That random journal by that random girl

Apparently Calvin just joined some kind of Microsoft program that gets the staff and students in CS and Engineering Departments free Microsoft software. Not Office, but XP, Vista, and Windows 7, along with some coding software I may just yoink merely 'cause it's free.

It's funny, though, because now I have a copy of Windows XP Professional. And it was free. And legal. This is ironic, because maybe 2 weeks ago I finished installing/setting up a bootlegged copy of XP Home on a partition in my laptop. And y'know, if I'd just waited, I could have had it legally, easily, and not had to use a DVD to burn stuff on. Or had to fiddle with that stupid WPA kill application because the dratted thing wouldn't validate.

Think maybe God's trying to tell me something here. Heh.

I realized this vaguely awhile ago, since I do most of my processing in my head, but I figured other people, who find my insistence that I NOT name my stuff perplexing, may want to know. That last sentence was horrible grammar.

Anyway, I don't name my stuff because I consider it merely an extension of myself. My car, for instance, is not me, but allows me to almost grow wheels and reach speeds I could only dream of running. The same idea applies to my computer. It extends my capabilities. It is not my beloved friend who has accompanied me through several years of my life: it is like my hands, or my legs, or perhaps more aptly, like portions of my brain.

There are portions of the brain that deal with specific body parts and specific human capabilities. Damage the temporal lobe, and you'll have issues with the things it deal with. But you don't name the temporal lobe "John" or "Leslie" or even "Alexander the Great." It's just "the temporal lobe."

Hence, I don't name my stuff.

Today's thought:

Telling a person with anxiety problems to relax is like telling a person on fire to calm down. It just doesn't work.

What is it about celebrity and being famous that makes us shut our brains off and not regard the person in question as a person? Is it the awe? The knowledge beforehand that we likely won't ever see the person again? Why is it that when we see a famous person, we think of them only in that context, and shut our brains to what kind of person they are, what they think about themselves, their hopes, their dreams, and so on? Why do we limit ourselves so?

I noticed this effect many years ago, probably the during one of the first times I came into contact with someone I considered famous. Having recognized it, and recognized the person was also a person, I worked to allow myself to set it aside, to see past fame's aura and look at the person him or herself. This is something that must be done consciously, however. I am still susceptible to blinding myself to a person, merely because they are famous.

I can't seem to figure it out. Why do we do this?

I was shelving books at WA's library when amidst the others, some theory books about WWIII already having been fought came up. As I glanced over them dismissively, it occurred to me that perhaps... just perhaps.... WWIII has begun and is being fought right this second. It's a tireless sort of war, mainly fought by idiots and people with too much time. But there are few armies in this war. The only objective is to be right, and battle after battle is fought on every subject. Yep, that's right. WWIII is being fought on the Internet.

Caution: not for the faint of heart.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=200249100507&ref=nf

For those that don't want to watch/didn't understand what they saw: This is a video of a girl watching the protest in Iran with her father. A basij member on the roof of a civilian house shot her directly in the heart. There was a doctor onhand, so he tried to save her, but there was no chance she could be saved from something like that. She died in less than two minutes, despite all the desperate hands that tried to stem her blood.


I've studied Psychology for awhile now. When things like this happen, I always ask why. Why would people be in this situation at all? Why would someone shoot an innocent girl in the heart? I keep thinking back to something in Theories of Personality... "Misery and Stupidity"- the causes of mental illnesses, according to one theorist. But really, it's fear and stupidity that cause things like this. And fear and stupidity are often so inexorably linked in humans.

I should be working on my homework right now, but recently I've looking at my arms. I gave blood yesterday, so there's a little poke mark on my left arm to match the one on my right, from the last time. If you look very carefully at the inside of my elbows, you can see a myriad of little, slightly shiny poke marks. Old scars, from donations before.

It's hard to tell, looking at them now, what they were. It's hard to pick them out from the natural creases in my skin. But they're there. Five of them, at least, on the left arm alone. Not including the newest one, which is fading to a dull red. It will turn brown, and then fade away entirely, given enough time.

It makes the homework seem kind of pointless, in comparison. Well, maybe not pointless, but not nearly as important as Calvin would make it.

So, I finally asked my pastor about the whole unbelievers going to hell thing.

It's bothered me for awhile, since I have some atheist friends I really care about. I don't want to see them burn. I wouldn't forget them in heaven, and if I didn't see them, I'd know where they were. And that would make me sad. Sadness won't exist in heaven. So I'm forced to conclude either God would change me and my memories, or God isn't sending people to hell left and right.

I learned a perspective from Rob awhile ago, one that has bothered me ever since he mentioned it. Ipvy brought it up later, and reminded me. God, as some people see him, is an interdimensional lawyer. If you don't do what he tells you, follow all these little rules and such, you go to hell. If you don't meet specific criteria, you go to hell. And since he created you, he has that right. And that, if you ask me, is a jerk.

I don't see God that way. But I can't figure out a way to express how I see it differently. So I asked my pastor. He's going to give me a book to read, but his short answer was that he believes, based on his careful reading of the Bible and other scholars, that only unbelievers who reject him go to hell. Meaning they've had the chance to know him, and have decided against him.

This theory is much more fitting with my sense of morality and truth than either my parents' or my own theory, and any I've heard so far. I suspect the pastor probably simplified his viewpoint, since he was in a hurry, but I'm hopeful that this translation of the Bible is accurate. It's very hard to know. But I don't believe my loving God would throw that many good people in hell.

I think I need to find ways of calming myself down. I've been noticing I've been having harder and harder times focusing, and I've described it as being filled with nervous static, buzzing loudly. Trying to focus on something I don't like through that is nearly impossible. My attention slides sideways. I made a list of ten things a couple days ago that were stressing me out, and I don't think I got everything there, either.

I'll survive. I must. The question is whether I'll survive with passing grades.

The choice between optimism and pessimism. It's a choice most people make subconsciously. Some people may change their decisions. I've been faced with that choice. I am a complicated sort of pessimist, but when simplified, definitely a pessimist.

The choice, as I see it, comes down to this: would you rather be right? Or would you rather be happy? A difficult choice for some.

Psychologically, these paths have been explored. Pessimists and optimists, their statistics, their lifespans, their general health... All of it.

Optimists live longer, get sick less often, are happier, bounce back from failures better, have less depression overall, get better grades...

And yet, if these statistics are to be believed, pessimists are less likely to make mistakes. More likely to see the truth of things. Are more careful in their observations, and thus more correct.

I'd rather be right. I've had enough abuse in this life to treasure what I have. I'm not going to throw away what I have in search on some magic jackpot of happiness. I don't want to endeavor to enjoy every moment of life. Some days I barely get by with what energy I have, much less trying to enjoy the grey and despair. Don't tell me to enjoy everything: it's a waste of my time, a waste of your breath. I don't go through life with a frown on my face. I enjoy what I think is enjoyable, and cherish what wonders I have.

What about you? Would you rather be right, or happy?

You know you're in a bad mood when it's freakin' amazing outside and all you want to do is mope inside and get nothing done.

For some reason, watching "Chuck" made me thoughtful. I almost always try to understand and refine myself in daily life, but recently I've been putting more effort into it, pending my diagnosis by Renee with some kind of learning disorder (I think).

It occurred to me while I was brushing my teeth after the episode that it is given to me to fight. I don't take things lying down often. When I was bullied, I fought back. The action was pointless, did nothing but keep my spirit from breaking and get me beaten up more, but I still fought. I fought because I saw nothing else to do. Because I would not knuckle under to the unfairness.

I inherited stubbornness from both sides of the family. My dad is more obviously stubborn, but my mom has a streak to match it, if you push her enough. Yet fighting and being stubborn is not always the right path.

God grants me the wisdom sometimes to look around, to see when I shouldn't be so aggressive. Some people are put off by such intensity on things that don't matter so much.

But in everyday life, it's a tricky thing. I'm reminded of a Harper motto I read in a book several years ago: In all things, there must be a balance.

Always keeping that in mind, I am glad I have the option to fight.

This year, mostly this semester, I've noticed I have issues paying attention in class. It's not that the classes are horribly boring. They're at least mildly interesting. (I'm a terrible judge of the levels of interesting, overall.) However, I can't seem to pay attention and just take notes in class with my computer. I seem to need to play Lament, or read comics, or something. The overall signal I get is "bored" when I try to not do other things, and it's so intense that I usually just cave.

I've attempted to combat this before, more informally, by simply ignoring my impulses and urges to open something more interesting and multitask with it. All of my previous attempts have failed. My mind slides sideways instead of processing the information.

Today I did something different, somewhat accidentally. I told myself, this morning while I walked to breakfast, that I would try to pay complete attention for 10 minutes in Sociology. If that got too boring, I would then allow myself to open Lament and play that. But only that. I ate breakfast, fully intent on carrying out my plan.

When I got to class, I was early, as I always am. So I started fiddling with things. I nearly opened Cantrip, which would let me play Lament, but decided if I started now, it would be too difficult to stop. Instead, I folded a sticker backing into an origami lily. That took me into classtime, and his opening story to finish. The paper started small, and it's not like sticker backing is the ideal paper to make origami with. It was hard. When I finished, he was beginning the lecture. So I started taking notes.

I hadn't realized it, but I also had Transmission open. Transmission is a BitTorrent client I use. Since I have an internet connection in that class, it was uploading and downloading nicely. I started watching the upload rates on one of the torrents while I took notes. And it kind of worked. I took notes of a slightly more complete quality than I usually do.

I'm not sure what to do with this discovery. Or why this has suddenly turned up and needs fixing now. But at least I have some kind of progress.

I have finally quantified one of my problems with exercise, and the reason for my capability to exhaust myself but still want to do more

For my own reference, this refers to the point when I get my "dead-eyes" expression and feel dead (utterly drained of energy). If I push myself after this, I hurt a lot and want to cry from the pain and frustration (Example: the mile run at WA with the whirlwind I missed seeing because I was in too much pain). This happens most often in mile runs or the like, but today I experienced it in Weight Training class, in the circuit training. From what I can tell, I only get the dead feeling when I don't have adequate time to rest my muscles and regain my breath.

So, my conclusion is this: My willpower far outclasses my body's capabilities.

I am a very stubborn person. I inherited it from both sides of the family. I would not have bounced back from the things that have happened to me if I weren't so stubborn. However, that stubbornness can be a bad thing when placed against an inevitable fact. In this case, that's my body's capabilities. I don't know the extent or limitations of them, so I do the best I can, but nevertheless I sometimes end up feeling dead after great expenditures of energy, such as today's class.

It's not a good feeling, like one would get after winning a race. There are no endorphins, no runner's high. Just a feeling of total exhaustion. Given ten minutes or so, I bounce back. I'm more or less fine now. But if not given that, I experience this unpleasantness.

When I was in Crew, I had a lot of new experiences. Some were good, some were bad. One of these really sticks out in my mind right now.

We ran every day for Crew, about a mile, sometimes less. The girls sometimes started before the guys, so both would be finished about the same time. I was always one of the slowest runners. I've never been athletic. However, I always tried to run at the best pace I could.

So one day I was running in the back, as usual, and I saw one of the guys wasn't leaving me behind as he normally would. He was keeping ahead of me, but that was it. He was capable of far better, but he stayed at my pace. After a bit, I caught up to him and gave him a look. He just grinned guiltily and sped up to stay ahead of me.

And me? I boiled inside. He was making a mockery of my hard work. That kind of situation, to me, is the epitome of pathetic.

I just finished watching the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first black President. It's a great moment in America's history. There were no noticeable assassination attempts. So here I am. Here's the country, at a crossroad. My complex nature wars between cynicism and optimism. Obama is quite the speaker. I can't honestly tell which side is winning, cynicism or hope. I think Obama's worst opponents, those who will most hinder his efforts to change this country, won't be the disbelievers, or the media. I think his worst opponents are the Senate and the House of Representatives. They're supposed to represent the people, and they don't, really. Not well. They're not of the same background as we are, most of them. So that leaves it up to the people to encourage them to vote the right way, or else. We'll see.

I'd like to be optimistic about this. I just really hate to be disappointed.

Edit: I saw Yo Yo Ma on TV! He and a bunch of other amazing instrumentalists played before Obama spoke. They were awesome, but Yo Yo Ma looked so happy and joyful, playing away at his cello. He is made of win. That is all.

It occurs to me that there's a difference between being open to God's instructions and passively going through life. God calls us to be mindful of what he's trying to tell us, to listen to his still-small voice in the quiet or in the bustle of life. It's an effort to do so, not a passive walking through life. Do most people miss that? That you have to listen all the time, lest you miss something he's trying to tell you? I know I didn't realize that until I thought hard about it after pledging my life to God on the long car trip to Madison.

It also occurs to me that not all unpleasant things should be avoided. It's the unpleasant things the human mind remembers best, and often it's the unpleasant things we learn from, not the pleasant sunny parks, the quiet coffee shops. It's the pain and the discomfort and the anguish that give us the best viewpoints into our souls. When unpleasant things happen, often people just turn themselves off, to avoid as much pain as possible. Dull the pain by not caring, interacting as little as possible. But you know, I think I've learned more about myself by examining those painful points in my life than I ever learned in the blissful days of preKindergarten, or the more recent week or two here and there when I've considered myself happy. I'll grant that I generally need calm to sort through what I've learned, accept it, and work with it. But I don't think I should avoid unpleasant things merely because they're unpleasant. That statement might deserve more thought.

Those two revelations are linked by a single thread. The movie, "The Dark Knight." It's a depressing movie, to me. It's the story of the fall of a man, the story of a near-redemption of a city, the story of a madman. The ending is not a happy one. It's inspired some deep and disturbing thoughts. I never wanted to see it again when I saw it at Calvin's free showing. Now I have to do it for class. So I watched it again, about 1.5 times. I took notes on the personality of the Joker, and the transformation of Arthur Dent into Two-Face. And once again, I noted the way the ending works. Blame Batman, because he can take it. Batman could take the ravages of the Joker, much more than Arthur Dent could. Yet Arthur Dent was the "white knight." It suggests disturbing things.

I take from the movie that the people more in touch with their dark sides are much stronger than those who aren't. Those people who have had horrible things happen to them, faced that down, fought for their sanity, and emerged again, different. Those people are stronger, more able to take the insanity and darkness of the world. The people who don't shy from fighting with the pain, the anger, the taint that pervades every one of us. Especially if, like Batman, they hold themselves to some kind of good code. Those are the strong people.

And me? I consider myself one of those strong people. Perhaps it's arrogance. As objectively as possible, I consider some of what happened to me painful, the things that tore me apart. I've feel experienced some of the horrors of the world. Not nearly as many as some people I can think of, but enough to make me more complex, more careful, more in touch with who I am, dark and light. Warring despair and hope. It's not a fight that really ends, but it's one I'm getting better at fighting.

My code is hard to summarize and make coherent, but it involves that I try to do the best I can by my friends, try not to do harm to others, and try to sort myself out and rearrange into a better person. I will never be a very good person. I can see that my progress is slow, and probably will remain so. It's an uphill battle, after all. But I can't give up. Not yet.

I just realized, I owe some of who I am and some of my recent development to Kriss. We can't progress as people unless we think it's possible. For me, that often means firsthand experience. "Seeing is believing" is not necessarily the best policy, I think, but it's one I'm comfortable in following.

Kriss is... hard to sum up. He tries to be (and generally succeeds at being) humble, nonjudgemental, patient, and kind. His way of being is the best way for him, but he won't push it off on others or pretend it's any better than others' ways of being. I've tried to understand his way of being for quite some time, feeling it to be superior to my own and what I've seen of others' ways of being, and it's helped me a great deal.

That capability, trying to determine what feels right and true to yourself, and then deciding what to do with it. I think that's really important. But I see it's possible, through Kriss and my interpretation of his way of being.

I'm now actively searching for my core beliefs. There was a lecture at Calvin a few days ago, a man talking about Faith and Doubt. One of the ideas he discussed was the three kinds of beliefs.

There are:

Public beliefs- those beliefs you profess to have, and/or want other people to think you have.

Private beliefs- those beliefs you have in your own head, that you think you believe.

Core beliefs- beliefs you absolutely believe. All your actions stem from these beliefs. They are your mental framework to life, and inviolate. An example of this is the belief in gravity.


The problem with core beliefs is that we generally don't know them. They don't express themselves to us.

Armed with this new knowledge and a better sense of purpose, I'm hopeful that I can make strides forward in my journey for a better life. I'm thankful for Kriss, and thankful for everything I have.

In 2008 I....

began and finished the most credits-intensive semester I've ever taken. (17 credits, 2 honors classes, both core, and a language I could only attend half the classes for)

Hopefully began to complete myself a bit more by letting myself feel all my emotions, including anger.

Got my first real job, first full time job, and first bad job. Yay Walmart in remodeling on the graveyard shift.

Acquired a crapload of good music and broke the 7,000 song milestone.

Had a semester in which it seemed like everything was going wrong, from flaming computers to being sick for over two weeks to having to use a crappy IBM with Linux in order to have any kind of sanity.

Failed my first final. Oops. Going to study hard and relearn that class and the prior ones so I don't do it again.

Straightened out my head a great deal in terms of romantic things, but I have a lot more to do yet.

Resolved several pesky issues and uncovered a heap of new ones.

Realized I have a grudge against God, but pledged my life to him anyway. Working on that grudge.

Met some neat people, had a life-changing experience or two.

Encountered an irate ditch in a snowstorm on a 20 hour drive, and found that snow makes pretty good padding for sliding cars. No injuries ensued.

Went on an ongoing artistic streak, art forms including wax shaping, origami, drawing, coloring, and fractal art with candy. (See Facebook Photos for pictures)

I am...

female
human
strange
anime lover
quiet

Japanese student
a friend
snake owner
origami folder
trying to balance

a Christian
computer savvy
fond of fantasy and sci-fi
a Psych major
much simpler than I used to be

still pretty complex
emotional, normally ruled by logic
creative sometimes
easily confused
a lazy bum if I let myself be

wishing it was easier to pin myself down
annoyed by the fly that somehow got in my room a day ago and still won't go to its fiery death in my lamp
someone who needs close friends
as non-judgemental as a highly judgemental person can be
hypocritical, but rarely on purpose

less trapped in my own head than I was in 5th-9th grade
more represented by fire and water than one would expect
buffeted by strong emotions
a reader of 40 some webcomics
a walking contradiction in quite a few ways

vegetarian excepting instances when I have reasonable assurance my meat was raised and slaughtered humanely
uncertain as to who I am and what I want from life
usually doing the best I can, but
eternally fighting myself
highly musical in voice, ear, and brain functioning

a picky eater
highly empathic
highly oblivious
well aware that the prior two contradict each other
a good listener

...done writing this, as it's literally taken me all day.