Comfort

Wow how stupid this sounds on the day after Christmas.  A day about gifts and selflessness, about celebrating and love, how my Christmas was none of that.  Even more tragic than that statement before, is how it took Eclipse (yes the vampire movie) to show me what I really want in life.

Comfort

More specifically comforting.

I've spent much of this break with other people, but at the end of the day I'm feeling more alone then ever.  All I've ever wanted, I realize, is someone to be there for me, to comfort me in the times that are out of my control.  I've been thinking back on my life and so much of it has been torture and suffering.  I just wish that as I came home from school, beat-up and friendless, that I had someone to tell me, "its ok that these kids don't like you, it will get better, i'll help you".  I just wish that as a teenager when I had been rejected, outcast, made a pariah, that someone had stepped in and said, " your worth something, people just don't get it".  I just wish that as I tore my body apart and reconstructed it that someone had said,"It'll be fine, you'll make it, I know you can do it"

I just wish that at the end of today, I had someone say its ok that your family uses you as a tool, but I won't.  That its going to be ok leaving college, that people won't forget you, that I won't forget you.  That even though you aren't spectacular, I wan't to commit to seeing you thrive.  That's what I want.

Recently I've been so afraid of everything, that I'll make it through this next quarter that could be my very toughest. That I'll have some friends after college or that I'll end up like my sister who is so alone and that we'll only have each other.  Or even for the first time driving down from Norcal through 8 1/2 hours of rain and traffic. Trying to reroute yourself because GPS doesn't account for the grapevine being closed. All alone. Can you imagine my fear.  Or having a conversation with your "best friend" who says I can't make time for you anymore, your not important to me.  Realizing after that conversation you can't come up with a single person you feel comfortable talking to about it. Because you honestly don't want to bother them, or feel like its a burden for them.

That's it in a nutshell, I'm afraid, I'm afraid to let go of any of this, because I don't know its going to be ok, I've lived 21 years, I've fought for 21 years, and all I want is the comfort of someone standing there by me while I fight.  Wanting to understand my pain, wanting to be apart of my life.  I'm tired of inviting people in, only to have them leave.  On my 21st Christmas my heart shattered again, and I can't pick up the pieces anymore, I rather just stay broken, its less work.  No more, No more, I tap out, God, I tap.  I've finally given up faith in myself like you always wanted. I guess theres always 2011.

Life Is

I wrote this as a Freshmen in college over 3 years ago, I don't remember where I was at or how I was feeling, but some of the things on this list still make me smile

Life Is

Life is Inexplicable
Life is Love
Life is Laughter
Life is Friends
Life is Pain
Life is Drama
Life is Wonderful
Life is Banana Pancakes
Life is Sleeping till noon
Life is Awesome
Life is Incredible
Life is What you make of It
Life is Hard
Life is a Quest
Life is Family
Life is Time
Life is Action
Life is Robots
Life is Voodoo
Life is Magic
Life is Shit happens
Life is a Process
Life is Good Times
Life is many Conversations about one Thing
Life is Worriesome
Life is Confusion
Life is Tradegy
Life is Complaints
Life is Heartbreak
Life is Romance
Life is Great
Life is Strange
Life is knowing those around you are awesome
Life is : )
Life is Happiness
Life is Self-Centered
Life is Sadness
Life is Self-Sacrifice
Life is Hope
Life is Marching to your own Beat
Life is Powerlessness
Life is being the Constant Observer
Life is You
Life is I like your Moves, I like your Style
Life is Helplessness
Life is Obscure
Life is Undeniable
Life is Forever
Life is Inescapable
Life is Mystery
Life is WOW
Life is Chit-Chat
Life is Movies
Life is Power
Life is Intelligence
Life is Divine Providence
Life is Knowledge
Life is Bad Times
Life is Count It!
Life is Comedy
Life is Disasterous
Life is Picking Up the Pieces
Life is Your Killing me Smalls
Life is Everything
Life is Nothing
Life is Wowzers
Life is Sunny
Life is Rosey
Life is Electronic Euphoria
Life is Disconnect
Life is Starting so you Can Finish
Life is a Constant Struggle
Life is Suffering
Life is a Message
Life is your mom
Life is Understanding
Life is Experience
Life is Rainy
Life is Danceing in the Face of Danger
Life is Forgetting
Life is Love Actually
Life is Falling
Life is Success
Life is Long-Lost Friends
Life is Flaky
Life is Joy
Life is Grace
Life is Faith
Life is Triumph
Life is Failure
Life is Creepy
Life is Upsetting
Life is Far From Over
Life is Getting it Right the Third Time
Life is Personality
Life is Amazing

Life is Life

Christmas Time

Wow do I love Christmas time! For many years of my life it was my sanctuary. It was a time, were as a kid, I would get a break from the stress, worry, and anxiety of schooling. A time were I could always escape the circumstances of my life, and just be me.  Christmas was when my parent's place would be decorated to the nine's with the most beautiful Christmas Tree, with over a hundred ornaments, with even more decorations throughout the house.  A sent of mistletoe in the air, with homemade gingerbread men that I would always steal when my mom wasn't looking and create gingerbread men villages.  Each cottage had a different "man" that had it's own personality that related to a whole community.  My mom always knew where the cookies went, always displaying my creation on Christmas morning.

Oh, Christmas morning!  What an assortment of awesomeness, a ritual unlike anything a J person like me could hope for.  My mom, who many would say is a world class gift wrapper (just ask my elementary school teachers or anyone that's got a gift by her lol, to bad I didn't get that gift :P), would have wrapped all our gifts and put them under the tree.  Big packages, small packages, big bows, small bows, wrapped to perfection, each gift a small work of art.  With care and due diligence, my sisters and I would move the gifts and stack them in three piles in the family room.  And then with reverence we would take turns, one gift at a time, opening what we had got for Christmas.  A sight I know I'm probably exaggerating, but to me those memories are nothing but extraordinary.  Remembering the feeling of elation when my parents had gotten exactly what I wanted, had taken notice of what I said.  It was always in that moment that I felt most like family, the most connected with my parents and siblings.

So this Christmas season, I thought, I want to bring a little of what I love so much to everyone around me. But how? Sort of like how the Grinch Stole Christmas, but in reverse :D! I thought, I really want to bring the Christmas to Whoville, so let's throw a Christmas Party!  And Boy was it great! When I was inviting people to the party, I thought, well its the weekend before finals, I don't think that many people will show.  And oh how I was wrong!  More than I could have imagined showed up!  I honestly didn't even have enough dinner for everyone (my bad)!  But it turned out great, we had a Gingerbread man creation contest (wonder were I got that idea from) that saw creativity never seen before, White Elephant gift exchange which is always a blast, and watched the undeniably hilarious Elf!  I couldn't believe how in-to-it all college students were!  I was like this is to awesome for words! Hugs all around lol!

But the night before the Christmas Party, I gave my friends their gifts for Christmas! To me this was sort of an experiment. I wanted to see if the same feeling of elation and connectedness could occur when other people received gifts, and of course I just wanted to love on them because their awesome!  Needless to say, there faces were priceless. As each gift was being unwrapped, watching the person's face go from curiosity, sometimes confusion (lol A-Lowe), and turn to that elated feeling, of someone understanding them.  It was awesome!  Maybe my friends didn't ask for that gift, but it was so personalized to them, that most of my friends just said "Wow".  I loved that moment. The fact that I could share in their joy, what a privilege, what an honor, something that I hope I always appreciate.

But I think the best part about this Christmas Season, was the excuse to tell everyone I loved them, there's nothing like saying I love you, and meaning it.  So Thanks everyone for a wonderful Christmas Season, I love you all!

Blowing my Brain

Scientia and Sapentia, or, What the Schoolmen Knew -an excerpt

by John Médaille -The Full Article

These displaced truths, scientia (the integration of all knowledge) without sapentia (Wisdom), have another effect: they become, in the language of the post-modernists, “master narratives.” That is, they become organizing myths that “explain” everything without being subject to explanation themselves, or even to examination. In the realm of economics, we can see this phenomenon in a crude form in such books as the popular Freakonomics series, which purports to explain everything in terms of an almost comic statistical analysis.

But there is another displaced truth that has become an even more powerful myth, namely the myth of Darwinian evolution. It is certainly a truth that species succeed each other over time, and that there is a tendency to higher levels of organization and intelligence, as the fossil record reveals. Now this truth is remarkable enough in itself, but in attempting an explanation, the Darwinists have ventured into the realm of pure mysticism. That is, they attribute the phenomena to random mutations which are tested against survivability. But to say something is random is equivalent to saying it has no scientific explanation, for that is what a random event is. The findings of a “science” of random events are suitable only for publication in the Journal of Non-Repeatable Experiments. If the changes in the genes are random, then there is no science which can reach them.

Of course mutations can be as frequent as you like, but this only adds to the mystery, for what is interesting is not the rate of mutations, but the rate of useful mutations occurring at a precise time. For not only does a mutation have to be an improvement, it has to be an improvement at the moment it occurs. A higher level of organization imposes a higher cost in energy, and if an eye, a wing, or a fin is not needed at the moment it appears, it is of no value. The rate of useful changes would surely be an infinitesimally small number, and the number that appear at the right moment would be infinitesimally smaller. And if these odds were not poor enough, this remarkable set of coincides must occur in more than one individual in the same area at the same time, unless one wants to posit a single mother, an Eve-like origin to all species. But even Eve had her Adam, and without a mate with a similar trait, a trait is not likely to endure. Is it not odd that the Darwinists, having rejected a common mother for man, posit a common mother for every other species?
Yet the changes do occur, with remarkable frequency at the precise moment they are needed and over a sufficiently large population in a sufficiently small area to ensure that a beneficial change will endure. Something very interesting is happening, something that cannot be reached by a “science” of randomness, which can only be a pseudo-science. Creationists would like to attribute everything to the direct intervention of God in every case, which doesn’t tell us much about how God does it, which is the object of science, but at least it is internally coherent, in a way that a “science” of randomness is not; the creationists may be mere mystics, but they are not half as mystical as the Darwinists.

It is not as science that Darwinism obtains its remarkable prestige, for it stands outside the scientific hierarchy and will accept no critique from statistics, biology, zoology, or any other discipline. It is a master narrative, claiming to explain all things, even as it has no explanation of itself. I was reminded of this fact by a book on technology covered in the last issue of the New York Times Review of Books. The author would tie the progress in technology to the theory of Darwinian evolution. Even the reviewer noted how silly that was, but I doubt a week goes by when the Review doesn’t carry notices on a book that “explains” something or other by Darwinian “science.” The path to scientific prestige in our age runs through Darwin’s mysticism; only by embracing this myth can we prove that we have risen above tribal taboos and myths of the Jews.
Of course, we all live by some organizing myth; it’s the only way to live. Our information must be “slotted” before it is received, or we could not make sense of the world. And the mythical narratives can never be proven, they can only be compared. The Scholastics were fully conscious of this fact, yet they could not rest with it. They worshiped a God who was not merely a mythos, but a logos as well, a rational God ruling a rational universe. The great and bold project of the Schoolmen was to understand this universe, not just a a collection of “facts,” but as in inter-related whole, in which each truth found its proper place to produce wisdom, a wisdom that was a remarkable union of belief and science. Modern science has given us modern miracles, like iPhones and atom bombs and Chrysler cars, but has not given us the wisdom to use them. And it is this wisdom, sapentia, that we need right now, if we are not to bring the whole thing down upon ourselves and our children.