OMG(osh)!

(Warning: I am extremely tired as I write this, but subconscious Phil is trying to say something and it is best to let him do his own writing. Conscious Phil is trying to proofread.)

There is nothing more pathetic than an adult trying to act like an adult. A child acting like an adult is cute, and an adult in touch with their inner child is enlightened; but an adult who tries to behave like an adult means they are neither what they are nor what they pretend to be.

- Me

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was hanging out with my friend Andrew. Two desperate post college buds looking for some relatively harmless things to do, we began trying to find stuff to watch. Now, I know what you're thinking, most guys our age watch other things. Things which are as frivilous and putrid as can be comprehended; but somehow, and in someway, we just started watching animation. It is odd that in our day and time animation is regarded as something for children to watch. It is something we adults find beneath us: quaint, provential, but certainly no way to behave.

In our day to day lives,* it is ironic that we forget what it means to be us. Breadwinners and romantics often kill their humanity just to attempt to be human. It is not just pathetic, it is a sickness. We then try and act like children, but we have forgotten what it meant to be a child. We forgot that it meant to have faith, to love without the boundries of our conceptions, to dream stupid dreams and not have them mean utter disgrace and failure. I have entered the world of the false adult on this account, much to my embarrassment and chagrin.

In the end the adult is one who is in touch with what we Christians call the eternal now; and yet is in touch with it in more than just what we know. The Christian knows that the eternal now is a point in which time and space are compressed forever and ever into one, what the physicists would call, singularity. At each moment our lives enter a beautiful crossroads. Here time and space meld like stars into existence. Instead of pulling apart and compartmentalizing, labeling and categorizing our being; the human spirit realizes the happiness of the moment. That person knows time is an illusion of order and is only an utility created to assist in our endevors. That person doesn't reject time, but realizes that time is beneath the human psyche and spirit. There is no force or tool more powerful or important than the tiny unknowable nothingness/everything of one human soul. It is bigger and smaller than the universe, and that its power lies in its incomprehensibility.

It is the forgetting of the wonder we experienced as children that leads us to work jobs of minutia and unfulfillment. We long to laugh at simple joys of imaginary stories and castles and far away lands, to fight wars, to forget ourselves. I am not saying that childhood is perfect and that we should be children forever; but I am saying that to forget what we learned as children is dangerous and, more importantly, unpleasant.

It was in my, to use a cliche term, "an enlightened state" that I began to watch cartoons. A connection with the simpler times of being a child, it made me happy again; the simple kind of happiness that is as necessary as the complex and philosophical ones. Naruto and Deathnote and Avatar are the simple pleasures that our the last refuge of my complexes.

I write this post to say that I am an huge fan of Avatar. I just finished the last episode and am in complete awe of the imaginations that can keep people captivated for three years. I started watching the show in the very middle of the middle (episode 33 to be exact). When I began watching the show with my friend Andrew, we desperately tried to watch as many episodes as we could. We would record them on a DVR and play them back later on that night, drinking wine, and commenting on how great a story it was.

The show, I should mention, is about four peoples. Each people is linked to elements: earth, fire, air, and water. Some individuals in each culture can manipulate the element of their people. There is a unifying reincarnation that appears in a cyclical pattern to each of the peoples called the Avatar. The Avatar, in this generation, is helped by his friends to try and restore balance to an unbalanced world. Corny? Yeah, but who says there is anything wrong with being corny?

The funny thing is that when I talk to kids, I usually mention that I am an huge fan. I have let friend's of the family borrow my dvds or watched a few episodes with my friends who have kids. The result is always the same, they end up becoming as obsessed with the show as I am.

Is there a point to this blog post? It is pretty easy to spot. Usually I am much more structured and rational, but sometimes it is just important to really enjoy the beauty of creativity and the joy of creation. When we were young we would tell stories to parents and draw pictures with friends, when we got older we forgot the simple joy of our imaginations. So, pick up the phone or sit down at the computer and tell a friend a story you have had or share a work of fiction that you have heard/watched/read. Enjoy this simple part of your humanity; if not for me, than for that little child inside you.

*I know I use that phrase a lot, but in the minutia of day to day isn't it odd how we lose ourselves.

Unedited Rant Number 1

I was wanting to write something, but the muses only seem to visit me during the most impractical time and in the most impractical places. A car ride, a moment before sleep, in the middle of the work day; these are the times they visit me most. When I am in front of my computer screen, when I am faced with a million distractions that fail to distract me; these are the times when they abandon me to the vast nothingness and apathy that seem to be the units of the day. Great phalanxes of nothingness seem to crowd around me while everyone else pursues a dream or at least a dream of a dream.

I try and write when I cannot. I remember once I tried to write a paper for philosophy and muses stayed far away. Here I was a day or two ahead of schedule, and they wouldn't visit to me. The day before the paper, it seemed like there wasn't enough that could be written or said. Why is that? Why is the world so cruel as to make even the easy things hard? And why am I and an handful of others the only people that really care?

Why don't we treat our philosophers right? I suppose it is because we are all philosophers; and if we start acknowledging that truth, than we would have to treat everyone properly. I have met so many people who have bought into the myth of unkindness. They do not even have skin that is very thick at all. They are like bad actors trying to be so very unkind because they think that is what is required of an human being. Is acting like professional lying? Why is lying to ourselves and others so important to ourselves? I don't have any answers. I am hoping something triggers something and I can write.

The truth is I want to write something right now. I want to say something important only to me. No one else will care the way I do and I even realize that it doesn't really matter except to a small group of my friends. I want to shout and curse down the sun and the moon and all the satellites of the cosmos; but after the primeval yalp ... what will I have really done. Oh, to not think so very much; especially about a blog post.

Contemplating Grey Skies or The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in about 2:55, when you know you've taken all the baths that you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

--Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything



I got home today from a rather tough day at work. It can be really boring. Its the same people and we do the same stuff. We all have this feeling like we should be getting better and better and faster and faster, but in reality ... there is a point where one has to just be grateful that we have one another at all. On top of this, I am really tired. I have been going to bed late at night because I drove home from Lexington the night before last at about ten o'clock and was up reading a cook book (yes, a cook book; no, not "How to Serve Man"). The sky was gray, you know that horrible tint of terrible that one runs across from time to time. It feels as if the sky wishes to land and smother the world below like a beached whale on an unsuspecting surfer.

I tried to make it through like any red-blooded American would. I went shopping. I found a couple of cooking knives, some pots, some pans, a food processor, condiments, etc.; but there is a sort of cathartic apathy that ensues after the Christmas credit binge and I just didn't feel up to spending any more money. I drove home and tried to muster my thoughts and emotions and will (my platonic goodie basket called the psyche) into one good long prayer. The words come out, but sometimes it just feels like one is mumbling at the sky or ground or, in my case, the road straight ahead of me. I took stock of my life and found the truly painful truth, there is one thing that I believe.

I came home and the gray skies that I had left behind in the day time followed me home as I watched news that I disagreed with and talked over the same daily ennui that I had brought up countless times before.

A friend of mine said that we cannot rely on others for our happiness. This is true, but we cannot rely on ourselves either. My mind came back to the thought I had had in the car. I am cursed to be a Christian. It is the one thing that in which I believe, and I have tried to grow doubt in my heart and head, and it just gets crushed by the overpowering facts. In the end, what I have found is something very interesting. The more we lose, the more we have room for other things. Faith is not some promise that things are going to be rosy-colored sunshine days. Faith is a promise that there are bigger things than gray skies and ennui emotions. There are bigger things than the things we want. Faith is about the realization that we are aware that there are bigger things than ourselves. And it in a world that can be kind of boring, isn't it nice to know there are still things that make life a little more interesting.