I lied...

when I said I didn't love you.

Good advice...

Your nonverbal communication was pretty strong today... What's wrong?
Frusterated.
With?
Too much stuff to do for school. My aunt says I should think about other options in case I can't make it. Gunny said I'm smart enough, but that's not enough and I need to rethink my reasons and priorities.
Gunny?
ROTC.
Are you fucking kidding me? Are you looking for sympathy because your crunches suck? You will pass and you will be successful. Fuck your aun and whatever else is running through your head...you will make it because you are the only one who can do it for you.
I'm not looking for sympathy.
I just need to get there.
Correct!
Your mind should be on school and how to be successful at OCS...not other peoples opinioins and ideals...
I know... but I'm also nervous about leaving everything I know behind. I don't want to let anyone down, especially myself.
There is no one else that can be let down but yourself... just remember what this will do for you.

Beware the Ides of March...

The Army, eh? Ha! In 74 days I will be boarding a plane to Quantico, VA, where I will attempt to survive 10 weeks of Marine Corps officer's training. Yeah... I know.

I'm at an interesting point in my life. I finishing up the penultimate quarter of my undergraduate career at the UW, while my final quarter looms before me. Not surprisingly, it doesn't look nearly as intimidating as OCS does just behind it. Upon reflection, I find that I have learned many things about myself over the course of these last few years. I have found that I am much stronger, but at the same time much weaker than I thought I was. I have loved and lost, and have realized that I am not ready for that kind of a connection. My love is too deep, too raw and all consuming... I have to learn to love without losing myself in it. But I know that I will always survive. There is always life after the storm, provided, of course, that the storm doesn't kill you. Unfortunately, I have yet to bring myself to be able to say "no" when I know something is causing me pain. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of pain than of pleasure." And I agree wholeheartedly.

I find myself involved in a situation that I don't know how to handle. Well, I should say that abstractly I know how I ought to handle it, but in practice I just...can't. There is a man--there's always a man--who I was with for very short time, but in that short time I became very attached to him. We stopped seeing each other "officially" after two months, but for the following two months, despite tense, awkward and often downright painful interactions, we continued to, occassionally, sleep together. Realizing I couldn't handle that situation, I tried to completely remove him from my life. I stopped calling him, stopped sending him text messages, stopped going to places I knew he would be, tried to pretend he simply did not exist... but essentially, I went into hiding, horrified that I'd run into him, my heart racing when I approached potential accidental meeting places. I staid in my apartment both dreading and desperately hoping for his call...

And after a three weeks he called. He wanted to apologize for the way he'd treated me, and to make sure we were still friends. He told me that he missed me, and that I was to stop avoiding him on purpose. The flimsy defenses I'd managed to put up against him disolved instantly. All the affection I'd had for him in the past--it had, in fact, been there the whole time--rushed over me as I realized how much I missed hearing his voice, laughing with him, sharing moments... that was almost three months ago, and we have gone back to spending nights together.

Eventually, he became involved with a woman. Knowing I was being ridiculous, I was ashamed at the feelings of hurt and betrayal that washed over me. I felt like the bottom had dropped out of the world and I was falling into nothing. Up until that point, I had managed to convince myself that I was over him, that my feelings for him had faded, but I was wrong. I had managed to bury those feelings by telling myself that he and I really were just two friends who enjoyed having good sex together, that I could handle it without letting my emotions get involved, that I could remain detached, but, in fact, all I had done was bury those feelings, hiding them away and hoping that they would shrivel up and die away if left locked up in the dark for long enough. And maybe--though unlikely--they would have, if not for his new interest. So, in a backwards and tormented attempt to be comforted, I called him and told him how I felt. I explained to him that I was not trying to win him back, or to complicate things, but that I simply needed to get my feelings off my chest, hoping that once I admitted that I had the problem, I would be better able to get rid of it. He told me he understood how I felt and that he was sorry, that he never meant to hurt me or rub anything in my face, that he was still very much my friend and that just because he was seeing another woman didn't mean I was going to lose him. And, pathetically, with the sound of his voice, I was suddenly at ease. I loved him even more than I had before, but I was oddly comforted.

And then, one night, he called me to invite me over. He wanted to sleep with me. I told him "no," that I would never knowingly sleep with someone who was involved with someone else. He insisted, touching me, pulling me against him, telling me it was ok, that he didn't really know where he and the other woman stood, that she was crazy and that he wasn't sure he really wanted to be with her...but still, I said no. I told him he and I both knew what it was like to be cheated on, and that I couldn't cross that line. He was annoyed at first, but finally admitted I was right, that we would try being 'just friends.' One week later, he called again. Again, I told him no. He asked me where our agreement had gone? Sex with no complications? I asked him if he thought his relationship didn't qualify as a complication. He said he thought I was being silly, but after an hour of back and forth texting, at 1am, he finally relented.

The very next night we met, had a few drinks, and though I was mildly apprehensive, my determination to say no to him crumbled under the weight of his presence, coupled with the alcohol in my system, and I went home with him. The next night he invited me over again, but this time, he insisted that there would be no sex, just two friends enjoying each others' company. He said that he and the woman he'd been seeing had broken up a few days before, and that he wanted to show me that it wasn't just about sex for him, that he genuinly enjoyed my company. I wanted to curse him. I wanted to throw things at him, to hit him... all I wanted was for my feelings for him to go away, and now I loved him more than ever. One night without sex and he "proved" his friendship to me. I no longer cared if it was just his way of manipulating me back into his bed, for even if it was, I would never see it, would never be able to believe it. We ran into each other the next day at a local cafe, spent some time studying together, and then wandered over to a nearby bar for a drink. I never realize how deeply I feel for him until he's no longer there. When I'm with him the day seems a little brighter, the weather not as bothersome, my stress all but melts away because when I'm with him everything is ok and nothing can hurt me.

Except him.

Aw shit.

I've gone and done it. After months of silence, I've taken the ultimate action against my frusteration with the lack of structure in my life. I've gone and joined the Army. Mommy always told me stories about those sad little girls and boys who ran off to join the circus, well, I've certainly joined a circus, if not one with your typical trapeze act and elephants. In three two and a half years I'll commission as an officer in the US Army, serve my term, hope I don't get shot and then....? PTSD? Two kids and a dog? What?

I must have lost my mind.

Who watches the Watchmen?

I sit cross legged on a purple bed in a room with three walls of green and one of white. A ladder stands tall beside shelving that barely grazes the pipe on which Christmas lights hang dark and a green towel hangs beside the red scarf whose tassles sway gently in the breeze of the Comfort Zone perched precariously atop the fridge. Greek warriors peer out from behind bottles of expensive perfume, indignant at their forced graphite encarceration, impotent destroyers of men, pain to no one but themselves, while a tin full of forgotten coins props Aristotle up against Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Bertrand Russel and Emmanuel Kant.

A book of hopes and dreams, pain and creativity rests upon the sigil of the Dark Knight spread haphazardly above a cache of shirts without thread. Love worn leather adorned by loyalties long forgotten lies dormant, waiting for the Spring when it might once again reach out and pluck the fallling stars from the sky. Glowing, my tiny universe tickles the air with so many translucent filaments, reaching out into the darkness with tiny points of light, each one a galaxy, a star, a soul, casting pale blue shadows as they swirl the dance of snowflakes.

I wish a happy birthday into the night, and in return recieve a warning of old lovers, the tiny scratches of a playful kitten, a few drops of blood unexpected.

And I feel... nothing.

All you do is talk, but do you really have anything to say?

There is a problem that arises among aspiring pseudo intellectuals (and I have to admit myself into this category because I am as guilty of this as any aspiring academic), and that is that they are so happy to listen the sound of their own voice, that they never actually hear what anybody else has to say. I find that in many a debate that I've had, when I stop and actually listen to what is being discussed I find that there is far less disagreement then any of the parties suppose. Everyone has something that they want to say, and a certain way they want to say it, effectively preventing anyone from having an actual, engaged conversation.

I recently had a philosophical discussion with my father about the nature of the phenomenal and noumenal worlds (I've been reading Kant in class) and I realized that, try as I might, he would not actually listen to what I was saying. I tried to explain to him that he wasn't actually saying anything really all that different from what I was saying, and yet he kept repeating himself. Any time I would dispute his argument, or try to posit an alternative view, he would simply repeat himself, often times verbatim, as if his saying the same words slowly and carefully would aid their absorbing into my mind. The man is like an English speaking tourist trying to communicate with people in a non English speaking country who thinks that if he repeats himself in English slowly and loudly that the people he is trying to talk to will somehow intuit a spontaneous understanding that he wants to know where the train station is.

In my father's case, however, the difference is that he is trying to take terminology and arguments of various philosophers (that he has not read), gives them new meanings and tries to disprove the very theories he has based his own arguments on. It's maddening.

The biggest problem with such a refusal to listen is that it breeds a refusal to listen. My father's stubborn clinging to his claims resulted in my becoming impatient and refusing, or rather, simply being unable to listen to his pseudo intellectual blather. No matter how many times I'd try to explain, he'd just repeat himself. He didn't offer an alternative example to perhaps shed light on his theory, he didn't explain further, he simply slowly and oh so condescendingly repeated himself again and again, and try to listen very carefully, Ari, because you might not understand otherwise.

He's lucky we were talking over the phone, because had we been talking in person I think I would have physically spit in his face in retaliation for his intellectually spitting in mine.

Linguistic Deterioration

I just recently, and by recently I mean less than ten minutes ago, stumbled across Merriam-Webster's Top Ten Words of 2006. To my horror and dismay, I found that "words" such as "google," "decider," vendetta, sectarian and quagmire had managed to make the list. Those...terms, while doing a fairly decent job of uninterestingly and with painful cliche manage to describe a great deal of 2006, it was the number one choice that truly caused my hope for mankind to slip just a bit more towards the black pit of despair. That word is "truthiness." Used for the first time in publication by Steven Colbert in the Colbert Report, October 2005, "truthiness" is defined by Mr Colbert as "truth that comes from the gut, not books." The American Dialect Society (this is coming from a group of people who voted that the word "plutoed" was the 2006 word of the year in a close runoff with "climate-canary." And anyway, on a brief tangent, what the hell kind of a country do we live in that we have a dialect society? Yeah, so our president can't really speak the language, but holy shit, guys, a whole society just for the sake of lauding American linguistic failures? What gives?) announced the following year that "truthiness" is "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true." So, when coming across an idea that someone "wishes to be true," rather than being an intelligent human being and actually saying what the ADS has defined "truthiness" as, we now get to contribute to the linguistic deterioration of America by saying, "Well, while that idea might not have truth, it does have a certain truthiness, which is just as good."

Let me ask you this, America: What the fuck? Pretty combinations of letters like "decider" and "google" and "truthiness," they're not words. They make you sound stupid, like when you say "unflammable" instead of "inflammable." Learn the fucking language, that includes vocabulary and grammar, people. Use it correctly. Not only will you sound smart, but you will probably actually gain a little intelligence.

Let's look at an example of a person who, more often than I think the world feels comfortable with, likes to use words, or in some cases, non words, in totally bizarre and often very, very telling ways...

"And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it." -George W"MD" (as I like to call him) Bush, Jan. 29, 2007.

"The best way to defeat the totalitarian of hate is with an ideology of hope -- an ideology of hate -- excuse me --with an ideology of hope." --George W. Bush, Fort Benning, Ga., Jan. 11, 2007.

This one is just priceless: "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."

Case in point: "Arbolist … Look up the word. I don't know, maybe I made it up. Anyway, it's an arbo-tree-ist, somebody who knows about trees." —George W. Bush, as quoted in USA Today, Aug. 21, 2001.

Do you want to sound as sinisterly moronic as he does? I didn't think so. Go read a fucking book, use real words for a change and for god sakes use correct grammar.

What causes me great annoyance is that the English language has been slowly degenerating into a language of synonyms. We now have concepts for which there are five or six words that, in the past had subtle differences in meaning that allowed for the beauty of language to be seen and appreciated, and now are totally synonymous and are used interchangeably. There was a reason for creating so many different words that mean almost the same thing. It's that almost that is of the utmost import; it's that almost that lends subtlety and a deeper meaning to our ideas and it's that almost that's been totally lost to the media and technology inhibited, 10 second attention spanned, TV soaked, and apathetically ignorant masses.

Even internet chat acronyms have filtered their way, not only into our writing, but into our every day conversation. I hear "WTF"s and "OMG"s and "LOL"s more often than I hear "democracy," "immigration" or "economy" from my fellow students in daily conversation. Terms such as "climate change" or "mass genocide" are thought to be only for "those crazy political activist types, you know, the one's who would chain themselves to trees or wear those stupid shirts with slogans like, 'Save the Whales,' or End the Genocide in Darfur,' or 'Stop Bush.'" Political involvement has become a cliche, worse, it has become something to scorn. The politically inclined are lined up right next to "those crazy Jesus freaks," but instead of being "bible-thumpers," they're "Bill of Rights thumpers." or "Constitution thumpers," or "Bleeding Heart Liberals," or "Extreme Right Wing Conservatives." Sadly, more often than not, they're just what the stereotype says they are: flag waving, slogan shouting faces in the mob, and that's no better than any closed-minded Christian, or any religious extremist for that matter.