Sleep

ALSO THIS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANY OF THAT

I have somehow (ahem!) got my sleep patterns out of sync with my life.
I have to reajust but every attempt just ends up with my staying in bed to long (after getting up to early from my body’s pov the previous day) on those days when I have nothing urgent to do (lectures, church etc) and so undoing all the hard work of getting up early (from my body’s pov) on those days when I do have things to do.

How can I resolve this?
I am almost tempted to take a sleeping pill one day to see if that does it… because I can’t spend the rest of the term going to everything important in a state of sleep deprivation..

People my own age

I don’t like being around people my own age. They are too cool. I don’t mean that I pour scorn upon their coolness or that I deride their following of trends and youth culture. No, it’s worse than that, I feel inferior. Whenever I am around people my own age I get a sense of inadequacy. Especially in a group. Everyone but me it seems knows how to cope, everyone but me can have a good time in a group of their peers, laugh and chatter so fast I have no idea what is going on, listen to music I find atrocious, talk about things I know nothing about excitedly. So I sit on the sidelines feeling overwhelmed and inadequate, and my natural response is to sink into myself to escape it all, and then it is as if I am miles away, watching my “peers” from afar rather than among them, which only intensifies the feeling that I am unable to relate, unable to connect – that I have something fundamentally wrong with me, that they do not have wrong with them.

In truth I know it’s not just me, there are others, but we, those of us who find the fast excitable pace of youthful social life incapacitating, we don’t tend to get out there, so we don’t tend to come across one another. So we each feel alone, we avoid other people for the most part, but sometimes, in hope we branch out, “maybe this time it will be different” – and if only we did it all at the same time it might be, but we never do, so the introverted go out into the den of extroverts and come out once again disillusioned, wondering “what is wrong with me?”
At least I hope that is it… and not some primordial flaw, some deep seated disorder…

Someone asked me to go to this “youth camp” thing – oh and I am loath to accept. The idea horrifies me. All my failings will be out in the open there, I will not relate to the people of my own age, they will not relate to me, at first I might try and make up for it by working hard, but as time goes on my brain will short circuit and all I will want is to escape, to hide, to go off and be somewhere where no-one will find me and talk to myself and recharge and renew in the safety of isolation. People will say “you should go, it will be good for you” – maybe it will, maybe it will.
I don’t want to go. People, when I am there will say “this is supposed to be fun” I already resent them for that, even though I am not there and they’ve not said it yet, I want to tell them off, to explain how angry it makes me that they think I should have fun in the functional equivalent of hell, that I will endure it for some noble goal if they give me one, but that I cannot endure the audacity of trying to imply I should have fun in such a place.

So I am become Sartre? Ugh, how dull.

Stranger than that we’re alive

We’re all still here
no one has gone away

When I was a kid it seems like we (my family and I) drove around a lot more than we do now. We went places, we did things, and in the hours and hours we spent in the car traversing the country, we listened to music, and one of the things we listened to a lot of the time, to the annoyance of my mother who found it boring, was The Incredible String Band. And two songs by the Incredible String Band stood out to me when I was a child, two that I particularly liked (my dad never tended to play the Hedgehog Song, which I also like a lot but didn’t really discover till later). The first, which seems to be more well known, was the Cellular Song. The second, which I liked more, was Job’s Tears – I sat through the rather awkward beginning, because I knew it built up to a wonderful ending, with a high pitched, almost angelic (but just too scottish sounding to really be an angel :p) voice, because very high pitched singing really did it for me when I was a child, even though now I prefer deep voices.

But even then, and still now, one part of the song really imprinted on me – really sunk in, and in a strange way even today shapes very much how I feel about life, even at times when I feel humiliated and tears are streaming down my cheeks. Right in the middle after the male lead singer sings listing marvel upon marvel

The winter and the midnight
Could not hold him
The fire could not burn him
Nor earth enfold him
Rise up Lazarus
Sweet and salty
Brother soldiers
Stop your gambling and talk to me
The thieves were stealers
But reason condemned him
And the grave was empty
Where they had laid him

he sings:

Stranger than that we’re alive
Stranger than that
Stranger than that
Whatever you think
It’s more than that, more than that

And that’s it… for me, that is really it, it says everything. It’s just a song, by some hippies from the 60’s, and there is probably plenty about it, both theologically and musically that could be criticised, but it says everything to me. Here we are, alive, here we are, isn’t it marvelous? With pain, with terror, with humiliation, with sorrow, but here we are… how strange, how wonderful!

Keep on walking where the angels showed
(All will be one)
Travelling where the saints have trod
Over to the old golden land
In the golden book of the golden game
The golden angel wrote my name
When the deal goes down I’ll put on my crown
Over in the old golden land

I won’t need to kiss you when we’re there
(All will be one)
I won’t need to miss you when we’re there
Over in the old golden land

We’ll understand it better in the sweet bye and bye
You won’t need to worry and you won’t have to cry
Over in the old golden land

A paranoid thought

Although I am loath to post it after my last post lest I look to be trying to fulfill my desires:

Some people were talking about a cat, and how when it is around one person it is very fussy with food because it knows it’ll get attention that way.

So another said, in the jovial and warm and loving way he always speaks, “yes, how dare you do anything but give me attention all the time” in the voice of the cat them “how can you do anything but love her”.

I spent the 2 hours waiting for the bus and the 1 and a bit hour bus ride home wondering, knowing how foolish it was really to think so, “did he mean me, as well as the cat? was he telling me off for being too needy” – and I felt hurt and rejected, even though… he probably really was just talking about the cat.

I do not think I asked for attention much today, least of all from him, he gave me a greeting, I laughed when he made jokes, but apart from that we did not interact directly. But I always imagine everyone can see it in my eyes, the gaping hole, the gnawing and insatiable hunger, the indefatigable yearning to be loved and fussed over, that probably all humans have – except those lucky souls with autism and other similar dysfunctions.

Because I could not pretend to be a good girl for long

I’m very attracted, even now, by the idea of becoming mentally ill. I know most mentally ill people would be horrified to hear me say that and lecture me on how horrible it is and how insensitive I am being in thinking such a thing. I also know that to will such a dysfunction on myself – and more the underlying motives I have for willing such things are fundamentally opposed to God’s will for man. To some extent it is just the… attraction to danger, to darkness, to a kind of depraved state, something primordial and I am ceirtain something intimately connected to the fall – and I think, if I could say such a thing, I can taste the mark of the fall in it, there is the taste, yes taste, of pride – of willing to strike out on ones own, really on ones own, in a world of madness, a world in which one can be truly alone, in which no-one can find me, no-one can see me for what I am, not even me, so mesmerised by the images and delusions therin.

Times like now those desires are amplified. When I am alone, when I am bored, when I know if I would just engage with God instead of playing with distractions looking for one that might satisfy me (there is none! none at all! what could satisfy me with my grandiosity? only God or madness!) – but I don’t, is it because I am lazy? is it because my “prayer corner” is downstairs and I am upstairs and the effort of climbing the stairs really is that much (as if it were so! as if I could not pray here!)? Or is it something else? Something deeper and darker? An inner unwillingness to let go of terrible desires, desires that caused and continually cause everything bad in the world.

But I am not a child anymore, I will not go to the lengths I did when I was a teenager to try and drive myself insane. So all there is, is the nagging sense of resistance, resistance to what I know is right. Why do I resist? Why does, truly a horrible thing, seem so attractive to me, and truly a wonderful thing …seem lackluster?

Emil Cioran wrote a short piece of writing in a book called “A Short History of Decay” called “Stages of Pride” – nothing I have ever read has struck me as so much like a mirror as has that piece of writing. That is me, goddess and worm. All and nothing. But not really, only in my confused mind, which – oh if only it were really confusion, and not something darker – which cannot accept the truth of mediocrity, of hum drum nothingness, of everyday dullness. “But we are not mediocre” you say “think of God’s grand plan for mankind, where is the mediocrity in that?” – ah! Look around you, it is here, in every day life, in which nothing happens, nothing happens, and then nothing happens some more.

I am ashamed to admit I am bored, my boredom is my weakness, my boredom is participation in modern culture, my boredom is the fullest admission of my lack of understanding, my lack of unity with God, my lack of sophistication, my lack of appreciation, my inability to grasp quite how beautiful all this around me really is (and it is, no doubt, it is) – but oh I am bored. I am bored of history, I am bored of living here in this house, I am bored of the boring websites I check day in day out, I am bored of my empty inbox, I am bored of doing nothing all day because I have no-one looking over my shoulder making me do things (and anyway, what would I do?), I am bored of exams and lectures and seminars, I am bored of this town, I am bored of seeing the same people, I am bored of waiting to grow up, I am bored of lacking a role, I am bored of knowing something so tremendous as death lies on the horizon and yet having nothing to meet it with but these boring thoughts of mine. Let me go mad so I have something really imposing to fight with – anything to fight with but boredom!

So do something you say? Agh! You do not understand! Nothing will satisfy me! Nothing, I know it, none of the things I or you or anyone else could think of to distract me from this boredom will distract me! I have tried them all, a moment, for a moment – yes for a moment they have their charm, but it is replaced so soon with tedium, nothing can live up to my expectations, because I do not want that! No, I don’t care what it is, it is not what I want, it can never be. And I sound spoiled to you? Yes I am, but there is no cure for it, except the one thing I am avoiding, and I can never really want anything except the one thing I am avoiding.

And I crave madness? As if I did not already have a madness of sorts – not so glamorous, not so frightening to the masses, not so inarticulate – but there it is, the only thing I can want, I avoid, and nothing else even moves me, even though it is, as I can attest, bright and beautiful and good!

Haha, and I have an exam tomorrow too…

The Ghost in the Machine

My dad and I were discussing why almost all pre-modern cultures believe not only in some kind of afterlife, but in the possibility of at least sometimes the dead involving themselves still in the lives of the living somehow. I was asking him, why is it that it is only modern cultures who do not seem to believe this. His answer was that we have too many distractions, so we don’t need to pay attention to what is actually going on around us.

Speaking of ghosts and distractions, when I turned on my computer today the keyboard was seemingly absent, I didn’t know what was going on but I used windows virtual keyboard to look online for advice, turns out it was the “ghost” of a windows keyboard keeping my computer from installing the keyboard I do have. I am not the guy who posts his query here but the steps that were offered to him (and actually he says didn’t work) also solved my problem (but not my “no cd drive” problem which I still insist was the result of divine intervention). I’ll give the link in case anyone who happens across this page ever has this problem.

http://ureader.com/message/1500288.aspx