Get back to normal.

I'm usually a very calm individual. Rational, intelligent, funny, entertaining, a fun person to be around. Those are the ways people usually describe me. No one ever associates me with anger, because even if I am angry sometimes, I can just let it go, because the mundane shit in life isn't worth getting actually upset over.

Every once in a while, however, something hits a chord in me. Now I'm not sure whether the times when that happens are the result of other things I never dealt with, or if it's just sort of a "perfect storm" scenario. Either way, it is genuinely frightening when I let it all go. I try not to do that, but sometimes it happens. It scares me, and it scares other people. I'm an imposing figure. Not especially tall, but with a solid frame and fairly muscular. When I get angry, I yell. I already have a very deep voice and when I yell you can hear it from almost anywhere on my block. I think this may go back to the whole I don't deal with my anger effectively thing. I don't even get angry or annoyed on a regular basis anymore. I get full on rage every once in a great while.

Usually, I can ignore a problem. It works for me. Acknowledge that something is making me angry and let it pass me by. Observe the issue at hand but don't attach myself to it. Well fuck. I don't know if I'm just in some "super sensitive to that shit right now" mode of thought at the moment or what (Super moon tomorrow, you guys!) but there has been a lot of shit recently and it seems like I have a lot of backed up anger in my system right now. I think it's the combo of the end of term, everybody being in close quarters all the time (the roommates aren't in rehearsals as much so I don't get my "me-time").

Also a huge factor in this is that my mother's stepfather died a couple days ago. It's just hitting me right now, really. I hadn't even seen him in a couple years, but I miss him like crazy. My mother's biological father died when she was a teenager. Same with my dad. Bill was the only grandfather figure I ever knew and that just makes it hit harder for me. He was the ideal of what a man should be when I was young, and I think I've been trying to live up to what he was my entire life. He was big, ballsy, manly Texan. He had a booming voice and the biggest heart you could ever imagine. I remember when his wife died, he shut himself off from the world for a while. However unhealthy that may be, I thought it was the strongest image in the world. A man, alone to confront his demons, by his own choice. I still admire his strength of mind and character. He always had time to see his grandkids, and I loved every minute of it. I never got to see him as much as I wanted to, but it seemed like a weakness to express that I missed him at the time. We were real men. We didn't need other people to make us feel good. We had pride and confidence in ourselves and that was all we needed. I think in a sense I still deeply believe that. Every once in a while I have a deep longing to be alone in the world. I want to be completely alone with my thoughts. Maybe I need to try to find out who I really am on a deeper level. I'm fairly confident in how I see myself, but there is always more to be found.
Maybe I'll go survival camping again soon. Just me and the woods.

One last thing that I won't really talk about. A couple recent events in particular have lead to me losing a little faith in someone I consider a good friend, and that is very sad.

I'm a little less angry now, and a little more sad. I think I'm going to go try to meditate before bed.

I hate stoners.

Okay, blog. Time for me to let off a little steam. I hate stoners. Hate, hate, hate. Not because I don't like them as people, I have a lot of really good friends who smoke a lot of weed. I don't smoke weed for my own reasons, but that is beside the point. I hate the way stoners get obsessed about weed. I hate how they get so excited when they have it, and I hate how whiny and mopey they are when they don't have it. The whole strain naming thing, too. I hate that with and endless passion, it's just one of those things that gets under my skin in a way that nothing else can really emulate. First off, mister dealer, you aren't a botanist. You haven't reported your "new hybrid" to any sort of marijuana cultivation committee (because there isn't one), you probably can't verify any kind of pedigree, because you just bought it from some guy who bought it from some other guy who might have grown it but most likely bought it from another guy.

To me, drugs are the coward's way out. I'm not trying to sound high and mighty, I've done enough drugs in my life, some I like, and some I don't. But really, I cannot fathom how lazy somebody must be to smoke weed every single god damn day. How is it so scary to be spending time with your own brain that you have to introduce some foreign chemical into your blood stream just to have fun? That is absurdity to me. Absolute, fucking absurdity.

Also, I hate all the little toys stoners buy. Pipes, bongs, vaporizers, grinders, rollers, jars, other stupid shit. Why the hell do you need all of that? And why so many of them? I can see the need for some of these things, but do so many of the stoners I know have two or more of each of these things?

Fuck it. I thought I could just rant for a while and get some anger out of my system, but no. I ranted, and I'm still angry. I'm fuming. I wanna yell at people, like hard. Yell and scream and actually scare people.

The dog's Buddha-nature.

I've been thinking a lot about Zen again lately. My mind continually comes back to it again and again. I've realized that I don't care much for the westernized-makes-you-a-better-bowler-or-actor-or-whatever zen. There is something real there. Deep down. Deep inside of ourselves, really. A lot of people seem to make Zen out to be about some kind of self-improvement. I feel that Zen is a much bigger mystery than that (as much of a beginner as I still am). Actual realization is something we come by so very rarely in life. Of course realization can make you a better person, but that self-improvement shouldn't be the main focus. Search for enlightenment. Crave it. Seek it out like nothing else. It may seem selfish to just care about your own enlightenment, but once it is achieved, think how much you'll be able to benefit others in their search! Maybe it is selfish at times, but even Buddha spoke of "skill-in-means", if you are to break the precepts, but it aids the path to enlightenment, all is for the best.

I've also been thinking about koans, those riddles that seem to frustrate people to no end. Personally, I love koans, I love farming that sense of cognitive dissonance. If you just sit back on the couch and think about it and focus on the koan, it doesn't make sense. Of course it doesn't make sense! It isn't supposed to make sense. It pulls your mind in so many different directions it almost snaps. And it should snap. That's what we're all going for, the snap. When you turn into an old bearded lunatic living alone in the mountains, speaking in riddles and laughing wildly at the sight of a butterfly.

I hate "designers", and the shit they make.

I hate the current "design" fad that seems to be going around. It seems like I can't stumble across more than four websites without some fucking blog about design shit. Be it furniture or product packaging, they always show up, and they always disappoint.

People seem to have this idea in their heads that "design" is the most important part of a product. Fucking no it isn't. Deliver a functional, well-made thing, and people will buy it anyways. This design boom seems to be a symptom of a larger disease. Companies make flimsy, useless junk and try to promote the hell out of it with "design", to try to attract consumers to buy their flimsy junk instead of their competitor's equally poorly made flimsy junk.

"Designers are artists", no, they're hacks. Using blocky letters and off-white backgrounds, and continuing to leach off of "indie" culture that isn't even relevant anymore. There are no more new ideas. I can assure you, if you do something, someone else has already done it.

I swear to god, if I don't die from the flu. (Or, The Benefits of the Influenza Virus on the Male Figure)

If I don't die from the flu before I procreate, my spawn are gonna be immune to damn near everything. And it will all be thanks to me, good old dad. Seriously, I've had this damn flu for like a week, I spent two days with a fever, then three and a half days where my throat hurt so much that I couldn't do anything even the least bit physically demanding without going into a disgusting coughing fit that generally resulted in me expelling a bunch of super gross green shit from my lungs all over anything nearby. Then my damn ears started to get plugged up with some damn weird stuff. The first time it hurt really bad and it made me super angry, but it went away after a few hours. Then the next day it started earlier in the day and lasted longer and it just barely went away by the time my friends came over to watch The Deer Hunter. Then it happened and hasn't gone away since. It doesn't hurt anymore, I think because my eardrum is probably stretching and expanding to make room for more fluid or whatever the hell is in there making it so I can't really hear shit.

This sucks. I hate life right now.

Also haven't eaten in like three days because I haven't had any appetite. Three whole days and I've put nothing into my body but water, tea, and Coke. I feel like I should eat because it might help me get better faster, but I really just don't feel like eating anything. Silver lining, though, it made me lose a few pounds and I look fucking goooood.

I'm a damn superhero. And I have a blogger!

You ever have one of those days where you feel like the best person in the world because you did something that normal people do every single day of their lives? But it's super special because YOU did it? I do. Guess what I did today? I went to the damn bank like a boss and deposited TWO checks. Then I went to MINET and paid my cable/internet bill. THE WHOLE THING. ALL AT ONCE. I even had to stand there for a couple minutes while the secretary chick ran my card and printed me a receipt. Now I'm back at home writing about it, ON A BLOG. I could just as easily have sit here and watched the news (something about letter bombs) and been humble and not write a word about how great I am because I went to the bank and paid my cable bill. Could have. Didn't.

Also on the topics of things I didn't do. New years resolutions. I hate them. Hate them with more passion than I hate a lot of things. I hate the idea that people think because a new year has started (an arbitrary date, by the way. We should really be using a lunar calendar.) that for some reason they make some half-hearted pledge to do some either overly ambitious or nearly insignificant thing to attempt to make themselves better people. That is god damned absurd. The fact is that they probably thought up this plan a few minutes before midnight while slugging down booze and trying to pick who to pork tonight out of a slovenly crowd of equally drunk people.

Yes I'm probably being overly critical. I'm fine with that. I have a clogged up ear so I can barely hear out of my left side and it is pissing me off. So I'm allowing myself to bitch and whine.

I'm still awesome, though. Because I was a responsible grown-up today.

Capstone notes

So I'm in capstone this term (basically a theatre thesis class) if anyone I know happens to read this, then please don't spoil the surprises for everyone else, I'm keeping some ideas here so they'll be easily accessible from multiple points e.g. any computer ever.

Art is a synthetic construct, entirely dependent upon the audience for existence. Art has no nature of it's own. It is the most difficult thing to define ever.

Is this art? (Van Gogh poster or something)

Is it still art? (rip poster in half)

How much of it has to be torn off and thrown away until it is no longer art?
You can't answer this because you cannot define art. No one can.

I can't define art, but I know the nature of it.

Art is nothing more than applied philosophy, thoughts about the nature of things put into some form or another. Now that may sounds dangerously close to a proposed definition, but it isn't (for reasons I will determine later, expound of the difference of nature and define)

Plato claims that art is almost as far as you can get from the form of something, as it is a representation of a representation of a form.

Gonna think more on this later.