No, Virginia, It's Nowhere Near As Dramatic As You're Making It

Some people need to seriously get over themselves. Provided with something cogent and absolutely rational, they somehow contort it into something sinister and dramatic. The simple truth is that you turned out to be an immature, unintelligent, utterly unattractive person whom I wished I could go back to just being an acquaintance with. I've said all I have to say on that matter now, and have no desire or interest in speaking of it anymore.

Is that the trade-off?

Am I only able to truly be myself when I'm in this state? Am I only able to really be myself when I am at my saddest, loneliest, most depressed state? I have no desire to elaborate right now.

A year of endings...

This time a year ago I couldn't remember this feeling. I was in the exact opposite place. I don't know what brought about the change or why it happened, it just did. It was like a reset button had been pressed and I was getting another go at things. Now I'm at this place again. I can't say I'm equally uncertain as to what's brought me back here - friends I made in the past year seem to be diminishing in number, I got passed up for the "promotion" to FT for no good reason, I have various other frustrations at work, I'm alone, and I'm staying with my grandfather (the former being a much larger contributor to the latter than one might think). I feel like it's a year of endings with few, if any, beginnings to take their place.

I'm going to be doing something mildly different for the next several entries. I'm going to try to post nightly (good luck with that). That's not what's different. I'm going to let my iPod be my muse. There are various things going on right now, so I figure there's no better way to cover the random topics than to live it to entropy. In the end, entropy beats everything. The title of the song or a lyric may be my springboard. In the unlikely event that a song doesn't even have lyrics I can work with, it will receive an honorable mention. If there's not much I can do from one springboard, I might use 2 or 3.

That's it for now.

Civil Twilight

"My chance to say something seemed so brief,
but it wasn't. Now I know I had plenty of time
Between the sunset and certified darkness
Dusk comes on and I follow the exhaust from memory up to the end"

So true in so many ways. I love The Weakerthans. Greatest band you've never heard of.

Pointless

I like my new apartment a lot. My new roommates are much better than the old ones. I can't say as much about the neighbors upstairs. If they at least had good taste in music...

Notes from the Land of the Lotus Eaters

I've not wrote much lately. Time has a way of playing tricks on you. One day you might be dreaming, and the next that dream becomes your reality. I feel like I've been sleeping for some time and I don't like the reality I've awakened to. I'm back in the stony-hearted city that bore and raised me, but there's more to life than where you are. I regret all the wasted time. More importantly, I miss things that sometimes seem lost.

I just returned from a week-long trip to North Carolina. I got to see the people that matter most to me, a few that don't matter quite so much, and some that didn't matter at all. There were people that I would have loved to see but didn't get a chance to. It was a fun trip, but it brought some painful realizations. I miss that strong familial friendship I had with my closest friends. I made mistakes and prices were paid for those mistakes. Will enough ever be paid to restore what's been damaged and build ever-greater things on those foundations? Will my distance be a hindrance or will it be overcome as the minor obstacle that it is?

My birthday was a defining moment. I decided to use it the way most people view the New Year. It makes more sense - instead of just celebrating a new calendar with everyone else, you're marking a new go around the sun for yourself. Sometimes I'm disgusted with my life and myself, but I'm not completely unhappy about that. I'm re-doubling my focus on writing to make up for the lost time. I'm going to try to post on here as often as I used to. I'm also going to work on a lot of other aspects of myself. Some of those will be returning to the person I was, while others will be continuing to improve myself.

I had more that I wanted to write tonight, but there are a lot of thoughts in my head that I just can't vocalize just yet. I wonder how Marie is doing. I hope she and her family are doing better. Josie, David, if either of you ever read this know that I hold the two of you up to the highest degree. I love and miss you guys a lot, and I hope we'll gain back that level of friendship between us and build those ever-greater things together. Come what may, I'll always be there for you.

Passivity

I was reading an article recently that essentially said the internet is rewiring our brains. They did brain scans of people who'd used the internet constantly and those who hadn't used it before. People who were "old pros" would use the decision-making part of their brains the most, while people who hadn't used it before had activity similar to reading. After enough time on the web, their brain patterns started to match the people who were "old pros". They've recently discovered that there's a lot more "plasticity" to our brains than they had previously thought. Pathways that get fired more often push out older pathways that aren't being used as much. It's how we improve at tasks with practice and why we get rusty with time.

I wonder what effects seemingly every day activities are having on the way people use their brains. Headphones have become seemingly ubiquitous on the subway. Are people lulling their minds into further disuse by giving up thinking time to hear the same songs they've heard a thousand times before? Personally, I have a radically different experience when I am without my headphones than I do when I'm wearing them. I'm more aware of what's around me (not just sounds that would otherwise be drowned out) and my thoughts are deeper and more engaging. Television takes the fall for its deleterious effects, but it's not acting alone. We are accomplices to the ill effects wrought on us whenever we engage in passivity to distract and deter ourselves from active thoughts and lives. In this regard I even give (some) video games some much understated credit for actively employing the mind and the body instead of just allowing you to bask in the narcotizing, numbing azure glow of the television.