(no subject)
my body still thinks it's an hour ahead and i can't sleep on time. my head is full my head is full.
so this is stream of consciousness...
humans fuck up everything by assuming they are better than animals. pardonnez mon francais, but i feel like so much would be resolved if we could understand that. it took me over 20 years to figure it out for myself even though i'd known it as a child. gender issues and religion and politics (well maybe not politics) and environmental concerns...there are answers that - even if they don't resolve everything - can at least give a basis for agreement. humans are amazingly creative, cognizant, detailed, and reasonable when it comes to the animal kingdom, and i don't understand how so many of us are total idiots! who can't see beyond their possessions! who can't imagine that we are in any way tied to earth and spend every night on the 20th floor penthouse! not to stereotype, but living so high in the air in the middle of a city would be too surreal for me.
yeah, ok, i'm a bit of a hippie but jesus christ why is that such a bad thing? there's nothing like surrounding yourself with millions of people in a city with skyscrapers and cars and buses and bikes to make you feel alone. to make that echo resound in your head and heart and then disappear again. i am happy with what i'm doing here, but i'm so bored with who i am. i'm too scared, too shy to do anything. i know there are people in this town i could be friends with, but i automatically assume they all hate me (and i'm pretty sure my shy silence can often look like silent hatred or boredom) but i guess i have gotten a sense that people look down on louisiana a lot in the rest of the world. like, we're a great place to mardi gras but you'd never take us seriously. we never actually get any work done. we can't clean up our highways or attract any decent teachers in our public schools, so we all just drink instead. ok that's partially true but there's so much more. being here, in tyecksis, in austin, at the iSchool, a small fish in this big pond, i feel like i have to rearrange my values to fit with everyone else. i put school pretty much at the top of the list these days because i do love it and i'm learning so much, but sometimes i forget and i feel like i'm doing it to be the best, to get the highest paying job, to idk. be smarter than everyone. that's never what i wanted. i hate when i act like it is. and i, again, will assume everyone here hates me because i value being happy over being successful. when i went back home for mardi gras a few weeks ago, it was a strange feeling because i was rating success in my friends in the back of my mind, i felt lethargic, i felt useless. it took me a minute to get my head to slow down. i must say that i think a lot of louisiana's feeling comes from religion. baptist or catholic, you open your house and share and drink and shoot the shit. dr. gregory (a man whom i've never met who has totally changed some essential beliefs) once said in jacob's class that religion propagates society. it is necessary, as shown throughout history. this man is a very strong catholic. and this somehow made me understand how man-made religion is. come on! how can anyone look at any religion and not see that? the fact that we are "better" than animals doesn't mean we should lord it over them, it means we should use our brains to make improvements, to help. hasn't anyone ever heard the term sore winner?
yikes i'm getting ahead of myself. point is, it's difficult to justify things without religion, and i would agree that it has made the world better. it also has made it worse (crusades, of course, for one). it is how we learn goodness and mercy and forgiveness and integrate them into our lives. (it is also how we learn to exclude and fear and brainwash.) it just seems so silly to me that grown adults can see all of this cultural history, understanding the basic human need of being needed and having to have answers, how they can see scientific advancements, how so much that was meant as truth is now taken as metaphor, and think that the bible (if we take christianity for example as the main example of american religion and my own religious history) is anything but an excellent historical contextual account! it drives me insane! it's difficult to talk about with christians (i.e. my entire extended family - i worry everyday about my non-religious wedding, i wonder who won't show up), though, because i was one for so long, and i can feel that emotion rise in me. it floods me. it's just some trigger that i think might have been created and worked at camp and youth group retreats. the "god feeling." i've had that same feeling on rollercoasters, being drunk, and first kisses. that's not a god feeling, that's a spontaneous overflow (as wordsworth might say). religion can be beautiful if one only has it instead of believing in it.
this is too long already.
so this is stream of consciousness...
humans fuck up everything by assuming they are better than animals. pardonnez mon francais, but i feel like so much would be resolved if we could understand that. it took me over 20 years to figure it out for myself even though i'd known it as a child. gender issues and religion and politics (well maybe not politics) and environmental concerns...there are answers that - even if they don't resolve everything - can at least give a basis for agreement. humans are amazingly creative, cognizant, detailed, and reasonable when it comes to the animal kingdom, and i don't understand how so many of us are total idiots! who can't see beyond their possessions! who can't imagine that we are in any way tied to earth and spend every night on the 20th floor penthouse! not to stereotype, but living so high in the air in the middle of a city would be too surreal for me.
yeah, ok, i'm a bit of a hippie but jesus christ why is that such a bad thing? there's nothing like surrounding yourself with millions of people in a city with skyscrapers and cars and buses and bikes to make you feel alone. to make that echo resound in your head and heart and then disappear again. i am happy with what i'm doing here, but i'm so bored with who i am. i'm too scared, too shy to do anything. i know there are people in this town i could be friends with, but i automatically assume they all hate me (and i'm pretty sure my shy silence can often look like silent hatred or boredom) but i guess i have gotten a sense that people look down on louisiana a lot in the rest of the world. like, we're a great place to mardi gras but you'd never take us seriously. we never actually get any work done. we can't clean up our highways or attract any decent teachers in our public schools, so we all just drink instead. ok that's partially true but there's so much more. being here, in tyecksis, in austin, at the iSchool, a small fish in this big pond, i feel like i have to rearrange my values to fit with everyone else. i put school pretty much at the top of the list these days because i do love it and i'm learning so much, but sometimes i forget and i feel like i'm doing it to be the best, to get the highest paying job, to idk. be smarter than everyone. that's never what i wanted. i hate when i act like it is. and i, again, will assume everyone here hates me because i value being happy over being successful. when i went back home for mardi gras a few weeks ago, it was a strange feeling because i was rating success in my friends in the back of my mind, i felt lethargic, i felt useless. it took me a minute to get my head to slow down. i must say that i think a lot of louisiana's feeling comes from religion. baptist or catholic, you open your house and share and drink and shoot the shit. dr. gregory (a man whom i've never met who has totally changed some essential beliefs) once said in jacob's class that religion propagates society. it is necessary, as shown throughout history. this man is a very strong catholic. and this somehow made me understand how man-made religion is. come on! how can anyone look at any religion and not see that? the fact that we are "better" than animals doesn't mean we should lord it over them, it means we should use our brains to make improvements, to help. hasn't anyone ever heard the term sore winner?
yikes i'm getting ahead of myself. point is, it's difficult to justify things without religion, and i would agree that it has made the world better. it also has made it worse (crusades, of course, for one). it is how we learn goodness and mercy and forgiveness and integrate them into our lives. (it is also how we learn to exclude and fear and brainwash.) it just seems so silly to me that grown adults can see all of this cultural history, understanding the basic human need of being needed and having to have answers, how they can see scientific advancements, how so much that was meant as truth is now taken as metaphor, and think that the bible (if we take christianity for example as the main example of american religion and my own religious history) is anything but an excellent historical contextual account! it drives me insane! it's difficult to talk about with christians (i.e. my entire extended family - i worry everyday about my non-religious wedding, i wonder who won't show up), though, because i was one for so long, and i can feel that emotion rise in me. it floods me. it's just some trigger that i think might have been created and worked at camp and youth group retreats. the "god feeling." i've had that same feeling on rollercoasters, being drunk, and first kisses. that's not a god feeling, that's a spontaneous overflow (as wordsworth might say). religion can be beautiful if one only has it instead of believing in it.
this is too long already.