Philosophy. lol.

Yesterday I started my summer classes - General Psychology and Ethics (Philosophy). I want to talk about how the philosophy professor saw me laughing to myself in the middle of his lecture. 

Ethics is a subtopic of Philosophy, and since I've never taken a philosophy class, I hadn't thought much of the kind of content I was getting myself into. Turns out, philosophy encapsulates everything I ever want to know (but technically never truly will). It is a subject of only questions and ideas of answers, but those that are never certain. My prof explained that we'd be exploring the different theories of morality. What is good? What is right? Where do good and right originate from? Is it something that preexisted and humanity just discovers? Or is it something that humanity created to give meaning? 

I started to laugh.

I may be insane because I've never felt so overstimulated in my entire life. This might sound crass, but the lecture induced a high. It felt terrifying, but so satisfying. I was so open to knowing more about what ancient philosophers came up with, but in the end there is no certainty. And I am definitely not in any place to say what is more correct - just like anyone else. I understood there to be a constant turmoil among philosophers and theories - something that will never unfold...only questioned further. I'm just sitting there - dumbfounded and thinking how ridiculous I've been, my entire life, until this moment. I thought I had everything pretty much figured out about life. It turns out, I'm pretty naive for truly believing I knew as much as I did. 

And then I learned about one story's idea of the meaning of life. Prof introduced the story of Gilgamesh - he concluded with the moral of the story: mortality. The human condition. Life, as we know it, is temporary - no matter what.

I laughed again.

Prof explained that it is a common belief that the goal of life is to reduce pain in this short-lasting period of "becoming" or living - because pain and suffering is inevitable in this world as understood by everyone who has ever lived. 

Kept laughing.

And I felt he was almost laughing with me. Throughout the entire lecture he was smiling. He seemed insane, too. And I knew why... It is very disturbingly amusing to try and see outside our own little worlds. Our own little society-dependent lives full of day-to-day drama, politics, economics, technology, etc. These extensive, detailed systems and routines we've created for ourselves are all we see. Not to say that anyone is bigger than anyone else; but maybe some see or understand a wider scope. And the more grand your view is, the more insane you are. [Just kidding.] But really, this class is basically trying to fit a universe of ideas into a four-walled room with florescent lighting. The man was insane. 

I was laughing because I was uncomfortably excited to find out how small I am. Not that I am meaningless, but that I am mortal. Not that life is meaningless, but that I endure the human condition - as we all do. And I'm certain that the rest of this class will be six weeks of this pleasurable discomfort. More laughter. 

We learned a bit about Buddhism, and I definitely want to further delve into its beliefs and practices. I've already found truths helpful to the things going on in my smaller world.

Tick talk.

I get really pissed off when I can't figure something out, and the concept of 'time' has screwed with me time and time, again. In the most recent couple of months, however, I found myself in a situation that has fucked me over in the most extraordinary way. 

It's a very personal thing to decide what time you value the most: the past, the present, or the future. Now, it may very well be dependent on the quality/composition of the life that happened/is happening - and, obviously, you can't know what will happen...the only thing that is absolutely certain is you only have NOW. And what you do with your 'now' determines what time you value the most. I have no idea why, but I have this really weird analogy: each time setting is a child. Your past is the oldest child, the present is the middle child, and the future is your youngest. 

If you dwell in the past, you're spending your 'now' on the unchangeable, thus, creating a 'newer past' that consists of only more of that same 'past'. It's a setback. You'll try to re-experience something that was meant only for the time that had already passed. The past is your oldest child - imagine he/she is matured and ready for college. Ready to be let go of. If you keep him/her with you - in your 'now' - he/she will only keep growing old on you. Your past will only grow older - you will only grow further away from it. The present is your middle child - this time is overlooked/neglected and independent from any other time. Though the present is the only thing you have control over, there are just too many things that compromise the ability to embrace the 'now' - such as the future. I find that the future, or the youngest child, demands so much of your attention (the way the youngest of children do) that the present is spent on something that just never comes. 

And in a very strange sense, I've come to hate thinking about the future. So many people stress about something that's never certain. Preparing for the future is a game of chance. You think you're doing all these things because you'll thank yourself later, but you're just banking on the assumption that everything will turn out the way you prepared for it...but every life is different (DIFFERENT CONTEXTS), and so we split our attention accordingly. I'm, honestly, just hoping that I have figured some universal truth to how each moment should be approached. 

My favorite TV show is the Fox network's "Touch" with Kiefer Sutherland. It ran for 3 seasons and then was cancelled, I think, due to lack of viewers. But for almost all the episodes, the Jake Bohm (the protagonist's son) would open or close with a rather existential monologue that served as the 'life lesson'. Here's one of them on the subject of 'now': 

"There are 31,530,000 seconds in a year. 1,000 milliseconds in a second. A million microseconds. A billion nanoseconds. And the one constant, connecting nanoseconds to years, is change. The universe, from atom to galaxy, is in a perpetual state of flux - but we humans don't like change. We fight it. It scares us. So we create the illusion of stasis - a world at rest, or a world of "right now". It is comfortable. Yet our great paradox remains the same: the moment we grasp the "now"... that "now" is gone. We cling to snapshots, but life is moving pictures - each nanosecond different from the last. Time forces us to grow - to adapt. Because every time we blink our eyes, the world shifts beneath our feet."

Everyone has a different 'now'. The bracket in which you define your present (literal seconds or a 24-hour day) - it all ends up being the same thing if you think about it...because of how it is a constant motion. Time waits for no one. Your 'now' is yours...spend it wisely.

INFJ

Regardless of how many people actually read these posts, I feel that I have to explain why I am the way I am, and why I'm even writing about these things. Although I can admit that I think way too much, I don't want to believe that it's insanity or that I ever need to change the way I see things. 

The Myers-Briggs assessment indicator is a tool I've come to seriously utilize. It's an assessment used to categorize people into personality types to help better one's understanding of themselves and how they approach situations as well as other personalities. My personality type is INFJ: Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, and Judging. 

I'm not going to lie - I pretty much just googled this stuff and there is a lot to say about each personality type, so I'm going to just try and keep the descriptions to a bare minimum. 

I have an Introverted Intuition (IN) - From what I gather, this means that my dominant function is to internally process data as I sense it. It's in my nature to piece things that aren't so obvious: ideas, perspectives, theories, stories, symbols, and metaphors...and I would do it in a very private manner. I wield an intuition that can't really be explained, but it's something personal that helps me make decisions. I feel that the downfall to this would be over-analyzing things that are meant to be simple or taken at face-value. This contributes to one of my biggest insecurities. There have been times when people have rejected the few ideas that I've voiced. When my analysis of something is met with little remarks like "...yeah sure, ok...", I feel that my perception is instantly devalued. Almost like I put more meaning into something that isn't meant to be shit...which may be true sometimes. But I feel like there has to be some people in the world who are meant to interpret meanings and I'm pretty content with being one of them.

Feeling-Judging Mode Type - Basically, I make my decisions based on the intuition I mentioned before. People with "FJ" tend to have a good read on others. We are also hypersensitive to the emotions of others which, therefore, makes them naturally considerate. I often find myself making decisions based on other people's feelings. It's sort of selfish and unselfish at the same time: in order for me to find comfort in a situation I am in, I try to create good vibes. I will please and give to other people so that I can be content with the surrounding energy that I've helped establish. And there are many potential problems that can follow this behavior, but I will not even begin trying to share those experiences...

So the reason I even bring this up is because many people tell me I'm "deep" and I like that about myself. But I've also come across people who would rather not delve into these kinds of conversations - which is cool too. I just really hate when people discredit my thoughts without putting an effort into understanding them. So if I request anything of you (the theoretical reader of this blog), it'd be that you honestly and whole-heartedly put forth this effort before you pass these posts off as something unnecessary or invalid.

And in short, I've created this site to be a personal outlet for these internalized ideas that can get too elaborate for me to process. I'm also kind of hoping that I'd be challenged or that people would affirm and even better my understanding of these things. I found that poetry has started becoming something I found conflict with in several ways and these thoughts started to spill over in Facebook statuses - which I don't think is the best way to expose myself, ergo, this blog was born.

INFJ article references: http://www.16personalities.com/infj-personality, https://www.personalitypage.com/INFJ.html, http://www.winerfoundation.org/Myers-Briggs/Profiles--FJ.HTM 

Humanity: the 'apocalypse' prompt.

Disclaimer: I don't know how successful I am at articulating this crap in my head, but try not to dismiss the post too quickly. 

There is one thing in life that brings an immense happiness to my being: humanity. I'm just discovering that all I ever want is to see the human in people. I know that this ultimately leads to a conversation about love, but I feel that that particular topic takes way too much credit away from other concepts (and it will definitely have more than its fair share of recognition on this blog), so I'm just going to elaborate on human connection. 

So I've been fortunate enough to be introduced to 'Spoken Word' poetry a couple of years ago. It has been and still is my mode of coping and expression. The environment that Spoken Word creates is an unadulterated projection of humanity. Open mics are about more than just the freedom of poetic expression; they are about having a receptive audience. At these poetry events, we are taught to be active with the poet - "...if you hear a line that you feel or resonate with, don't be afraid to let the poet know. Snap, clap, stomp - if you give the poet good energy, he (/she) will give it right back." And so the foundation to this relationship between audience and poet is humanity. A call and response. A moment of vulnerability and the affirmation of others.

All this to get to my point...

A couple of months ago, a friend had asked me for a writing prompt. I told her to describe the end of the world - whether that had sci-fi/cinematic influence or whatever - she had complete freedom of interpretation. She sent me back something rather interesting, and it triggered the long-running idea of a personal apocalypse. This inevitably ties back to the idea of 'context' [as with everything I'll ever think/talk about]. 

Everyone has their own personal "end of the world"; and when you think 'apocalypse' there are no zombies or hell fire or aliens or whatever other shit things come to mind. I'm thinking of when humans stop being human. The modern-day apocalypse takes the form of every social issue that is among us today. When people value money more than they value life...when people dictate the rights of other people...when people of differing contexts are driven by their perception of their superiority to prove something that can't ever truly be universally affirmed as they desire. We are our own destruction.

But the encounter of inhumanity is a very human experience.

Consequently, the great majority of Spoken Word is inspired by an individual account of a social issue. So we're brought back to this simple projection: a poet spits his story of an inhumane experience and the audience affirms his context. This acknowledgement validates the poet and humanity becomes apparent.

This is a phenomenal group poem by some students from Rutgers University. 

Context

I've learned a lot in the sociology classes I've taken and one of the biggest concepts I've come across in the past year is the idea of considering 'context'. 

With every considerable human interaction, there is bound to be an introduction of a life story. Offering bits and pieces of one's own background serves to better the understanding of the way they are or the way they live presently. So here lies two problems as I see it: (1)failing to consider another's context and (2)neglecting to communicate one's context. From my experiences, I've come across the former more than the latter. 

Let's put this into perspective: 

[Picture retrieved from: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/49891508342420572/]

Say, you have tattoos and piercings. Say you also have two parents that absolutely forbid their children to ever "mutilate" themselves with tattoos and piercings. There can be many reasons for this; they may have grown up in an area wherein tattoos and piercings are associated with a generalized population of hood-rats and criminals and gangsters, etc. On the other hand, there can be many reasons why you'd want tattoos and piercings for yourself. See, you were placed in a context in which you developed a desire for a particular image. Whatever the reason, your want is valid - while at the same time, your parents' judgement is valid. Both are validated by context.

And, okay, this ^ seems petty and passive-aggressive of me. So let's jump to a bigger scale: 

There's something I haven't been able to stop thinking about. So I have this friend that consistently suggests that the things I do are "not normal". And by that, I've come to learn, she means "not what I am used to". I've heard her say, on multiple occasions, "I have never seen/heard of that before". I feel that it's interesting for her to use the labels "normal" vs "not normal" - which suggests that whatever she is not used to is wrong. That different translates to incorrect. I have to mention that a lot of this criticism was directed toward cultural aspects of my lifestyle. I've had to laugh my way through a lot of these moments, but I'm not sure where comedic relief stops resolving this subtle kind of racism - the same way I'm not sure if I'm making a bigger deal out of it than I actually should be. All I know is that she comes from a different context...

In the grand scheme of things, I'm finding that the biggest source of conflict is that between people of opposing contexts. Mutual understanding of the others' context is the key to any kind of solution. I'm only trying to learn how to apply this to absolutely everyone I come across from now on.

Introduction

It's about to go down.

I've been home (San Francisco) for a week and I've had the worst time being stuck in my head. And it's weird that, as I grow older, I find I demand more of a purpose for myself - so I keep myself busy with petty chores and pointless small talk. I'm starting to paint, but my patience for my pieces wear thin. I reach for books but I don't seem to get lost in any of them like I normally would. All this said, I'm starting a blog as my "summer project". It'll basically be an edited and better-organized version of my journal - something to keep the shit thoughts I have under control. 

It's been 20 minutes since I've started the blog and I already feel the discomfort of the stereotype. It's a little unnerving to see myself sitting in a coffee shop, on my little tablet computer thing, typing away the angst-y and controversial shit thoughts I can't just keep quiet. I wanna gag a little, but I can't say I'm not enjoying myself right now.

And so here it is: the one-woman shit show that is my blog.