On the origins of homosexuality

Men and women everywhere were rocked today by a scientific breakthrough that came, of all places, from the tiny offices of the Tas travel agency. Despite a complete lack of research, no adherence to the scientific method, and no discernible hard evidence, the company - which to this point had sadly restricted itself to selling luxury cruises - has proven beyond a doubt the true cause of homosexuality among men and women.

P. L. Marshall, president of the company, issued a press release over a lunch of bran flakes and feta cheese describing the incredible find.

"It's really very simple," the honorable Mr. Marshall stated. "What if a child has a crab-faced mother and an insanely gorgeous father? Isn't it possible that the child is so repulsed by his horrifying mother that he becomes attracted to his father instead? Then, when he grows out of this reversed Oedipus complex, he naturally displaces this affection onto other men."

The information - so blatantly and revoltingly obvious that it had clearly escaped the higher minds of the American psychology community for decades - promises a massive paradigm shift; perhaps one that rivals the dramatic shift in thinking after Darwin's earthshattering "Origin of Species."

"It's absolutely astounding," reported Dr. Taylor Fields, senior psychologist at the Chimaerical Institute for Psychological Health. "We never even imagined that something so abjectedly retarded as crab-facedness among mothers could be the cause of homosexuality among men. Of course, it all makes sense if you just imagine that the universe really is out to get you, and that we ultimately mean rendered dog turds in the grand scheme of things. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go redeem myself by drowning in a porta-potty."

Margaret Cohen of North Fork, Tennessee, was stunned to hear the news. Mrs. Cohen, whose face has been described by neighbors as "the very sphincter of Hell," stated, "Oh my God! It really IS all my fault!"

Her husband, Mr. Andrew Cohen, commented, "I never actually noticed it before, but you're absolutely right! She's hideous! She looks like the ass crack of Hades! What the hell was I on? I want a divorce!"

Not everyone, however, believes in the validity of the research. The Cohens' son, Robert (known locally as Pricilla McQueen), remains skeptical.

"Well fuck-a-doodle-doo...another BS scientific discovery about why I like to suck cock. Why don't you sons of bitches do something important, like find out why people still wear pleated jeans?"

Others insist that they knew all along.

"Ah knew it!" added Jimmy-Bob McCree, native of sixty years to Podunk, West Virginia. "Those gawddamn homersexuels're a gawddamn unnacheral insult to God and nature an' this here research proves it! We oughtta line'em all up and give'm the firin' squad. Er put'em to work diggin' ditches. Er sumtin'." Mr. McCree was unavailable for further comment, as he returned to performing various unmentionable acts of a carnal nature with his pit bull.

Podunk is one of several thousand charming towns scattered throughout the American south where certain pigment-challenged residents may still occasionally awaken to the sight of a flaming cross on their lawns. Homosexuals here, though uncommon, are nevertheless regularly ostracized in a ritual process involving bundles of sticks and a tall stake meant to reduce further incidences of "sexual immorality." However, it is in small towns like Podunk, where reduced gene pools often result in physical deformity, that news of the research struck like lightning. When informed that they would have to either promote homosexuality or marry outside the family, most residents of the town spontaneously imploded.

Scientists are not, however, discouraged by the mass outbreak of gruesome death in rural America.

"Does it matter?" Dr. Fields remarked from inside a porta-potty in Central Park. "Another few generations and they'd have bred themselves into extinction anyway. The point is that we now have an easy way to prevent the spread of homosexuality. Just don't let ugly people have kids. I know it's kind of hard-wired into our shallow, shallow society anyway, but alcohol can still cause a lot of flukes, particularly in Las Vegas. Now go away! You're distracting me."

A proposal for a constitutional Amendment is already underway in the House of Representatives, requiring all couples who want to have children to register and pass an objective test on hotornot.com.

In an even more sweeping motion, the Pope declared that allowing ugly people to breed would now be tantamount to condoning sodomy, and as such be a direct act against God. It was a therefore a matter of course to officially ban such a blasphemous thing in church doctrine. To further discourage misplaced affections among the youth, only ugly men would henceforth be allowed in the priesthood, and stunningly gorgeous women permitted in convents. The habit, long a staple of the convent, would be replaced by string bikinis and thongs in order to jar younger adherents in the proper direction. When noted that such a thing may, in fact, condone lesbianism instead, an anonymous bystander stated, "Sweet! Lesbians are hot! I'm so converting to Catholicism!"

Certain individuals, however, have suggested a more moderate approach.

"There's, like, no need to be so drastic," asserts J. T. Morgan of Sanatee, Pennsylvania. "If people are so concerned about it, just put a paper bag over the mother's head for the first few years. That ought to do it."

Note: I actually hadn't intended this to be so long, and it seemed to get rather darker than I intended as I wrote...but anyway, this little work of satire does result from an actual conversation at work. No, obviously none of these people actually exist, or said any of these things. The crab-faced mother comment, however, is a real one, and I might have disputed it if I weren't busting my ass laughing.

On homesickness

I miss the way sunlight streams through a canopy of red and gold leaves, and autumn winds that taste like mountain streams. I miss the sight of two-story split-levels of vinyl and brick on either side of the street, with half-acre yards neat as turf and speckled with dandelions. I miss the smell of damp earth on freshly raked leaves, and the ridges of a decade-old handlebar against my skin. I miss the way the trees rustle as a wind combs through their leaves, in just that way so you know a storm is brewing on the horizon. I miss the feel of carpet underneath my feet as the first swollen drop of rain pitters against the window, knowing that the purr of an engine will soon sound in the driveway. I miss the vaulted evening sky, spotted with stars so innumerable they seem to crowd against the distant darkness, until the spaces between us seem to shrink and grow at the same time. I miss soaring down narrow streets on a bike at three in the morning, until the wind slices at my face and hands with cold razors, and knowing that nobody will ever be there to slow my way. I miss the way moonshine reflects off the snowfields at night, so that the ground itself seems to be glowing white, and the air is so cold it hurts to breathe, and so clear that you only wish you could take deeper breaths.

I miss all these, as I sit in this jewel-speckled city, with its palaces of glass and steel. I've traded a great deal to be here, for the right to pursue my dreams. Sometimes, in the depths of my complacency, it's good to remember what all of us gave up in coming to New York.

On idiotic crushes

I love Steve Sandvoss and I want to bear his children.

Okay, that was a bit simplistic and a trifle exaggerated. Let me exposit. I just saw a movie called "Latter Days," rented via Netflix about...oh...forever and a month ago. Minus the forever. I got Netflix because it was more economically viable than continually paying late fees at the local Hollywood Video, which is a 45-minute commute from where I live and therefore very inconvenient now that I'm out of school. Who wants to sit in a subway for an hour and a half just to rent a fucking movie? (I almost capitalized the Subway, and it's worth noting being forced to watch people eat overlarge sandwiches for an hour and a half just to rent a movie would not only suck, but reeks of unacceptable surrealism.) Anyway, I keep putting off watching the damn movies due to a lack of time, so in reality they're costing me something like seven bucks each. Did I ever mention that I'm a goddamn lazy artard?

Getting back to the point, in "Latter Days" Steve Sandvoss plays a rather sweet-faced Mormon boy who happens to be gay. He discovers and eventually accepts his sexuality over the course of the movie. If you happen to be Mormon...what are you doing reading my blog anyway? Depart this palace of sodomy and sin! Depart before it sucks you in! Depart and read nothing herein! Okay, so you don't have to be Mormon to realize that being gay and Mormon is kind of like being gay and right-wing Republican...and we all know how well drag and George Bush go together (although, admittedly, that's a rather amusing mental image.) So, the movie's pretty much about how he comes to terms with himself, and how his true romance comes to terms with how meaningless his party-boy lifestyle really is.

It's a low budget film and the script is hardly Pulitzer-prize material, but I found it generally rather enjoyable. Not just because there are legions of gorgeous semi-naked men (I seem to recall having had this discussion earlier), but because I actually did find the movie holding a certain resonance. However, it did feel a little like they were trying to cram three and a half hours of storytelling into an hour and a half. The script and scene-work was choppy like a Ginsu. I was also uninspired by most of the performances, although as I said Steve did a rather good job. I may be slightly influenced, however, by his wholesome, corn-fed, disgustingly attractive boy-next-door good looks (which could turn the heads of straight men and bull-dykes alike!) Actually, that can't be it - his co-star, Wes Ramsey, was arguably just as good looking, and I thought his performance campy and a bit forced.

One point of unintentional hilarity, however, were all the shots where someone would have been naked but for some very cleverly angled cameras and well-placed limbs. It was pretty skillfully done, and the actors didn't look like contortionists or anything, but I still found it profoundly funny how often we would have gotten a faceful of penis but for that errant wrist or convenient shadow.

I can't say it's a great movie, but it is pretty good and I would recommend it to my gay friends and anyone who isn't bothered by copious amounts of man-ass.

On working too much

Well, no...not really TOO much. I'm rather enjoying being a light techie/stage manager and I get to watch the show every time it's on. 12-hour workdays are kind of a pain - particularly when you consider that I spend roughly another 2 hours commuting to and from work every day, which leaves about 2 hours left over to do things. If I got Mondays off, though (which I currently don't), I think I could definitely run lights and semi-stage manage for a few months. I feel all nifty going backstage and calling out places and so forth. It's also really quite an experience watching Broadway actors do their jobs every night. Damn, but these guys sound good. I also find it heartening to know how often lines get flubbed even by professional actors.

Unfortunately, long days also leave me tired and sleepy and unable to formulate proper coherent thought to share with the world.

On hedgehogs

For someone who styles himself a writer, it's interesting how I can dance around the topic so much. Or that so often, I can't seem to express precisely what it is I want to say, and I end up engaging in a huge amount of intellectual waffling before either coming out with an answer or dribbling away into nothingness. It's like my mind is some big metaphysical cow that has to chew an idea for fourteen hours before finally either realizing what it's trying to digest, or just packing it away to become psychic compost. (At least I feed lots of astral flowers.)

Some days...some days I feel positively inhuman, in the sense of being distanced from humanity. In some ways, it's a carryover from my childhood, and on those days I feel like...well, I don't really feel at all. It's like all my emotions are inside this tightly crushed up little piece of paper, surrounded by an utterly impenetrable iron shell. Then I draw a smiley face, tape it to the ball, and it's business as usual. In that way that I do, (and I'm quite aware that it's a way of mine) I say it's all part of being Chinese, when I think it's really just all part of being me. I am exceptionally good at compacting everything into a neat little package that can be locked behind a big metal door (or doors), and then going about as happy and as charming as usual. In spite of everything I write here, I really am quite good at not letting it show when something is bothering me. Or not letting what I'm really thinking surface. Or not letting it show when I'm really completely, utterly indifferent to everything that's going on around me. That's actually a little scary, sometimes - I imagine that serial killers probably do exactly the same thing.

Wow...that sure killed the mood. (Pun intended.)

I always found it kind of funny that to say someone "isn't human," is always meant to imply a certain monstrous aspect, or a lack of emotion or empathy. Yet, when you get right down to it, being human can be being quite monstrous. Humans are by nature egocentric creatures - in fact, child psychology suggests that until a certain age, we are completely incapable of empathy. Isn't that funny? Children are the innocent and the pure, and until they pass that magical age of roughly 4-5 years, they'll happily dissect a family of rabbits simply because they're curious what they look like on the inside. It's a monstrous thing, and yet it's also not, because the child doesn't know any better. Until they're told or otherwise informed that it's wrong, it's simply not wong. But I'm sure that's of little comfort to the family of rabbits. And, of course, there are people who would happily dissect a family of rabbits even though they were told it's wrong, but they really don't care. Or because whatever positives they might derive out of the experience outweigh the negatives. There are monstrous people out there, but they're as human as any of us. Then again, there are some marvelously good people out there, but they're as human as any of us as well. How are such dualistic creatures possible?

That's actually a bit outside the hula hoop, because that's not how I feel today. There's something called the Hedgehog's Dilemma, which in its literal aspect is of course completely malarky, but illustrates a point well enough. The idea is that the hedgehog suffers pangs of loneliness, but two of them trying to come closer will only hurt each other. The hedgehog thus has a choice between remaining lonely, and allowing someone close enough to get hurt. This is a notable point, because in all of New York City there have been exactly two people close enough to me to know what I might be thinking at any given time. One of them is no longer here, and I feel her absence daily.

Of course, she would never allow me to wallow like I'm doing now - she was always exceptionally good at kicking my ass into proper order. What would she say to what I'm writing right now, I wonder?

"G, you're being ridiculous. You're an emotional fucktard sometimes, but you're certainly not inhuman. You're just finding an excuse for waffling around, like you always do. You like things being easy and safe, all packaged up with this neat little bow, and honey, they're just not. You're never going to grow as a person if you stay inside your comfort zone! You know what I think it is? I think you just need to get laid."

Ahhhh...Jiiiiiesus. In front of an audience you say this to me?

"I'm sorry, but it's true! Every time I see you you're like this big...ball of sexual frustration. It drives me boooonkers! Listen, next time I'm in New York, we'll grab Darien and go down to some bars in Chelsea. You can pick someone up and have some wild monkey sex, and you'll feel much better."

Ugh. But I hate casual sex.

"Pish. Pish! We're going, and that's that!"

But-

"Pish!"

Wow. Not even here and she's still managed to hijack the conversation. Well, there you have it, folks. She sure gets right to the point, doesn't she?

Heh. I was hurting when I woke up this morning - I was really feeling the horrendous solitude of living alone in New York City, and I all ready to be gloomy and angsty today. Now...well, now I feel a lot better. Isn't it wonderful to be loved?

On physics, quantum or otherwise

First off, I'm utterly offended that there isn't an entry under the categories for "Science and Technology." I mean, what the hell? I find it insulting that Myspace assumes nobody here is going to talk about the universe around us. And before anyone says anything, this is most certainly NOT a web or HTML topic. What, am I supposed to classify this under...life? News and politics? (Are there interstellar wars out there? Stars lobbing flares and planets at each other?) Romance and relationships? (Shock! An illicit affair between a quasar and the Large Magellanic Cloud!) Lunacy, I say!

Anyway, I was thinking about the dimensionality of things on the Subway, trying to wrap my mind around the idea of dimensions above the fourth. Really, I was trying to decide whether the concept of a fourth spatial dimension as anything other than time is asinine. I think that it is, because space as a word is very specifically defined as three dimensional, with "physically measurable" components. Tack on a fourth, and you're automatically talking about time. Unless you talk about a fourth dimension that moves along WITH time, but I think that would just end up being a fifth dimension. Weirdness! Or maybe I'm playing with words instead of playing with concepts, which is just ridiculous. Anyway, everything that defines space seems to be derived from space. If an object is defined as three-dimensional, then it is said that it can be moved from one location to another, but the terms "location" and "moved" seem to me themselves entirely dependent upon a definition of space in the first place, thereby rendering the whole thing circular. It seems the mathematicians have it right after all - only math can really define this in a nice, clear-cut way.

What does this have to do with the fifth (and above ) dimension? Well, it's hard to imagine because we can't perceive it in the same way as the other three, but time is just another axis, perpendicular (orthogonal, as we engineers call it) to the other three. We just can't...measure the fourth axis the same way we do the first three. Now, we've established that two objects can't exist in the same place at the same time, which brings me to my first point of speculation. Why can't an object exist in two places at the same time? Of course, we would be completely unable to perceive such an event (I really ought to read up a little more about the discreteness of time, and the relevance of Planck's constant. Quantum mechanics has always been a difficult topic for me to wrap my mind around. I think it's because I'm a very visual person, and quanta are very difficult to properly visualize.) because the object is effectively changing its position in only three dimensions, and not moving along the fourth. Actually...oh, right - that would require said object to be moving at the speed of light. Well, that answers that question.

You know, the more I think about it, the more I want to just talk to a quantum physicist about all this. Reading a book is all well and good, but they can't always answer your questions in a meaningful way. What really brought this whole thing up was a speculation on my part that so-called "psychic" or "telekinetic" powers may actually just be a result of someone capable of picking up cues that exist along a different dimensional axis - one that we can't readily perceive. If we're heading into the realm of disembodiment, it's not necessarily unreasonable for something to exist solely along the axis of time, with no components along the first three. Throw a fifth and a sixth dimension in there, and it would have a fully realized three-dimensional "space" of its own without ever having to touch a "physical" space where we can readily perceive it. Hell, superstring theory (which I don't really understand at all) suggests at the existence of anywhere from 11-26 spatial dimensions, and if we're stuck looking at four, well...that's a lot out there that we just plain can't see. Why should humans necessarily exist in only four dimensions if there really are dozens more floating out there?

Perhaps there could be a nice, scientific explanation for ghosts, telepathy, and all the other pseudoscientific wonders of the world after all.

And maybe this has been much more of a philosophical speculation than a scientific one.

On iambs

Dance your dance, oh Shiva, dance, dance away my tears.
Sing your song, oh Shiva, sing, sing away my fears.
My heart is cracked, my heart is torn,
for you were there when I was born.
So lay me down to sleep, oh Shiva,
Say that I can rest.

Dance, oh Shiva, dance dance, dance away my tears.
Sing, oh Shiva, sing sing, sing for all who hear.
My love has fled, my heart is dead,
And lonely days are days I dread.
So music me to sleep, oh Shiva,
Play me to my rest.

Dance for me, oh Shiva, dance, dance away my tears.
Sing for me, oh Shiva, sing, sing so I may hear.
There's nothing here, there's nothing left,
Don't say that I should stay bereft.
So gaze into my eyes, oh Shiva,
Look, that I may rest.

No, I'm not actually that angsty. I got an idea of a sort of myth, about someone - a god perhaps. He is a good god...maybe the best of all the gods. Because of this he was betrayed and in the process lost everything he loved. So in the end all he can think to do is ask someone else - a goddess, maybe - who loves him to dance her dance and sing her song.

This dance is called the Dance of Shiva, named after the Hindu God, whose dance is of cosmic significance. It's an ultimately selfish thing to ask of her, but if he's allotted one selfish thing in all eternity, this would be it. And because she loves him, she dances away the world and sings down the heavens, and in the process gives him the rest he asks for.

Then the second world is created, and it is forever missing a certain something, because the god who was betrayed had no hand in making it. But perhaps if that original betrayal was somehow sufficiently atoned for, he'll come out of his rest, and take hand in the world once again.

Yeah, my stories are usually pretty dark. Believe it or not, it helps keep me maintain a positive outlook.

On the perversity of friends

So I was in the Great Wall restaurant underneath my apartment with Darien. Yes, it's a Chinese restaurant, and I'm sure there are hundreds in New York called "Great Wall." We're not, as a whole, terribly creative when it comes to naming things in English. Anyway, I eat there a lot, and I do mean a lot. Their eyes light up when they see me, and even the owners' kids know what I'm going to order when I walk through the door (Hunan shrimp with brown rice, incidentally.)

So yeah, I was in there with Darien, and after a brief discussion about cash we decide that I'll pay for dinner. So she goes, "I'll have the meat dumplings, and he LOVES the cock." And I was all like, "Omgwtfpwned!"

(Pause.)

Okay, no she didn't. We were actually just talking about it after leaving the restaurant because the lady at the desk thought she was my girlfriend. I found the idea, however, hilarious in a manner difficult to fully articulate. I mean, say you've been working in an oily, sticky, dimly-lit, low-brow dive of a kitchen for some seven and a half hours. Your English is spotty, one of your most consistent customers comes in with a gigantic redheaded girl (Darien is six foot, one inch), and while ordering she just casually goes, "Yeah, he LOVES the cock."

How the hell do you respond to that? Do you even understand what she's talking about? Isn't cock a term for a male chicken? You thought he liked shrimp! Should you just ignore the statement? Smile and nod? Oh my god, what do you say? Quick! Need an answer!

"Ohhhh, really! Yeah, me too!"
"Okay! We have lots cock! Best cock!"
"Oh no, the cock no good here."
"Do you like cock too?"
"What kind cock does he like?"
"Whaaaat? He is The Gay?"

The potential for hilarity is spectacular enough that I almost want her to try it out one day, just to see what their response would be. It would probably have to be the day that I move to midtown or something, because I do like eating there and the food's remarkably cheap.

Heeheee...he LOVES the cock!

God, I'm such an artard.

On the mysterious you

Blogging has become a remarkably addictive activity for me, particularly given certain recent events in my life. Part of the reason is that I like to stay up far, far past my bedtime, and inevitably around three or four in the morning I want to talk to someone. Most of my friends would gnaw out my liver if I called them up at 4 am just to shoot the shit (what a bizarre colloquialism. I keep seeing the two guys from Brokeback Mountain, taking pot shots at piles of cow dung), so blogging becomes my proverbial hole in the ground. Unlike Midas' hairdresser, however, I remain keenly aware that there are actually people reading this. Maybe that's why I like it - I kind of feel like I'm actually reaching out and touching someone, except without the molestation charges. Hah! I kid. The only person I've ever molested in public is Chuckles, and I only did that with my eyes. (Didn't know about that, did you Chuckles? I'm going to get that tattoo someday. You know which one I'm talking about...)

Back to the topic at hand. It's curious - if I really only wanted to write about how I feel or otherwise express myself, I could easily just make a word document and spill as much as I want on there. I don't even necessarily have to worry about spelling or punctuation or capitalization or anything like that. I could just unwind, and...talk, about anything at all. (Yes Dave, I can actually write without necessarily capitalizing and punctuating everything. I might even misspell a word or two here and there. Try not to faint.) If all I wanted is a hole in the ground, then I could easily make something totally private, for no other purpose than to let my fingers rattle over the keys. Something to let me relax as the words just dribble out of my fingers. It might be even more therapeutic, in a way.

And yet, here I am, again and again, rattling off words to my unseen, unknown audience hidden in the dark. It's like I'm standing on a stage, flooded in a cold wash, and all I can see is the white projector light reflected off the back of my audience's collective heads. A sea of anonymous faces sitting in the shadows. Well that can't be entirely accurate, can it? I have a supposition about who reads what I write - I assume its people on my friends list. I've already addressed two of my oldest friends, but for all I know they pay no attention whatsoever to what I'm writing. At least one of them, after all, only put up a Myspace page because his brother hacked his computer. It's not simply a matter of talking to my ideal audience member (and the old goat does get rather boring after a while. You can only hear "Hrmmmm" and "I see" so often before you want to whack the guy with a keytar.) It's...knowing that there's someone out there, reading and relating, perhaps. Maybe it satisfies my need to stand on a soapbox and be heard, every now and again (or every twenty hours or so). The internet is undoubtedly one of the best media for such a thing nowadays. (Parentheses are fun! I love parentheses! I can digress and go all sorts of places inside a pair of parentheses! It's like having a totally random subroutine sitting in the middle of otherwise very clean code! It's like, while the program is in the middle of calculating, say, the optimal shape of a low speed wind tunnel contraction, it suddenly comes across a subroutine that screams, "I demand that you output rows and rows of pickles to the screen!" And the program can be all, "WTF?! No!" but it can't resist the power of the subroutine, who can totally bitch-slap it and go, "Ho! Give me pickles!" And voila! In the middle of a wind tunnel contraction you suddenly have rows and rows of pickles. But only briefly, because then the subroutine ends, and you're back to something that makes sense.)

I was tempted...almost tempted, for a moment there, to ask "Who are you people? Who is actually reading this? What is it that brings you back here, if indeed you're a regular reader?" Well, hmmmm...I guess in stating my intent not to ask the question I've actually rather asked the question, haven't I? Aren't I a tricky fellow? Do I really want to know? Should the house lights come up, and reveal just who is sitting in the seats? Part of me says yes, but part of me is going, "What if you end up with an utterly creepy man in, say, a bunny suit?" I have, mind you, no particular onus against bunny suits, excepting possibly the one from Donnie Darko, but...come on, a grown man in a bunny suit? In a dark theatre? Are you telling me that you don't find the idea completely skeezy? But then, maybe that man is actually Ricky, who can pull off such things without being creepy, because he's just that kind of guy. See? I can suppose all I want, but until I have confirmation, my audience remains whoever I think it is. Maybe that's a good thing.

I was feeling rather...sad isn't really the word for it. A sense of longing for something far, far away is probably the best way to describe it. Perhaps it is the sensation that a cow gets when it looks up at the moon, and knows that although music and literature makes it sound terribly simple, it's really a logistical nightmare for an 1,100 pound mammal to clear 238,000 miles of dense atmosphere and hard vacuum, then return to the earth intact. Not only is there a lot of equipment involved, but it doesn't even know how the moon feels about such an endeavor. But that doesn't stop it from wanting to try. God, how it wants to try.

At least the silverware's getting laid tonight.

On the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Absurdity is what happens when there is a conflict between what you think the universe should be like, and what you encounter tells you the universe should be like. Did I learn that in theatre history, or was it somewhere else?

In a perfect world, everything turns out exactly as it should. Well, in a world with six-odd billion egocentric people, what precisely does that mean? What is justice, or even a fair sense of equality when there are six billion slightly different views on the topic?

I'm good at what I do. There are better people out there, although whether that's because they're naturally gifted, worked hard, or both could be a matter of some discussion. Is it fair that some people were born with greater gifts than I have? Is it fair that I'm more adept at recognizing patterns and solving problems than 99 percent of the population (at least, according to standardized tests. And while I'm on the topic, who the hell decides what is "standard," anyway. What does that mean? Why should a bunch of ultimately inane questions asked under a very specific situation determine someone's capabilities? For example, in spite of everything, I don't deal well with pressure. I crack easily, and I make lots of mistakes when under a time constraint. I don't think quickly, I'm not very clever, and I'm not particularly witty. Understanding and memorization, however, comes as easily to me as a sparrow takes flight. However easily that may be. And I'm a very fast learner, at least on a scale where the base unit is a matter of hours or days. Does that make me smart? Do I get a gold star?) Does fairness even fit into the grand equation of things in a meaningful way? Not everyone can be a rocket scientist, after all. Someone's gotta sweep the factory floor.

I'm not a naïve person. I understand that the world isn't a pretty place. But every now and something rises out of this little bog of complacency I've settled into, and everything just looked skewed. And I start to wonder what it would all mean if it didn't really mean anything. Nobody's out there, nobody's watching over you, and the fact that a pigeon just shat on your head has no cosmological significance whatsoever.

I know exactly what's bothering me. Well...sort of. I'm just doing the philosophy dance again, because it distracts me from what I should be addressing, which I have no intention of going into detail here. Eh. It's 5 am. I'm less than coherent. I just wanted to write.

On boundless inanity

I really ought to go to sleep, but I procrastinate, as usual, even though my brain feels like it's made of moth balls and cotton candy. Rambling on seems like a decent activity, except that I don't have any alcohol on me and my sleep-deprived ramblings are a lot less interesting than my alcohol-driven ones.

Speaking of sleep deprivation, I think I actually had a bout of microsleep on the phone today while making a phone call. I was asking a question of the noble people over at Delta Airmiles. The actual question escapes me, but when the representative asked me a question in return, I had already fallen into a brief sleep on the phone. I recall being cognizant of the fact that I had been asked a question, and I thought that I had answered it...but in fact I'd only dreamed that I'd given an answer. I realized this and promptly woke up, just in time to hear the representative go, "Hello?"

Speaking of dreams, I had an interesting one last night. It involved several Chinese people putting on a very bad play, in which a girl missed her cue and then promptly knocked over a prop. The odd thing (and there is always an odd thing) was that the play seemed to be taking place in the Virginia Tech War Memorial Gym...which any Hokie will tell you isn't the most optimal place to be staging a play. The prop that had been knocked over was a stack of presents, which had been sitting underneath a rather improbable Christmas tree on the edge of a gym railing. While the cast attempted to push their way to the end of the play through pantomime, I made a hasty retreat downstairs. My father, who lives in Hong Kong, happened to be coming up the stairs at the same time. He patted me on the back, and I could only roll my eyes, thinking, "Well, there goes Dad again, up to watch another god-awful Chinese play." Which, of course, is wrong, because my father has never seen a play in his life, Chinese or otherwise.

And then, for no reason at all, as I headed toward the locker rooms I decided to jump into a ballet point in my sneakers. When I executed it perfectly, feeling as weightless as though I were underwater, I realized that something was wrong. I am quite incapable of doing a ballet point, even in hard-toed boots. I am also about a hundred and sixty pounds too heavy to be weightless. This fact somehow got through to me, and I promptly thought, "You know, I do believe I'm dreaming. I should wake up now."

And I did.

Now I sort of wish I'd done something better with my absolute control of my dream realm. Summoning legions and legions of gorgeous, muscular men comes to mind. Or leveling mountains with a wave of my hand. Either one would've been satisfactory. As in they would have satisfied something. I've always wanted to level a mountain. I've always wanted legions and legions of gorgeous, muscular men. Perhaps I should combine the two, and level a mountain by gesturing to my legions of gorgeous, muscular men.

Ah, does my inanity know no bounds?

On the foolishness of men

Pride is a stupid thing, particularly when mixed in the right amounts with its diametrical opposite, uncertainty. When uncertainty tells you that you might not be doing the right thing, pride inevitably responds, "Of course I am!" Intelligent, reasonable behavior then goes out the window.

Ahhhh...screw it. I'm too irritated to be abstract and philosophical. I play an online game. I'm in a guild. One of my guild officers asked me last night to do something that, as far as I'm concerned, was ridiculous. I requested a confirmation of the instructions (mostly because I couldn't believe what I was hearing), and was told, effectively, to shut up and not question his orders, he knows what he's doing. And all I can really think is, "If you're asking me to do that, you obviously don't." We're still discussing the matter, privately and via e-mail, today. He's not budging and while I'm trying to remain diplomatic, my patience has thinned considerably.

I think living in New York is starting to make me rather abrasive. Speaking from history, I don't like giving my opinion if I think it will stir up waves. That is changing with alarming rapidity, and I'm acquiring a certain shocking bluntness.

Or maybe I'm just not the bottomless cup that I always thought I was.

On continuity

I write this as I contemplate a proper answer to a message. I posit something else in the meantime - is it easier to ask a question, or is it easier to answer one?

Now to the matter at hand - my problem with the God of Christianity stems in some part from the concept of omniscience and omnipotence. I was going to go into a huge discussion about the issue using newtonian and quantum mechanics, but then I realized that was mostly just me enjoying the sound of my own voice (so to speak). The crux of the matter is - if God is omniscient, truly omniscient, can there be any free will? If the universe is a closed system, with no outside interference, then the answer would have to be no. If God knows the future, then he knows exactly how each of us will behave indefinitely far into the future. Everything we do is nothing more than the motion of cogs in a great machine, wound and set to spinning at the dawn of time.

Now...I do have to entertain the notion that perhaps God does know the future, but he may act to change it. That, however, would actually argue against God's omniscience. After all - if he knew how things would turn out, why didn't he just set them in motion the right way to begin with, without necessitating later intervention? Anyone who says here, "He moves in mysterious ways..." is going to get smacked, because I like the idea of an arbitrary God even less than the idea of a limited one. Anyway, this knowledge includes accounting for intervention from certain other outside sources, such as the Devil. Omniscience is OMNISCIENCE, after all. Knowing all things.

I think it's been posited that if the future doesn't exist yet, then there isn't anything to know. God can't know it because...well...it doesn't exist. You can't know what's not there. I, however, think that's a cop-out answer. The future may not exist, but an omniscient God certainly knows every single variable in the present and past universe. He knows precisely where everything is, how fast they're moving, and what forces are acting upon them. He knows me, and how I think, far better than I know myself. After all, I don't know what motivates me half the time. He doesn't need to guess what my reaction would be to certain stimuli - he knows. This is God, after all.

So if he knows all this, even if the future is unknowable, he should be able to predict what will happen to an indefinite amount of time into the future. Now, at this point, it would be reasonable to toss in that little kicker, entropy. The tendency of things for things to fall into the lowest energy, most disorderly state. Maybe some things happen simply because they happen. No rhyme, no reason. The bowling ball has fallen onto the cow because...it was there and the cow was convenient. But this would suggest that something like chaos and entropy could balk the infinite mind of God. If his predictions, his knowledge, and his will can't pierce the veil of entropy...then he's hardly omniscient and omnipotent, now is he?

It's a conundrum either way. Logically and reasonably, I can't see any way around it. Either what I believe to be my choices have no meaning, and therefore I have no hand and no responsibility for the things that I do, or God is not omniscient and omnipotent.

But now...now we enter a rather more abstract realm. What if I were to say - "My choices have meaning. I have free will, and God is indeed omniscient and omnipotent." Well, I'd have said it, in the loneliness of my apartment, and I would likely feel a mite silly because all it really did was stir up the dust on my monitor. But if God were to say it, if an omnipotent God were to declare it so...then it kind of has to be so, doesn't it? In spite of all its apparent inherent contradictions, if an all-powerful being declared this statement to be true, then for him to really be all powerful the statement must then be true. And the rational order of the universe breaks down.

But of course God must realize that, and therefore he is free to declare, "The universe remains a rational, orderly place that follows certain rules." And so it does, forced into it by nothing more and nothing less than the infinite power of God's will. This brings up an interesting thought. What if all these contradictions and inconsistencies exist within the universe, following no law or regulation, but bound together into existence by the simple and inescapable power of God's intentions. I keep getting this mental image of a man with an inescapably strong rope, tying shut a massive suitcase that really just wants to fly open and spew underwear all over the place.

Which is the entire point, but brings me to my third problem with the Christian God.

When everything springs from you, it makes your decisions a bit arbitrary. But I'm sleepy, and don't feel like touching on that right now.

And yes, these are things I think about while riding the subway.

On insomnia revisited

There are too many thoughts living inside my head. I'm too tired to entertain them, but neither do I want them to leave, for it is dark and lonely in here all by myself.

On past recollections

Well, I don't know. I just got the urge to write something in here, because I was doing rather well and it seems such a shame to just...stop. I'm also procrastinating on sleep, which is a rather masochistic thing to do, but I find sleep isn't quite the comfort it used to be. Who really needs sleep anyway? Hallucinations are fun!

So anyway, I was talking with...who was I talking to? Yeah, I can already tell this is going to go very well. I'm already forgetting the persons with whom I was conversing, and here I'm trying to make a certain philosophical point. Oh, right - it was Missi. Yes - we were walking toward the promise of fried chicken or some other clot-inducing sustenance right after a show at the Academy. I don't remember the show, but I do recall a certain sense of dissatisfaction. Not with the shows, mind you. But...with something else.

I take an aside here because in conversing with Myia this weekend, I've finally identified the feeling completely. It was dissatisfaction with the things I should have been unhappy about while at the Academy, but wasn't admitting to myself. I've always held a rather more exalted opinion of the school than perhaps it entirely deserved. Or maybe I forced myself to think so, intent on finding another way of reaffirming myself in a field where I still feel a little off-balance. I don't know. I like the Academy. I enjoyed my experiences there most of the time, but it certainly wasn't as perfect as I kept making it out to be.

In any case, I didn't recognize any of this in-school or after graduating, but they finally caught up with me that night after the show. My emotions are painfully slow sometimes, and I rarely have the patience to wait for them. Unfortunately, they then gang up on me at the next available inopportune moment. By that point everyone's tickets have mixed up so I don't know what order they're supposed be in, and everything just sort of shoves in all at once and leaves me feeling nothing but slightly confused and rather hungry.

But I digress into strange metaphors. Let me just say - I felt the pain of separating from the school for quite some time. It was inevitable. After all, I practically lived there for two years and then, slice, nothing. To make matters worse, I've never handled sudden transitions well, and sudden changes in my life make me internalize even more as I try to sort through what I feel. Well, the transition finally completed that evening, and I no longer missed the Academy. Life goes on. Yay.

Well, that was a considerably longer digression than I intended. Anyway, as I was initially saying - it occured to me that everything I enjoy in life seems to be one form of escapism or another. I can actually sort of pinpoint where it started - jab in a red pushpin, as it were, roughly around the time that my parents divorced and life effectively went to shit for five or six lovely years. There had been a certain motion toward fantasy before then, and I'd always liked horror movies, but the central obsession of my devious little developing brain up to that point involved certain extinct lizardfolk that roamed the earth (raping, as it were, the planet, and pillaging without regard, as Nicky Silver so eloquently puts it) some 65 million years ago.

There must be some kind of psychological study about this sort of thing - changes in a child's interests as his environment undergoes certain radical shifts, positive or negative.

Anyway, for one reason or another, fantasy, science fiction, and horror became my primary mode of expression very suddenly, whether in writing or in art. At about this time, I started what I called (at that time) my Alien Sketchbook. I think it was probably my first inklings of world building, because I constructed this entire...hmmm...galaxy would be the best term, in my mind. I was in the sixth grade at the time, and I have no recollection of what I was reading. Stephen King was certainly in there, but in a pre-adolescent sort of way I actually chose what I read based upon page number rather than content. Lugging around a book somewhat larger than my head was a very good way to make people think I was intelligent, or so I thought.

Anyway, the Alien Sketchbook (which still sits in a box somewhere in Mom's garage) was a collection of all the aliens that inhabited my little galaxy at war, doing what they could to survive its peaks and its troughs. I had categorized all of them and listed basic specifications like how tall they were, as though I could build them in a factory. Most of them were omnivorous (except the evil ones - they were all carnivores), and even the flying insects could bear loads that ranged anywhere from a fair-sized building to a small moon. Most were also psionically capable in some way, and any one of them could probably have forced stars to go nova by giving them mean stares. I was very taken with psionic powers at the time.

Anyway, I worked stupendously long hours on my Alien Sketchbook - I don't think I've experienced such jumps in my artistic ability before or since. I honestly think my obsession with that battered five-subject notebook worried my parents a little...particularly when I never let them look through it. And you know what, they probably snuck into my room and looked at it anyway. What an outrageous invasion of my privacy! I am very displeased.

I think in some corner of my mind, I was quite convinced that my galaxy, with all of its cataclysmic wars and demi-deific entities, was very real. It was somewhere out there, lost in the ether of space and time, and even if it didn't exist right then it would certainly come to pass at a future date. And when the aliens landed on Earth some gazillion years in the future, they'd pick up my little Alien Sketchbook and marvel that such a young boy in a nondescript Virginia town could have catalogued them so accurately.

I maintained the Alien Sketchbook for several years. As I grew older and my artistic skill improved, I actually secreted the original five-subject notebook away and replaced it with a black three-ring binder. This was a real beast of a binder, three inches thick with D-rings and very carefully chosen narrow-ruled notebook paper. It also had the approximate mass of a Winnebago, could probably be considered a lethal bludgeoning device in thirty-six states, and made me look like a turtle when hidden in my backpack. A rail-thin, anemic turtle with incredibly geeky gold-rimmed glasses. Is it any wonder middle school sucked so much? Hell, I'd have picked on me, given half a chance.

Hmmm...4:30 am again, and here I am still in the middle of a very long blog with no end in sight. Ah well. My craving for writing is satisfied. Sleep would probably be a good idea.

On blogging for the sake of blogging

Online journals are kind of an oxymoron. Or maybe just the name is an oxymoron. I keep a journal, of sorts - more of a stream of consciousness written work that I do (or at least used to do, before I became a fat lazy Chinese bastard) - that I wouldn't show my evil twin from Dimension X, much less the public. Well, in all fairness, there are a goodly number of things I wouldn't show my evil twin from Dimension X, because in due nature of science fiction he would be plotting my downfall in the most humiliating way possible. It would probably involve gallons of pig blood during the high school prom and force me to unleash the full unbridled might of my psychokinetic powers upon my shallow, derisive classmates. Flee, pitiful doomed mortals! Flee and cower before your doom!

It occurs to me now that a) I'm more likely the evil twin and b) red wine makes me psychotic. As I was saying - I often can't quite decide my mode of communication when writing in an online journal. Part of me believes that nobody reads this crap, and that part is clearly in denial because I can glance to my left and see that my random scribblings have drawn the attention of at least 83 people (or one person 83 times, or some combination thereof). Another part of me believes that I'm writing to an audience that will never actually read what I'm writing, and thus I adopt a certain abstract narrative mode. My audience becomes my ideal listener and takes the form of a bearded old English gentlemen in a very well tailored grey suit and wire-rimmed glasses. He looks terribly interested in whatever I have to say, nods every once in a while, and occasionally says, "Hmmmm..." in a very thoughtful way. While I wouldn't, say, go into perverse sexual fantasies for this gentlemen (how shocking!), I might be willing to share my childhood traumas and complicated relationship with my family.

And part of me just wants to spill, and superego has to slap him upside the head before the deep, dark reaches of my soul gets slopped onto a computer screen.

I digress at this point to say that the journal thingy I used to do is actually called "Morning Pages," if you're familiar with the works of Julia Cameron and her fantastic book "The Right to Write." She is a wonderful writer, Morning Pages are great, and I like banana pudding. The world is a fabulous place, or roughly 5% of its surface area contains fabulous places, and the rest are alternately dens of hedonism, misery, and despair. Humans are some silly bitches.

It is also possible, I find, to switch modes in the middle of writing a particularly long piece. This is especially true when I've consumed a concoction made from fermented grape juice in possibly unwise quantities. For the record, 2004 Fairvalley Pinotage reminds me of mashed paper and vodka. Being a sugar nut, however, might color my perception a bit.

ANYWAY, yes, switching modes in the middle of writing. It creates distinct voices within a given piece of work. Kind of like stitching together a quilt using several different materials, some of which aren't appropriate to quilts at all. Asbestos, kitten's paws, and radium come to mind. While it creates an interesting texture, the resulting furry, radioactive, and carcinogenic hodge-podge inevitably causes a catastrophic breakdown in reader comprehension. The entertainment value may, however, appreciate nicely and make up for the loss of coherence and value.

On friends and friendly advice

Myia and Darien are the bomb. Getting drunk with them is among the most entertaining and endearing experiences to be imagined.

I am also an idiot. A romantic idiot. And I have no idea how to be anything else.

On bitchy, bitchy hope

What do you do when you rationally, realistically realize that something is pretty much hopeless? When your higher brain functions acknowledge something as terribly improbable, when you're mentally prepared to accept that it has a snowflake's chance in hell of succeeding...and yet you keep yearning for it? Or am I talking about the difference between hope and desire? Perhaps they're interchangeable - it's quite difficult to hope for something you don't want, and you can't want something without even the tiniest hope that you might get it. You can certainly acknowledge it as hopeless, you can tell yourself that it simply can't happen...but deep down inside, there's always that tiniest glimmer that says, "Just maybe..."

There is something interesting about the duality of hope. Hope can keep a man going long after he should have long since expired. If it's strong enough, it can be the only thing that keeps him going. Hope can be marvelous, because it means we can go to bed on a dark today wishing for a brighter tomorrow. Because not to hope is to accept something that might otherwise be unacceptable. Hope can support us and keep us going in the face of the worst opposition, as we drag ourselves toward that light so far at the end of the tunnel. Hope believes in change.

But perhaps hope can also be a dark thing, a consuming thing. Hope leads all too easily into obsession. Even if it's not quite that extreme, hope can become the yearning for something that...realistically can't happen. What use is hope if what is hoped for can't occur. What use is dragging yourself through the tunnel when there isn't a light at the end?

Heh. And there is my dualism, in a way, and yet not. There's always a light at the end of the tunnel, somewhere. Maybe not in this one, and maybe you can't see it, but there is always light somewhere. Even in my worst dregs of despair, there's always something, SOMETHING that I can hold onto. Something bigger and brighter than myself, perhaps. Hell, even the knowledge that in the end, the universe goes on.

God, I'm such a drama queen.

I wish Myia were here. I need to talk to her so badly it's painful. 'Cause damn it all to hell, I've done it again.

Okay, I'm abstracting, and I know I'm abstracting. In fact, not only am I abstracting, but I'm also being terribly emo at the same time..and Jesus bloody Christ, some of it is being emo ABOUT abstracting. Do you know that sensation when you step slightly outside yourself and go, "My good man...do you have any idea what you sound like?" And then you kind of just want to grab yourself and shake until a) all your teeth rattle out or b) you get a grip and realize you're a mature adult, not a whiny sixteen year-old. There are mature ways to deal with things, and I actually know what they are.

All things in good time, all things as they develop, and...

You know what? Fuck it. I give myself the right to hope.

On insomnia

I can't...bloody...sleep. Why can't these bloody profound creative thoughts come to me when I'm in a position to do something about them, and not when I have an eight-hour day to look forward to tomorrow. Even if a large enough number of monkeys working for a long enough time can produce Hamlet, my forehead whacking the keyboard every minute for eight hours straight is unlikely to produce a workable web page. Maybe it's because night is so much less...distracting, than the day. I wish being nocturnal was a reasonable mode of existence for a human being in New York City. Come to think of it...it is. Okay, fine - I wish being nocturnal was a reasonable mode of existence for me. I hate walking around half the day like a drone, and when I'm finally feeling up to speed, it's past dinner time. AND WHERE THE HELL HAS MY COPY OF "BACK TO METHUSELAH" GONE?!

I think it's also because more often than not, I'm alone at night. And though I'm not even aware that it's happening, my shields go down. And everything I'm afraid of thinking during the day just flood in. I don't know. It seems like I don't know half the things I'm saying nowadays. Particularly on this online blog. God I'm tired...I wish I could just go to sleep. Instead, I shall post a poem that I wrote a long time ago.

"Mother and Sons"

I am told that life is small,
and I have heard that life is cheap.
A worthless bauble among all
the treasures of the galaxies.
A speck of dust in the great black room.
Against the vast expanse,
not even a curiosity.

I am told we are a whisper, lost
against the tempest of time.
A forgotten word in the dusty library.
When we die, none will remember us,
no one will weep.
We will be as a forgotten memory.

Ah, but if you die, my dearests,
I will weep.
I will weep for the lost songs and
the lost poems, the endless unwritten stories
that will never come to be.
I will grieve for the lost sunsets and
the lost clouds, the great designs
that no one will see.
I will mourn the seas in their fallen seashells,
the unheard sighs of the abandoned trees.

I will weep for wonders left
underdiscovered.
I will lament the starry sky
and the spaces untouched by your curious hands.
I will cry for your vanished lives.

I will weep for the lost worlds,
for the sum of years from all who have lived,
surpasses the life of time.

For that loss, my dearests,
I shall weep.

The sentiment is a mite trite, but I still hold to it. It seems to me particularly true when I look at the great skyscrapers of New York City, gaze at the myriad sparkling lights of these huge structures, knowing each erected with not only the effort of man and machine, but the accumulated knowledge of ten thousand years. Each building contains dozens, hundreds of people, most with at least as many years behind them as I have, and each with a story to tell twenty or more years in the making. Each with a story as different from the other, and also as similar, as the moon is to a fuzzy white peach. Perhaps it's insomnia making me excessively romantic, but when I really get down and think about it, those stories and those lives seem to me of paramount importance...every bit as important as any sun or galaxy of stars. A whole universe, for that matter, seen through the eyes of one person.

On dragons inside a dungeon

Unless you're creative with your dungeons, odds are good that they simply won't fit. And even if they did fit, could a colossal wyrm really take enough advantage of an underground room to benefit from his natural flight? It is, of course, possible to make a truly enormous room.

You know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking about a dragon inside an opera house. Not just any opera house - a HUGE opera house. I'm talking four, five hundred feet to a side, thousands upon thousands of chairs, and enough room for the dragon to fly. I'm talking split-level mezzanine where archers could possibly shoot the dragon before it has the chance to rain fiery destruction upon all the oh-so-expensive velvet chairs. No crowds, mind you - that would just make things difficult, but...I think there should be a chandelier. A huge one, dangling right in the middle of things, so a particularly heroic...ahm...hero could jump from the mezzanine to the chandelier and take swipes at the dragon as it flies underneath. And if the heroes are really clever, they can fiddle with the levers and knobs and try to hit the dragon with pieces of the set. Yeah. That satisfies my sense of the unusual.

In a more serious note, I'm kind of pissed off at myself. I know what constitutes a good adventure. I know, essentially, what will entertain my players. I can even recognize signs that someone isn't enjoying a game. Why, then, can't I seem to do anything about it? My success rate in running a smooth, really enjoyable game seems to hover between 40-50%, and that's frankly just not good enough. I want all of my players to be enjoying themselves, dammit, not just two or three at a time. Why oh why can't I seem to let go of the story in exchange for fun when I need to?

Bah!

On nightmare fuel

The sheer amount of time in between posts here makes me wonder why I even bother keeping up a blog. I think I post when I want to talk, have no one to talk to, and can talk myself into believing that a) there are people out there listening and b) there is no one out there listening. I love being a walking ball of contradictions.

So...I suck again. And not in a good way. (When was the last time I sucked in a good way, and is there any way to say that without sounding like a slut-man?) It's been, wow, about four months since I graduated from the academy, and have I done anything productive in my intended field of passion? Nope. Not a damn thing. Not a single, blessed, bloody thing. Well, I got my headshots, and I worked - made some money, although not nearly enough to support any sort of healthy lifestyle in New York. Oop. Back up - getting my headshots is actually kind of misleading, because getting my headshots suggests that I...ya know...have headshots. I have digital images of myself that, once committed onto paper, would make lovely headshots. I have no gotten them reproduced, in part because by the time I actually GOT my headshots, I'd already planned to go home for two weeks. In part because reproductions would cost me about three hundred dollars right now, and that's money I don't have. And anything else put onto the credit card is going to be just another nail in the coffin lid.

But that's not the real reason at all, now is it? Let's be honest here - I'm scared. To hell with scared - I'm fucking terrified. It is, for obvious reasons, not a run-around-like-a-headless-chicken sort of terrified...although in a cosmological sense, that's pretty much what I've been doing in the past four months. No - I'm sunk so deeply into doubt it feels like I'm walking around staring at myself, judging, and constantly finding myself wanting. I feel like that quote in Stigmata, as my oftentimes flawed memory presents to me, "An actor must have faith; you do nothing but doubt."

So I'm getting off my ass tomorrow. To hell with it - I'm slapping the money on the card (one of the many cards), and high interest be damned. I'm sick of lying around thinking about what I need to do for my future, instead of actually doing it. It's funny. All I have to do is think about what Myia would say to me. She would kick my ass so hard I might as well give up homosexuality. Well, she's coming back to New York pretty soon, and I'm damn well going to have something positive about myself to say to her for once.

On pushing one's limits

I was lying in bed last night contemplating my recent release from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and reflecting upon my accomplishments as an actor. I've been doing that quite often these past few days. I only briefly flirted with that big no no of acting - wondering whether or not I'm any good. It's like, the kiss of death, because I end up going through every single play and every single scene I've ever done, thinking about how I might have done it better. It was a only a brief flirtation, more of a passing glance than a scandalous tryst in the dark corners of my mind, but I didn't get a good night's sleep anyway. I think, however, that was mostly because I dreamt that Adam Vorath shot me in the chest with a machine gun, shortly before his band of space pirates hijacked my colonial transport and flew off into the asteroid field. I'm going to have to get him back for that. Oh yes...get him good...

But I digress. Actually, I got to thinking what helped me the most while I was at the Academy. And while they were undoubtedly the most frustrating times of my Academy career, it would definitely be during those scenes that came out of left field. The most helpful were those scenes where, after the first read, I was going, "How the hell am I supposed to play that?" There weren't that many of them, but they really forced me to sit down, analyze every aspect of the scene and study every portion of the script to come up things that would work for me on stage. Even more than that, the rocky scenes made my tendency to "pre-direct" my scenes much more apparent, which was instrumental in letting my instructors move me out of there.

So where is this leading? To my last play of course, and how I screwed up. Just about everyone I spoke to regarding Hay Fever knows I was bitching about my character. Richard Greatham is in a lot of ways similar to the character I played in my last play, Gerald Thornton from Time and the Conways. I was more than a little annoyed at this, and I generally made sure all my friends knew about it. The funny thing is - I got so caught up thinking about how similar they are that I missed out on the opportunity to make them different. I felt like Richard was well within my realm of experience, that he and I were extremely similar people, and thus there was no need to reach very far to get myself "there." In other words, I coasted, and as a result the character wasn't nearly as interesting as he could have been.

It's a dangerous thing, I think, when I can identify very strongly with a character. It makes me lazy, and it makes me think I can get away with things I wouldn't even contemplate if I had trouble identifying common elements. It's good to realize this, I guess...I just wish I'd done so BEFORE the school year ended.

On credit cards

They are the devil, for the make the purchase of expensive things entirely too easy.

On the necessity of being with people

Why is it that I always end up wanting to talk to someone only after I've decided I want to be alone? Why is it that it always seems to happen in the evenings, generally after 10pm, and when I'm sitting in front of the computer? It never fails to depress me. Or maybe I never fail to depress me. And that's awfully depressing.

Were I still in Blacksburg, I think I would stroll over to Alexi's room, spelunk and wind my way through the mountains of garbage he has strewn all over his floor, and hover over his chair while he rants over what idiocy Riceboy X is spewing in the 3000GT forums. I'll only understand about half of what he says, but his endless supply of trash talk never fails to cheer me up. Then we'd proceed to watch some utterly random but strangely hilarious video clips, undoubtedly involving vintage cartoon characters in perverted sexual escapades, and closing the evening in an oddly comforting way.

In spite of being a tried and true introvert, I'm starting to think I really do need to live with people I can relate with and talk to.

On a lighter note, anyone who didn't see Women of Lockerbie missed out on a truly tremendous show and wonderful performances from everyone involved. It was deeply moving, deeply affecting, and in no way shape or form influenced my current mood.

On taking too much time

I was in the shower at the gym today, and I got to thinking about God. No, that is not a double entendre. My mind just wanders sometimes. At any rate, I got to thinking about the main reason I take exception to the deity of Christianity, and before you know it, I was on this huge mental spiel that involved everything ranging from newtonian physics to the nature of omniscience. Quantum mechanics, time, open and closed systems of bodies, chaos theory - I touched on all of it as I narrated to myself why I disliked the Christian idea of God.

All the way home, on the subway, I was still going over all the reasons in my head. I mounted a mental soapbox, as it were, and waxed eloquent on what I perceived to be a fundamental reason that Christianity is, for me, flawed. I practically narrated a small thesis on exactly why the idea of God, as it is presented in the Bible, offends my sensibilities. Then I get in front of my computer, get prepared to write some astonishing, remarkably philosophical, lovingly polished piece of vaguely self-congratulatory prose...and I lose all desire to put it into concrete words. The concept of it is still sort of floating around in my head, visually reminiscent of the Crab Nebula, but actually committing that entire piece to writing feels odious to the extreme. As a minor aside, I am extremely proud that I have found occasion to use the adjective "odious." I was remarking to Lyle only earlier today that our modern sense of language is decidedly unpoetic.

So. What does this indicate? I think it suggests a rather profound shift in my way of thinking since my younger days. Things, even things I love, take too much time these days. The idea of going back over this idea that I've already hammered over for something like an hour and a half in my head, and writing it out before going to bed just seems utterly tedious. Before I started attending college, such an activity would've seemed...well, fun. That's a bit worrying. I feel like I don't enjoy writing as much as I used to, and the work involved in hammering out anything of even acceptable quality is growing too substantial. There always seems to be something else that needs to be done.

Hah. If Jackie were reading this, she'd probably tell me that it's because I'm not in the moment.

Was there any point to this? Well, I could feed my arrogant side. I could say it's because I'm wondering whether or not pieces of particularly insightful or eloquent work were left unwritten simply because their authors got lazy or possessive. Certainly the likes of Einstein, Thoreau, and Faulker wrote great works, but what more lay unrevealed in the depths of their minds? Could they have kept the greatest treasures of their imaginings to themselves, never to grace the light of day? Does it matter?

But actually, I think it's just because I wanted to write, and to share what I wrote.