I keep being told by friends that I need to start dating someone, anyone as far as they are concerned. It's been 3 years since my wife decided to leave me for a man with more money and since then I haven't dated anyone. There have been people that have interested me but at no point did my interest in them ever evolve into a date. Just last week I was told I was a monk.
I have a great number of excuses for not dating anyone. Some are horribly personal, others are what I tell people when they start suggesting that I should start seeing someone. A list of my public excuses:
1. I don't know any women near my age (which is somewhat true as I work with teenagers and attend school with even more teenagers).
2. I need a woman I can share my faith with (which again is true however I make no effort to meet women who share my faith).
3. I have plans for the future that I don't want a relationship to mess up (after my wife and I split I started making plans to go to Wales for a year, she wanted to try and work things out, when she said that it wasn't working the deadline for my application had passed and I couldn't go. I don't want that to happen again right?)
4. I'm fine alone, it leaves me the opportunity to do what I want when I want (of course I don't do anything because I have no one to share such experiences with).
5. I can't afford it (dating is expensive and I don't have that much money to spend on doing things with someone else, or so I tell myself).
These are the main excuses I would share with anyone who asks why I don't date or apparently have no desire to date anyone. While they all have a certain ring of truth to them they all have a certain ring of bullshit as well.
Human's are essentially communal beings. We naturally seek out others to share ourselves with. There is a perverse sense of fulfillment that comes from giving of yourself to another. Even more so when it is recpricated in kind. Then there is the natural biological drive to procreate which drives us towards relationships with others on a purely instinctual level. Of course there are those who choose to deny themselves this (usually refered to as monks or freaks - take your pick) but in doing so often try to isolate themselves from society so as to distance themselves for desire and distraction. I unfortunately am not a monk.
Would I like to be dating someone? Of course. Am I willing to try and meet someone so that I could date someone? Probably not.
The real reasons I don't try and meet anyone are personal. You see I (like everyone else does) have an inner voice which talks to me. Its amazing what you can hear when you take some time to listen to the inner narrative. For instance did you know that I am unworthy of love? Or perhaps that there is no way another person could be interested in me? Another thing that I have learned from my inner voice is that I am terribly unattractive and frightfully unappealing.
This is just a small sampling however I have begun to notice a pattern. I don't seem to like myself all that much. The word negative comes to mind. I'm sure that someone out there would classify it as something akin to a 'negative self image'. If I was saying these things to another person some might claim that what I say is verbal abuse.
Of course when you find yourself in an abusive situation you should make every effort to extricate yourself from said situation. How do you do that when your doing it to yourself? Suicide? I guess that that would be one out but I don't find it all that appealing.
I said in a previous post that I had been listening to my inner dialogue and had had an epiphany. That to fulfill God's command to love your neighbor as yourself, you need to love yourself. It seems I am having a terribly hard time at this. Perhaps my inability to love myself is having some effect on my ability to love others? Or perhaps its having an effect upon my simple desire to seek out someone to love?
I want to love someone. To have that connection with another person that I lost when my wife left. It just seems that I have to convince my inner voice that I deserve it before I'll be able to seek it out.
For some reason this makes me sad.
I'm not too sure why.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Monday, May 30, 2005
Weekend
Boring lives suck.
You wait all week to get a couple days off from work and your boring ass life dictates that you do jack shit with your time. If I had worked at least I would have had something to do.
Well I finally bit the bullet and got around to smoking some dope on the weekend.
I got together with a friend and got it all planned out. We'll rent some movies, buy some pizza and smoke some dope.
So my friend and I start watching 'Harold and Kumar ...' and light up our first joint. He takes all of 4 drags and claims to be pleasantly high. I finish the joint off and feel nothing.
I smoke a second joint, still nothing.
Third. Nothing.
Fourth. Nothing.
What am I? Some kind of mutant who can't get high. I wait this long to finally try it and after smoking 4 joints I still feel nothing.
At least the movies wern't half bad. We watched the aforementioned 'Harold ...' as well as a movie called 'Casual Fridays' which is a bunch of clips from incredibly horrible tv spliced together to form 90 minutes of hilarity. We also watched 'Appleseed' which was a rather interesting anime film.
Can't wait till next weekend. Maybe I'll just get shit-faced drunk and pass out in a gutter somewhere. That'd be an interesting story.
Wouldn't it?
You wait all week to get a couple days off from work and your boring ass life dictates that you do jack shit with your time. If I had worked at least I would have had something to do.
Well I finally bit the bullet and got around to smoking some dope on the weekend.
I got together with a friend and got it all planned out. We'll rent some movies, buy some pizza and smoke some dope.
So my friend and I start watching 'Harold and Kumar ...' and light up our first joint. He takes all of 4 drags and claims to be pleasantly high. I finish the joint off and feel nothing.
I smoke a second joint, still nothing.
Third. Nothing.
Fourth. Nothing.
What am I? Some kind of mutant who can't get high. I wait this long to finally try it and after smoking 4 joints I still feel nothing.
At least the movies wern't half bad. We watched the aforementioned 'Harold ...' as well as a movie called 'Casual Fridays' which is a bunch of clips from incredibly horrible tv spliced together to form 90 minutes of hilarity. We also watched 'Appleseed' which was a rather interesting anime film.
Can't wait till next weekend. Maybe I'll just get shit-faced drunk and pass out in a gutter somewhere. That'd be an interesting story.
Wouldn't it?
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Constructions
Recently I've been trying to wrap my head around the notions of human constructions. Now I'm not talking about roads and bridges or buildings and dams but rather the systems that humanity has created for ourselves to operate within. Examples would include capitalism, democracy, nation states, money, etc.
When I sit back and look at it - them, it - they seem so concrete, so permanent, so daunting, so consuming. Its not until I take a moment or two and really think about the issue that I am able to overcome the societal imprinting upon my mind that says that these things are unchangeable and perfect systems. They simply are not permanent nor unchangeable so why do we treat them as such?
John Lennon in his famous song 'Imagine' invited us to imagine a world without possesions or countries. What would it look like? What would it be like? John didn't think we would be able to because we were so caught up in the now, the 'breads and circuses' of life that we wouldn't be able to truly consider and conceptualize a world without these human constructions. Can you conceive of a world in which there were no countries? Can you imagine a world where there was no money?
These things are created by man in an effort to allow human beings to interact with one another in a ordered and coherent system. When I begin to look at these things and try to conceive of a world without money and countries I tend to construct soceities that are united and seemingly harmonious. Of course this mental frolicking is simpy a hypothesis and perhaps tends towards the utopian but I try to be honest as well.
What does money do for us? The simple answer is that it allows us to buy things. Of course this relient upon the notions of materialism and consumerism which says that we have to buy things, most of which is completely and utterly unnecessary. What about food and shelter? The neccessities of life, we have to buy those as well don't we? Given our condensed urban culture this is true for a great many people but we don't HAVE to buy these things. We can grow and catch food. We can build shelters using the resources inherent in the environment. Human beings have been doing it for millenia. So what does money do for us? It divides us.
Money serves to elevate one segment of the population while degrading another. We have created a system with the 'haves and have nots'. A system where we are to 'keep up with the Jones'. We are constantly bombarded with the notion that we must buy, we must consume, we need the latest piece of frivolous crap, we need the current unnecessary fad. We are told that those with money are better than those without. We idolize the rich and scourn the poor. The system we call money feeds a system we call capitalism which feeds the inherent degredation of mankind.
We have created other systems to prop up and take advantage of these two systems. Today we allow those with more money to have better health care, to drink cleaner water, to breathe cleaner air. Those with money are granted greater protection. All because they have more of what we call money. Are they better human beings? Does the fact that they have 'money' make them a genuinely better person than the person without? Does this fact mean that they deserve to live longer, healthier, happier lives simply because they have more 'money'? The answers to these questions are interesting and important. At the heart of them lies your conceptions of human value and which is more important human life or money.
What do countries do for us? Of course they allow us to express our uniqueness while protecting us from the uniqueness of others. Canadians are different than Romanians just as Germans are different than Koreans. Thats true right? We are inherently different and therefore need these human conceptions of segregation, right? Of course with countries we give rise to patriotism which gives rise to fanaticism in certain instances. In the name of countries we are willing to do such horrible things that we would never conceive of if we were talking about neighborhoods. We grant out countries the power to do what is 'necessary' to insure our prosperity and safety even if it comes at the cost of the lives of others. Like money, contries are a system of human interaction which we use to elevate some and degrade others all the while using them to dehumanize those who are different.
I guess the trick in all of this is trying to identify the effects of these human constructs and then imagining a world that either negates or enhances those effects we deem negative or positive. To me the systems of money and countries serve to seperate and dehumanize mankind. As such when I try to conceptualize of a world without these systems I envision a world where humans are free to live in harmony without human constructs to tell me that I am better or worse than anyone else or that I have a right to steal from this group in the name of mine.
Human beings are communal creatures and as such will always come together to form communities. In doing so systems will be created to not only help us interact with one another but also with other groups. Of course what is truly important in all of this is that we realize that these things are HUMAN CONSTRUCTS and as such can be changed by human beings. Capitalism, the nation state and democracies are not creative autonomous entities in and of themselves, they are tools and systems created and used by mankind to facilitate interaction. Because they are ours by creation they are ours to change and modify or to ultimately end. Mankind is the master of these systems not their subjects.
When I sit back and look at it - them, it - they seem so concrete, so permanent, so daunting, so consuming. Its not until I take a moment or two and really think about the issue that I am able to overcome the societal imprinting upon my mind that says that these things are unchangeable and perfect systems. They simply are not permanent nor unchangeable so why do we treat them as such?
John Lennon in his famous song 'Imagine' invited us to imagine a world without possesions or countries. What would it look like? What would it be like? John didn't think we would be able to because we were so caught up in the now, the 'breads and circuses' of life that we wouldn't be able to truly consider and conceptualize a world without these human constructions. Can you conceive of a world in which there were no countries? Can you imagine a world where there was no money?
These things are created by man in an effort to allow human beings to interact with one another in a ordered and coherent system. When I begin to look at these things and try to conceive of a world without money and countries I tend to construct soceities that are united and seemingly harmonious. Of course this mental frolicking is simpy a hypothesis and perhaps tends towards the utopian but I try to be honest as well.
What does money do for us? The simple answer is that it allows us to buy things. Of course this relient upon the notions of materialism and consumerism which says that we have to buy things, most of which is completely and utterly unnecessary. What about food and shelter? The neccessities of life, we have to buy those as well don't we? Given our condensed urban culture this is true for a great many people but we don't HAVE to buy these things. We can grow and catch food. We can build shelters using the resources inherent in the environment. Human beings have been doing it for millenia. So what does money do for us? It divides us.
Money serves to elevate one segment of the population while degrading another. We have created a system with the 'haves and have nots'. A system where we are to 'keep up with the Jones'. We are constantly bombarded with the notion that we must buy, we must consume, we need the latest piece of frivolous crap, we need the current unnecessary fad. We are told that those with money are better than those without. We idolize the rich and scourn the poor. The system we call money feeds a system we call capitalism which feeds the inherent degredation of mankind.
We have created other systems to prop up and take advantage of these two systems. Today we allow those with more money to have better health care, to drink cleaner water, to breathe cleaner air. Those with money are granted greater protection. All because they have more of what we call money. Are they better human beings? Does the fact that they have 'money' make them a genuinely better person than the person without? Does this fact mean that they deserve to live longer, healthier, happier lives simply because they have more 'money'? The answers to these questions are interesting and important. At the heart of them lies your conceptions of human value and which is more important human life or money.
What do countries do for us? Of course they allow us to express our uniqueness while protecting us from the uniqueness of others. Canadians are different than Romanians just as Germans are different than Koreans. Thats true right? We are inherently different and therefore need these human conceptions of segregation, right? Of course with countries we give rise to patriotism which gives rise to fanaticism in certain instances. In the name of countries we are willing to do such horrible things that we would never conceive of if we were talking about neighborhoods. We grant out countries the power to do what is 'necessary' to insure our prosperity and safety even if it comes at the cost of the lives of others. Like money, contries are a system of human interaction which we use to elevate some and degrade others all the while using them to dehumanize those who are different.
I guess the trick in all of this is trying to identify the effects of these human constructs and then imagining a world that either negates or enhances those effects we deem negative or positive. To me the systems of money and countries serve to seperate and dehumanize mankind. As such when I try to conceptualize of a world without these systems I envision a world where humans are free to live in harmony without human constructs to tell me that I am better or worse than anyone else or that I have a right to steal from this group in the name of mine.
Human beings are communal creatures and as such will always come together to form communities. In doing so systems will be created to not only help us interact with one another but also with other groups. Of course what is truly important in all of this is that we realize that these things are HUMAN CONSTRUCTS and as such can be changed by human beings. Capitalism, the nation state and democracies are not creative autonomous entities in and of themselves, they are tools and systems created and used by mankind to facilitate interaction. Because they are ours by creation they are ours to change and modify or to ultimately end. Mankind is the master of these systems not their subjects.
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