Let's make a cake
I've finally made it to UCSD. After dealing with administrative mistakes on nearly every step (and mistakes in their rectification...), my enrollment appears official and my financial aid is dealt with. I've moved in to my grandparents studio condo in La Jolla. It's small, but much larger than what I had living with dad. If I am so inclined, I now have the space to do some kind of exercise like Yoga, which wasn't really available at my dad's house. I'm settled enough in the studio but there are still many things I haven't set up and don't have much time to work on. This is the end of my third week and I'm trying to get used to the quarter system and working full time again. As I'll get in to later, I've barely been producing 25 hours of constructive activity for about the past 8 months. Now I'm producing about 40-50 hours.
Things may appear to be going well on the surface, but I don't feel like they are. Not too long after my last blog I pretty much hit bottom with my nihilism. The idealogical frame work I'd built around my previous, less brutal nihilistic perspective came crumbling down. I don't have time to impart in words the totality of what I've lost to my nihilistic beliefs. Even if I did, it would be even harder to get a grasp of what it's like to experience life this way. I'd certainly never imagined it before I was in the middle of it. Even the most prominent names associated with Nihilism do not offer examples quite analogous to the way my beliefs have cast my perception and experience of life. Everything beyond simple hedonism has lost a drastic amount of value. While the list of things that have lost value is long (what hasn't may be shorter), personal relationships of all kinds and accomplishment are two of the more prominent of them. This loss of value has cost me a great deal of productivity this last year. Very little seemed worth doing, and it's all I could do to muster the energy to meet my nominal obligations and responsibilities. It really sucks to see 7 years worth of philosophy relegated to the dumpster, and to not have the structures you've built to deal with day to day life. I've been left with no choice but to build a new ideology from scratch. The things I've lost are so axiomatic that you'd really never think of losing them or the implications of losing them until they're gone. I have nothing left from what was taught to me as a child and my values and perspective differs greatly from the vast majority of Americans. It has left me feeling isolated with such different morals and values (or lack there of). For reasons, some of which attributable to nihilism and others not, I've lost a great deal of hope in the future and my future happiness. This hopelessness quickly turned in to suicidal thoughts and generally feeling like death most of the time. That certainly has been my life for the majority of the past 6 months or so. I drowned it out mostly in World of Warcraft, since being left to my own thoughts only seemed to dig me into a deeper hole. Before the end of the Fall semester I was very concerned that I wasn't going to live past May of this year. My thinking had been that, having seen my emotional state and how much work I'd been doing, that I would get to UCSD and instantly crash and burn my first quarter and a chain of self-destructive and isolating behavior would drive me to take my own life after lashing out at all those who love me and would try to help me. Not 6 weeks ago I believed this to be inevitable without some change. Fortunately there has been some and so suicide does not seem like such an impending threat. As I'll get into in a moment though, it still feels present. The few weeks I had off from school gave me time to take a load off and work more on building a new functioning ideology. At this point I have a little something cobbled together. It's enough to make me feel secure until I have one of the childish fits I've been having fairly frequently. It's very alarming to find myself melting down over the pettiest of things, and embarrassing even though it goes unobserved. I really feel awful during these fits and I just want to give up and die. One of the things that has helped has been a mushroom trip which I'll mention in a moment. Before this mushroom trip I had a frequent and unsolicited compulsion to throw myself from a bridge. I don't quite understand this desire. It's unusually public (I was thinking specifically of freeway overpasses), and dramatic. Suicidal thoughts have played a large role in my life, I've killed myself thousands of times in my own mind and in a multitude of ways. Jumping from a bridge is new, although I've thought about doing it skydiving many times. But a bridge is oddly public, and not something I chose out of reason at all, unlike most of my other imaginings of suicide. I've analyzed this but I can't discuss it without digressing into other things so let's move to the mushroom trip. I really wasn't sure how the mushroom trip was going to go. I picked them up on new years eve just to get them, and after checking around with others I quickly decided there wasn't anything I'd rather do but stay in my new studio and do some mushrooms. Within the first 5 minutes I regained my self-love, which I'd lost as an indirect consequence of this more stringent nihilism. That had been causing a great deal of trouble, even more than I'd previously thought. Little else came from the trip, despite the fact that I spent the ENTIRE time in introspection. 6 hours of thinking with the occasional realization that the ceiling is moving like crazy. I thought a lot about family and friends. I realized that despite my many weaknesses I'm still a very strong person and that I am an element of strength in many peoples lives. I also realized that there really isn't any source to draw strength from around right now but myself, but I feel a lot more comfortable with finding my own strength and the will to do it. At this point I must mention a dichotomy of mind I'd been experiencing the past 6 months or so. I'd become very disassociated from my emotions in a way I've found most marked, and despite a lack of any supernatural qualities, I'd call uncanny. It was a disassociation of my rational and emotional mind and getting into the details gets a bit hairy. Suffice it to say, as my rational mind had near absolute dominance over my behavior/decisions (as long as certain conditions were met), I hardly experienced any feelings at all, although I was aware of them, and had access to what they were if I cared to look. In fact I had to be quite diligent in watching them lest they get out of hand and threaten my rational control. And that rational control really carried me through. It was a necessity, because, as I mentioned, my compulsion for the majority of the time was to jump off a bridge. The mushroom trip really closed that dichotomy. At least during it. It was very nice to feel. Not just feel but feel passionately. I fear this dichotomy may be returning though, once again as a necessity. I am not very comfortable with where I'm at. These fits remind me that my sense of security is false, and that I'm not that far away from completely melting down. When calamities so small throw me off, I fear that something larger and well within the realm of things that happen from time to time in everyone's life, may just do me in. I still don't have very high hopes about the future. The only hope I really have is that there are reasons to hope that I just don't see. I at least have reason to believe that. But there's only so much I'm willing to invest into such an unsure future. I'm dangerously comfortable with the idea of concluding my life prematurely, not believing in any imperative for long life, nor that anything I do, have done, care about, and have cared about, matters past my death. Those things only pseudo-matter to me now, in life. I do still have a natural interest in pursuing future pleasures that is inherent to being a human being, so saying that this is a bad place to be may be superfluous. So all I can really do is focus on my plan of educating myself, without which I'd have no plan at all and little sense of imperative with which to develop a new one. Hopefully no calamity will befall me that will send me into a terminal spiral before I can inject value into the abstract concepts that have been so conducive to the success of human beings. There are other things to talk about in my life, but this is at its core. There's much more I'd like to explain as well, but this is all the time I'm willing to invest for now.
Things may appear to be going well on the surface, but I don't feel like they are. Not too long after my last blog I pretty much hit bottom with my nihilism. The idealogical frame work I'd built around my previous, less brutal nihilistic perspective came crumbling down. I don't have time to impart in words the totality of what I've lost to my nihilistic beliefs. Even if I did, it would be even harder to get a grasp of what it's like to experience life this way. I'd certainly never imagined it before I was in the middle of it. Even the most prominent names associated with Nihilism do not offer examples quite analogous to the way my beliefs have cast my perception and experience of life. Everything beyond simple hedonism has lost a drastic amount of value. While the list of things that have lost value is long (what hasn't may be shorter), personal relationships of all kinds and accomplishment are two of the more prominent of them. This loss of value has cost me a great deal of productivity this last year. Very little seemed worth doing, and it's all I could do to muster the energy to meet my nominal obligations and responsibilities. It really sucks to see 7 years worth of philosophy relegated to the dumpster, and to not have the structures you've built to deal with day to day life. I've been left with no choice but to build a new ideology from scratch. The things I've lost are so axiomatic that you'd really never think of losing them or the implications of losing them until they're gone. I have nothing left from what was taught to me as a child and my values and perspective differs greatly from the vast majority of Americans. It has left me feeling isolated with such different morals and values (or lack there of). For reasons, some of which attributable to nihilism and others not, I've lost a great deal of hope in the future and my future happiness. This hopelessness quickly turned in to suicidal thoughts and generally feeling like death most of the time. That certainly has been my life for the majority of the past 6 months or so. I drowned it out mostly in World of Warcraft, since being left to my own thoughts only seemed to dig me into a deeper hole. Before the end of the Fall semester I was very concerned that I wasn't going to live past May of this year. My thinking had been that, having seen my emotional state and how much work I'd been doing, that I would get to UCSD and instantly crash and burn my first quarter and a chain of self-destructive and isolating behavior would drive me to take my own life after lashing out at all those who love me and would try to help me. Not 6 weeks ago I believed this to be inevitable without some change. Fortunately there has been some and so suicide does not seem like such an impending threat. As I'll get into in a moment though, it still feels present. The few weeks I had off from school gave me time to take a load off and work more on building a new functioning ideology. At this point I have a little something cobbled together. It's enough to make me feel secure until I have one of the childish fits I've been having fairly frequently. It's very alarming to find myself melting down over the pettiest of things, and embarrassing even though it goes unobserved. I really feel awful during these fits and I just want to give up and die. One of the things that has helped has been a mushroom trip which I'll mention in a moment. Before this mushroom trip I had a frequent and unsolicited compulsion to throw myself from a bridge. I don't quite understand this desire. It's unusually public (I was thinking specifically of freeway overpasses), and dramatic. Suicidal thoughts have played a large role in my life, I've killed myself thousands of times in my own mind and in a multitude of ways. Jumping from a bridge is new, although I've thought about doing it skydiving many times. But a bridge is oddly public, and not something I chose out of reason at all, unlike most of my other imaginings of suicide. I've analyzed this but I can't discuss it without digressing into other things so let's move to the mushroom trip. I really wasn't sure how the mushroom trip was going to go. I picked them up on new years eve just to get them, and after checking around with others I quickly decided there wasn't anything I'd rather do but stay in my new studio and do some mushrooms. Within the first 5 minutes I regained my self-love, which I'd lost as an indirect consequence of this more stringent nihilism. That had been causing a great deal of trouble, even more than I'd previously thought. Little else came from the trip, despite the fact that I spent the ENTIRE time in introspection. 6 hours of thinking with the occasional realization that the ceiling is moving like crazy. I thought a lot about family and friends. I realized that despite my many weaknesses I'm still a very strong person and that I am an element of strength in many peoples lives. I also realized that there really isn't any source to draw strength from around right now but myself, but I feel a lot more comfortable with finding my own strength and the will to do it. At this point I must mention a dichotomy of mind I'd been experiencing the past 6 months or so. I'd become very disassociated from my emotions in a way I've found most marked, and despite a lack of any supernatural qualities, I'd call uncanny. It was a disassociation of my rational and emotional mind and getting into the details gets a bit hairy. Suffice it to say, as my rational mind had near absolute dominance over my behavior/decisions (as long as certain conditions were met), I hardly experienced any feelings at all, although I was aware of them, and had access to what they were if I cared to look. In fact I had to be quite diligent in watching them lest they get out of hand and threaten my rational control. And that rational control really carried me through. It was a necessity, because, as I mentioned, my compulsion for the majority of the time was to jump off a bridge. The mushroom trip really closed that dichotomy. At least during it. It was very nice to feel. Not just feel but feel passionately. I fear this dichotomy may be returning though, once again as a necessity. I am not very comfortable with where I'm at. These fits remind me that my sense of security is false, and that I'm not that far away from completely melting down. When calamities so small throw me off, I fear that something larger and well within the realm of things that happen from time to time in everyone's life, may just do me in. I still don't have very high hopes about the future. The only hope I really have is that there are reasons to hope that I just don't see. I at least have reason to believe that. But there's only so much I'm willing to invest into such an unsure future. I'm dangerously comfortable with the idea of concluding my life prematurely, not believing in any imperative for long life, nor that anything I do, have done, care about, and have cared about, matters past my death. Those things only pseudo-matter to me now, in life. I do still have a natural interest in pursuing future pleasures that is inherent to being a human being, so saying that this is a bad place to be may be superfluous. So all I can really do is focus on my plan of educating myself, without which I'd have no plan at all and little sense of imperative with which to develop a new one. Hopefully no calamity will befall me that will send me into a terminal spiral before I can inject value into the abstract concepts that have been so conducive to the success of human beings. There are other things to talk about in my life, but this is at its core. There's much more I'd like to explain as well, but this is all the time I'm willing to invest for now.