Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Random

I guess this is getting really freaky with the 3 days in a row thing, but i was thinking about some random stuff today and it set those good ole wheels rolling. Between then and now i have played Tony Hawk (to beat the extra stuff and get all the fun toys) and taken a take-home test. Which was actually harder than the test i took today. ... 3 pages. 35 questions. i can't believe that class cost 3grand.

I was thinking about the 4th grade of all things. Can you believe that? How often do you start going through your head about one year of your life. And actually, i can't remember at all thinking about the whole year... rather it was just one day and a general feeling. That one day was the first time i fell in love. Cheesy, huh? Not something i'd usually share, but hey, you'll never meet her and i'll never see her again. Hell, i can't even tell if it was a dream or not.

There was this kinda park thing that my school did to celebrate the end of the year. My mom was one of the chaperones i think... i dunno. All i know is that this girl and i started talking and walked together... i think we may even have paddleboated... that's romance ;-) Anyways, the fact that i was (and am i think) a hopeless romantic isn't why i brought the topic up. The reason i brought it up was that i never saw her again... at least i think. See, as a kid, i had such a short, almost non-existent memory, that i couldn't remember anything about this girl by the start of the next week. Face, name, anything. I thought it might be Brooke or something, and i'm pretty sure she was maybe a redhead, but other than that, i remember as much now as i remembered then.

What does this all have to do with anything? Simply that that memory followed me until i reached around my senior year of highschool. I don't know if i've accurately depicted just what this memory of mine entailed... my entire life up until senior year of highschool, as far as i can recall, was a dream. How fucked up is that? I feel like i have no goddamn history because everything to a point, with very few exceptions, seems entirely made up one night in bed! And i'm not talking about the typical "been so long ago it seems like a dream" thing, i mean it quite literally. Anyways, i started thinking about why my memory would be like that. Why was it that when i came back from Brazil, i couldn't at all remember the kid that i'd played with before i left? Sure i was young, we're talking forgetting first grade by the end of third, but still, it's a little messed up, yknow? I mean, put it this way, i remember one time in second or third grade when i got on the schoolbus and ended up talking to someone that was reading "hitchiker's guide" and let me borrow it. You know what the problem was? I didn't remember that person almost the moment i stepped off the bus. I remembered i had the book, and that i'd borrowed it from someone, but i had no idea who! When the guy asked me for it i had that glazed "who are you?" look. I went home, got the book, and returned it to him the next day because by chance he saw me and reminded me again.

I don't know what to say - i have a huge thing that i wanted to talk about but Marianna and Henry and Matt just walked through the door...

We'll keep this brief i guess: the point of what i was coming to is that the one thing i remember about my whole life is how much time i have wasted doing nothing or playing video games. If i had spent one hour of that time doing something else, something productive, i could have accomplished so much by now! But the most disturbing thing is that i don't feel like if i had known that it would have made a difference. Not because i would have been too lazy to change (though that would most certainly have been a factor) but because i feel as if i have gotten to the point where i am today as a result of my past, which is starting to seem so much like a fantasy that i have trouble defining just where i am in the first place! If we are defined by our environment and history, then what happens if we find ourselves without either? Granted such a discovery would eventually mean molding from that point forward, but what if no molding occured? What if all that was left was an unshaped mass? an uncarved block of wood. I know i didn't come up with that one, that's part of Taoist dogma... what is it though that drove that thought? Maybe it's the same inspiration... maybe everyone has these kinds of thoughts at one point or another and some create a belief system out of it.

The big difference is that in Taoist belief the idea is to become that uncarved wood. To become one with your nature, surroundings, existence, and the world ... but not in the same sense (or with the same finality) as death and samsara in Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and pretty much every other world religion. The idea is that you're still alive, but you are no longer ... a mask ... you are no longer wearing a mask. Wouldn't that feel good?

"I am an opera singer" - Cake

We all wear them, so maybe we all need/want to be liberated from them... maybe the idea of becoming an unmolded being is attractive to everyone on some level. Who knows. I just keep thinking about what my life would be like if i had just ... payed more attention. Would i have spoken up about my opinions in terms of where to move or if we should at all? Would i have been able to stop dad from drinking? Would i have gotten better grades? not kicked out of Kent? Would i even have been anywhere near the situation where i find myself currently? I mean you really have to wonder if something as seemingly insignificant, which everyone takes for granted ... if something like your memory or attention span would have made any difference, maybe even all the difference in the world ...

I wonder sometimes if what i feel like i'm holding out for is an idea of who i am and where i want to be ... and if ultimately that's what's missing from my past .... the memory of me. ... Maybe the biggest problem of all is that i can't remember my dreams - and so i've dreamt up my life. Fuck. That's a little too deep for 8:30 on a wednesday after all those finals.

Shit. I just realized what i typed last night. "All we see or seem..."

Huh. At the time it was a kind of abstract reference that didn't totally fit the analogy ... now i wonder if maybe i'm my own dejavu. ... I guess that's a whole nother question in and of itself.

KTBB

.Christian

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