (Also to get away from my psychotic roommate. My current roommate mainly just lies on the couch and watches TV, so we’re getting along okay so far.) What I’m saying is: I’m lonely, please smother me with compliments. No seriously, what I’m saying is: Change is hard.

I think part of the reason I’ve been watching more horror movies over the past couple years is that I’m trying to learn my limits. I’m not sure why some stuff disturbs me or just turns me off and other stuff doesn’t. I got through Audition okay. I’m not sure how much I liked it, but I can see that there was craft involved. I really didn’t like Eraserhead. Whether or not that is a horror film is debatable, but David Lynch has never been easy to categorize, so I feel we might as well call some of his films horror. Eraserhead in particular is polarizing. As somebody else said, nobody has ever walked out of that film saying, “It was okay, but…” It’s a movie that tries as hard as it can to nauseate you and make you feel really weird and icky, and it succeeds, I suppose, but I have no idea what the fucking point of that was. Strangely enough, I had no problem sitting through The Lords of Salem and Saw. (I didn’t like Saw, but it wasn’t hard to watch.) I found the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre to be a well-made film that I have no desire to see again. Its influence is undeniable, but again, what was the takeaway?

Maybe I’m trying too hard to find meaning or subtext in everything. I don’t know. What I do know is that I can’t seem to find the time for everything that I want to do. The result is that my brain feels very crowded, which is frustrating, because it means that I have to tell the screaming voices up here that they can’t always get what they want, and they don’t like that very much. It makes them scream louder, which is upsetting to me, because I miss the days where I could wake up, do shit for a while, and then go to bed without feeling as if my gray matter was going to break through my skull and plaster itself all over my wall. Like I said, it’s noisy up here. My mother told me she’s worried that I’m spending too much time alone, which might be true, but her announcing it to me as if it just occurred to her struck me as her trying to take credit for something that I already acknowledged. I still don’t know who reads this thing, but I’ll keep typing as long as anybody cares.

I have a lot of projects right now. I also have a lot of little errands to run and tasks to perform, from changing my address on my Economist subscription to checking on the status of my voter registration. (I was supposed to get a voter’s guide a little while back, but I still haven’t gotten it. Maybe my registration didn’t go through or something? I don’t know. I did it on the DMV’s website. It would be a bummer to miss out on the midterms, because if there’s one thing that drives me nuts, it’s voter apathy. The Democrats benefit when more people vote; the GOP benefits when only their people vote. Which strategy is more sustainable in the long term?)

I am definitely starting to think that there is such a thing as a Red State Liberal. I read a book last year called The Cross in the Closet by Timothy Kurek. It was a powerful, if slightly obvious memoir by a conservative Christian from Nashville who decided to spend a year living as a gay man to see what it was like. Of course, what he realized was that gay people and straight people aren’t all that different, labels don’t matter, blah blah blah, but the point is that even though Mr. Kurek and I probably wouldn’t agree on too many things political or theological, I think that’s just because we’re coming at it from different angles. Red State Liberals (not that Kurek is one, I’m just saying) and I might agree on political or religious things and still have fundamentally different worldviews. With Tim Kurek, it’s exactly the opposite. He wasn’t trying to figure out what it was like to be gay, just to understand why sexuality is such a big deal to some people. Since he had once been a homophobe himself, even calling a gay boss of his a faggot in front of customers, it’s obvious that he’s done a 180 on what he used to believe, and I applaud him for that.

Fall is my second-favorite month. Winter is my favorite. It’s tangential, but I think The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s most underrated plays. I’d put it just below Lear and Antony and Cleopatra. I like romances. This has been your stream of consciousness for now. I’m going to bed.

Long Take

Christian art? Art is art; painting is painting; music is music; a story is a story. If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.

~Madeleine L’Engle

Why is it so difficult to find quality representations of faith in fiction? Most of the films I see tend to present characters as Christian, but not too Christian. If faith is relevant to the story at all, it tends to be very watered down. Finding an honest discussion about faith vs. rationality anywhere in the media is pretty difficult, although it does happen occasionally. (I am reminded of that wonderful moment on Lost where Jack says that having faith is taking the easy way out and Locke shoots back, “What makes you think it’s easy?”) This question is inspired in part by that stupid God’s Not Dead movie that seems to be doing quite well at the box office even though nobody whose opinion I respect has anything good to say about it. Let’s see, we’ve got Kevin Sorbo slumming it as a strawman caricature of vindictive atheism and the same persecution complex that has Fox News complaining every time somebody says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”. If this is what stands for mainstream Christianity these days, I’m so glad I’m not a part of it.

It seems that religious films are coming back in vogue. There’s that Son of God movie that is also doing quite well even though, let’s face it, it looks like a turd sandwich. Fiction, by nature, requires that the creator challenge the audience in some way. But there is nothing about these films that is even remotely challenging. They are produced, distributed by, and marketed to people who just want to be told what they already know. Even most of the Christians I know have no interest in seeing them, because the Christians I’m friends with, generally speaking, have more than two brain cells to rub together. It kind of drives home the idea (which I still don’t necessarily accept) that there are two different Americas. There is a sizable portion of the population that eats this shit up. And the only time I ever interact with them is when they’re trying to convert me.

I am going to make an unusual prediction and say that the GOP will retake the White House in 2016. I have suspected for a long time that this will be the case, and when I see how smug and complacent my fellow Democrats are about Hillary’s chances, I become even more certain. Hillary Clinton will not be President of the United States. She had a shot at the nomination back in 2008, but whether due to her own transparent bitterness or the general mood of the nation, we went with Barack, and I don’t regret it. I’m not saying she’s not qualified to be President; I’m just saying that a successful career in politics and an instinctive knowledge of how the game is played does not guarantee you the position. The Presidency is fickle that way; the job selects whomever is right in that moment, however unusual of a choice they may seem. Hillary is too obvious. If the Democrats want to win in 2016, we will have to pick someone a little more out of left field. But we won’t, and thus, we have handed the whole thing over to the Republicans.

That doesn’t have to be disastrous, by the way. There are no high-profile Republicans that I like, but there are a few with whom I occasionally agree. Chris Christie is unlikely to get the nomination after the whole bridge scandal, and Rand Paul, grandstanding douchebag though he is, does make good points sometimes. Neither one has any chance of getting my vote, but they don’t need it. Even in landslide victories like Barack Obama’s in 2008 and 2012, slightly less than half of the country went for the other guy. They think differently, those Republicans. But surely they can’t all be assholes?

Barack Obama’s life story is an interesting one. The man came from a background that, a few decades ago, would surely have prevented him from getting anywhere near the White House. Even today, I think it’s kind of amazing that he got elected even once, let alone twice, especially with such sweeping electoral college margins. When my fellow Democrats justify nominating Hillary with, “Who else are we going to get?”, I am struck that such complacency could affect the same people who elected a half-black dude from Hawaii whose middle name is Hussein. America, forgive the cliche, is the land of opportunity. And I like Hillary, but if she were President, she would lead as if it were her right all along. I hate to break it to you, Hill, but the presidency is no one’s right. Just ask Mitt Romney, if you can remember who he is.

Him? Is he rich or something?

I might like to vote for a Republican before I die, even if it’s just for dog catcher. That way, I can say that I don’t always toe the party line. This country has a two-party system, and what has kept both parties afloat for so long is their adaptability. The GOP will adapt to the changing times. It will be long and painful, but look closely and you can see that it is happening already. Every so often, I find myself nodding at a Republican and saying, “Good point.” Until the Syria debate, it had been almost a decade since the last time that happened. Ultimately, what I’ve had to accept in that time is that I do not control the swinging of the pendulum. I can feel it moving, but I don’t know how to stop it. Perhaps that is for the greater good. But I’m still voting for Hillary.

“This girl does anal, that’s for sure. You can tell just by looking at her.” —Best YouTube comment ever

Like You Do

The only valuable thing I’ve learned from this ninny is that gay men can be boring dudebros just as easily as straight men.

I’m having trouble adjusting my living habits to my work schedule. I’m starting to work mornings, which is good, as it means that my skill level is increasing and will hopefully result in a greater share of tips and more hours in the long run. Problem is, I still have this problem where I can’t seem to get to sleep before midnight no matter how tired I am. It’s my head. Specifically, it’s the voices that live up there. They’re a pretty noisy bunch, as I have said on many prior occasions. I’m not a person who can just make snap judgments and roll with what happens. I need time to plan. (That way, I’m ready to curl up into a ball and cry when the Flying Spaghetti Monster inevitably thwarts my plans.) But seriously, I just don’t thrive when new shit is getting thrown at me every minute. I need to be able to go to my room and lock the door (which I always do even though nobody ever barges in) and spend six hours staring at my computer or lying under my desk in order to figure out where to go from here. My plans tend to function better in the long term than the short term. I just don’t work well when people are demanding to know what I’m doing.

My boss pulled me aside to let me know that my some of my coworkers don’t like me very much. He didn’t phrase it that way; he just said I seem kind of closed off and might want to consider being a bit friendlier with the people I work with. Boy, do I not find that surprising. Friendly is not my default setting, never has been, never will be. You should meet my father, who can smile and chat with most people he meets. If his father were still around, you could meet him, a man who could take 45 minutes just to go down the street and buy milk. My grandfather could strike up a conversation with anyone. Some people just think that way. “Oh look, a person! I should totally be friends with them!” they evidently say to themselves. It is my job, I believe, to educate them on the wonders of misanthropy.

Before somebody mentions it, this is one of those posts where I don’t really have an overarching theme. On some days, I do, but today, I have only a shitload of random thoughts. If you want to understand just how deliriously sex-negative some elements of our culture are, watch the clip below. It’s a compilation of scenes from the short-lived TV series, The Secret Life of the American Teenager. There is a line in this clip so mind-numbingly ridiculous that to even hint at it would spoil the fun. And here’s the kicker: IT’S ALL FROM THE SAME EPISODE. I…I just don’t know what to say to something like that. This show was produced by the same woman responsible for 7th Heaven, a godawful series in which an insultingly perfect white Christian family learns thuddingly obvious (and extremely moralistic) life lessons. Totally different from this show, of course.

Actually, I think I do have a theme going here. Mainly, I’m just frustrated with that feeling of being over the hump. I’ve never had a job quite like this one before. I’ve had retail jobs and food service jobs, but never one this…intense. My canvassing job was more stressful, but since I wasn’t in it for the money, I feel like it doesn’t count. My psychotic ex-roommate was fired from two jobs in the course of one week. At one, he lasted only an hour. My goal, when starting at the coffee shop, was to last more than an hour. I succeeded, and even if I make a fool of myself by shouting at a customer or fighting with a coworker or doing something else that I very well might do if pushed, the worst thing they can do is fire me. That’s fine. I was never married to this thing to begin with.

When I moved to Queens last August, I was thinking of starting over. I had finished my education and was trying to get started professionally. But then shit happened and now I’m here. I don’t subscribe to that “everything happens for a reason” fatalism. As far as I’m concerned, I still think the ideal turn of events would have been for me never to have moved in with that psychopath in the first place. But the fact remains that shit had been on a downhill slide for a while leading up to that. My social life was uneventful, my job search was getting more and more desperate, blog traffic was in the toilet, and somewhere along the line, my computer broke down. Traffic seems to be picking up. That’s nice. But this blog isn’t my life. Try not to confuse one with the other.

Some people see life as one big chess game. I see it as an argument. This is fitting, as I usually win arguments. When I lose, it’s not so much that I’m wrong as that I’m outmaneuvered. Some people know how to play off of others’ emotions with words. They construct an argument that sounds convincing, but is totally meaningless. Those people are my enemies. I have never been very good at winning in the short term. I just tough it out in the hopes that people will come around eventually. Because it’s not really about winning; it’s about who is left standing. I’m still here.

Scythe

Not sure what this has to do with anything.

I’ve noticed something funny about this blog over the past few months. I’m not just getting fewer page views than I used to, but fewer page views per visitor. It’s as if more and more people are stumbling across this blog just because they’re looking for a picture of Tom Daley in a Speedo or Taylor Lautner’s ass. Well, I’ll try to tone that down. The top five search items leading people here in 2013 (this is true) were “taylor lautner ass”, “donkey porn”, “gay donkey”, “white people are annoying”, and “jamie foxx naked”. Now that I’ve typed them out, that will probably lead more people here, but hopefully, some of them will stay to learn more of my thoughts on politics, philosophy, and religion.

I’m getting really impatient. It’s been close to a month since I’ve seen any of my friends, and because my friends are people, we keep agreeing on a time, then realizing that doesn’t work, then having to reschedule. I hate living in the real world. And of course, there’s my mother. She sent me a card reiterating that I should reach out to the environmental organizations in the area. I’ve already told her that I’m thinking about volunteering, but that’s not enough for her. She wants me to network. I hate networking. If I have to choose between networking and unemployment, I’ll take unemployment. I don’t know what I’d say to the various organizations even if I did reach out to them. “Hi, I’m young and trying to make a career in activism. Can you help me out?” I don’t want a job with one of those groups at the moment. I don’t believe that there’s anything wrong with taking a year or two to do other shit before returning to work in your chosen field. It’s not like there’s an expiration date on my masters degree or anything. Why do I not feel like networking? I just don’t want to, that’s why.

I used to dream very rarely, but these days, it’s almost every night. That’s frustrating. It’s hard to focus in your day-to-day life when you feel like your subconscious is trying really, really hard to tell you something. And in this case, there is usually some very obvious thematic or literal connection to my own life, so it’s not like I even have the pleasure of waking up and wondering what all that was supposed to mean. I know what it means. But I can’t shut it off.

You might have noticed that I blog slightly less frequently than I used to. That’s for the better, I think. It means that I am getting better at organizing my thoughts and shit. Only problem is, I find myself arguing with an empty room more and more because I don’t have a therapist any more. It was not exactly my decision to start seeing a therapist in the first place (I’ve been to two therapists in my life, and in the first case, my mother made me; in the second…well, that’s another story), but at least it was sort of my decision to end it. (In the sense that I was leaving New York very suddenly and didn’t feel like finding another therapist on the West Coast.) The problem with therapy is that there’s no definite answer as to when to end it. One friend of mine sees no need to end it. To her, it’s merely one more way to get herself to the next level. Go with what works, I guess. Mainly, I’m looking for flesh-and-blood people to share my time with. There just don’t seem to be that many of them out there at the moment.

This is completely random, but here is a video that I absolutely love. I know next to nothing about Islam or the Qur’an, but I know bigotry when I see it, so watching a Muslim take a self-righteous Christian a-hole down a peg is deeply satisfying. A friend of mine has an uber-conservative Christian grandmother who used to post offensive shit (Ann Coulter quotes, for example) on his timeline. When he responded to a quote that was deeply offensive to atheism with one that mocked Christianity, she threw a fit. I looked on in wonder. It’s like some people honestly have never faced the possibility that their shit stinks, too. You might be sweet and kind to your friends and family, but if you sincerely believe that Christianity is automatically better than all other forms of belief, fuck you. You don’t have to believe that Jesus said it to see the wisdom in the Golden Rule, and if you seriously believe that the shooting of Trayvon Martin had nothing to do with race, you are wrong.

It’s January, which means that there aren’t too many good movies out in theaters at the moment. There’s Inside Llewyn Davis, but I feel like I could wait for the DVD on that one. There’s The Wolf of Wall Street, but that one just looks like a white-collar version of Goodfellas. I’m sure it’s stylish and entertaining; I just don’t see why I need to see it. Wait a couple months and we’ll have The Grand Budapest Hotel and Veronica Mars. Maybe you are unfamiliar with the latter’s source material, but if you consider yourself a nerd, you must watch all three seasons of the TV show right now because OMG SO AMAZING

I can’t shut my brain off, people. I can’t really do anything except keep trying to dig in and hope that this time, I can escape the cycle of having the same fights with the people over and over and over again. There are few things more intimidating than an empty room. So let’s hope I can defeat this one. It’s not even my home, really, just a place I’m staying until I figure out where to go from here.