amen.

so, i’m getting married really really soon… that may be why i haven’t posted in awhile. i’m getting more and more excited as the party draws near – alot of really good friends and family will be there to support us. overall, i’m confident that the whole thing will get completely out of hand, and still work out really well.

a few things i like about my person:
she has an intensity that’s hard to match, and she puts everything she has into whatever she does. she smells good, and better all the time. her skin smells flowery, and her hair is spicier and warmer. she’s always very honest and genuine, and she’s a great cook. mmmMm food. she’s also waaay soft and fuzzy. i think she may be made of clouds… clouds with a warm-blooded heartbeat and other primal human goodness. and she likes me. she just wants me to be myself and share who we will become.

what a gig, eh?

we’ve been together for about 1/4 of our lives – from sneaking in each others’ windows to reconstructive chest surgery to one bachelor’s degree and multiple dropouts (i won’t say who. (hint: the college graduate is not writing this.)) we’ve seen each other shift and grow, weaving ourselves together. we’ve discovered that we are greater than the sum of our parts, and instead of thinking it’s me against the world, we really feel connected to it; determined to do what we can to help things along, and lucky enough to be able to do it as a team.

life: i’m for it. =]

(p.s. there will surely be more on this topic as my headspace allows.)

so, most of today, i identified, organized and carried
useless empty space (not to be confused with useful
empty space, like the kind in a house or a bucket.)
to the space-monster (dumpster).

i removed useless empty space to create
useful empty space so later, we can fill it
with more empty space. not satisfying.

his interpretation of the bible led to a version of baptism
that was more like the sacrament of confirmation.
i think his definition was sufficiently vague for me to
interpret it as – a conscious, well-informed, public decision
to be committed to life and the good of mankind. i like the
symbolism: jumping into a lake, not knowing how deep it is,
getting in completely over your head and trusting that
it will all turn out ok.

whatever all that means is pretty relative.

he also pointed out the importance of a “baptism of
the holy spirit” which is the emergence of a personal
conviction to live for the good of everyone, not just
your self. as soon as you feel truly connected with
God (everything, everyone, through the “holy spirit”)
you naturally feel responsible for helping out.
without this internal baptism, a dunking in water
is just kidding yourself.

1 Cor 12:12-13 For just as the body is one and has
many members, and all of the members of the body,
though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.
For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body -
Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and all were made
to drink of one Spirit. (RSV)

the definition of baptism is debatable, but
we all drink from life’s artesian flow.

........ ..... ... .. . .

think you could help us out? are you helping already?
(…am i?)

our collective operating system (open source society!) needs at least.. *counts on fingers* 8 lots of debugging. every little bit counts. *giggles*

thanks in advance. =]

pt 1
according to the bible (or a possible mistranslation or
misinterpretation of it?), humans were created in perfect
paradise, and everything was… perfectly okay. except,
apparently, for the curiosity of his (perfect) creations -
adam and eve. because when God said, “yo, don’t eat
this fruit, or uh.. you’ll die, ok?” (how did they manage
to make God such a flat character?) adam and eve
were just too intrigued, so they talked to the “serpent”
(another perfect creation of God, right?)

and then they broke the rules. yep, broke ‘em.
they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
and freaked out a bit. God seemed to be pretty upset,
and he evicted them. (i suppose he didn’t guess that
they might be curious and use their free will-powers?)

so, now we all have to be baptised – dunked in and/or
sprinkled with blessed water to wash off the original sin
of questioning things, so we can be perfect (ignorant) again.
(please leave a comment if you think i’m oversimplifying it -
which i admit i may be, but read the whole entry first,
if you don’t mind.)

here’s how i think it may have happened:

somewhere along the way, some smart, ambitious
guys (or gals, i guess, but i doubt it) figured out
that they could use their free will to confuse and
coerce people into doing all kinds of weird things -
presumably to gain status and dominate them.
they convinced lots of people there was something
very wrong with them and they needed to do this
or that to fix it. they may have pointed to ambivalent,
impersonal storms and volcanoes and claimed that god(s)
was/were pissed, or blamed peoples’ poverty on god(s).
after many centuries of very persistent advertising,
(nice euphemism – “advertising”) people believed them.
by this point, the descendants of the smart guys who
started it are sitting tall and fat on mounds of
devoted, “unworthy” poor people.

i think “original” sin is an infection of ideas passed down
from people trying to manipulate each other. gold-plated
rims, ten-thousand dollar tabernacles, and other forms of
“bling” are descended from this domination approach to
societal indoctrination, which relies heavily on the division
between “haves” and “have-nots.”

gold tabernacle: talk about gilding the lilly. worth ~2000 burgers.

meanwhile…

“other” people are starving to death.

i think we acquire original sin after birth, after baptism
by believing what people tell us without any second thought,
and the way to wash out this kind of original sin is not to
douse yourself in holy water, but to question everything.
it seems to me that when you question beliefs, what is
good and true will stick around, and harmful beliefs
have a chance to fall away – a sort of evolution of ideas.
so, try to question everything, and don’t forget to
question why you question things from time to time.

(i must admit that questioning everything can sometimes
get in the way of decision making. it took me awhile to
post this because i kept questioning every paragraph.
so in the end, you do really have to just go for it and
hope for the best.)

one way or another, i think honest self-inquiry is
our responsibility as free-thinking humans.

i would also like to point out how much faith it really takes
to question your most deeply held beliefs. i mean that.
you have to have real faith that what you believe will
maintain itself as something good to hang onto.

pt 2
someone once told me that if it weren’t for original sin,
everyone would be perfect, so there has to be original sin.
what does that even mean? what is a “perfect” person like?

the perfect pillow might be one that’s comfier and softer
than every other pillow, so would other perfect pillows
have to be exact replicas of the original form of pillow?
that sounds … pretty unimaginative to say the least,

or might each pillow be a different perfect for each
different person’s taste? (i have pretty wide shoulders,
so i like thick pillows, but they hurt my girlfriend’s neck.)

we all carry around our own idea of the perfect person.
we all have, within ourselves, some kind of perfection.
whatever name we give that part of us is not as important.
we’re all trying to be our perfect selves, even if some of us
think that means ignoring, insulting, or invading people.

each one of us and all of us are in a perfect state of
constantly becoming; perfectly imperfect in our own way.

what’s your idea of a perfect person?

so where to start? oh, i know – at the end. actually, i have no idea where the beginning and end are on this one.. or if there even is a beginning or an end… or if one beginning is another end.. or all of the above? …

*clickity-clikticky-clikit-clicky*
at work earlier today, i was fiddling with
this expensive item (let’s say it was
a really big, heavy, expensive item.)
and i dropped it on the floor, and
it broke into a gazillion pieces,
so my manager cut my hands off.

i am sitting on the ceiling right now. and why is the sky blue? if that’s true, i’ve eaten my shoe. (wait, what?)

Ookaayy, this bit is actually kind of serious.
i’ve run into this problem that i don’t seem
to be able to work out. i have some strong
beliefs, and like most other people who
have strong beliefs, i tend to think that
what i believe is right, or why else would i
believe it? so, when i talk to people,
i try to get them to see things from
my point of view, and when they don’t
agree with me, i automatically try to
get them to change their beliefs to
match mine. but here’s the problem:
one of my very strongly held beliefs is that
people shouldn’t try to force their beliefs
on other people. i think later to myself,
“maybe that’s the point of communication?”
but i don’t really know if it is, i dunno.
how easy is it to simply express opinions
with no intention to replicate those
opinions in others?
do you have any thoughts on that?

(this next paragraph is kind of depressing.
i recommend that you not read it if
violence makes you really really sad.
(it does me, it made me sad to write it.))
a relatively small man broke into my apartment
about a month ago and started shouting at me;
just freaking right out about how i was wrong,
very wrong. he started provoking me – pushing
me into the wall, then down onto the floor.
i told him that i would absolutely not fight back -
when you fight fire with fire, everyone gets burned.
and i really meant it! but that just made him even
madder. he began to yell loudly about how full of
crap i was and threatened to break all my bones
one by one.. he squeaked it really. i told him that
i have no problem with pain, as long as i know
that i’ve done the right thing. well, at this point,
he started crying, and went toward the window to
look at the sky i guess; mumbling about how sharp
his knife was… well, i had to take advantage of
his moment of weakness, so i pushed him out of
my 5th floor apartment. he broke both his legs
and several ribs, i think. from that moment on,
i never told the truth ever again. the end!
(hey, i was just taking our government’s lead..)

i am the queen of france, and i have the power to kill a yak from 200 yards away … with MIND BULLETS! (tenacious d is one of the coolest uncool bands ever.)

and remember, ninjas never look like ninjas.

.

something about we humans that makes us
want to keep chasing the horizon, even
though we know the earth is a sphere.

does the world need changing? or is it
perfectly imperfect? is the fact that
i want to change things part of the
universe’s perfection?

if all else fails, you can just be satisfied
with your dissatisfaction. it works for me. =D

…

when the paradoxes sing and the contradictions ring o, the universe seems to say *ding ding ding ding!*

the early frothing, unstable earth may well have sparked the creation of the earliest life on our planet – out of chaos, comes order. the first rocks formed 4 billion years ago (give or take a few hundred million), and it only took another few hundred million years

for single-celled wee beasties to arrive as the first life to find home on earth. as rocks on the earth’s surface started to bump into each other and stick together, the earliest continents accreted, followed shortly (geologically speaking) by the first complex cells like the ones in our meaty bits.

wait, let me zoom out. so, there was some dust in space that started bumping into each other and sticking together. eventually, it built up enough gravity to fuse some hydrogen atoms together to make some helium, and a LOT of energy. then, debris bumped into each other and stuck together to become planets. thus, the solar system was born.

sorta like this

there were also many many many tons of “heavy” elements – which are made in EXPLODING STARS called supernovas; countless light-years away, countless millenia ago – things like oxygen and carbon, which is pretty fortunate for us, because they’re some of the building blocks of the building blocks of life.

keep going, it gets better (or something)…

but wait a sec, before that, there was a formation like
a gigantic solar system (which are pretty big themselves,
so this is like humongous-gigantic or something). ok, and
this stuff we can’t directly detect apparently makes up
a huge part of the universal “mattergy” and does some
sort of accretion-type-thing and sticks all together and
kinda makes the bowl that holds the fruit of galaxy formation.
we call this stuff dark matter. so, after this “dark matter”
forms like a blobulous proto-milky-way dark matter galaxy,
the various bits of matter were pulled together faster.
some stars formed, and some of them were close together
and ate each other and formed bigger and bigger stars
until the gravity got so heavy that the force of the stars’
fusion explosions were not enough to maintain a star
that absolutely massive, so it collapsed in on itself
(infinitely – so far as we can tell), effectively ripping
reality as we know it.

it is believed that most galaxies have a so-called “supermassive” black hole keeping them turning, stable enough to support large-scale star and planet formation.

right, so uh, we live on a planet - in a really fortunate location too, just the right distance from our local energy source – the sun, so the temperature is warm enough so not all our water is frozen and not so hot that it would all evaporate into the atmosphere.

and we have a LOT of water, not only enough to support life, but enough to separate the continents for a really nice amount of diversity. water is absolutely necessary for all life as we know it, and water is the

only molecule that we know gets less dense
when it freezes. if that weren’t so, all ice would
sink to the bottom with the rest of the cold water,
and eventually freeze everything in water’s lovely
hexagonal frozen crystal pattern. the earth’s surface
is about 2/3 water, and our bodies are about 2/3 water.
that includes africans, europeans, americans, asians,
kittie cats, and elephants, and squirrels, and…

hang on, i can’t turn down an opportunity to talk about cultures.
people get together – first in families, then tribes, then towns

and cities, then states and countries - forever broadening our identity to include more and more people. so, people bump into each other and stick together.

we’ve invented complex language to trade ideas
that tend to bump into each other and stick together,
and we didn’t just start with sentences. we had verbal
symbols that bump into each other and stick together
to form words that bump into each other and stick
together to form phrases, that can then be combined
to form sentences and paragraphs and stories and
analyses all that. ok, so, these ideas of ours -
we exchange information mostly in hopes of forming
an organism larger than any one of us can be individually.
depending on who you are, you might call this sort of
entity the Oversoul of Humanity, or the Body of Christ.

at some point along the way, single-celled organisms
bumped around into each other and somehow
figured out that they could be more effective if they
work together and start turning into a larger whole
with cells being more specialized, since they didn’t all
have to go around looking for food separately.
eventually, after alot of mostly keeping what worked,

and mostly ditching everything that was bad for the whole, alot of individual cells got together to form the fingers i’m using to type this. they did all this with chemical and electrical messages that i know very little about. i hear it is quite fascinating though.

note: i wrote this awhile ago and decided to add some pictures.
i found some on google, and i used one of my own.

but i think that without sadness, happiness would
have no meaning whatsoever. it’s not just good OR
bad; it’s a whole spectrum of experience that includes
great, bad, ok, terrible, awesome, awful, and
full-on, unflinching ambivalence.

i think pain can show us the true value of pleasure.
it all depends on how we look at things -
when things are good, we can think, “i sure am
glad that things are good, because they could be
so much worse.” and when things are bad, we may
think to ourselves, “wow, i had it soooo good before!
if i get out of this, i definitely won’t go around taking
everything for granted again. life can improve.”

i know which way is up better because i know
which way is down, and they’re deeply connected
by the very feature of being opposites of each other.

feeling good now has no meaning unless you’ve
felt bad before. so feel it all.

This is my first attempt at keeping a regular blog,
so we’ll see how it turns out.

I like almost everything, but I particularly like thinking about
how things work – people (individual and collective), science,
philosophy, religion, art (all media) – i try to ask the biggest
and smallest questions i can think to ask
about anything, everything, and nothing.