First: Some Reminders
For some reason, the following thoughts came in a cascade while I was seriously considering wiping out the random folder structures in my computer, the organic architecture that has held my music since before college, with a single list of stuff autogenerated by Itunes. Here they are:
Remember: you are not a good person. and you are not becoming a better person.
You are lazy. You are increasingly indifferent. You can't be bothered to understand the perspectives of others or genuinely empathize with them. You resist all changes to your whimsical routines simply for the hell of it, even if this contradicts with your own stated principles and goals. You intellectually pre-empt people, insert your boilerplate summaries into their personal stories, and then dismiss them. You refuse to agree with anyone about anything substantive, even while you're increasingly willing to flatter them about baloney.
Mostly, you don't care about things. A vast range of them. You prefer being a child - wallowing in struggling to break out of your own bad behaviors, even if they're extremely trivial - to working hard in pursuit of any external cause, even a selfish one. You're like A YouTube baby with all the self-analysis and internal debate, except you hate video. You're an **outdated**, text-only YouTube baby.
Worst of all, you substitute this confessional stuff as your moral connection at the expense of actually getting involved. In anything. And here you are, writing a live-journal post about it instead of fixing it. Because, worst of all, you don't even care about your own critiques of yourself.
In short, you're juvenile. And getting less friendly all the time. You're a casual hedonist without the zeal or genuine excess*, an armchair generalist, and in a state of constant distraction. You spend every day floating through serious topics and doing nothing specific. You're a dilettante. The perfect word. As perfect as years ago, but without even the genuine sense of self-loathing you remember going along with that.
*A Rice-A-Roni and Super Nintendo Hedonist
------------
I think this is all a good precursor to telling stories. In a literary sense. A little balancing internal dialogue to contrast with rather boring narrative. Unless, of course, true to form, I don't bother to tell the actual stories. No, wait, true to form would be to finish this LJ abuse project, since it's a trivial crusade created on whim to avoid .. doing other things.
---------
So all of this was triggered as I sat, contemplating an XP-Search - created pile of music. I got an IPOD for Xmas, thus killing off my old, battered Discman - which I was prouder of the older and more antiquated it got. I hate retro as a trend, but apparently love anachronism. Anyway, the IPOD can't be loaded without fuc*ing ITUNES, and ITUNES is a huge mishmash of music in a library, and I can't tell which folder any of it comes from. See, I get music from a variety of sources, where it lands in a variety of folders, which sort of track my own personal history, sort of by chance - different kinds of music dominate in different software sources, which land in different folders, etc.
The problem is, I have no idea what I've imported into ITunes and what I haven't, because I hate Itunes and never use it on a day to day basis. But I was stuck for a month with just my IPOD (and the car stereo), and my IPOD has great sound quality, holds everything, very portable, etc, I should learn to love it. But to do so I have to sort out ITUNES. I can't even figure out what's on my IPOD when I'm using it, but I'm pretty sure a bunch of things aren't there.
So if I killed my whimsical and scattered array of music folders, which my girlfriend finds harder to interpret than the Davinci Code, and let ITUNES dump everything in its own neat set of boxes, problem solved.
I was on the verge of this when I felt some real emotional protest. Apparently, part of me thinks that killing off these folders is a lazy, selfish pursuit of convenience ahead of integrity and independence. My internal protestor is a little weird, because he both thinks I'm lazy - meaning, I don't bother to do unique things - and he also thinks all the unique little idiosyncracies I still pursue are cheap gimmicks to avoid committing to a real cause. That's not consistent.
Anyway, I really don't want to be... as I head into Washington - I guess I always want to be a free spirit. How lame is that! This isn't about not working for The Man - The Man is a side of everything and inescapable. It's not about not giving up my principles - that's inevitable - BOTH in the form of evolution of new information, and modifying in the face of self-interest - hell, what principles do I have a rigid enough grasp on to not give up, anyway? This isn't about being a free spirit in a way that other people would find admirable, or according to romantic Free-Spirit Stereotypes. I eat fast food, drive a car, and am not very unique.
But in a more prosaic form - simply to be free to _not_ be efficient, _not_ be practical, _not_ even try to be successful at all - the freedom to do things the wrong way, to try things that probably won't work, to blow things out of proportion (like this LJ), to do things purely for the hell of it.
I want to retain this wonderful whimsicalness, this genuine willingness to completely discard the opinions of others, and yet somehow- somehow - radically cut it all down in size - not because I'm too lazy and bored to bother - I hate that - but because I want to genuinely immerse myself in some problem faced by the world. Not even solve it, probably unrealistic. Not even, probably, find someone who even has a plan to solve it that actually makes the world better. (Lots of people have plans to solve problems, and some of them might even work, but far too many of them screw someone else over in the process). But just get into it. Thrash around in it. Orbit it in some sort of functional and useful, ameliorative way.
In short, and I definitely didn't realize this before I started this essay, I need to get the Hell out of this state - it's nothing personal Arkansas, I could do this comfortable, arbitrary, life of leisure anywhere, but this is where it is - I need to get out and into something.
Thank God I finally had this chain of thought. I've been waiting. And waiting. And waiting. To feel some sense of inspiration about, and connection to, the place where I'm heading. And it's all been so completely casual, even banal. Go to DC! Your friends are there! You're smart enough to swim with the fish! You'll probably homeland security consult and make a buck! Charge ahead at full speed towards whatever future was the easiest to think of and the one you knew best already!
Now I have something - a way in which doing this will mold me upwards in an ethical sense. To be sure, I'm running away from bad tendencies, not towards good ones. That's ****always*** how I work. It may be flawed, but that's all there is, folks. I will definitely take it. It's purpose. Definitely purpose. Good.
I used to write emails that sounded like this. I'm not doing that anymore. It's too intrusive and risky. It assumes a level of connection with people that I don't necessarily have. And when people cross into my personal life from my professional life, it makes me look like a fool and a patsy. Let's be honest: this method of discourse is charming at times, I hear, cute at others, but ultimately I tend to make myself look like a fool. And I can't afford to look like a fool. Frankly, I hope to look like a stiletto: Swift, effective, reticent, non-ostentatious, totally serious, ruthless.
Maybe I'll get a blog or something. Something where you can opt-in, punch in a web address if you want to read something. Not something where something arrives in a mailbox, leaving my hands and falling into the hands of others.
Remember: you are not a good person. and you are not becoming a better person.
You are lazy. You are increasingly indifferent. You can't be bothered to understand the perspectives of others or genuinely empathize with them. You resist all changes to your whimsical routines simply for the hell of it, even if this contradicts with your own stated principles and goals. You intellectually pre-empt people, insert your boilerplate summaries into their personal stories, and then dismiss them. You refuse to agree with anyone about anything substantive, even while you're increasingly willing to flatter them about baloney.
Mostly, you don't care about things. A vast range of them. You prefer being a child - wallowing in struggling to break out of your own bad behaviors, even if they're extremely trivial - to working hard in pursuit of any external cause, even a selfish one. You're like A YouTube baby with all the self-analysis and internal debate, except you hate video. You're an **outdated**, text-only YouTube baby.
Worst of all, you substitute this confessional stuff as your moral connection at the expense of actually getting involved. In anything. And here you are, writing a live-journal post about it instead of fixing it. Because, worst of all, you don't even care about your own critiques of yourself.
In short, you're juvenile. And getting less friendly all the time. You're a casual hedonist without the zeal or genuine excess*, an armchair generalist, and in a state of constant distraction. You spend every day floating through serious topics and doing nothing specific. You're a dilettante. The perfect word. As perfect as years ago, but without even the genuine sense of self-loathing you remember going along with that.
*A Rice-A-Roni and Super Nintendo Hedonist
------------
I think this is all a good precursor to telling stories. In a literary sense. A little balancing internal dialogue to contrast with rather boring narrative. Unless, of course, true to form, I don't bother to tell the actual stories. No, wait, true to form would be to finish this LJ abuse project, since it's a trivial crusade created on whim to avoid .. doing other things.
---------
So all of this was triggered as I sat, contemplating an XP-Search - created pile of music. I got an IPOD for Xmas, thus killing off my old, battered Discman - which I was prouder of the older and more antiquated it got. I hate retro as a trend, but apparently love anachronism. Anyway, the IPOD can't be loaded without fuc*ing ITUNES, and ITUNES is a huge mishmash of music in a library, and I can't tell which folder any of it comes from. See, I get music from a variety of sources, where it lands in a variety of folders, which sort of track my own personal history, sort of by chance - different kinds of music dominate in different software sources, which land in different folders, etc.
The problem is, I have no idea what I've imported into ITunes and what I haven't, because I hate Itunes and never use it on a day to day basis. But I was stuck for a month with just my IPOD (and the car stereo), and my IPOD has great sound quality, holds everything, very portable, etc, I should learn to love it. But to do so I have to sort out ITUNES. I can't even figure out what's on my IPOD when I'm using it, but I'm pretty sure a bunch of things aren't there.
So if I killed my whimsical and scattered array of music folders, which my girlfriend finds harder to interpret than the Davinci Code, and let ITUNES dump everything in its own neat set of boxes, problem solved.
I was on the verge of this when I felt some real emotional protest. Apparently, part of me thinks that killing off these folders is a lazy, selfish pursuit of convenience ahead of integrity and independence. My internal protestor is a little weird, because he both thinks I'm lazy - meaning, I don't bother to do unique things - and he also thinks all the unique little idiosyncracies I still pursue are cheap gimmicks to avoid committing to a real cause. That's not consistent.
Anyway, I really don't want to be... as I head into Washington - I guess I always want to be a free spirit. How lame is that! This isn't about not working for The Man - The Man is a side of everything and inescapable. It's not about not giving up my principles - that's inevitable - BOTH in the form of evolution of new information, and modifying in the face of self-interest - hell, what principles do I have a rigid enough grasp on to not give up, anyway? This isn't about being a free spirit in a way that other people would find admirable, or according to romantic Free-Spirit Stereotypes. I eat fast food, drive a car, and am not very unique.
But in a more prosaic form - simply to be free to _not_ be efficient, _not_ be practical, _not_ even try to be successful at all - the freedom to do things the wrong way, to try things that probably won't work, to blow things out of proportion (like this LJ), to do things purely for the hell of it.
I want to retain this wonderful whimsicalness, this genuine willingness to completely discard the opinions of others, and yet somehow- somehow - radically cut it all down in size - not because I'm too lazy and bored to bother - I hate that - but because I want to genuinely immerse myself in some problem faced by the world. Not even solve it, probably unrealistic. Not even, probably, find someone who even has a plan to solve it that actually makes the world better. (Lots of people have plans to solve problems, and some of them might even work, but far too many of them screw someone else over in the process). But just get into it. Thrash around in it. Orbit it in some sort of functional and useful, ameliorative way.
In short, and I definitely didn't realize this before I started this essay, I need to get the Hell out of this state - it's nothing personal Arkansas, I could do this comfortable, arbitrary, life of leisure anywhere, but this is where it is - I need to get out and into something.
Thank God I finally had this chain of thought. I've been waiting. And waiting. And waiting. To feel some sense of inspiration about, and connection to, the place where I'm heading. And it's all been so completely casual, even banal. Go to DC! Your friends are there! You're smart enough to swim with the fish! You'll probably homeland security consult and make a buck! Charge ahead at full speed towards whatever future was the easiest to think of and the one you knew best already!
Now I have something - a way in which doing this will mold me upwards in an ethical sense. To be sure, I'm running away from bad tendencies, not towards good ones. That's ****always*** how I work. It may be flawed, but that's all there is, folks. I will definitely take it. It's purpose. Definitely purpose. Good.
I used to write emails that sounded like this. I'm not doing that anymore. It's too intrusive and risky. It assumes a level of connection with people that I don't necessarily have. And when people cross into my personal life from my professional life, it makes me look like a fool and a patsy. Let's be honest: this method of discourse is charming at times, I hear, cute at others, but ultimately I tend to make myself look like a fool. And I can't afford to look like a fool. Frankly, I hope to look like a stiletto: Swift, effective, reticent, non-ostentatious, totally serious, ruthless.
Maybe I'll get a blog or something. Something where you can opt-in, punch in a web address if you want to read something. Not something where something arrives in a mailbox, leaving my hands and falling into the hands of others.