Altron
Well-Known Member
Here goes...
10:30 PM 12/3
It's late, and I'm tired, and when I get tired, I get kinda long-winded, philosophical, and easily amused. Tomarrow morning, I'm going to laugh at myself about this, but I'm seventeen years old, and the gloss hasn't even begun to dull.
But, I was pondering the meaning of life as viewed through the "New Posts" page, and I saw that this place was called the "Real World". I think that's funny. If anything, we should call Lunatic Lounge or Love and Lifestyles or the Soap Opera Box (err... I suppose the offical name is Shout Box) "The Real World". I mean, that's where most members have feet-on-the-ground discussions about every day life. What the kids are doing. How work was. What the missus is cookin'. You know, the stuff you do in the real world. What happens each and every day. The odd comfort of sharing simple, mundane information with total strangers. When you think about it, that's what we are. Total strangers. Total strangers who know everything about each other.
I mean, most of us have gotten pics up by now, but a few haven't. I'll use Gonz as my poster-boy for this, since he don't have a pic up. I've known Gonz for over four years, which is longer than I've known my best friend. He could walk up to me on the street, and I wouldn't know him. I wouldn't recognize him in the slightest. In all likelihood, it would be very awkward making small talk and stuff with him. There's the barriers of social ettiquette and spoken words and body language and different voices and all sorts of things that say so much more than simple text, but stifle some of what could be explained with words. Yet, I know his online mannerisms so well, and he knows more about me than most of my friends. There's no raised eyebrow looking back at you when you write this stuff online. There's no visual or audial stimulation in this form of communication. It's communication through a purely mental medium. Online communication between well-written people is damn close to telepathy. These aren't words you're reading, these are thoughts. There's no messy conversion to spoken words and messier conversion back to thoughts. The only limitations are the vocabulary and writing skills of the posters, which are miniscule compared to those of spoken words.
I mean, how fucking weird is this?
I came here a young kid looking for guidance. I was, what, 13 years old? A complete fucking kid. I was a developing computer-game-addict. I got through elementary school with a few good friends, doing stuff like playing soccer and fooling around with Legos and real 'kid' stuff like that. I was never really one of the 'cool' kids. Bam, middle school hit, and I got fucked. The usual, a few tight friends who I got along with, never went near the 'cool kids'. I was bouncing along, finding refuge with a few groups of kids who let me be not-quite an outsider.
But, y'know, those are the people who you're fumbling around in the dark with, trying to find out who the fuck you are. When the lights finally start to come on, they usually aren't the people you want to be with. I was friends with people out of neccessity, and once that was gone, friendship soon faded.
My parents were rather lenient with me. My dad was and still is an alcoholic, and that's always something that will make you grow up quickly and under your own power. I was already more independant from my parents than most of my friends, and sinking deeper and deeper into the morass of online gaming. Then, I got unleashed onto the internet, through my uncle, who is pretty much responsible for every good and bad thing that's ever happened to me.
And this place was fucking cool. I was 13 years old. Girls were people who were fun to look at but not to touch, and terrifying to speak to. My uncle let me read his copy of "The Anarchist Cookbook" and that pretty much summed up my opinions on life and the world. Starcraft was one strong fucking drug to me. That's what those games are, you know. They're not games. They're drugs. You pop in a CD, and for hours on end, you have no contact with the real world. You float through a magical hallucinated world of aliens and dragons and starships and knights. It's an escape from the everyday grind, a taste of adventure. It's every bit as dangerous as LSD.
I was spending a lot of time with my uncle then. I first spent a lot of time with him and my aunt in summer of 2001. I saw what it was like to be somewhat newly married, where everything was fresh, where kids were naught but a blip on the horizon, and you could go out partying and drinking late into the night WITH your wife. I saw the tail end of the "no responsibilities" stage of life, where you worked hard all week and partied hard all weekend, that stage which I'm just beginning to see the beginning end of now.
And yes, this shit has gone way off the deep end. It started out as a paragraph commenting on my perceived irony of how politics have only a slight bearing on our real world, yet we designate the real world to mean philosophical and theological and political debate.
But, fuck, I got treated like an adult. I was old enough to not really be a kid, but young enough to be easily impressioned. And these people I was hanging out with, in their 30s, they thought it was hilarious. It was New Years Day 2002. Jeanine was a freshman in college, working on becoming an alcoholic and a stoner at the same time. My aunt and uncle had been married a bit more than three years, hadn't even thought about kids yet. I was in the seventh grade. I was sitting on a stool in someone's kitchen, drinking a "make the kid a rum and coke without the rum, he's too young" with my aunt, while my uncle was having an animated conversation with some people who we had met when we showed up on their deck at an hour earlier and crashed their party.
And this place, this place was fucking awesome. I got treated the same way here that I did by my uncle.
Then, my mom got cancer, and shit -really- hit the fan. The chemo was keeping her sick and in bed, and keeping my dad far more concerned with her than with my brother and I. I would sit in the living room playing Tony Hawk with my brother, listening to hushed phone conversations in the next room, for hours on end. I channeled my energies into the realm of "case-modding". Monday through friday grind at school, but then experiments with ancient computers and various household objects and a random assortment of tools in my basement. Kept me sane. My brother wasn't so lucky. He was 11, not mature enough to handle it, and since he couldn't drown his tears in dope and drinks, he used ice cream and potato chips. Turned into a real loser. My mom still feels bad that she let him down. Did I mention that I'm a hell of a negotiator? I mediate disagreements between my parents, and help them out when they're feeling down.
Then, high school started in late 2003, and what a fucking mess that was. We had a class for computer certifications. It was awesome. All the gamer-nerds like me in one place. What began as a semester elective turned into a tight group of friends. Most of them are still good friends. Sawhney and I still get along well with them, although our intrests have differed from theirs more and more recently.
Oh, and by then, I was good e-friends with "Codu". He's one of the most interesting people I've ever known. He was very smart, very philosophical, very artsy, and very schizophrenic. I played innumerable hours of Diablo II and Warcraft III with him. He was born in 1980, putting him in early-mid twenties when I knew him. He was another traumatic childhood dude. Psychotic mom, good-for-nothin' dad who either left and never came back or died when he was like 16. Suicide attempt at like 16. He smoked. It's funny, y'know. There's a certain group of people where referring to "smoking" ALWAYS means pot. It's the intellectual, semi-hippie group. He also drank plenty and smoked cigarettes and all that stuff. He believed in reincarnation as animals. Here was this dude, 9 years older than me, whom I never had the oppurtunity to meet in real life, treating me like a combination nephew, brother, and best friend. He was kinda a loaner. Married, but on the way towards separation. Hopelessly addicted to computer games. Had a decent-paying job that he was good at and liked. Never went to it. Tough relationship with his wife, because he cared more about pot and warcraft than her. She told me that he was usually depressed in real life. I told her that he was usually happy online. He used the internet to escape from real life. It finally got the best of him. He sat down on a bed, underneath a picture that he painted, and blew his brain out with a pistol. I was 16 years old, on a two hour long distance call to Memphis, telling a widow about the other side of her husband's personality. She told me that he considered me his best friend. This man, who affected me so much, who treated me like an equal despite my youth, bam, dead, gone. Less than five months after my uncle did practically the same thing.
Oh, him? What a mess. He had kids, twin girls. He wasn't prepared for the strain of fatherhood. Instead of escaping through video games, he used straight vodka. Lots of it. 16 ounce Snapple bottle of 80 proof, that was dinner.
Obviously, you drink like that, it fucks you up. He was a fighter, though. Four months of drugged out mindlessness in the hospital, as the doctors tried to re-grow organs that had been -dissolved- by alcohol. Finally went out in the spring of my Sophomore year, as he was bleeding out as fast as they could pump blood in, with his wife (who is also his best friend), his best friend, and his brother held his hands for the last time.
I fucking warned you, didn't I? "I could tell you my aunt's story, but it would take too long"
The kicker - as my uncle is bleedin' out in the hospital, my aunt takes a pregnancy test, and yep, she got pregnant mere weeks before he was hospitalized. My uncle was four months in the grave, and a daughter that he never knew existed and who will never meet her father was born.
Fall 2005, damn, life totally fucking sucked. That was my big rant over at JJR's, where Prof cheered me up. In the past six months, I had lost two of my closest friends, and the only one to blame was themselves.
Then, I got a job, and started to wean myself off of my drugs... err... games. A few good people decided to help me out. I became confident in who I am, and got some social skills for a change.
And, as you all surely know, I'm totally crazy about Jeanine. She's awesome. She's so much like me, but different in a lot of ways too. We get along very well and agree on a lot of stuff, and we are both really interesting people.
I mean, this shit has been like three hours in the writing, and it's really trailing off. I'm still a bit of a weirdo at school, but I don't give a flying fuck about that place. Sawhney and I are tight as can be, and everyone else can go fuck themselves. I have friends at work, and they're all much cooler than the ones at school.
There, I'm friends with -everyone-. I'm funny, I'm charismatic, and I'm somewhat interesting. I met some really cool people.
I find out in 11 days whether I'm accepted to Stevens in Hoboken. That's going to be fucking awesome. I'm going to make the most of it. My parents did. My friends say shit like "I'm going to study hard and get a good job" and I'm like "Fuckit, I'm going to make as many friends as I can and party as much as possible."
It worked for my dad. He lived in fucking "Animal House" in Boston in the late seventies.
The one thing I don't think I'm gonna do, however, is become a stoner, which is odd, because many of my friends are, including, to a limited degree, Sawhney. My dad was a big time stoner in college (think Jeff Spicoli from "Fast Times", that was my dad in college, complete with the long blonde hair and no shirt) and he stopped. He said that drinking is better to do, which is why he stopped smoking in the early eighties, and why he ain't never gonna stop drinking. Jeanine, too, was a pretty heavy duty stoner, and she weaned herself off of it after college.
I mean, I expect to do alright. I have much more self control than my father, and hopefully I won't become as depressed as my uncle or Cody.
I dunno what the fuck is up with me. I was having an interesting conversation with one of my friends, who was like an education major or something, and she apparantly thinks that I'm "Hyperslexic". Now I'm a bit worried that I might be fucked up. I mean, I know that I'm rather fucked up anyway, but I always thought I was just different. She thinks that I have a "learning disorder".
Basically, I'm smart. I'm easily bored, but I'm very smart and I have a very good, if erratic memory. I do decently at school, but I antagonize my teachers a lot. I'm not very good at history, beyond the fact that my good memory usually lets me do decently. I'm good at english, because I can articulate myself very well on paper (better than I can verbally, which, to my horror, is apparantly one of the symptoms of "hyperslexia"). I do very well on tests, because of my memory. I also pick up on things quick. I do most mathematic stuff mentally. It's not even that I'm good at math, it's that I can see something, I can understand how it works, and I can see what needs to be done to make it work. I don't apply myself at all. I sleep or space out 80% of the time that I'm in school. I fail lab reports, I do almost no homework whatsoever, and I blow away tests without a second of time spent studying. I didn't even study for some of the CompTIA certification tests I took.
So, I'm having another identity crisis, thinking that I'm "hyperslexic"
I dunno. I think I'm decently articulate, and I do have social skills (although I am really nervous about asking her out). I hope I'm not fucked up.
Yeah, so, anyway, whoops, that kinda took three hours longer than I expected. It's interesting to see people talking about such mundane or such personal things with strangers over the internet. It's so fucking cool. There's no barriers of language, geography, age, gender, social status, anything. Nothing to prevent open communication.
We talk about average, everyday stuff here. That's what makes it cool. That stuff is the true "Real World". It's real to us, every single day.
I don't get politics. I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again. I don't really consider myself politically inclined. I prefer a more conservative idealogy, but I'm kinda a hippie. More and more, I'm finding myself saying "Why can't we all just be friends?!?!"
It's bleak out there, man. Any way you look at it, we're fucked. Why not enjoy it? The world is a big and scary place. Hold onto the people you love, and make the most out of it, instead of worrying about other people's shit. Wars suck. My grandfather's grandfather was in the civil war. He was wounded and in a brutal prison. My grandfather was in WWII. He made it out alive, but he never speaks of what happened to him in the South Pacific. My dad missed Vietnam by a few years. I'm scared to death of having to go to war in some fucking desert in the middle east. It's fucking horrifying to see what humans can do to each other. There's no reason for anyone to die in war, no matter what fucking side you're on. And that's where I'm politically torn, why I don't like to argue, because I can't, without feeling like a hypocrite. America is the greatest country in the world. Freedom is the best thing around. Just because it's worth dying to defend doesn't mean that people should die. It shouldn't need to be defended in the first place. People should recognize how great it is, and flock to it, and support it, instead of attacking it. I can't stand terrorists. We should kill every single one of them. But we shouldn't be dying, because they shouldn't hate us. WHY? Why do they hate us?
I'd like to point out a series of books that has affected me deeply in this regard, and that would be Goodkind's Sword of Truth. Richard Rahl is a righteous dude. Everything Goodkind says about politics through Richard, I agree with.
Life is too short and too meaningful to be wasted.
Fuck, that's why I don't like seeing people disagree or fight. Life is too short to get pissed off, or to hold a grudge, or to take little things too seriously. I am a hardcore optimist. I try to see the best in everything and everyone. I've seen firsthand what can happen if you let it all get to you. You end up in a wooden box under the dirt, while the woman you love is standing there crying, holding the children that you'll never get to see grow up. There's so much bad shit in this world that to spend too long in it is to drown in it, and miss all the wonderful things. There's no reason to miss those wonderful things. Like when I would kick back on the couch with my uncle, and we would talk about life late into the night. When I would do "one more baal run" with Codu, as we discussed the meaning of it all. When I play pool with my dad and he tells me stories about the awesome things he's done. When my mom visits me at work and takes me out to a restaurant on my break. When Gautam and I are hanging out in the library when we're supposed to be somewhere, having fun. When I'm having a bad day and dealing with an angry customer and Jeanine walks by and makes eye contact and we both can't help but grinning.
If you have your head so far into the bad, you miss the good. What's going on in Iraq isn't the Real World. The Real World is what interesting things Prof's children do, or what exciting toys Tonksy bought, or what Nixy thinks of her new apartment, or what college Sawhney is applying to today.
Fuckit, I'm done, Took over three and a half hours.
10:30 PM 12/3
It's late, and I'm tired, and when I get tired, I get kinda long-winded, philosophical, and easily amused. Tomarrow morning, I'm going to laugh at myself about this, but I'm seventeen years old, and the gloss hasn't even begun to dull.
But, I was pondering the meaning of life as viewed through the "New Posts" page, and I saw that this place was called the "Real World". I think that's funny. If anything, we should call Lunatic Lounge or Love and Lifestyles or the Soap Opera Box (err... I suppose the offical name is Shout Box) "The Real World". I mean, that's where most members have feet-on-the-ground discussions about every day life. What the kids are doing. How work was. What the missus is cookin'. You know, the stuff you do in the real world. What happens each and every day. The odd comfort of sharing simple, mundane information with total strangers. When you think about it, that's what we are. Total strangers. Total strangers who know everything about each other.
I mean, most of us have gotten pics up by now, but a few haven't. I'll use Gonz as my poster-boy for this, since he don't have a pic up. I've known Gonz for over four years, which is longer than I've known my best friend. He could walk up to me on the street, and I wouldn't know him. I wouldn't recognize him in the slightest. In all likelihood, it would be very awkward making small talk and stuff with him. There's the barriers of social ettiquette and spoken words and body language and different voices and all sorts of things that say so much more than simple text, but stifle some of what could be explained with words. Yet, I know his online mannerisms so well, and he knows more about me than most of my friends. There's no raised eyebrow looking back at you when you write this stuff online. There's no visual or audial stimulation in this form of communication. It's communication through a purely mental medium. Online communication between well-written people is damn close to telepathy. These aren't words you're reading, these are thoughts. There's no messy conversion to spoken words and messier conversion back to thoughts. The only limitations are the vocabulary and writing skills of the posters, which are miniscule compared to those of spoken words.
I mean, how fucking weird is this?
I came here a young kid looking for guidance. I was, what, 13 years old? A complete fucking kid. I was a developing computer-game-addict. I got through elementary school with a few good friends, doing stuff like playing soccer and fooling around with Legos and real 'kid' stuff like that. I was never really one of the 'cool' kids. Bam, middle school hit, and I got fucked. The usual, a few tight friends who I got along with, never went near the 'cool kids'. I was bouncing along, finding refuge with a few groups of kids who let me be not-quite an outsider.
But, y'know, those are the people who you're fumbling around in the dark with, trying to find out who the fuck you are. When the lights finally start to come on, they usually aren't the people you want to be with. I was friends with people out of neccessity, and once that was gone, friendship soon faded.
My parents were rather lenient with me. My dad was and still is an alcoholic, and that's always something that will make you grow up quickly and under your own power. I was already more independant from my parents than most of my friends, and sinking deeper and deeper into the morass of online gaming. Then, I got unleashed onto the internet, through my uncle, who is pretty much responsible for every good and bad thing that's ever happened to me.
And this place was fucking cool. I was 13 years old. Girls were people who were fun to look at but not to touch, and terrifying to speak to. My uncle let me read his copy of "The Anarchist Cookbook" and that pretty much summed up my opinions on life and the world. Starcraft was one strong fucking drug to me. That's what those games are, you know. They're not games. They're drugs. You pop in a CD, and for hours on end, you have no contact with the real world. You float through a magical hallucinated world of aliens and dragons and starships and knights. It's an escape from the everyday grind, a taste of adventure. It's every bit as dangerous as LSD.
I was spending a lot of time with my uncle then. I first spent a lot of time with him and my aunt in summer of 2001. I saw what it was like to be somewhat newly married, where everything was fresh, where kids were naught but a blip on the horizon, and you could go out partying and drinking late into the night WITH your wife. I saw the tail end of the "no responsibilities" stage of life, where you worked hard all week and partied hard all weekend, that stage which I'm just beginning to see the beginning end of now.
And yes, this shit has gone way off the deep end. It started out as a paragraph commenting on my perceived irony of how politics have only a slight bearing on our real world, yet we designate the real world to mean philosophical and theological and political debate.
But, fuck, I got treated like an adult. I was old enough to not really be a kid, but young enough to be easily impressioned. And these people I was hanging out with, in their 30s, they thought it was hilarious. It was New Years Day 2002. Jeanine was a freshman in college, working on becoming an alcoholic and a stoner at the same time. My aunt and uncle had been married a bit more than three years, hadn't even thought about kids yet. I was in the seventh grade. I was sitting on a stool in someone's kitchen, drinking a "make the kid a rum and coke without the rum, he's too young" with my aunt, while my uncle was having an animated conversation with some people who we had met when we showed up on their deck at an hour earlier and crashed their party.
And this place, this place was fucking awesome. I got treated the same way here that I did by my uncle.
Then, my mom got cancer, and shit -really- hit the fan. The chemo was keeping her sick and in bed, and keeping my dad far more concerned with her than with my brother and I. I would sit in the living room playing Tony Hawk with my brother, listening to hushed phone conversations in the next room, for hours on end. I channeled my energies into the realm of "case-modding". Monday through friday grind at school, but then experiments with ancient computers and various household objects and a random assortment of tools in my basement. Kept me sane. My brother wasn't so lucky. He was 11, not mature enough to handle it, and since he couldn't drown his tears in dope and drinks, he used ice cream and potato chips. Turned into a real loser. My mom still feels bad that she let him down. Did I mention that I'm a hell of a negotiator? I mediate disagreements between my parents, and help them out when they're feeling down.
Then, high school started in late 2003, and what a fucking mess that was. We had a class for computer certifications. It was awesome. All the gamer-nerds like me in one place. What began as a semester elective turned into a tight group of friends. Most of them are still good friends. Sawhney and I still get along well with them, although our intrests have differed from theirs more and more recently.
Oh, and by then, I was good e-friends with "Codu". He's one of the most interesting people I've ever known. He was very smart, very philosophical, very artsy, and very schizophrenic. I played innumerable hours of Diablo II and Warcraft III with him. He was born in 1980, putting him in early-mid twenties when I knew him. He was another traumatic childhood dude. Psychotic mom, good-for-nothin' dad who either left and never came back or died when he was like 16. Suicide attempt at like 16. He smoked. It's funny, y'know. There's a certain group of people where referring to "smoking" ALWAYS means pot. It's the intellectual, semi-hippie group. He also drank plenty and smoked cigarettes and all that stuff. He believed in reincarnation as animals. Here was this dude, 9 years older than me, whom I never had the oppurtunity to meet in real life, treating me like a combination nephew, brother, and best friend. He was kinda a loaner. Married, but on the way towards separation. Hopelessly addicted to computer games. Had a decent-paying job that he was good at and liked. Never went to it. Tough relationship with his wife, because he cared more about pot and warcraft than her. She told me that he was usually depressed in real life. I told her that he was usually happy online. He used the internet to escape from real life. It finally got the best of him. He sat down on a bed, underneath a picture that he painted, and blew his brain out with a pistol. I was 16 years old, on a two hour long distance call to Memphis, telling a widow about the other side of her husband's personality. She told me that he considered me his best friend. This man, who affected me so much, who treated me like an equal despite my youth, bam, dead, gone. Less than five months after my uncle did practically the same thing.
Oh, him? What a mess. He had kids, twin girls. He wasn't prepared for the strain of fatherhood. Instead of escaping through video games, he used straight vodka. Lots of it. 16 ounce Snapple bottle of 80 proof, that was dinner.
Obviously, you drink like that, it fucks you up. He was a fighter, though. Four months of drugged out mindlessness in the hospital, as the doctors tried to re-grow organs that had been -dissolved- by alcohol. Finally went out in the spring of my Sophomore year, as he was bleeding out as fast as they could pump blood in, with his wife (who is also his best friend), his best friend, and his brother held his hands for the last time.
I fucking warned you, didn't I? "I could tell you my aunt's story, but it would take too long"
The kicker - as my uncle is bleedin' out in the hospital, my aunt takes a pregnancy test, and yep, she got pregnant mere weeks before he was hospitalized. My uncle was four months in the grave, and a daughter that he never knew existed and who will never meet her father was born.
Fall 2005, damn, life totally fucking sucked. That was my big rant over at JJR's, where Prof cheered me up. In the past six months, I had lost two of my closest friends, and the only one to blame was themselves.
Then, I got a job, and started to wean myself off of my drugs... err... games. A few good people decided to help me out. I became confident in who I am, and got some social skills for a change.
And, as you all surely know, I'm totally crazy about Jeanine. She's awesome. She's so much like me, but different in a lot of ways too. We get along very well and agree on a lot of stuff, and we are both really interesting people.
I mean, this shit has been like three hours in the writing, and it's really trailing off. I'm still a bit of a weirdo at school, but I don't give a flying fuck about that place. Sawhney and I are tight as can be, and everyone else can go fuck themselves. I have friends at work, and they're all much cooler than the ones at school.
There, I'm friends with -everyone-. I'm funny, I'm charismatic, and I'm somewhat interesting. I met some really cool people.
I find out in 11 days whether I'm accepted to Stevens in Hoboken. That's going to be fucking awesome. I'm going to make the most of it. My parents did. My friends say shit like "I'm going to study hard and get a good job" and I'm like "Fuckit, I'm going to make as many friends as I can and party as much as possible."
It worked for my dad. He lived in fucking "Animal House" in Boston in the late seventies.
The one thing I don't think I'm gonna do, however, is become a stoner, which is odd, because many of my friends are, including, to a limited degree, Sawhney. My dad was a big time stoner in college (think Jeff Spicoli from "Fast Times", that was my dad in college, complete with the long blonde hair and no shirt) and he stopped. He said that drinking is better to do, which is why he stopped smoking in the early eighties, and why he ain't never gonna stop drinking. Jeanine, too, was a pretty heavy duty stoner, and she weaned herself off of it after college.
I mean, I expect to do alright. I have much more self control than my father, and hopefully I won't become as depressed as my uncle or Cody.
I dunno what the fuck is up with me. I was having an interesting conversation with one of my friends, who was like an education major or something, and she apparantly thinks that I'm "Hyperslexic". Now I'm a bit worried that I might be fucked up. I mean, I know that I'm rather fucked up anyway, but I always thought I was just different. She thinks that I have a "learning disorder".
Basically, I'm smart. I'm easily bored, but I'm very smart and I have a very good, if erratic memory. I do decently at school, but I antagonize my teachers a lot. I'm not very good at history, beyond the fact that my good memory usually lets me do decently. I'm good at english, because I can articulate myself very well on paper (better than I can verbally, which, to my horror, is apparantly one of the symptoms of "hyperslexia"). I do very well on tests, because of my memory. I also pick up on things quick. I do most mathematic stuff mentally. It's not even that I'm good at math, it's that I can see something, I can understand how it works, and I can see what needs to be done to make it work. I don't apply myself at all. I sleep or space out 80% of the time that I'm in school. I fail lab reports, I do almost no homework whatsoever, and I blow away tests without a second of time spent studying. I didn't even study for some of the CompTIA certification tests I took.
So, I'm having another identity crisis, thinking that I'm "hyperslexic"
I dunno. I think I'm decently articulate, and I do have social skills (although I am really nervous about asking her out). I hope I'm not fucked up.
Yeah, so, anyway, whoops, that kinda took three hours longer than I expected. It's interesting to see people talking about such mundane or such personal things with strangers over the internet. It's so fucking cool. There's no barriers of language, geography, age, gender, social status, anything. Nothing to prevent open communication.
We talk about average, everyday stuff here. That's what makes it cool. That stuff is the true "Real World". It's real to us, every single day.
I don't get politics. I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again. I don't really consider myself politically inclined. I prefer a more conservative idealogy, but I'm kinda a hippie. More and more, I'm finding myself saying "Why can't we all just be friends?!?!"
It's bleak out there, man. Any way you look at it, we're fucked. Why not enjoy it? The world is a big and scary place. Hold onto the people you love, and make the most out of it, instead of worrying about other people's shit. Wars suck. My grandfather's grandfather was in the civil war. He was wounded and in a brutal prison. My grandfather was in WWII. He made it out alive, but he never speaks of what happened to him in the South Pacific. My dad missed Vietnam by a few years. I'm scared to death of having to go to war in some fucking desert in the middle east. It's fucking horrifying to see what humans can do to each other. There's no reason for anyone to die in war, no matter what fucking side you're on. And that's where I'm politically torn, why I don't like to argue, because I can't, without feeling like a hypocrite. America is the greatest country in the world. Freedom is the best thing around. Just because it's worth dying to defend doesn't mean that people should die. It shouldn't need to be defended in the first place. People should recognize how great it is, and flock to it, and support it, instead of attacking it. I can't stand terrorists. We should kill every single one of them. But we shouldn't be dying, because they shouldn't hate us. WHY? Why do they hate us?
I'd like to point out a series of books that has affected me deeply in this regard, and that would be Goodkind's Sword of Truth. Richard Rahl is a righteous dude. Everything Goodkind says about politics through Richard, I agree with.
Life is too short and too meaningful to be wasted.
Fuck, that's why I don't like seeing people disagree or fight. Life is too short to get pissed off, or to hold a grudge, or to take little things too seriously. I am a hardcore optimist. I try to see the best in everything and everyone. I've seen firsthand what can happen if you let it all get to you. You end up in a wooden box under the dirt, while the woman you love is standing there crying, holding the children that you'll never get to see grow up. There's so much bad shit in this world that to spend too long in it is to drown in it, and miss all the wonderful things. There's no reason to miss those wonderful things. Like when I would kick back on the couch with my uncle, and we would talk about life late into the night. When I would do "one more baal run" with Codu, as we discussed the meaning of it all. When I play pool with my dad and he tells me stories about the awesome things he's done. When my mom visits me at work and takes me out to a restaurant on my break. When Gautam and I are hanging out in the library when we're supposed to be somewhere, having fun. When I'm having a bad day and dealing with an angry customer and Jeanine walks by and makes eye contact and we both can't help but grinning.
If you have your head so far into the bad, you miss the good. What's going on in Iraq isn't the Real World. The Real World is what interesting things Prof's children do, or what exciting toys Tonksy bought, or what Nixy thinks of her new apartment, or what college Sawhney is applying to today.
Fuckit, I'm done, Took over three and a half hours.
