I know I'm dying of banality. The mundanity of the world is slowly killing me, and my dreams seem less and less potent all the time. I know there is much I could do to prevent it, but a malaise has settled over me that I don't know whether I can recover from. Oh, I don't mean I'm getting to the point where I'll kill myself. No, I mean that part of me that makes life worth living is dying, and when it does, I'll be an empty shell like the rest of humanity. But I'll go on, without dreams, without imagination, in a boring job that I'll find a reason to enjoy or pretend to enjoy. It's actually horribly depressing, but apathy is part of the package.

What makes me different from you? What makes me able to live a banal life, while you cannot? Do you know what it is? I do. It's because your dreams were more real than mine. That's right, for all my talk of dreams, of having another life in the imaginary world of my head, I have never forgotten or doubted what is real. I have never truly left it. I have never believed my dreams. I have just wanted to so badly that I have lied to myself and everyone else. Oh, don't get me wrong, when I talk about the possibilities of the future, I'm not lying. Those aren't my dreams...those are my hopes. Those are the bright possibilities that I idealistically believe can happen...even as I fail to strive hard enough to achieve them. I have a path in life, and I am not walking it. Where it might lead, I have no idea. To a house on a lake surrounded by trees, with winter grass everywhere? Possibly. To an apartment in a strange city that feels like home? Possibly. Why did I stop trying for that first one, why did I settle for the second? Because I stopped hoping? Because I stopped believing it was possible? I don't know. I think it was because I wanted to believe in your dreams. In your eyes, I could see how real they were. How real you believed them to be. How real you needed them to be. I wanted to have a house with you that you designed. I wanted to go to fashion shows with you. I wanted to have one of your elaborate weddings. I wanted to be a trophy husband to you, a writer growing in fame, to you, the bold fashion designer making her mark on the industry. Because they were your dreams, they seemed so much more real to me than my own. My own seemed like mere fantasies that would never come true, and yours seemed like something glorious, and more importantly, possible!

Is that what you saw in me? I'm not very interesting sometimes. I'm not very manly, in my feminine/hippyish/happy-go-lucky, carefree way. I don't even say the right things at the right time, and manage to screw things up even in situations where I shouldn't be able to do anything wrong. Did you see my dreams, those same dreams that I had rejected as impossible or improbable, did you see them as more real than your own? Did you believe in my dreams the way I believed in yours? Do you feel that you yourself are hopeless, but perhaps you could be happy helping me achieve my dreams, or be happy with me as I achieve them? Does it depress you twice as much that not only do your own dreams seem out of reach, but that I am not doing what is necessary to achieve my own?

I believe in you. I give up on my own dreams most of the time because they feel out of reach. But from my perspective, yours are not out of reach, and I want you so much to achieve them. I love you, and want for you the happiness that I don't know whether I'll ever gain, that of making one's own dreams come true through one's own efforts. There is always possibility. It is through my perspective of you that I know that my own dreams have possibility, however impossible they may seem from my own angle. I know that however impossible your dreams seem to you, it is merely your own inability to see beyond your own darkness. Do you care? I don't know sometimes. I know that when I push others away, it is not with the intention to hurt them, but the intention to hurt myself. If I ever pushed you away, or allowed you to push yourself away, it was because I wanted to hurt in some way, too, so that the mental anguish of failure was not the only feeling inside. I mean today, too. It hurts more to turn away than to hold on tightly. Though you gouge my eyes out or rip my heart from my chest, it hurts more to turn away from the one I love.

Writing it the profession of marytrs. I realized that today, on my way to work. Sacrifice is our prayer, words are our mana in the desert. But what is valuable about my life that sacrificing it would mean anything? What have I sacrificed for that which I profess to love? Time and money? They are meaningless things to me. They only limit what I can and cannot do. What things of me have I sacrificed? What am I willing to sacrifice? Could I give up my only son? Could I turn my back on my people? I offer up those things which I wish to lose, and I give you nothing that you want. It is not something I wish to give up that I must sacrifice. I do not even know what it is, for I have tried not to listen. It is too fearful. And yet I must, for I hold the knife, and I hold the ropes, and the wood is upon the altar. Lord, where is the sacrifice? I cannot hear your voice, and I am afraid. I cannot lift my hands, for I am afraid.

When my cat yowls at night, he always has some toy or other thing in his mouth. We wonder why he is programmed to make such a racket, when he doesn't make much noise the rest of the day. There are no other cats to talk to, no people even. It just struck me that it must be the sound he makes to announce himself as a hunter able to provide for a family, just as male birds make noises to announce that they have made a good nest. He is no hunter, this soft housecat, neutered and declawed, socially inept. He's never killed prey in his life. And yet, at night, he takes in his jaws a stuffed animal, roughs it up a bit, and howls of his great victory. It is a yearning, nothing more, that he feels compelled to act out. This drama is probably a mystery of life to my cat. He may not understand it, but he still feels drawn to do it, because it feels right to do so. When I come into the living room and glare at him, or just walk toward him (he always moves before I step on him in the dark), he makes a questioning noise, drops the toy, and walks away from it. Am I supposed to inspect the kill, accept it, and will this raise my cat's self-esteem? Does my cat have self-esteem, with no females to impress and nothing to worry about but snack number 14 or finding the best place to sleep? It makes me think about what my own self-esteem is dependent upon, and what I must do, what I am compelled to do by inner yearnings that I cannot explain. I have no need to win women; I have a wonderful girlfriend, and all my desires to please are aimed at her. I want to be funnier, so I can provide fulfilling entertainment for her. I want to be financially successful, so that I can provide economic fulfillment for her. She likes competance, and that works, because I like learning things and doing things. She likes warmth, and that works, because I'm a personal space heater. [laughs] She likes comfort, and that works, because I love giving hugs, and I like pillows and stuffed animals (and act like them sometimes too). ...Yet there is so much more to my self-esteem than what she gives me. I do not depend upon her to make me feel good about myself. No, there is something inside me, something I have forgotten how to listen to, something that no longer has the power to impel me to action. And I want it to. It calls to me, this burning desire for something more, some expectation for myself that I am not satisfying, and I do not know how to listen and do. I do not know what song I must sing in the dark of the night with a stuffed animal in my mouth. I fear I am slowly forgetting how to sing. It is frightening, more frightening than anything I have ever known, to think that I may be losing the power of my own happiness. What quest can I embark upon, where would I start, where would I go, what would I do, to find that power within myself? I do not know, and I am tired, too tired. Is it the slow enveloping creep of time, or the death of my spirit, that I feel? This fight is not yet over, there have been no knockout punches thrown on either side, but I know not what else to do besides stand there with my arms in front of my body, trying to block the blows. I know there is more than this, but what is it? What is it??

I just came to an extremely depressing realization: music is my opiate of choice. I have been condemning my computer for wasting my time, when my computer is merely a friend that always has a supply of drugs at hand. He is not the devil, and it is not his fault that I am hopelessly addicted to the PASSIVE action of music-listening. I avoid the drug that is television and the drugs that are psycho-stimulants and I even usually avoid that legal depressant that we all feel is necessary whenever several people come together for a good time. But I self-medicate myself with that beautiful thing that is a hard-drive full of music (of course I own all of these cds, officer), and that sole source of destracting relaxation while driving, the radio. I can't write while I'm listening to music, because the music interferes with the words in my brain so that they can't come out properly. Like, we have cordless headphones for the tv, but they're on a channel too close to the cordless phone, and so using the headphones causes the phone to mess up (the music has a much stronger signal than the phone base). The music has a much stronger hold on my brain through the listening circuits than my thoughts do on the thinking circuit. I sometimes wish I were blind so I would learn to think about my surroundings, or deaf so I wouldn't be distracted from the words in my head. [laughs] of course, exploding my ears with REALLY LOUD MUSIC or blinding myself by LOOKING AT THE SUN TOO LONG are not really options I'd care to consider, so I'm stuck with all these freakin' distracting senses. I'm so addicted to music that, when I'm not listening to music, I prefer to attempt to recall songs and sing them, rather than some more creative outlet like writing my own songs or stories or poems or ANYTHING of my own. Like the neurons have been fried from too much drug use. And I know the solution. Silence. Forced silence. Quit cold turkey. The only things I'll hear are voices of people talking to me or around me. But it's so scary. And so hard. I feel like such a coward. Can I ask anyone for help? Is there such a thing as AA for music addicts? Do I get a program sponsor who I can call when I'm close to breaking down and turning my speakers back on? Will my friend the cpu be too much of a temptation, or can I still be friends with the source of my would-be creative euthanasia?

So my life revolves around three things right now. 1. working as a cook at Cinco Ranch. They got new shirts, so I don't have to keep borrowing Charles, which was annoying for him, since he uses them at his other job as well, working as a chef at a bar/restaurant, because they're new and don't have uniforms. Also, I'm working more often, because either they like me a lot (I impressed Ed, the head chef, which Charles says takes a lot) or they're trying to phase out Matt, who used to work there but only came back, like me, to cover hours since another chef quit. Matt, apparently, is arrogant and prefers to do things his way. Charles and Ed are the same way, to a degree (I've learned two ways to do almost everything, both of which are good and acceptable), but they don't conflict with each other, whereas Matt does. Charles warned me not to listen to him too much if we end up being scheduled together. Last week, he had three days and I had one. This week, I had three days and he only had one. [shrugs] good for me, anyway. 2. job-hunting. Despite my enjoyment of the food service industry, and working with great people like Charles and Ed, I am still looking for a job in the publishing field broadly and the editing department specifically (though I would settle for a non-editing job in the publishing field or an editing job in other companies). That goes slowly. I thought it would be as simple as collecting a bunch of jobs to apply for and sending them all out in the same day. However, I discovered that researching the companies to find out who to address the cover letter to, and writing a good cover letter specifically aimed at each company, is a pain in the butt. And so, my life has a third center of revolution: 3. organizing stuff. That includes old papers and poetry I've written, notes from classes I'm keeping, artwork (real and on my computer), coins that I and my grandmother collect, and at some point I need to get back on my EBay account to take charge of selling all the comic cards, sports cards and magic: the gathering cards that have been accumulating in our house for quite some time. Raph is finishing up the card list for them, which he has been working on for over two weeks, but since he goes back to school soon (yikes! summer is almost over!), I'm gonna have to be in charge of the whole selling and mailing things out, plus organizing them into sets to sell, since we have far far too many (and would never get rid of them) if I sold them individually. comic cards will probably go in complete, nearly complete, or far from complete sets. I mean, why not? Magic cards will probably go out as decks, so I can get rid of lands and commons as well as the rares and uncommons that people ACTUALLY want to buy. It will basically be giving away crappy cards (or cards we have 30 of) to people who buy the good ones. Unfortunately, almost all of our cards have been played with, so we're selling to players not collectors, and won't be able to get full price for anything. [laughs] as if you can get full price for anything on EBay. [shrugs] Coins have been organized, but researching foreign coins is a pain in the butt because all I have is the picture and whatever foreign language text the coin has. At least most of the coins I have are from countries that use the same alphabet as us. A couple are in arabic and russian, and others are in asian languages that I have no idea how to identify. I mean, I suppose I could look up the faces of leaders from the last 100 years so I'll have a general idea of what decade it was made in. [laughs] And, I have the project that has been put on hold for a long long time: copying all of my poetry (the stuff on loose paper and the stuff on my computer) into a single spiral notebook in a special binder. I really do have a lot. A lot of crap and some stuff worth actually editing, but I just want it all in one place, that's not electronic, so I don't lose it if my hard drive goes bye bye for some unforseen reason. People are like "I put stuff on backup disks, so it's safe". No, the only real safe is paper. Paper you have to burn or dissolve in water to lose. My computer could die tomorrow because a screw works its way loose from the mother board and touches the case, and a spark of electricity fries everything. Yes, yes it's that easy. It doesn't happen very often, but if you think of it another way: computers have a life of, what, max 10 years? I mean, if you have a frequently used computer from 10 years ago, besides "what kind of freak are you?", but also "damn, that's an old computer". I generally don't trust them beyond 4 years. At least, hard drives that get as much use as mine. It's like pushing a car's mileage past 100,000 miles. Yah, that much. But paper, hell, they still have books that were printed 100-200 years ago. The newer crap, stuff printed 40-50 years ago, is already coming apart, but that's not the paper's fault but the cheap binding and the wear from handling. My binder gets very little handling and can last at least a good deal longer than my computer. So yes, I have lots to do. Plus I have to put on shoes and go to church now, because I work tomorrow morning. I'm so used to school, where mass was saturday afternoon, that I don't even think about the fact that the family is used to going to sunday morning mass. [grins and shrugs]. Anyway, gotta go...stuff can wait. It has learned to be patient. Oh yah, remind me to pay my bills. And tell the Kenyon post office I moved. I swear, they forward my credit card statements 2 weeks after they recieve it, and they don't forward anything else. I thought they automatically forwarded stuff over the summers. I mean, I'm friends with half the workers there and had a long chat about graduating. [sighs] Anyway, church first. au revoir, blogger, until again.

What kith are you? Find out here.

The eshu wander the entire world, following the path of their own fate. They get to wherever they're going at the best moment, and the trip is always exciting. They live for adventure and the new; the moment for them is always now, and cowardice is shameful. Eshu have an extremely personal sense of honour. They follow their paths with style and flair, sampling each new culture and quickly blending in with the locals. The wanderings of the eshu are legendary; probably something they've seen to themselves, as the eshu are consummate tellers of tales. Indeed, they learn through their tales, gaining experience both through the telling and the achieving of feats of legend. They often see themselves as the central characters in some grand play, be they hero or villain they play their parts to the hilt, no matter the cost or how reckless the action. They'd rather go out in a blaze of glory that will fuel stories for centuries to come than live in ignominy. Besides, as changelings, they'll simply be reborn.