Archive for the ‘Personal Thoughts’ Category
I thought that since I’ve been blogging for a couple of months now, and I am halfway through NaPoWriMo, I thought I’d write about how the experience has effected me.
On writing:
– I’m glad I have finally gotten into the swing of things when it comes to meeting my weekly goal. I definitely struggled with it when I first started.
– I find I write best when I’m not trying to write about something too specific. When I try and write on a subject like psychology or personality, I can’t seem to focus my thoughts and get it started. So, at least for the forseeable future, I’ll keep up my posting habit of daily prompts, weekly challenges, and random thoughts.
– Writing this blog has actually kept me going. I haven’t had the best time in my life right now, and even though I am not writing about that regularly, just the act of writing helps me channel all that negativity into something positive.
On NaPoWriMo:
– I’ve found writing poems to be a very cathartic experience. Although most of the time my poetry comes out completely angst-y, it helps keep those feelings from creeping into other facets of my life and causing havoc. Plus, it keeps be using my creativity.
– I’ve also found writing a poem a day is really hard work. I feel like I’m scrapping the bottom of my creative… thing you scrape the bottom of. I’m still going to finish of the challenge because I find it fun, but don’t be surprised if my last few poems are dirty limericks and haikus about writer’s block.
– This has renewed my love of poetry and I’ve decided that, in addition to my 2 posts a week I am currently doing, I will also be posting at least 1 poem a week. I will also go back through all the poems I wrote for this challenge and give them the revisions that they deserve.
Finally, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who follows me, who likes my posts, and who view my blog. I know it seems like a small thing to do. But that half a second you took to click a button on your screen gave me the motivation I needed to keep writing. Just knowing that someone out there enjoyed my writing for even a second, makes it all worth it. I hope you all continue to read my blog; I’ll try to keep it entertaining.
-Shaman 🙂
I’ve never felt I was a fiction writer. At times, I feel so wrapped up in myself that I can take the time to imagine anything different. In fact, I only feel like when I am writing as my self about myself, that I feel it is any good. The closest I’ve gotten to fiction writing is creating characters for role-playing games, which have been average, plot-wise, at best.
So when this week’s writing challenge came up, at first I felt like I shouldn’t even try to do it. I mean, I’m just not that good at it, right? But on further reflection, I decided I wanted to do it. The point of a challenge is to challenge yourself, so I did.
I had a fun doing too. In the end, isn’t that the point?
Anyways, here it is. I hope you enjoy:
The man leapt. Freeing himself from the shackles that bound him, he cast himself off the edge. Away from hate, regret, failure; as the wind rushed by it stripped all this from him. He was left a man without any burden, except existence. Now, he was finally free to fly.
Thank you for reading.
Daily Prompt Time.
Tell us your tried and true techniques for focusing when that deadline looms and you need to get work done. In other words, how do you avoid wasted days and wasted nights?
I don’t, to be honest. I have a problem with either procrastinating until the last second, or do my projects in a rush and finish them early. It’s not about what I find fun or enjoyable, not completely. Sometimes things I enjoy take me forever, and things I hate get completed instantly. In fact, I started this post at around 9 today, and I have:
-Taken a shower.
-Watched the new episode of Cosmos.
-Took a nap.
-Watched a documentary on Einstein.
-Started to clean my room, but got bored with that and started writing again.
I enjoy writing, but for some reason it was the last thing I wanted to do. But sometimes, when i get a great idea, I’ll end up writing pages and pages of stuff, eschewing food, hygiene, friends, sex, and candy to do so.
So the better question is: how does one be a functioning adult while having the habits of a hyperactive toddler?
I do that by breaking up the stuff I don’t like to do over the day, in between breaks of doing stuff I want to do. I will, for example, write blog posts, surf Wikipedia, teach my self math, and read e books. I will occasionally take breaks from all this to actually do my job. Luckily, my job is easy and transactional, so i am able to do plenty of non-work, while only having to deal with the occasional distractions of working.
However, then we get to the question: what is wasted time? I can understand that if I sit around and do absolutely nothing, that I am wasting time. But if I am learning, expanding my brain, or making money, is it wasted time?
If that is true, then in fact I make a very good use of my time. Its just the rest of the world that is the problem. 🙂
First off, I tend to WAY over think things. So naturally when a prompt about time travel comes up, my mind goes off with all the things that wouldn’t work: the grandfather paradox, the conservation of history, the what-if-I-squish-the-butterfly-that-somehow-emancipates-the-slaves-and-creates-sweet-n’-low problem, etc. I think because of my tendency to over think, I can’t really do a blog post on a historical event and time. Well I could, but it would probably be way to long for anyone to bother reading, although I’m sure someone would find my ramblings about killing Hitler’s dog and investing in Google would be entertaining.
But as I thought about what I wanted to say, my thoughts turned personal. Instead of trying to do a funny rant about paradoxes, or a deep rant about why it wouldn’t work, I decided to write a letter. I wanted to write a letter to my past self, as if I had the ability to pop back and give it to myself. It ended up being very cathartic. I’ll share it below. I hope you enjoy reading it, as much as I did writing it:
Dear Shaman,
I know you don’t know where this letter came from. Just found it in your pocket while you are walking home. Well, I put it there. I know this is going to sound strange, but I am you, from the future.
No you aren’t about to die. No, you don’t need to save the world.
No, you absolutely SHOULD NOT TURN AROUND RIGHT NOW!!!
I got you, didn’t I?
If you had anything important I had to tell you, I wouldn’t be able to. Those are the rules. No I will not tell you the rules. But if you think about the paradoxes I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Just don’t over-think it too much, you’ll figure it out when you are my age. 🙂
I can’t really tell you anything important. Not big advice, or life lessons, or things to look out for. By the time this gets to you, I’ll have had to revise it so it can be sent. Not I won’t tell you that either. I will say the only reason I’m allowed is because I’m assure this will not turn you, and therefore me, into a gibbering psych patient.
So I can’t say much. But I can give you an idea of what your near future is going to hold. If you want to stop and not know anything, this would be the time to stop. I won’t judge you. It’s probably the smart thing to do.
….
Come on, who am I kidding?
I know you’re going to read it. No way you wouldn’t. You (I? We?) are way too curious for your (our) own good sometimes.
A couple more things before I go on. Obviously I’m avoiding names, dates or any discernible information. Pretty much anything worthwhile, actually. Even so, I would like you to read without skipping, all the way to the end. If you haven’t already skipped to the end before reading this, that is.
First off, enjoy the years you will have in high school. Yes, I know that it seems fun to feel angst-y and deep right now. But you never really grow out of it, so you should cut down on it while you still have all of these friends around. You’ll have more fun if you just lighten up, and not worry about girls and all that other crap. Don’t get me wrong, deep brooding will always be one of our hobbies. But there’s a time and place, and the girls you’re agonizing over aren’t worth it.
Instead, try to spend more time will the friends you love. It’s not that you’re going to lose them or anything tragic, but you never will capture the magic you have right now with them. People just drift apart sometimes. You’ll still love them. But you’ll also long for them all the time. I wish that I could just recapture one more conversation, one more day, one more moment you’ve yet to experience. So enjoy them while you have them. They will make wonderful memories. But don’t worry, I’ll keep making sure we have plenty of good memories to come.
You will have bad things happen to you too. That’s just the way life goes. Some will be big, some on the small side, but all of them are important. You will be more depressed then you ever thought possible. They will make you angry, and make you sick. You will feel like giving up, calling life quits and leaving it all behind. Hell, I’ve gotten closer to doing so than I’d ever care to admit. You will be more miserable, and you will suffer. (See, told you that you’ll still be angst-y.)
But don’t let all that worry you. I’m sending you this now, so obviously you make it through all of the problems you face.Weird as it sounds, you’ll look back at those times, all the pain, the frustration, the hopelessness, just as fondly as all of your happy memories. Every tear shed and wall punched will have made you a stronger person. They’ve made me a better person than I ever thought I could be. Granted, I’m still learning, and I’ve probably got some more prime suffering years ahead of me. I’ll send us both (you? my selves?) a letter when I finally get past that and get to the just plain fun parts of life.
Now, I can’t give you too much advice, for obvious reasons. But if there is one thing I want you to remember; just one thing I want you to take from this surreal experience, is this: love your life. Love every single success, every single screw up, every bad day and every good moment. Love every single breath, every single tear, every single breath, every single moment you’re alive. Love every aspect of your existence. You get one chance, and it is far too short to spend worrying about everything you’ve done. Just enjoy it all while you can. In the end, you’ll life it right if you do that.
Sincerely you,
Shaman Romney
P.S:I promised I’d stop lying to myself. Never thought it’d be literally, but here we are. I lied to you earlier in the letter. I could have told you anything I wanted to. Who your friends will be, who will hurt you, what you end up doing to those around you. But I’m not going to. I like the way my life has gone so far, and I know you will too. You maybe mad now, but you’ll understand when you finally get here.
Another day, another prompt.
If you could return to the past to relive a part of your life, either to experience the wonderful bits again, or to do something over, which part of you life would you return to? Why?
That was the first thing that came to mind. Now there are things I regret, but would be afraid to change since they define me and my relationships with people. Things like breaking up with the mother of my daughter, or the 3 year-long relationship that caused me all sorts of problems. Those things made me grow and mature, and as much as they sucked, I’m not sure I’d enjoy my life if the didn’t happen.
But there is something. I would go back and actually give a damn about school. High school, college, all of it. I don’t know what moment I would have to go back to, but I’d go back there and actually try. Back to senior year, when I constantly skipped my calculus class to go hang with my friends. Now, I love my friends, but I’d have seen them anyways. If I’d just finished that damn class, I’d probably be doing a job I like instead of this one I don’t.
Now that I think about it, I even have the specific day I’d go to. It’d be the day that my professor caught me and my friends cutting class. Thinking we were badasses, we just walked past him head held high like the rebellious little shits we were. Naturally, he gave everyone a super easy quiz and stopped caring about how I did. If I didn’t, why should he?
The irony of everything is that had I applied myself, I’d have passed. I’d have been able to take that credit to college, and go into engineering like I wanted. Instead, I tried to take it in college, got overwhelmed, failed it 3 times and went into accounting instead. Now, ironically, I am teaching myself calculus in my spare time, because now I value learning. It only took 5 years and thousands of dollars.
Stupid teenager. 🙂
I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I’m not sure where I am supposed to go. I just know at the moment I’m not happy with it. I look back and see all the missteps I’ve taken; the time wasted. It makes me angry at myself. Makes me depressed. Makes me feel like I have no purpose. Makes me… really understand Linkin Park better.
I know I’m just going through a bit of an existential crisis, and have been for a while. Its the reason I’ve decided to start blogging. But I’m not going to use this post to dig through the depths of my despair and discoveries stemming from them. I’m sure there will be enough of those posts with out me really trying.
Instead, I’m going to talk about something that I hear all the time from people trying to give me advice to get past this crisis. They are usually coworkers, but I hear it all the time. People me well when they say it, but it always kind of bothers me. What they always tell me is this:
“Just open yourself to god, and he will guide you.”
It’s either that or something very similar. Now, that annoys me for a couple of reasons. Firstly and more personally, people are making assumptions that I believe in a god, most likely the same one they believe in. Or, if they are my coworkers, they know I’m an atheiest-leaning agnostic (5 on the “Dawkins Scale“), and they feel a conversion coming on. If they say stuff like, “Calm down and focus, and the answer will come to you,” I’m not bothered at all by that. But many people feel grounded by their faith, and feel it works for everyone. However, assuming I haven’t prayed enough or the solution is just god is insulting to me and to you. Sadly, for every person who is kind in their advice, there is another who does that exact thing.
That ties into my second point. Whether your intentions are selfless or not, I have a problem with the idea itself. The problem is you are giving someone else the power and responsibility to make you happy. As I stated in my writing on free will vs destiny, I believe we are in control of our own destiny, for ill and for good. It’s not even a matter of God, it’s a matter of free will. Giving in to god feels like giving up the very thing that allows me to think about my life. Sure, it’s giving up the part of me that brings me down. But it’s also losing the part that allows me to be better in the end. At some level, I feel like asking god to guide me is giving up on myself.
I’m the one who should fix my problems. I’m the only one who can. Therefore I’ll be the one who guides me.
Normally I don’t really do the daily prompts offered by WordPress, but this one actually caught my attention, so I here’s what I think.
Do you believe in fate or do you believe you can control your own destiny?
I’d like to believe in fate, I really would. The idea of being predestined to do something great, to find your one true love, to know that some day somehow you will achieve your life’s meaning, is comforting and warm. That is, until you really think about it.
Not everyone is destined to be an Einstein or a Mozart. If you look back at the billions of people who have lived and died on this planet, how many achieved anything more than just taking up space. Working themselves to the bone, to maybe achieve their own personal happiness, and the happiness of those around them. I’d think that would be a good life, but is that what you would want to be destined for? For happy mediocrity?
Plus, who’s to say you’d only be destined for good things? Just as you could be the next Gandhi, you could also be the next Saddam, or Stalin, or Hitler? Plus, if small good things can be predestined, who’s to say that your destiny isn’t to steal, cheat, gamble and rob? Having your life predestined, if you truly believed it, would rid you of all real resposibiltiy. You do anything wrong, its not your fault. It was just your destiny.
Scary thought, right?
I believe we choose our own fate. We are in charge of our own destiny. Our mistakes are ours to own, but so are all our accomplishments. Nobody controls you. Nothing can stop you from trying to acheive what you want. Nothing stands in the way of your happiness except you. Now, the circumstances you are born into, the twists and turns you take through out life can and will limit your choices. You aren’t completely in control, but you are in control of what you do about it.
I like to view life, destiny, fate, all of this, as a river. Everyone has a direction they are flowing towards. That is determined by where you were born, genetics, environment, and all the other things that you don’t really have any control over in the beginning. But even though you flow in a general direction, you get to choose the ebb and flow, where it branches and where it bends.. With enough gradual changes, you can even choose a whole new direction to flow towards. Then, when you reach the end, your “river” becomes a new starting point for others.
So in a sense you may have somewhat of a predestined path. But it was predestined by the ones who came before you, not some mystical power. You can challenge your path, and change it. All it takes is wanting and work.
But, everything could totally be predestined. I could just be predestined to disagree with the notion. Just like you could be predestined to agree/disagree with me. 🙂
I’m kind of down today.
My friend is going on a trip for a couple of weeks. For a normal person, it wouldn’t be a big deal at all. But I have some fairly heavy issues with abandonment, and therefore there is a part of my brain that is currently freaking out and curling up in a ball to cry. I know all of the tips and tricks to calm it. The opposite emotion reaction, the mindfulness, etc., and it does help. It’s probably the reason I’m not actually freaking out in a ball and crying.
But my brain, being the wonderful and magical machine it is, loves to find new and creative ways to bring my issues to the fore of my mind. I know (well, I can safely assume at least) she’s not literally going to leave and never return. I know once she leaves, my friends won’t literally cut me out of their life. I know that none of these nasty worst case type things will happen to me, because it’s not how rational adults handle things. Despite my friends being bundles of issues like me, I know they wouldn’t do that.
But then my brain brought a new thought up:
“What about abandoning you symbolically?”
What that means, is that although she may be leaving on a trip, and may not in fact drop her entire life and run, she is using this as a trip to soul search and figure out her life. When she’s done doing that, I’m afraid she’s going to find I’m not one of the good things there. Then, she’ll come back, smile, be nice, but slowly build back the distance that I’ve worked so hard to remove. Then all my friends, many of which are her family, will just slowly distance themselves from me too. Then my brain will be right, that nobody ever really loved me, I should be alone forever, blah blah blah…
Look, I know it’s not the reality. I know that is all my crazy, my demons coming to the fore again. I’m working on it, and doing ok. But I am going to miss my friend. We were getting close, and even debating starting a relationship. (Yes, I know, internet relationship gurus, friend zone and plenty of fish and all that, but this is more complex. Or, you know I’m being strung around. Either way, she’s got enough problems too that I’m going to at least let this ride to the end.) I have a feeling that might change, but I need to keep telling myself that it may change for the better too.
If you say it enough times, it should come true, right?
At my work, we have a set of core values: things that as an organization we are supposed to embody as lowly paid employees. Not that it’s wrong to have core ideal for your organization, in fact I think it’s a requirement of any successful one. But my work place, at times, takes it to the level of World War 2 propaganda. They talk in long flowing speeches, making it a point to try to build you up and motive you to be ideal. Well, their ideal. Although group visions and goals are great, I don’t think you need to make your employees march lock-step in order to have a successful company, and individuality should be encouraged. But alas, being skilled at most jobs nowadays is measured by how well you can sit down, shut up, and do as you’re told.
I bring all that up because our core value that they selected for the month was selfless and supportive. Most of the time, we just end up reading lines off a pre-prepared training sheet, all while putting on a smile and pretending to care. It was a pretty boring training, and I wouldn’t even write about it, except for one of the things they talked about during the training bugged me.
They said, “Now, everyone has heard of the golden rule: Treat others as you would want to be treated. But I want everyone here to apply a new rule above that one. The platinum rule: Treat others how they want to be treated.”
Now, I know my co-worker obviously (well not obviously, but hopefully) doesn’t actually believe in that. I’m also pretty sure that the trainer who created it probably felt that they we being creative more than anything else, and just hadn’t given it much thought. Had they done so, they’d have figured out how colossally stupid the very idea of that rule is.
First of all, you’d be completely missing the point of the golden rule. Treat others as you want to be treated is treating people how they want to be treated. You can be nice to the people you help as part of your job because we all hate the crappy people who are jerks to us when we need to be served. It amazes me how many people just don’t get that.
Secondly, the new rule itself is stupid. At worst it’s telling you to be subservient to other people’s desires, and at best it’s telling you to do the same thing as the golden rule, but a little bit nicer. There is a difference between saying, “the customer is always right,” “give them the pickle!” and all that other stuff. But telling people to “go above and beyond the golden rule” just rubs me wrong.
For example, I want to be treated like royalty. I want to be handed money for doing no work, and get beautiful women to jump all over me and attend to my every whim. According to my work, all my attractive co-workers should be making me dinner and giving me money. That would not make me a good person. That would make me a jerk.
But hold on, you say. You your self aren’t following the platinum rule, and therefore you missed the point. You should rethink your premise and your life you say. To you I say firstly, I’m royalty and therefore you shouldn’t question what I say, peasant. Secondly, and more importantly, you shouldn’t let jerks push you around. The rule is not designed around the idea that everyone will use it, but that everyone should use it. Thus, if you follow the platinum rule, you become a door mat. But if you follow the golden rule, you can still decline them, because even though part of you would really want to have people not do it, another part of you knows that being told off is how you would want to be treated.
Either that, or you are just an egotistical ass. 🙂
-Shaman
Firstly(And unrelated-ly), trying to write blog psts at work during down time is not a very effective way to blog. Its hard to keep a train of thought going when you have constant interuptions. So, seeing as I am posting at work, I’ll keep this brief.
I’m not a fan of Valentine’s Day. No, not because I’m a desperate single person.(Not saying it isn’t somewhat true.)
No, I don’t like Valentine’s Day because its all about obligation.
You take a girl out to dinner and buy her a nice piece of jewelry, or flowers, or chocolates on any other day, and you’d be a very romantic gentleman.
But if you DON’T do those things for a girl on valentine’s day, you are a lazy no good loser who doesn’t deserve love.
Obviously there are many women who don’t feel that way. But the holiday is based around that idea.
If you are the type of guy who likes the big romantic gestures, (like me) then it shouldn’t matter what day it is. You should do those things because you want to. Not because you feel obligated.
Shame on The Universe 