One New Thing

I am in a world of firsts. Last November, I found out how to be okay with being single for the first time. I mean really okay, like, healthily so. I was in a great place.

About a month and a half after that I met a girl. On facebook. We had sex for the first time. It was my first time too. I fell for her. Not the first time I fell for a girl, but it was the first time one fell for me too. She moved in right away, because she needed someplace to go and I needed a roommate. Not the first time I've had a girl for a roommate, but the first time we've shared a room. I told her I loved her for the first time, and I meant it, and she said it back, and she meant it. That was a first for me.

We moved out. And in. To a new place. With a lease. I signed it and I thought, I REALLY believed, that for a full year I could live with her. It seemed doable.

There was trouble in paradise though. I think the both of us saw it coming and started preparing ourselves for it. The other too. So that was kind of a first too. The first beginning of the first end.

And now here I am. At what I hope is near the end of the end. The first end. My first end. Probably not my last either.

But I didn't want to buzz over it that fast in this post. There is so much more to this story than that. I instigated the end, you see. We went to lunch and all was fine. We were both going to go away to a lake with friends tomorrow in the morning. We were meeting with those friends and laughing and joking and planning and hoping. We came home and she wanted to have what she anticipated to be a difficult talk about our sex life, about a recent occurrence that troubled us both greatly. I snapped though.

I talked about the event itself. I can't post it here, to protect the guilty. I accused, and was very very honest about how I had felt for quite some time, long before this event. And one hour later, the relationship was over.

Seven months, instigated by a few hours of passion, undone by only one. It seems almost unfair, what I did to her, what she did to me, all the good and all the bad, all mixed up and hellish and just...gone...all gone...

It's striking me just now that she's gone. That I made her leave. That now, again, I'm alone. I have my first new ex.

I'm not sure that I will be okay as a single person right away.

TRH

Judaism

So today I went to a Chabbat Dinner. It's pronounced with a definitive rolling in the throat, a very hebrew word. It is, after all, a Hebrew dinner officially starting the Sabbath, and it was for me very much a learning experience.

I have never been exposed to jewish ritual, or even culture. I spent the majority of my educative years in suburban Minnesota, filled with scandinavian folks brought up as Protestants, and occaisionally Catholics (like I used to be). I haven't been exposed to judaism really at all and so this was the immersion.

It was quite fun, really. They sang lots of songs in hebrew and we had DELICIOUS food (all of it Kosher, naturally), and after there were a WHOLE lot of songs. I found out the hard way it's tradition not to talk in between washing hands and eating (In our house, growing up, dinner was the only time the whole family got together, so we did a lot of talking about everything no matter what).

It was a great opportunity to ask lots of questions (and yes, to those of you who know me, I did my very best to be respectful and keep the jewish jokes to a minimum) and work to understand the jewish faith. It was interesting to be there when people were performing a religious ritual that likely meant something to them (I would say about as much as church meant to me as a catholic) when I was a complete outsider to their belief structure. It was clear they meant what they did and it was important to me, but to me it was all words. Religions are funny that way. Their god is no longer (was, but is no longer) my god.

Religion is weird that way sometimes. I have a hard time reconciling the hope and solidity it brings people with the despicable acts it can inspire people to perform. As such, I'm really having a hard time knowing just how to feel about such an event. I want to revel in their solemn and private faith and feel perfectly fine about observing such a thing, in fact being part of it. I don't want to feel bad, like an imposter or an intruder to such an event. I don't really agree with religion, condemning it on account of it's worse parts. One bad apple spoils the barrel, of sorts. Or perhaps more like nukes - everybody in the world has one, but it only takes one use of one to ruin everybody's day.

Some days I just don't know. Being fencish SUCKS.

TRH

The Fallacy Of Hope

Dour, ain't it? Hope is in the air this election season, almost as much as bullshit. It creates an interesting mix, this concept of how things may change along with how shitty they are now.

Now, I usually leave politics out of work, contenting myself to visit harm upon their egos at the expense of their mothers and housing situations with both efficiency and cruelty. Of recent, even politics has crept into the mix as we chat Obama/McCain occaisionally. Pretty much everybody there seems Obama-y, so no concerns. Interesting thing my boss mentioned, though.

See, the economy has been rough on her. She mentioned the store's just barely been getting by this year due to the harsh economy, and then said with a hint of sarcasm, "But we'll elect a new president into office and then everything will get better!"

It interested me because I think people have been thinking that he's the political "Easy Button."Here's How it is, folks: he's not. I certainly believe he's better than McCain, but he's not going to fix anything right away. Nobody ever could. It's the nature of the American system, how the bureaucracy works.

I'm not saying this to dissaude anybody from anything now. It's cynical, yes, and that's who I am. I'm putting this out there to prevent cynicism one year into President Obama's first term, when little to nothing has gotten done, the world has progressed as though nothing had happened and everything seems like McCain may have been the quickfix we passed up. I'm sure things will get better, but likely by the time I retire. Oh, and did I mention? I'm 22.

Maybe I should just cryogenically freeze myself until then.

TRH

Dillematime, GO!

So I have this roommate. She's not so bad, I guess, in her own way. A fair bit OCD, kind of uptight, but she pays half the rent and half the utilities and I haven't woken up with a knife in my chest yet, so there you go. Thing is, she's moving to a dorm again next month, right when they open.

I liked living on my own. I could wander around butt naked all I liked, I had the TV completely to myself (although she doesn't occupy it too much), I didn't need to worry about keeping the other couch cleared off, the dishes got done when I decided they needed to and I never got yelled at for not doing enough to keep the place clean.

At the same time, though, it's actually clean now, at least by my definition. Plus, all of my utilities and rent (which, notably, I once managed on my own) are cut in half, freeing up a good bit of funding each month.

And so my dillema - do I get a roommate? Do I live on my own? Ugh. At any rate, the ad is up and four hours after going up I had an email already. A room close to campus for $150 does not stay empty long in this town...

TRH

First Amendment Responsibilities

Hello fellow foolish humans,

It seems the world is in the proverbial shitter. I say proverbial because really most of this "shitter" stuff going on is trivial and/or somebody else's problem. ANYTHING going on in sports - the answer is "all of you morons shut the hell up and sit the fuck down". Problem solved. Rivers flooding in the midwest - tragic, yes. Donate money to the Red Cross, or if you really feel a need to help I'm sure they could use sandbaggers and volunteers for rebuilding. Join the Red Cross and volunteer for that disaster area.

More problems exist than this, and all of them are forcibly inserted into your brain by various news media. Wouldn't it be nice if people actually thought through these problems with a pragmatist viewpoint? The solution to every worry is to simply look at the problem in the mindset of "what can I do to help?" Frankly, the solution is very very often "practically speaking, Nothing". Myself, I have no money to give and no time to volunteer without VERY seriously subverting my college plans which I need to keep up a bit for financial reasons.

So, the question is, what can YOU do about Gas prices? The Iraq War? Controversy surrounding the Beijing Olympics? The answer is practically speaking, not much. Write a letter to your representatives and senators if you really care that much. Vote in November. And then, once you've got that done, STOP WORRYING. Turn off CNN. Shut off your computer. Grab a frisbee, or a book, or something else. The news media has turned sour, and while they still give factual information, they rather unfortunately give it over and over and over and over and over again until it is beat into your brain and they have nothing else they could fill the time with but their own gut feelings and opinions regarding news presented as facts.

In short, televisual news is full of fail and text is better.

TRH

Personal Beliefs, or lack thereof

I have a friend who lists herself as Agnostic. I myself list myself as such as well. Funny thing about Agnosticism though. See, to call yourself Christian means you believe in the Jewish God, that your soul was saved two thousand years before your parents even met, that random Holy Spirit thing (Honestly, Brahma/The Force makes more sense than that one). To say that you are a buddhist means that you believe in the Noble Eightfold Path as a solution to the Four Noble Truths, all that. To say that you are an Atheist is the other end of the spectrum, to believe explicitly that there is no deity, higher power, great and all knowing intelligence, anything. Effectively, it is to believe that there is nothing to the universe beyond what we have noticed (and a few things we haven't quite noticed yet, but may mildly suspect, like Dark Energy, which is a whole other blogpost in itself.)

There is a wide area in between believing in one faith and dogmatic set, and believing in absolutely nothing. That spectrum, to me, is all agnosticism. Some call it spirituality without belief, some call it unknowingness. I call it apathy: I really don't give a crap whether or not there is a god. It doesn't concern me. If I die and there is nothing at all, then nothing happens, obviously. If I die and there is something there, then I'll simply argue that I lived my life as I wanted to and that while there may not be things I'm proud of, I don't believe I need to defend my lifestyle to anybody. I am a sentient thing capable of making choices for myself so far as I know, so if there does turn out to be a god then he/she/it is not better than me.

As a psychologist once told me, Agnosticism is a very humble choice because it's about admitting that you DON'T know. It's the idea of giving up any specific beliefs, accepting that it's as-yet unmeasurable whether or not there is a god (scientifically speaking), and that you don't need a religious institution to tell you how to live or save this "soul" thing. It's effectively saying that you don't know who's wrong or right and that you don't need to know.

So that's Agnosticism to me. Apathy. Don't know, don't care.

TRH

Crap.

As of five PM last friday, the spring 2008 semester at the University of North Dakota ended. Given as how I entered in the Fall of 2004, I have now completed four calendar years at this particular institution. Being as how I'm not done with the program (probably another year to go) I am now officially a Super Senior.

It's not really someplace I want to be. I'm financially independent, live in my own apartment, have a car that you wouldn't expect to see Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers cruising around in. I maintain a job that pays the bills, I even have a resume and coverletter that I could, if necessary, modify for use for another company. I'm pretty much ready to enter the real world as a productive (albeit lazy and eccentric) adult.

But I can't. Even if I want to move somewhere else, meet new people, do far more interesting things, I can't. I almost have a college degree, which means I don't have a college degree. Granted I should be finished with my commercial pilot's certificate, so I'll have a marketable skill, but the degree lends it even more credence. Also, a degree is required for my plans after college.

I really don't want to be here though.

TRH