Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Vance asked me last Saturday “are you going to go home and write another status about how your friends redeemed yourselves?” and I was like “what? How can you redeem yourselves again? You already redeemed yourselves once and you haven’t fucked that up yet.” I think at the time I was missing the point. Apparently I know people who legitimately care what I think of them, which is entirely fascinating to me because it happens to be near a time when I’ve finally managed to get over caring so much what other people think of me, at least to the crippling degree I did before (I still fret constantly over stupid things I’ve said and done, I just do my best to not let it affect my behavior) and it’s throwing me for something of a loop.

In the same week I talked to two (2) different people who professed a desire to live a life of hermitage (they also know each other. I am intensely interested in whether or not they have said this to each other and formed some sort of mutual hermit pact.) which I find endlessly fascinating, as these two are people that I think of as being very “cool” and “sociable” because I hear about all sorts of parties and things that they do that I don’t and I feel dumb and a bit jealous. It’s funny that they should mention hermitage to me, because frankly I’ve been there. When I was 14-15-16-17-18 that was all I wanted to do in life. Social interaction was too fucking scary. It took years to get out of that mindset, and those were pretty much years where I didn’t talk to anyone that wasn’t essentially virtual. I was invited to one thing by a crazy guy who I have immense respect for during that time and it was a ton of fun, though it scared the crap out of me at the time.

I’m really not saying “don’t do it, man” or anything, because frankly I think people should experience everything they can. I just feel a bit sad and dumb that they’re just now deciding to pursue this just after I finished realizing how shitty it really was. Plus I feel a bit ironic that they would tell me that they wanted to live a life totally away from people, because that’s essentially what I do.

Maybe I’m just being unrealistic. Mern tells me, though, about all this cool stuff she does with or did for her friends and I feel… well a bunch of stuff. Partly jealous, partly happy, partly some sort of vicarious pleasure in hearing about things that I’d like to think that I would do if I were in that situation. She’s the kind of person who bakes things for people and shows up at their dorms with candy and hugs when they’re sad and cries on the phone for hours when faraway friends have their mothers in the hospital and stuff like that. I just think “wow” most of the time when hearing this.

I tell people that I want to be a prophet, but I tend not to be clear on what exactly I want to be a prophet of (a religion where everyone is fucking everyone else all the time, I said once). I want to be a prophet of peace and love, I suppose. There’s some great words. Jamie Whyte terms them “hooray” words, words you can say and everyone will say “hooray!” like “justice” or “democracy.” They’re words that you can say and everyone in your audience will have a different idea of what it means. And by not elaborating you can avoid alienating some portion of your audience who disagrees with you. It’s a very popular political trick. I’ll go kind of against the grain here and define exactly what I mean by peace and love.

Peace as in the unconditional agreement not to harm other people. Don’t be a dick. On a personal scale, it’s pretty much unavoidable, but on an international scale, it’s downright unforgivable. There is no fucking reason to start a war with another country. There never has been and there never will be. This includes interfering with another country’s governance. Putting economic and political pressure on other nations simply because you don’t trust their motives is schoolyard bullshit and totally inexcusable, especially from nations who spend so much time trumpeting their impressive “freedom.” Fortunately, globalization should cover this. The continued economic and cultural merging of the globe should hopefully result in a relatively homogenous world and (I dare to dream) political stability under a unified world government. Or it will collapse into petty squabbles over resources or fascinating proxy wars between corporations. We’ll see.

Love as in the understanding that every other person is another person; complete with all the same fears, hopes, desires and needs as you. I envision a world where everyone has a friend or three like mern, and everyone does what she does for everyone else. Because being lonely really fucking sucks. Love is about the connections people have to one another, not some mystical ideal, not a single emotion. Love is turning to your fellow man and saying “He too, is me.” It is about turning to your fellow woman and saying “She too, is me.”

I’m not saying everything will be perfect. Far from it. Putting yourself out there and caring how other people think is almost always a risk. Interacting with other people and investing yourself into these interactions is almost always a whirlwind of suck. There will always be relationships that fall through, spurned lovers, cheating, lying, ugly rumors, and so on. I just want no one to be alone in this. Everyone needs a friend like Mern, and they’re only lying to themselves when they say they don’t.

I hate all of this. It scares the living Jesus out of me. (Literally. I renounce Christianity every time someone shouts “boo!” behind my back) I spent my life acting more or less like this song here by Regina Spektor that made me cry so much when I first heard it I tried to go to sleep to make it stop. It just reminded me of how totally lonely I really am. (Yeah yeah, what a fucking pussy loser. Crying over a song he must be a huge fucking faggot. You can say what you like, but I already said it to myself. You’d just be repeating after me. I can outdo Gavin for self-deprecation; I just don’t go on about it.)

ANYWAY. My point is that I spent so long trying to get along without anyone else that I’m just absolutely frightened of opening up to anyone. But I’m not a brain-dead moron like Daniel, and I realize that Opening up is exactly what I need if I am ever going to get out of this horrible funk. If I ever expect anyone to be friends with me, first I’m gonna have to be friends with them, and all. I remember hearing that a lot in elementary school. I still think this just goes to show that you learn everything you really need to learn about the world from Disney movies and kid stories and that just gets fucked up later by reactionary cynicism that declares “Oh ho, that must not be true because it was made for kids” or that ridiculously pervasive lie “It’s not that simple.”

So I am spending all my time trying to not be a hermit, to the best of my ability and tolerance for doing things out of the norm. If you click on my profile there (or take my word for it, if you’re reading this on my blog) I copied and pasted the Meyers-briggs personality thing from some site or other that I consistently get, ENTP. There’s a bit I particularly like that goes “Aside from those two areas, ENTPs tend to be oblivious of the rest of humanity, except as an audience -- good, bad, or potential.” which I find pretty accurate. I hate myself for it, but I’m pretty judgmental of everyone I meet, though I do my best to not let it color my actual actions, I’m polite to everyone regardless of how hideous ore dumb I think they are. That said, it does provide myself with ammunition to argue myself out of making friends with people. Stuff like that. As if the cognitive dissonance wasn’t apparent enough, I more or less love everyone I know. I am annoyingly uninterested in my own activities to the point that I will pretty much drop everything and go help someone else if I really thought it would help.

I dunno, here I am back to talking about myself and making statements that I’ll regret and hate in 3-5 days. I should probably stop here.

I just feel like dicks lately and I wanted to tell no one in particular. Actually I wanted to tell one guy I really respect, but he raincheck’d. Now I’ll feel dumb bringing it up again because I already wrote about it and I variate wildly from assuming everyone reads everything I write to assuming that no one reads anything I write.

Yep, I’m nuts.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

“Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.”

I am a lucky person. I get to listen to impassioned speeches about how great las positas is because when I go to “real” college (or “a four-year”) there won’t be all this support to help me learn the material. I’ll be in a big room with two hundred students and a professor that doesn’t know my name and the class will be entirely lecture and then a midterm and a final and that’s it. The only people who will really be helping me will be graduate student researchers (interestingly enough, the very people my aunt hires at berkeley) who are essentially TAs. It will apparently be a horrifying experience, compared to the high-school-like student numbers at laspo. I am very lucky I do not have to go through this.

The thing is, it’s the high-school-like classes that are killing my grade and me as I keep getting hit with mundane busywork assignments that serve only to inflate the grade, rather than assist in comprehension. Sure, ultimately it’s my responsibility to complete this stuff, but when I can take a class that’s purely a midterm and a final and get an immensely better grade than a class that has homework and projects up the wazoo, there’s clearly a problem somewhere. Humh.

“Jake you’re just a lazy asshole”

Yeah, pretty much.

It’s my choice to be one, I suppose. It’s my freedom here in America to choose lazy assholedom over studious application of talent. Capitalists and libertarians might say “well, you’ll never get anything that way. There’s no way to make money without working hard (besides inheritance, which you clearly don’t have).” I hugely beg to differ. If I wanted to make money I could totally do it. Lots of lazy assholes do, somehow. They trade stocks. They make connections in a business and jump straight to manager. They start businesses and cheat on their taxes. They start websites based off of other people’s ideas and then spin them off to be sold for huge chunks of money to suckers larger businesses who think that the advertising revenues alone is totally worth it.

“Jake, those people work hard.”

No, they don’t. They most certainly do not work as hard as the millions of people who hold more than one job just to pay rent and utilities. What’s the difference? They’ve got connections. Or they’re smarter. Or they’ve just got a different worldview. I dunno. Tim Rogers, still my favorite writer even though he hasn’t responded to my legit and totally awesome game ideas, wrote recently “All around the world, people like myself and Bob [Pelloni, of bob’s game fame] are finding ourselves in a state where legitimately earning money is about as complicated as downloading pirated music.” And it’s sorta kinda true. It’s really bugging me for two reasons, those being “fucking fuck you capitalism” and “why am I not getting some of that?”

I dunno, this stuff sucks dicks to think about. I have been wildly blitzing through money lately, a shocking twist from last year when making rent was such a huge deal that I would often end up finding myself with exactly twenty dollars to last me two weeks and budgeting out groceries to fit. Now I ended up moving back in with my dad and my attitude has gone totally downhill (so regardless of what happens this fall I’m moving the hell out). I don’t know what to tell you.

I love school, though. I can’t tell you how much joy I take in listening to lectures on rituals and anthropoidal evolution and political maneuverings and all of this stuff. I want to be in academia for the rest of my life. I want to do research and learn everything I can about anything I feel like. Leave no stone unturned, no argument mystified. I want to be one of those people that news magazines call up and say “hey what is your opinion on this?” and I whomp out some two thousand totally accurate words stating and defining a position. I want to start a cultural movement that sweeps the entire world and paves way for a proper unified world government and hegemony, giving globalization a real chance at succeeding and incentivizing space exploration as the next logical step of human existence, now that all of earth is one unified government and wars are outmoded methods of expression and limited to skirmishes between rival local factions that are quickly pacified by a council of affair and police corps made of the countrymen of that region.

Yes.

It’s all very radical and I’ll bet people who’ll argue against it are a dime a dozen. I want to shoot these people. Ugh. I hate traditionalists. I hate people who thrive solely on nostalgia for a time they hardly remember. I hate people who are old and don’t appreciate the new. I’m not saying that novelty is really a great factor in decision making (no suh) but for christ’s sake, neither is nostalgia. Seriously, social conservatives and reaganites and all those people who seem to think the middle ages were the best ages because “knights were still chivalrous and wars were fought with honor” (HAH) and then they dress up and prance around and pine for something they have absolutely no experience with outside of what little writing and oral histories survived them are infuriating. It gets worse as the years move up. People who whine about how cell phones are destroying the capacity for people to form communities and neighborhoods (that shit died in the fifties) or that the internet and video games are the devil because they’re teaching kids things without censorship are even worse. No renaissance fan, no matter how rabid, legitimately considers the idea of re-instituting a medieval society. At worst they simply want to integrate parts of it they like into the modern era. But those other folks have hundreds of thousands of people who support the censorship and destruction of our communications infrastructure simply for the cause of recreating an idyllic past that exists solely in their minds.

It’s a stubborn, dogmatic point of view, and it’s remarkably difficult to defeat. Just a hint of the mindset was demonstrated in the demonization of the healthcare bill and the uncanny lockstep reaction to its passage. This is not the way humans will survive. This is not the way we have survived. The reason we have all this great shit, hell the reason these people can behave like this is because some humans were deviant little bastards who decided the world ought to be different than it was or is. Social conservatism is literally the cancer that is killing the human race. They’re eating the telomeres of society. We’re going to end up with another dark age because we’re halting innovation in favor of delusion.

Man, that just bugs the fuck out of me.

So let’s kick ass, you and me. Let’s tell those fuckers to shove it up their crusty assholes and forge ahead to a brilliant new future. Let’s maniacally flail around in desperation, doing everything we can to do anything we can. Let us lose the wisdom to know the difference between what we can and can’t change, but gain the courage to change it anyway. Let us ditch the patience and understanding to accept what is and forge our own path through life. Let us make mistakes, let us triumph, let us fail spectacularly and succeed amazingly.

Let us live our lives on our terms, not the terms others shackle us with. We are alive and we are always free.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Turns out I can totally backdate these.

Good morning. I went swimming today. It was fun, but I ate too much pizza last night so I felt kind of ill afterward. Woah hold on. I just saw a commercial for a scooter with a swivel wheel. Woah. Man. Woah, here’s a commercial about reading the serving size on the food you eat.

What the fuck? Being a kid these days is weird.

But this super hero super squad show is great! It’s condensing all of those complex and horrible plotlines in the comics to a sort of nice summary. They’ve got all sorts of stuff just in this episode. Skrulls, the super-skrull, hulk and things weird animosity, fucking thanos and his infinity gauntlet, which appears not to be as great as it usually is. “zounds! My symbolic tool of righteous aggression!” Out of thor losing his hammer (which is also symbolic for a penis, aww yeah)

Oh hey check it out. The same commercial for zoobooks they had on like fucking 12 years ago when I was a kid. I remember zoobooks. I had a ton.

Oh god. The skrull invasion plan was on a facebook page.

Oh god.

I think I’m in love.

Oh, I see. Thanos was really a skrull. Explains the lack of ULTIMATE UNIVERSE DESTROYING POWER. “it makes string cheese. For all their advances, the skrulls were never able to make string cheese. String theorists would make a fortune from this tube.”

Oh man. That was so great.

Anyway, yeah being a kid is hella weird these days. Like there are so many things that companies are expected to push on you to keep you healthy. Responsibility for this thing has shifted largely from parents to the entertainment companies that sell things to parents for their kids. Why? Cause parents have money. also corporations are evil. Evil like taxes. Anyway so you grow up being told on the tv “go outside and jump around and do stuff. Stop watching tv” and you end up largely ignoring it cause what the fuck, you’re watching tv. God damn. If I wanted to be outside I would be outside.

Though, I guess it’s not really new. The spinach industry totally ran the popeye comic. If you learn nothing from it, you learn that hamburgers hake you fat and worthless and that spinach makes you beat up dudes you don’t like. Maybe I’m just being silly. I just get kind of annoyed when videogames ask me to take a break like once an hour. God damn, what happened to free enjoyment of the media I’m consuming? By George, I am going to write a book one of these days that between every chapter says “Get up and go outside and meet people, you horrible shut-in. This book will do nothing to help your life.” That way irate readers can’t sue me when they realize they’ve wasted their life reading a series of cheap starcrafty knockoffs (I’ll call them “Spacewar: the final war in space.” The first novel will be subtitled “the obscure threat” or “fighting advanced”) and become horrible neckbeards who spend their lives fapping to ships of the hot three titted alien bimbo chick and the shy nerdy girl with the glasses that maintains the space library.

Man, the other day I was at a borders wandering around and not buying things (pfft, paying for books. That’s what libraries are for. I have been not paying for things long before napster or any of that shiz) and I wandered into their study section. So that got me to thinking. There are absolutely hundreds of books in this section, right? There are all these books on. Passing all manner of tests: GREs, LSATS, AP courses, and so on. It got me to thinking how weird this was, that there’s an entire cottage industry of helping people pass these tests that are supposed to be indicative of how much a person has learned or exactly how smart they really are. So instead these tests become not about how smart a person is, but how much money they spent on study books, or how well they absorb these study books. What the hell is up with that? AP courses especially. They’re supposed to be something for students who find their regular classes mindlessly dull (*cough*) to look forward to, because they’re all college and at a higher level. Then the AP tests started counting for college credit (or maybe they always did. Dunno) and it became an important part of an achiever’s job to get a 5 on the tests so that they can secure an early start for their future college careers. Fuck the achievers man. They don’t give a shit about the material. Seriously, you talk to them. They have no passion beyond scoring that A. They treat school like a job.

And school is a job these days. Kids go to school to learn valuable knowledge for their future careers. It says so right on the mission statements of most high schools. That’s also fucked up. Why does a high school have a mission statement? No wonder everyone hates it. You don’t go to school to learn about the world around you. You go to school to pass a test and get a job that pays you money so you can afford to have kids and pass on your genes. School is just a means to an end, and that end is your inevitable death. If you’re lucky, your kids will have done well in their schools so they can afford to support you on top of their families and you die comfortably in a nice rest home.

“oh no, that is not me” you think. “I am destined for something much more fascinating and also I never want kids or to get married.” Ha. Ha. Ha. You don’t think that millions of other people don’t also think the exact same way? Simple economics and statistics dictate that your dream is foolish and irresponsible and simply not likely. What’s all the worse to me, is that these delusions are inevitable in an environment like this. You spend your childhood growing up and watching cool kids and cool people on tv and in movies doing awesome things and you decide that you also want to be cool and awesome and that eventually through sheer moxie or something, you too will obtain the coolness of these tv and movie people. Yes.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

I used the word “I” 158 times in this document, not counting that one. Man I am so self-centered.

Woah man. I just watched an entire episode of aqua teen hunger force. I didn’t laugh once. What is this thing on tv for. And yet like a sucker I sat through the entire thing. I was thinking about making this into a rant about tv, but I thought “naw, no one actually watches tv any more.” At least hardly anyone I know does. Which is good. Good for you guys. Tv is awful and terrible and just awful.

It’s kind of fascinating to me how very ocular we are as a species. We evolved this vision essentially to help us avoid running into branches and to see fruits from afar and we’ve taken it to the point where we’ve got devices that are pretty much standard in pretty much everything that show us all manner of abstract information. It’s totally fascinating to me and probably inevitable for a species like –

You know what they say “if there’s snow on the fields, plow it from both ends”

Sorry, still watching tv.

Anyway, a species like us.

Wow that was the weirdest show. Titan maximum or something. It was sort of like a high speed webcomic.

By the way have I mentioned that I love webcomics? They’re so great. They’re a visually appealing way to get a nice story and some good characterization across. And since they’re pretty much self-published, censorship is non-existent. Like for serious, ever since I found “kong: the gay barbarian” I have not needed porn.

Huh. “drinky crow and gabby” (or something) was pretty interesting. It’s basically just “draw blood, guts, use bizarre 3d cell shading techniques.” But it had some fascinating writing. The show was a snappy commentary on the purpose and concept of god and religion, delivered entirely too quickly. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t very funny, but it was contemplative.

Anyway webcomics. Yeah man. I read them. I spent the last couple of days being absurdly depressed and reading the entirety of shortpacked and finally getting around to reading questionable content. I am so full of weird transformers references and witty indie band quoting I’m ready to burst. Man. I love the character work on both of them. They’re interesting people. Genuinely fascinating and pretty well developed. No blank and obvious stereotypes here. That’s what you get when you (let your heart win) get your stories raw. The less middlemen in the way of art, the closer it can hit home. That’s cool. I love it when people do things just for the hell of it, not because it will sell. And the internet is totally the best platform for this. Space on the internet is essentially unlimited, as it can grow by exactly the amount your thing needs. On tv space is limited by literally time (if time were infinite would space be infinite too? Is this equation correct: t/∞+s/∞=2?) That’s neat.

Er, sorry, totally not focused here. In the newspaper you only have so many pages to print. In film, only so much money to spend on making them. In life itself, there is only so much room for so many foodstuffs and for so much housing. It’s a bit crazy that the internet destroys all that. Granted, the internet will run out when we run out of oil, just like everything else. But that will never happen. Not in my lifetime, anyway. Discussion for another time.

I don’t really understand the obsession with comedy, though it is entirely probable that I am just a cranky son of a bitch ((no, really) the bitch part, I mean) right around this hour of night. I like things, and I find some things very funny. For example the daily show earlier had on a muppet version of perennial whackjob micheal steele saying the outrageous things he says. It was fucking hilarious. Also steve carrel is much more likable when he isn’t acting. Also Colbert made a joke about the muslims and jews having to quit smoking and how that might make them a little edgy. I laughed absurdly hard. But comedy itself I just don’t really appreciate. Well, that’s not it. It’s comedy that adds something else. Or something else that adds comedy. Like, I dunno, that titan maximum cartoon. It was some sort of comedy/action mashup. And it entirely failed to amuse me. It’s like trying to have a serious moment in a dungeons and dragons game and having a dude start yelling “the eyes demand sacrifice” or “blood for the blood god.” It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone who bursts out in song every couple of minutes.

I dunno, maybe I am being grouchy. I like humor, I do. Some people seem to think I’m a reasonably witty guy (I SO am) and it really bugs me how often a joke I make in passing I hear told back to me a few dozen times as some sort of meme.

Speaking of memes –

Actually, look, if I say something that doesn’t make sense to you, please do me a favor and google it. You’re already here on the internet. google is literally in a box straight up the screen there. You have no excuses for not educating yourself about what I’m talking about. Google has rendered all oblique references opaque. You know the first time I read the word opaque was in an animorphs book when I was twelve. I remember looking it up later in an actual physical dictionary, rather than ignoring it and just assuming that the author was smarte—another discussion for later.

Speaking of memes, I hate them. You all have figured out by now that I browse 4chan, right. 4chan.org, once a haven for creepy japan-o-philes now a hipster hang out, because like, it’s so edgy dude. Seriously, it has totally lost the reputation it never deserved in the first place. And I don’t care, cause I’m a hipster who is so edgy. Anyway, memes come from 4chan, supposedly. It’s not actually true, memes come from all over the internet, but the entire internet eventually ends up on 4chan anyway. So they go there to breed, more or less. Like salmon. They’re awful, because they’re essentially a crutch for people who are incapable (it can’t be done!) of making jokes. They’re the hip and edgy equivalent of a 13 year old girl (or Amanda Frescas (:p (eh, who am I kidding, you’re not even reading this))) yelling “spork!” for no reason. It’s pretty uncool. I, with my superior wit, do not need such a crutch to generate spontaneous laughter. I simply do.

Fake superiority complex aside, my real superiority complex dictates that if you make a joke, don’t make it more than once (unless the opportunity comes up more than once and you’ve hit the point where making that joke again would invite a sense of recognition and camaderie rather than simple spite or boredom). Make a new joke every time. Because the world is made of jokes. So many jokes that there are two fake news shows on back to back more or less every night (I think) that do nothing but make fun of the same day’s news. It’s great.

I dunno, maybe I’m just really bugged by it because I hate hearing my own joke thrown back at me with no real addition in humor. Plus I hate to see jokes run ragged.

Hmm. I complain about a lot of things, I think. I’m not really doing it out of any legitimate resentment, but I think I’m discontent. And the only way to fix discontentment is to change something in yourself or your environment. This is part of that to be honest. I complain because I want to get my complaints down on something and I want to enunciate them and have them disputed or understood. I think I’m mistaking that (and I think a lot of people will probably mistake that) with complaining for the sake of complaining. I’m trying to make changes in my life. I’m working on this issue, because it’s a pressing one that bugs me with annoyingly suicidal thoughts from time to time. (note to people who care too much about me, please don’t take this as a sign for intervention. This is something that I need to do, otherwise I may as well have died.)

I just need my life to go somewhere. I was hoping college would help me do that, but so far college has sounded like high school, and I’ve largely treated it like I treated high school: by avoiding everyone around me because I am too damn scared to talk to them. I need to change this. I am already flailing about blindly through life. I need to flail harder. I need to learn to take risks. I need to learn to get up from a fall. Most importantly, I need to stop rejecting myself before I even feel rejected.

So I’ve decided to be gay.

I’ll make housecalls.

No, I’m kidding. Actually I will make housecalls. To play scrabble or something. Actually monopoly. I kick ass at collecting money from hapless tenants.

Ugh, now I’m trying to change the subject, because I am not really sure where to go from here. When I write, I write very seriously. Everything I put into a work that I write has some reason for being in it, mostly because I delete the stuff that shouldn’t be in it. I am hoping that when I am dead and my lesbian bondage fiasco novels have made me world famous, historians will look back on my early writing and write critical essays determining through divination just exactly how gay I was anyway. Nobody with any actual balls writes about his feelings. A lot of the time, I wish I were dumb. I wish that I could pick just one retarded hobby and stick with it. I wish I could just say “oh, hey, transformers, that’s my shtick” or “oh hey, guitars and various rock trivia” or “oh hey, I’m ridiculously flamboyantly queer” or “yeah, man, I love the shit out of recreational drugs.” It’s funny, because the typical response is something like “oh yeah well real people aren’t like that.” I beg to differ. Like for serious. People telegraph what their main interests are, and boy do they enjoy them. Me? I dress sorta-kinda hipsterish but I look kinda intimidating (all 150 pounds of me) and then I talk to people about videogames, then I turn around and discuss philosophy or fucking sci-fi novels, and then I go on about religion or current events, or then I start talking about 4chan or something. I dunno. I don’t have anything that defines me, really.

When I was thirteen, I really really wanted to be a video game developer. I even downloaded rm2k and had something of an epiphany as to how games actually work. Along with the epiphany was the realization that, shit, this shit is a lot of work. So then I decided I wanted to be a journalist at some point, because I really like reading the newspaper. Then I realized that I really enjoyed reading the newspaper much more than I enjoyed writing it. For a while, I wanted to be dead, because everything sucked. Now I kinda want to be a prophet, but I’m finding it really hard to convert people because I can’t fucking talk to them one on one. Like, seriously, I am the only person I know who gets shy and nervous when a waitress tries to make small talk. I am a shitty-ass prophet.

It probably doesn’t help that I spend so much time trying to get away from things or from people. I go outside walking wearing reflective dark sunglasses and huge, loud headphones so that I don’t need to see or hear anything when I walk around. I call my outdoorsy stuff my “sensory deprivation apparatus” because I am a huge dork. It’s really bad. It really worries me when I go about telling things to people over the internet that I don’t tell to people I actually know, based wholly on the assumption that people on the internet can hurt me less. Man, I’m messed up.

Maybe the problem is that I’m not embracing the right things. Maybe tv is a good thing, because it helps me avoid my problems like everything else. I have a pet theory that if I ever actually bother to get drunk, I’m going to end up an alcoholic, because it’s a vastly more efficient means of escape than lying in bed in the middle of the night and imagining I gain the ability to fly or being at home alone and doing silly stances and pretending I’m an earthbender (((toph is so hot) I don’t care that she’s twelve, she’s a fictional character) my name’s toph, which sounds like tough, which is what I am).

I read QC and stuff to live vicariously a life where people care about what I say or what I think about, and those people happen to be in the same apartment building as I am. Same with shortpacked. And it’s retarded. I’m trying to pretend to be someone I’m not without actually changing myself into that person. It’s like a super-lazy version of escapism.

I really hate it. I hate being smart enough to know that that won’t work. I wish I was autistic and could truly believe in the idea of having a virtual furry girlfriend who I photoshop into all of my photos, or believe that a licensed character re-color rip-off is actually my best friend. Instead I get to spend all my time sitting here thinking “gee, Jake, you got problems. You should, like, go fix them or something” and replying “eh, too lazy. I don’t know how to use photoshop anyway.”