Your best kept secret and your biggest mistake

You know, in television, movies, and school, they (again, the proverbial, omniscient "they") always make it sound like there's a bold, mile-wide distinction between the good choices and the bad choices. Good choices are sometimes harder to make, but you're supposed to be able to feel in your heart that it's right and it'll pay off in the end. Bad choices are the easy, risky roads that will inevitably cause you to destroy your body, end up in federal prison, and vicariously kill all those who love you.

Depending on who you are, some decisions will always be distinctly good or bad, no questions asked. In my mind, smoking, excessive drinking, murder, and incest will always be bad choices. Wearing seatbelts, attending classes, and not hitting pedestrians, conversely, will always be good ones. These are all things that have, or can have, immediate consequences, though. Smoke, and you gunk up your lungs. Don't attend class, and you possibly fail classes. Etc. This grand master rating system begins to fail once the implications fall farther into the future. And what happens during a conflict of interest, when you're either misguided by your heart or by someone who tells you not to follow it? Or there's the times when neither path is particularly good, and the choice simply becomes between the lesser of two evils. You can analyze possible consequences, benefits, affects on your life financially, emotionally, physically, intellectually, socially, spiritually, (grammatically...), but all you're likely to come up with is a complicated and lengthy list of pros and cons.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I just tend to think about things that intrigue me, and after extended trains of thought, conclude, "Yep, not much you can do." Or I guess in this case, the conclusion would be, "Just do your best."

Show me the truth, 'cause I want to be blinded

I'm really excited for All State. I just wish my school could be there to see it.

Christmas is six days away, and besides adapting an astounding lack of ability to retain body heat, to me it doesn't feel significantly like winter, let alone Christmas. Maybe once I actually get some of my shopping done, or we get a good snow, I'll feel better, since I appear to have grown completely immune to whatever seasonal feelings radio carols are intended to bring.

Though when I think about it, I really think Christmas for the general population is beginning to drift to extreme polar ends of some elaborate Kringle spectrum. It's either utterly commercial and perfectly acceptable that way, or seems to host hoards of people who don't feel "in the spirit" and every year go on a dramatic quest to reignite that "true meaning of Christmas" feeling within them, stressing out because it's just not like it used to be. To me, Christmas is a celebration of the birth of someone who is very important to my beliefs, mindset, and lifestyle, and whose death I wholeheartedly believe accounts for my eternal life. It is about Jesus, but it's also important to remember that it's a joyous occasion and shouldn't be regarded with the steadfast serious intensity of a bull ramming it's head into a tree. Have fun, eat good food, be charitable, kiss your mother, and thank God.

Speaking of which, my gifts of Christmas love lists to my friends seemed to go over well, which I'm glad for. I'm of the opinion that if there's ever an opportunity to tell those you love that you care for them without sounding strange, corny, or awkward, you should jump on it. And who doesn't want a list of appreciated good qualities about them?

My favorite lines from Ragtime:

"He wanted to say, 'By your side I could be brave. If there's such a thing as justice, let me help you find justice. This I do for Sarah, who lies in her grave.' But all he said was... 'I know how to blow things up.'"

The space that's in between insane and insecure

I remember when I was six or seven, I watched children's network television a lot and at one specific time I passionately wanted a Ribbon Dancer, a product that basically consisted of a stick with a really long ribbon at the end and whose commercial was constantly on TV. Now that I think about it, any one of my family members could have probably made one from everyday supplies fairly easily. But I begged my dad to order me one, and I agonized over the 6 weeks of shipping before it came. When it finally arrived, I enjoyed it constantly for a good two weeks and then hardly ever broke it out again.

I really think threads of behavior in childhood can continue on once you get older. I do the exact same thing now, but not with toys. Now, I'll desperately pursue something, and not long after, or even just before I acquire it, I'll talk myself out of everything and withdraw. I guess that kind of thing could be explained on the consideration that I only go after things just to see if I can do it, and when I find out I can, I lose interest. But that doesn't explain the fact that sometimes after backing out, I want it back again.

It's childish, flighty, and doesn't make any sense.

This train of thought brought to you by a conversation I had with my dad during dinner, in which I pretty much started tying to think of how much I could remember from my dad's old townhouse. It's interesting, because I can remember doing things that made perfect, logical sense at the time, but in hindsight, make about as little sense as ramming your head against the wall.

For example, my sister and I had this game (and I use the word "game" loosely, as "game" connotes that it had some sort of point, which it didn't). In the downstairs of our house, there were three different types of flooring: hardwood, carpet, and tile. Now in our game, if you were on the tile, it was "snow" and was too cold to stand on. The wood was "lava" and was too hot to stand on, and the carpet was "quicksand," and could not be stood on for obvious reasons. The premise of the game was: you can't be on any one surface for any length of time (i.e. "run around a lot"). This entertained me for hours. We were bright children.

Those weird things you do as a small child are kind of like waking up and remembering a dream. The things you did in the dream are totally logical at the time ("Of course my best friend is a talking giraffe and we're on a quest for dictionaries"), but upon regaining consciousness, you wonder what you ate to cause such lunacy.

Other things I specifically remember about that house:

- Watching black and white reruns of I Love Lucy and Bewitched on the little TV in my and Cathi's (then Cathy's) room.

- Cutting myself on a Swiss army knife on Christmas when I used the dull edge to try to slice open a box and the sharp side closed on my finger.

- Happily entering one of those little pastel plastic houses that we had in the backyard during the summer, only to run out, screaming, when I found it infested with bees.

'Till the sun burns out

Update on the Life of Linda (LoL?):

- In an attempt to become healthier (and at this point I'm resisting going into a rant on the difference between "thinner" and "healthier": two terms which people seem to confuse), I've agreed to start going to a "fitness center" with my mom three times a week, starting today. I suppose I should have some sort of goal, as "become less out of shape" is kind of ambiguous and tends to be frowned upon as these things are supposed to be measurable. I'll work on it.

- Finals are coming up, and I'm decidedly not stressed out about it. My mantra is "if I haven't learned it by now, a week of frantic studying while losing sleep and sanity isn't going to help much." Which might not hold true once I get to college, but until then I'm going to bask in the grade school glow of requiescence.

- As if it's any surprise, I'm really looking forward to winter break (not Christmas break, mind you. Though on a NVHS events calendar in one of my classrooms I noticed that it had Hannakuh marked but not Christmas. Conspiracy?) for more or less the obvious reasons. Friends, food, family (alliteration aside), gifts, concerts, all-state, sleep, snow...

Current blessing: Little homework and family discounts

Latest irritation: Listening to the product of jealous resentment

Song I'm tired of hearing: Santa Baby

Thought of the moment: I've noted that a lot of things that others find hilarious I find sad or disgusting. I'm not sure if that means that I have a different kind of sense of humor or none at all. I'll just tell myself I have a heightened appreciation for things like satire as I sit by myself in my corner while everyone else watches another rendition of Cheech and Chong.

And there was a distant music, simple and somehow sublime

As much as I'm looking forward to winter break and Christmas, as much as I love classical and traditional music, and as much as I enjoy WLIT, I've decided there are few things more obnoxious and offensive to my sense of sanity than sitting for hours painting a sign in a linoleum tiled hallway, being forced to listen to variations on the same five Christmas carols played over and over and over...

Something else that's slightly obnoxious: Have you ever noticed that most people have a very hard time just accepting the fact that other people have opinions different than theirs? That seems like an obvious statement, but we've all had those conversations where someone continues to insist that he's right on a completely subjective topic. The kind of people who are offended by the idea that other people may rationalize things differently. By all means, it's fine to discuss, debate, and argue, as I can attest since I love to do so, but there's a point at which both parties are probably going to have to agree to disagree, unless one of the persuaders is one hell of a rhetorician.

Incidentally, I've also decided that calling other people hypocrites is 88% of the time unfair, especially when, in criticizing or satirizing social flaws, the person doesn't exclude himself.

Other notes:

- Tomorrow's my birthday. Woo!

- Giving blood isn't that bad.

- I've updated my picture site with some Ragtime pics.