25th hour...but like, in a good way...kinda

So it's my last night in California for a while...and I spent more than a little of it considering how different this place seems to me now and taking stock of all the people and things I will miss. I will miss my friends, and I will miss having a big sky over my head, as that will soon be replaced with little blue scraps bordered by concrete and glass. To an extent, I will miss the irresponsibility that comes with total dependence, but I will not miss the illusion of stability and stagnation which I have come to realize for what it is. The world has continued spinning while I've been at home, and my life was not put on hold when I returned. Perhaps I could have done more with my time, but these three months meant a great deal, and I have learned and seen and done many things in that time. I think for the first time I've been emboldened by my summer experience, and rather than grasping desperately at my remaining time here I find myself eager to take the next step and return to the work I now see in a different light. Plus there's a pretty girl I'm anxious to see again, so that's going to help the transition I think.

I'm going to miss my parents. I spent a good deal of time with them this summer, and especially in Europe I felt like I was part of a family - not due in any part to the simple (but rather rare) proximity of the three total members of our nuclear family, but rather because of the experiences we were sharing, the reassurance of their familiar personalities in foreign places, and the respect for and pride in each other that we all shared. My parents are truly honorable, amazing people, and my respect for them grows daily. They shaped who I have become, but also gave me the immeasurably valuable ability to think for myself and live my own life. They gave me my life, not simply biologically but intellectually as well. They gave me the ability to think, which is rarer perhaps than one might believe.

While I've said already that I'm going to miss my friends, I think there's a place for them in my future even larger than the one they have in my past, and I'm anxious to share my life with them and have many adventures, because life's too damn short to spend being bored.

The next step begins now.

Discipline

I tend not to be a terribly organized or disciplined person, but I've found that keeping myself on a schedule and trying to minimize the amount of random shit I'm surrounded by at any given time can have a radical effect on my mindset. This kind of self discipline, especially when it comes to enforcing a strict schedule and separating time spent studying and time spent relaxing, gives me a degree of control that I usually lack, and it seems like control has become a precious commodity lately.

Serious discussion will resume soon, I promise.

New Rule

I think from here on out, I'm not going to post on days spent traveling, or at least not after traveling because I'm usually burnt out (like I am now). As supreme dictator of this blog, the motion passes.

Were I to write something, it would be a continuation of last night's rant, and about how wanting to believe something can be dangerous sometimes.

If someone else wants to write tonight's blog, feel free to comment away.

Also, I have decided that one day I will run for president. More later as that develops.

Desperate to believe

Sometimes I talk a big game.

I've reassured myself time and time again that the easiest explanation for the belief in God (aside from personal divine revelation) is that it serves as a means of coping with mortality and uncertainty. If one only believes in God, there is no need to fear death, and it seems to me that there is less of a need to agonize over the tribulations of this fleeting life because it is only a somber prelude to the glorious hereafter. Without my own divine revelation, or any other evidence in support of a belief in God, this notion that Man has invented the idea of God for his own reassurance undid my faith.

I had to start again from the ground up with a purely humanistic philosophy, and realized that not much was lost in God's absence. The earth was just as beautiful for existing by its own means, my love and affection for my friends and family was just as pure coming from my own fragile mind rather than being inspired in me by a creator, yet suddenly there was so much more fear and doubt. Without the guarantee of immortality, suddenly everything I had taken for granted was imbued with a deeply melancholy ephemerality, and there was no greater, guiding purpose to my life. It seemed to me that this long imagined creator had relinquished custody of my life and suddenly placed it into my own young and unskilled hands, and I had no idea what to do with it. For the most part, I still don't. But after a while, that stark autonomy and awareness of the fleeting nature of my life and the things around me grew to empower me. Suddenly, I became a wonder in my eyes, emerging from beneath this imagined creator to realize my own potential and revel in the beauty of every heart-wrenching moment of my life. I had the power in God's stead, or I should say I realized that humanity had always been in control of its own destiny. If not for fear of death, maybe we never needed God at all.

And this is all fine and good most days, and I've drawn strength and courage from this empowerment. But some days I find myself in my mom's hospital room listening to how lucky she was to be alive, or at the foot of my grandfather's bed as he struggles to sit up by himself but can't, and I want so desperately to believe there is something more beyond the veil. I have never wanted so much to be wrong. And I worry that some day all of my rationality and philosophy will do nothing to protect me from an inconsolable grief, and there will be nothing left of me.

I shall rule the seas

Not a whole lot went on today for the most part, but while shopping for my dad's birthday present I got conned into speaking with a Navy recruiter by my mom. Seeing as I've actually been glancing sideways at the idea of military service recently, I figured it couldn't hurt to bounce a few questions off of someone.

I decided I'd just loiter up to the office to look at some of the pamphlets and random shit they had outside and wait to see what they did. I had been standing outside the office for literally five seconds before one of several guys in uniform came out and offered me his hand. Then came the questions, standard ones first: age, birthplace, college y/n?, where's your school (Columbia? Isn't that in South Carolina?), etc. Then the fun ones that I seriously considered having fun with: got any tattoos?, are you on drugs?, ever been arrested?, are you pregnant? Anyways, after that was through, I had to get over the first real hurdle: So...what brings you here?

Finally, a good question.

I simply said I was kicking around ideas for after school and wanted to know what joining the Navy would be like and what opportunities were there. While getting in as an officer was somewhat more involved, I learned they pretty much just test the shit out of you and assign you someplace you show aptitude for. And then it hit me: I didn't have to know or want anything to get into the Navy because they would just mold me into whatever they wanted anyways. So here's the bottom line: sign up, do what you're told, do it well, get paid, get benefits forever. What a deal! If it weren't that nagging little bastard question of "to what end" to consider, I might have signed up right there. Problems solved. But I want more, I think, even if I don't know exactly what yet, and I think I need a greater purpose than the general good of the Navy and the good ol' US of A.

I'd heard enough, but I had to ask...

"So how do I become a submarine captain?"

He laughed.

Vignettes

This summer has been a story composed of vignettes.

Over the course of three months, I've woken up in 14 different places across 9 cities in 4 countries, and as a result my memory of this time is a patchwork of wildly different places and people - the familiar juxtaposed against the new and strange. Trying to remember all the places I've been and things I've done is like trying to remember all the elements of a dream I've recently awoken from.

Yesterday morning I woke up on my futon in Los Angeles, and my mom told me that I would have to drive us to Phoenix. This morning, I woke up on a couch in Phoenix, visited my dying grandfather, and spent the afternoon and early evening watching lightning strike across the horizon. Then dinner. Then more lightning. At about midnight, lightning began to strike every several seconds for an hour. I have never seen anything like it. I also saw my grandfather burst into tears at the mention of a name the significance of which is unknown to me, but even though I have never seen that before either, I prefer to remember the lightning.

I watched it for hours.

One more time...

Probably should have written something earlier, as I now have to drive to Arizona. I'll probably post tomorrow with fun details and such about this summer's final journey.

Old Faces

I've seen a lot of old faces recently, belonging to people I had not seen in years and who had for all intents and purposes ceased to be a part of my life, but who suddenly reemerged on the scene. Talking to these people evoked in me a bizarre recognition of my own growth as I recounted the events and thoughts that have come to define my present self, and then astounded me as I watched them evolve before my eyes from living figments of my memory into flesh and blood as they told me tales of their lives since we had parted. For each of these people, as the time we spent together came to a close, I felt the strange desire to tell them everything about myself...every secret and worry. I suddenly wanted to hold on to them and the fleeting time of our reunion, and every embrace was my attempt at bringing them back into my life for good.

They're good people, every one, and I'm going to try to remember how important it is to know them.

And my blog takes yet another turn for the emo. I'm gonna take a break from this wussy shit and go pound some sheet rock around an engine I'm rebuilding or something like that.

Between

When I open my eyes, I’m greeted by the breaking dawn over fields rushing by my window. Orange and red reflects off of last night’s rain, which has pooled among the various open spaces, and glints into my bleary eyes. Totally confused, I don’t know the time, or even where I am anymore. Seeking a quick answer to one of those, I reach for my phone. 6:21am. For some reason it’s burned into my mind, like when you happen to glimpse something with more reality than its surroundings, like when you encounter destiny. “Maybe the train’s about to crash, and this’ll be the time at the heading of all the newspaper articles”, I think to myself. I quickly dismiss my strange and morbid pretensions at clairvoyance and begin beating my brain into coming up with a plan, as staring blankly at my passing surroundings didn’t seem to be cutting it for some reason. Get food, I think, that’s always a good first call. Getting food leads to getting up leads to the possibility of finding something worth doing once you’re out of bed. But I’m not in a bed. I’m sitting on a train bound for Chicago, and then to Los Angeles some two days after that, but for all that I have no idea what patch of flatland nowhere is playing across my window at this moment. “I am nowhere”, I think, before noting that all flatland nowheres seem to resemble central California, though the latter may not be as flat. With a shrug at my own obtuse musings, I stride down the middle of the sleeping car (it’s the only movement one can perform down the middle of a sleeping car), moving confidently toward food.
Relishing the prospect of an anonymous meal followed by more outward staring, I move into the dining car and wait to be acknowledged. It strikes me that it is in fact the anonymity of travel that appeals to me so much - the outward smile and the nonstop inner monologue crouching just behind. Perhaps my judgment of others stems from my desire to understand everyone around me, but at the same time I would not allow anyone the same chance willingly. No, I’m here to be an enigma, the nameless traveler. I’m here to be a ronin. Oh, how fucking cool. “Orange juice, please”. I’m soon joined by a middle-aged white couple, which, though it initially displeased me (all I had planned on up until this point was a quiet meal and some staring, so dealing with people at 6:30 in the morning was a drastic and dangerous deviation from what I had originally hoped to spend my morning doing), presented my first opportunity to delve into the opinions of others and try to fit them into my own worldview, like jigsaw pieces. This one might be “people on trains talk like this: ”. They seem like nice people, even if the women seems to be rather loudly unhappy about this or that, and they seem interested in my story. I enjoy speaking to them, and we hit quite a few topics of interest. Inquisitions into my major inevitably lead to a discussion of China, and I am more than happy to have that conversation with them. Then comes, equally inevitably, the discussion of America’s economic woes, and it’s here that I begin to pay very close attention. The women, whose name I have forgotten (Susan, maybe?) is wearing a shirt that depicts an eagle swooping down, talons first, with the words “Freedom Reigns” across the top. This shirt, and the notions it represents, have obviously made more of an impression on me than her name, and will likely endure in my memory as the strongest reminder of this breakfast encounter. Back to American economic woes - she says “God help us” a few times, because we don’t make anything in this country anymore. She says, “God help us, it’s one of the few things we can count on”, and the man nods. My turn. “What do you think we should do?”. “Cut everyone loose. Cut back the government and leave everything up to American ingenuity again. It’s worked before”. The food arrives, and they bow their heads.
Minutes later, I watch Bryan, Ohio pass beside my window.

I wanna go home

I've lived in the same house my whole life. Even though I now spend most of the year living far away from that home, it has remained the single place that I inevitably return to, and I wonder if some part of me is still convinced that I'll never have to give this place up. Of course it's not just the building I return to, but every summer I also return to this illusion of permanence, content to let the "real world" slide for a couple of months because it'll still be there when I've had my fill of unreality. It's a mentality I've been living with for a very long time.

Sometime very soon now, however, this likely won't be the place I return to, and I confess I'm rather frightened by the prospect of severing this deep connection to my own past. Like I've said before, I feel very much like I've reached the disconnect between my past and my future, when my entire way of looking at life will change as much as where and how I'll be living. It's a narrow mindset that I live with, but I think I've finally gotten a glance at the hereafter, and I just wish I had the self-knowledge and drive to match the unlimited possibility I'll soon be thrust into.

Sad, sad, sad, all the time.

While grasping around for ideas for today's post, I realized that I usually listen to very melancholy music while I write. Actually, when my mood doesn't usually present a more suitable choice, I usually default to music that's on the softer, sadder side. I sincerely hope it's not because I'm some emo child that craves sympathy on some deep level...and I don't think that's the case despite the inevitably emo flavor of my next sentence. I think I listen to sad music because it draws me inward to myself, whereas upbeat music tends to make me more aware of my surroundings and what I'm doing. It's weird to think that I feel closest to my own thoughts when I'm listening to somber music, but I guess it could just be a result of my introspective personality rather than an indication that I'm a particularly melancholy person.

More later.

Limbo

Note: I've changed the blog settings so anyone can comment now...no need to be registered. Please feel free to write something in response to a post.

I feel as if I've reached some kind of turning point in my life, and now find myself standing between everything that's happened to me before this point and everything that I might do in the future. I have a couple theories regarding how this has come to pass. First, my best friend recently graduated from college and now faces a terrifyingly undefined existence in the wake of finishing school. This will be the first autumn in memory that he has not returned to school, and has nothing else to do but search for a job and try to establish some financial security and stability. In two years, it's possible that I'll be facing the same fate, and that realization brought about another - that soon the path laid out for me long ago by parents and teachers will be coming to an end, and I'll be left in sole custody of my life. Actually, it's more likely that I've had sole custody of my life for some time now, but I'd never before now really considered the freedom I have to choose. I'd taken school and grades and the necessity for achievement for granted for so long that I never looked beyond the next requirement, the next step. It's like I've been walking down the road staring at my feet and now suddenly I look up and don't know how I've gotten here, or where I am. That realization, brought about by my friend's precarious position, is part of the disconnect I feel now. Another contributing factor has to be my first trip out of the country, which the stark juxtaposition against my familiar surroundings has rendered almost dream-like in my memory. I remember being there, but those experiences seem so out of sync with my life before and since that I hardly believe it happened. However, the perspective that I gained as a result of being so far away from the familiar reinforced my awareness of the potential of my life and reminded me that there is so much in this world to do that I had never before considered doing.

Home suddenly feels much smaller, and as I wait to return to school with a new sense of purpose, I feel caught in this limbo between my whole life until now, and the vast possibilities of the future. Terrifying, wonderful possibilities.

A Wilde idea

"Life is too important to be taken seriously" - Oscar Wilde

As you know, I've been thinking a lot recently about the manner in which I should live my life - not so much about what I'm doing, but how I'm doing it. Recently it seems, I've learned the value and necessity of courage, and realized that perhaps the greatest danger to leading a fulfilling life is fear. So often it seems that fear drives people into complacency, because the routine and familiar can instill a sense of control. It's like the NIN lyric, "I believe I can see the future, as I repeat the same routine" - it's easy to tell the future if its the same thing every day. But knowing how your life is going to turn out isn't the point of being alive.

It's with that in mind that I've come to respect people who can live fearlessly and, one could even say carelessly, because they'll never have to suffer the regret of missed opportunities. I might even go so far as to say that death is a very small thing compared to a life lived in fear of really living. Better to be constantly at the mercy of life in all of its uncertainty.

I know someone who likes to burn the candle from both ends and is often the subject of concern from friends and parents, and many people would say this person is deeply troubled. While I'd probably agree with that assessment, I think I admire the fact that this person lives illogically and seems to be completely off the rails. Part of me believes that life is best lived close to death, or at least uncertainty, because taking one's life too seriously may be missing the point of being alive.

I know I'm grasping at a lot of complex ideas, and I'm sure I'll come back to all of them, but if this post has to be about one thing, it would be my admiration for courageous people, and people who understand what really matters in this life.

Ask yourself: what is there to be truly afraid of in your life? When is fear healthy?

More later,

Bryan

How tragic.

A quick and dirty entry, due to an impending party:

We build our lives, at least to an extent, around various people whose lives intertwine with ours for a given amount of time. Friends, lovers, colleagues, but especially friends. At times it seems we can trust them with things that we keep secret even from our own family, and the fact that they don't actually share any blood relation to us can give us a welcome perspective on our lives. But maybe their lives are never truly bound to ours, as is the case with family. Not having a large family myself, I've always relied on my friends to pick up the slack and I've never been disappointed. I have amazing friends. However, they all have their own lives to lead, and if those lives and their choices lead them in another direction from my own, what am I supposed to feel? How much can I do to keep them close to me, without, through my actions, destroying what made us friends in the first place. To be blunt, should anyone really have to work to sustain a friendship? Or is it better to wish them well on their journey and let them drift away from you?

Honestly, I don't know the answer, but at this point in my life I really wish I did. I fear that as I change, I may be growing out of friendships I've had for many years. I think to myself, "how tragic", but it's no tragedy to have had a meaningful friendship. It's tragic to expect it to last forever, and be disappointed by reality. I suppose, in a sense, they will always be your friend, but maybe (and I hate this word), after a while they're doomed to become an acquaintance. Maybe the trick is to recognize the desire for possession associated with friendship and overcome it. The friendship was what it was, and maybe trying to prolong it is just a selfish desire to avoid pain, or reluctance to relinquish someone who is "yours".

Maybe I'm trying to talk myself into something.

Bryan

Who's to say?

So, my day began with a phone call from my mom, saying she had to be hospitalized because of the multiple pulmonary embolisms in her lungs that had probably developed as a result of a blood clot in her calf. It seemed she was out of danger now, but it was apparently only by chance that these embolisms (which I have learned since then are blood clots that travel throughout the body) did not lodge in her heart and cause a heart attack, or become lodged in a critical area of her lungs and kill her. But because they didn't, the only treatment required is a simple administration of blood thinners, in large amounts at first via IV, and then later in pill form. Whew.

It's not a fun exercise to contemplate your parent's death, but every once in a while it seems that you aren't given a choice, which brings me to my point.

When I think about death (and I really try not to, as a rule), I tend to ask myself what would make someone content enough with their life to accept their death. Many people have said that you can't separate death from life, but the opposite appears to be true - death must be evaluated with respect to the life that preceded it. So, the big question: what makes a good/happy/successful/fulfilling life?

Money.

Make lots of money.

Just kidding. Wouldn't that be awesome though? Anyways, I definitely don't have an answer yet, only some thoughts and guesses.

Off the top of my head, I'm going to say there are two schools of thought on what makes a meaningful life: the journey people, and the destination people. The first group, as you may already have guessed, think a good life is found in the act of living, in the way a person chooses to deal with the realities of their experience. The second group choose a goal for their lives, and their satisfaction with their lives at any given moment corresponds with their success in pursuing this goal. I know I'm painting in broad strokes here, but I'm trying to distill some fundamental ideas about how people look at their lives.

Back to my mom for a second. I have to wonder what she thinks of her life at this point. Sometimes I envy the perspective she has on life, having lived a great deal more of it than I have. She's told me before that children are at a disadvantage because they often don't know the whole story of how their parents came to be the people they are today, and that sometimes it keeps the children from realizing the humanity that they share with their parents, that their parents also often flailed around for years and years until they finally fell into circumstances conducive to a more stable life. I think if I truly believed that, maybe I wouldn't worry so much about my future. But then I have to ask if she's lived the life she wanted, and if, faced with the end, she would be content. To use a tired metaphor, we stand at opposite ends of a gulf, one looking forward and the other looking back.

If I had to choose, I'd say I fall into the journey school of thought. I can't think of any great ambition for my life, or what I want to get from the world. I'm looking for a point of view from which to confront every day, but I lack the goals of the destination people that help them stay oriented on their path. I'm sure I'll go into some of this stuff in greater detail later, and I'll definitely have to flesh out this whole "meaning of life business" (could I have picked a broader first topic? Seriously.). For now I think I'll try to learn as many skills as possible, and try my hand at traveling. Perhaps with more experience, I'll find my path out there somewhere.

One final thought. The greatest virtue of the traveler is courage, and his greatest enemy is comfort, because comfort is what makes the traveler cease to be a traveler.

This'll have to do for a first effort. More later

Bryan

The First Step

Ok, so why am I writing a blog?

Maybe a better question would be: why am I writing a blog NOW?

I suppose my first response would be that I need to remember how to write, or more precisely how to communicate ideas. At various times in the past I've endeavored to write on a consistent basis and get my ideas down on paper or in a file somewhere, with the knowledge that no one would ever read them but me. Looking back, it was a useful and rewarding exercise, even at the moment of writing my reflections, because it helped me to get some handle on the things I was feeling and the thoughts that had passed through my mind during the day. I guess by creating a forum for explaining my ideas, I forced myself to first understand them, and since I fell off writing those nightly reflections, I find myself less capable of explaining or understanding my emotions. It seems odd that an external exercise might help one understand their own feelings, but I think that may actually be the case with me, and taking up this project again will represent a resumption of that self-examination that I found so valuable. Admittedly, those reflections were extremely personal (and often very badly written), so I'm not sure yet how much will be shared in this blog, but at any rate I feel like I can trace this newest endeavor back to those scribbled musings.
However, I feel like my purpose in starting this new project has several new dimensions that demand a public setting. I had one of the ideas that contributed to the creation of this blog in conjunction with another friend's blog, which had grown to the point where she was looking for other contributing writers to supply stories and essays and such. I thought briefly about joining the staff, and about the kind of ideas that I could write about. It was then that I considered writing several essays concerning my own thoughts/beliefs about religion, relationships, travel, and how one is supposed to live their life, all of which have undergone serious reconsideration over the past year. I had wanted to write about a few of these subjects for a while, if for no other reason than to get my ideas on a page and in some kind of understandable organization so I could examine them in their entirety instead of picking at them one by one as I usually do when talking with people. Hopefully I'll follow through on this, and some of the entries before I return to school will be in the form of these essays. This brings me to another reason for this blog, which is to serve as a forum where my ideas can be discussed, challenged, and improved upon.

Lastly, I hope for this blog to keep me honest and driven, since I plan to share my plans and ambitions here, and with any luck my sharing them with all of you will help me to follow through with them. It'll also motivate me to get out of my dorm room and find interesting material for this joint.

As for the title of the blog, "Going Outside", I thought it was a succinct way of saying that I want to find a way out of the comfortable and familiar that seems to consistently obscure the tremendous potential that my life (and every person's life) has, which I'm beginning to become aware of more and more. Yes, I hear you say. Very arty.

Alright, enough preluding. What to expect from this blog:
- Reflections on things happening in my life
- Rants about world events
- Any kind of formal writing I undertake, for whatever reason
- Whatever shit I think up later

As for updates...I think I may try for daily until school begins, then it'll probably be more like weekly. Say, every Friday.

Thanks for reading, tell/warn your friends if you find something worth sharing.

Bryan