On Interviews

Hello, audience. I'm going to talk, yet again, about being an adult. I seem to do this every couple of months, but that's okay. Few enough people read this blog that I feel entitled to talk about whatever I please. If you want to read other things, read other blogs. It's really that simple.

Actually, that pretty much describes my philosophy toward most things about myself--I'm abrasive. Get over it, embrace it, or move along. No one is making you interact with me.

Anyway, the subtext here is that there is no greater farce than adult life. It's so much BS that even I have to cringe a little inside, and that is speaking as a confirmed bullshitter. Adult life is based almost entirely on lying all of the time to almost everyone. Intimate relationships are set apart in adult life, because those are the people you either lie less to, or lie about different things.

At least when we were teenagers, everyone knew everyone was lying about who they were and how they were doing and whatnot, and it was not encouraged. As a child, there's this ringing chorus of "be yourself! Trust people! Be honest about who you are and what you believe!" and then you get out of school.

Suddenly it's all dating people because you're supposed to be in a relationship, and trying to get a job.

To be honest here, theoretical readers, I haven't had that many job interviews. I've had enough, though, to know that they're all about both interviewer and interviewed pretending they want to be there.

You walk in, and (after making you wait long enough that you know you're at their mercy) the interviewer shakes your hand and introduces themselves, a name which you promptly forget, because you were busy wondering if your handshake was firm enough, or if you smiled when you said it was nice to meet them, or if they notice that your pants are still kind of wrinkly, or wishing you had brushed your teeth before you left.

After they sit you down and start "trying to get to know you" the real pretense starts. You have to convince them that you're worth hiring, which they have probably already decided based on your initial application, and they spend the entire time pretending to be interested in hiring you.

It's like a date, where you both try and convince someone that you're exactly what they're looking for, even though you're lying through your teeth, and so are they. "Quick! Pretend you're way smarter, funnier, more competent, more attractive, more outgoing, and more dedicated and hardworking than you have ever actually been."

Because for some reason, we think that is a good basis for any kind of relationship. Especially when the chances are that they decided whether or not they wanted you in all of three minutes.

And the answer is usually no.

This basically defines adult life. There's this demand that you seem totally together all the time, regardless of whether or not you are; it doesn't matter if you're a broke alcoholic and all of your relationships are crumbling as long as you can seem like you're a successful human being.

Maybe this is one of those "fake it 'til you make it" things (a favorite saying of my mother's), but mostly it just seems like total crap. Does this ever help anyone? I mean really. Did I just miss the day where they handed out grown-up starter kits full of instruction booklets about how all of this makes sense?

Rambling About Goals and stuff.

Hello, audience. Here's my first post for 2014, though since I haven't been especially good about posting regularly ever, I wouldn't read too much into it. It honestly just occurred to me that it's New Years day, so expect no lofty resolutions from me. I don't have plans for a regular posting schedule, or anything like that. I do intend to do more writing in the near future, but I'll have to be a little (or a lot) more disciplined about everything.

Damn you, Discipline! You and The Pendulum can just go away, and I'll keep wasting a lot of time.

 This game may or may not have eaten nearly half a day since I bought it like three days ago...

Actually, discipline is closely related to the thing I was actually intending to muse on. (Publicly musing seems dangerous, and yet it's one of my best ways to think.) My older brother was in town "for Christmas" (he actually arrived on the 26th), and something he said to me while he was here was that "you are either moving toward a goal, or moving away from it." Or something quite similar to that, anyway, and I've been thinking about that idea.

I have several goals, some of them more nebulous than I'd like to admit, and I am (despite what seems to be popular opinion,) actively pursuing at least some of them.

Admittedly, the one I'm moving toward most actively is moving into an apartment, followed by finding a different job, but those either don't seem to count, or seem depressingly impotent.

But I'm not sure I agree with my dear brother. The essence of that thought is definitely something I agree with, and it seems a little nit-picky (ewwwww....nits.) to bother disagreeing at all, but I do. Goals are not always something you can actively pursue; sometimes there's a time for such things, or sometimes goals don't always have clear paths to pursue.

This sounds a little defensive, now that I say it out loud (or in print), and I don't deny that I could definitely be working harder on most of my goals, but it's something I think is still true.

There seems to be this trend, especially in my generation--I don't know about you older or younger people, but I suspect that it's also prevalent--that you are supposed to have a Direction, and a Plan. People begin asking about such things literally the second you graduate high school, and they always disapprove if you don't have an answer, because if you don't have a mission for your life, the expectation is that you will hop into the grooves worn by previous generations and go to college, get married, reproduce, and do something professional in fields you tested well in during school. Usually in that order.

God forbid you don't have a distinct list of goals, complete with dates, deadlines, and color codes. Because the people that don't have a Plan grow up to be losers. You don't want to be a loser, do you?

Not that I can say much in answer to that mentality. I'm an artist.

Some people I've known have a clear idea of what they want to accomplish with their lives, and they're doing what they think is necessary to making those things happen, like getting the pertinent degrees and certifications and suchlike, and in some ways I definitely envy that, but I don't think it's necessary. People say all the time that life is a journey, and it's about the journey, and other variations on that idea, but it seems like no one treats it that way. Experiencing life as a series of shaping events and experiences is seen as short-sighted and lazy even as people post inspirational photo-manipulations and quotes on their social networking pages saying just that.

But only if you have a defined destination. We don't want tourists or explorers.

I think this falls into the same category of "no winning" as the housewife dilemma. For those who don't know what I mean, even after years of women being allowed to work and have careers, there is still this idea that if you have a career, you hate your kids, or are selfish for having your own life and not having kids, but on the other side, if you choose not to have a career, and stay home with those same children, you're wasting your potential, and it's seen as a total cop out of having your own life.

The difficulty with these situations, I think, is that they're both not true, and people are forcing their presumptions on someone else, and demanding that other people make the same choice for the reasons they would, when that is impossible.

Not everyone has to do the same thing. It's okay to do and think and be different. We don't have to hate people for that.

Another thing that people say and don't do...I think the internet is going to call everyone on their hypocrisy someday.

I hope I'm not online that day.

Just a few words, since they're needed elsewhere

Hello, audience. I thought I'd pop back in to remind everyone that my blog isn't dead, or anything. I've just been all over the place. Halloween was kind of insane for me, and since then I've been doing NaNoWriMo.

For those who are somehow unaware, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, where those of us who harbor illusions/aspirations of writing novels go to be forced into accountability and put words on the page. The goal is 50,000 words in thirty days, and it's utterly insane.

Which is why this post is going to be short. I have work in a few hours and several hundred words to write before that. I don't know how anyone who has school or work full time even does this, but somehow they do.

That's the awesome thing about NaNoWriMo, though. It's this awesome way to force yourself to create. I know November is also Make Art Every Day Month, and I find that amazing too. I'd love to participate in both, but I think it would probably kill me. It makes me kind of sad, though, that I need to force myself to do things that I love to do. The creator in me hangs her head in shame that the joy and accomplishment I find in creating well isn't enough for me to force aside the demands of my fairly undemanding daily life to make.

More and more the past few weeks, I'm finding that passion isn't enough; desire isn't enough; enjoyment isn't enough. I put those things aside to do other things that matter less to me, because somehow that makes sense. The only thing that makes this happen in discipline.

And that sucks.

I'm not an especially disciplined individual. I find it difficult to make myself do things that I don't feel like doing, which, yes, is a common problem. Discipline doesn't come easily to anyone.

My sister said once that self-discipline is just parenting yourself. You have to override the mental whining child, and just go to bed, or get our of bed, or eat this or not that, or clean your house, or whatever it is that needs done that you don't want to do.

I bribe myself shamelessly most of the time. Not so much with my novel, because thankfully that little graph showing me how on track my word count is makes a really good incentive system for me. I want to hit my word count even if I don't want to write.

And speaking of which, I should really shut up and do that.

Let Yourself Be Huge

Happy May, everyone. I thought about slinking back into view and apologizing halfheartedly for disappearing, but I apologize for NOTHING!

Half-ass hooray!

Also, April was kind of a stupid month., so I decided it didn't deserve to exist here.

This last week (by which I mean last monday), I climbed the incline with Rosalinde. Also known as The Hell of a Trillian Steps. Basically, I walked up a mountain in eighty degree (Fahrenheit, of course) weather, because for some mysterious reason, we thought this would be a fun way to use my day off. This, for those of you who don't know, is a three mile staircase going straight up into the Rockies. It's one of the ways crazy mountain people like to walk up a 14,000 ft mountain.

I think this is right after the false summit.

Every hundred steps or so (I wasn't counting, because that would be too depressing), we would stop and rest. We'd look down at the steps we'd just come up and the world spreading out down below us. And the thing about seeing that is that you have too be far enough above it, and because I can't just sit on a mountain side and go, "ooh look, I can see Kansas from here," it got me thinking about a lot of things, primarily how huge and how small we are.

Have you ever studied what perspective means in two-dimensional art? I was taught the basics of it in middle school, and I've learned progressively more as I have grown in my art. Basically, what it comes down to is creating the illusion of a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. Objects that are closer appear larger, and objects that are farther away appear smaller, and things that are really far away, like the horizon line, begin to get blurry. That's called atmospheric perspective.

I started applying this art definition or perspective to life, thinking back over the past, and how events that are close to you can seem earth-shattering, and those that you've moved long past have receded and blurred, becoming less important. Mountains and mole-hills. If things are really big enough, you can see them from miles away, and they'll affect your mental landscape from almost any distance.

I think it can be dangerous to equate proximity and importance. But that's not actually what I meant to talk about in this post, as you may have gathered, its title still being utterly unrelated.

A little more than halfway up, we stopped for a real rest. Not sitting down for two minutes and drinking some water, but a real rest. We found this shady spot off the staircase and laid on the ground for maybe half an hour, watching the sky and talking.

A lot of what we do revolves around talking, even climbing a mountain.

The clouds were practically right on top of us, and we could see the color spectrum flowing over them as they passed near the sun. Thousands of gallons of water floating above us, and reflecting the light spectrum. I spent most of that day in a state of awe and gratitude for the world we live in.

While we were there, this big rock caught my eye. It was a few feet to my right, and I could see lichen growing and ants crawling over it, and it struck me:

Those ants have no idea they're living on a mountain. But how different are we, really? Living in our little piece of here and now, and never suspecting the sheer hugeness of the world. http://xkcd.com/1110/

I think people are afraid of their potential. I'm not really sure why, but for some reason, almost no one seems to genuinely want to attain excellence and hugeness. We become content with being small and insignificant in basically every way, and never reach for anything greater.

This probably sounds contradictory to all my talk of small importances; things don't have to be apocalyptic to matter. That's still true, but I think sometimes it becomes an excuse. Defending one's smallness and weakness and complacency by saying that there are lots of ways to matter. I know that sometimes happens for me when I consider not trying to do the things that I desperately want to do with my life. "Well, there are lots of ways to be happy. Maybe that's not the one I need to be pursuing."

And then I have days like that, where I slap that thought in the face, because it's utter crap.

Let yourself be huge, damn it. The world is huge and awesome and crazy, and it's just waiting to be discovered still. It will always be worth discovering, even with every scrap of the universe measured and documented and claimed. There is always more to do and see and say and learn and be. So why not? I want to do everything and go everywhere and learn as much as there is to learn. Why would I settle for this indefinitely?

I think that's probably the best way to stave off lack of motivation and frustration. If you want more, it's your responsibility to get it.

I know, probably a little heavy for me, but this is what's been in my head of late.

Existential Questing: Screw linear questlines.

Do you feel smothered audience? I feel kind of absurd writing three blogs in next to no time. Especially since I posted just last night, but Becca and I were talking this morning, so I thought I'd share some of this.

So I'm going to do something I don't usually do: talk about video games.

So Skyrim.

It ate my life and owns my soul.

Becca and I were talking about life, and how she's started viewing everything not necessarily as good or bad, but as an experience, because a lot of times, she thought things had to go from point A to point B, like in a basic, RPG type videogame.

Someone else has set out a path, and you're supposed to follow the linear storyline, do you necessary quests, fight your boss battles, pick up items, and reach your highest level and finish the game, but life isn't like that, boys and girls. Life is more like Skyrim (oh, how I wish...); you have a story arc, but it's entirely up to you how much you do. You can choose any perks you feel like and create basically any kind of class you want. It's like the best of every tabletop RPGs, where you have open class creation and pretty open world creation.

But life is like that. I've talked about it before. It's not necessarily about getting to the end point. There's no GO to pass, and if you do, it's kind of iffy whether or not anyone is going to hand you $200 for absolutely nothing, usually, as in the case of LIFE, you have to pay for everything.

To quote the good Shepard Book, "How you get there is the worthier part." It's a concept that I've talked about several times with Becca and Rosalinde. There's not actually a magical end point. Your life satisfaction gauge is never going to max out, not even when you're in your forties, happily married with beautiful children, a steady lucrative job, and a dog, blah blah blah. (That sounds intolerable, by the way.)

So it doesn't make any sense to live as if that's true.

And that's not just us consoling ourselves for not doing anything with our lives yet.

There's not an outside standard to follow. There's no progress bar. No one is going to show you your life is  30% complete, and if you have a quest marker other than on your GPS, I suggest you seek medical attention.

And I'm starting to stray from my point, because theoretically I actually have a thread to follow, so I should shut up probably.

But my point here is that we should live mindfully. Pick up a few side quests, and don't be afraid to ignore some as well. Life is as much of an adventure as you make it. If you follow the paved, well-tended, high traffic highway, you'll be able to get exactly where you aim for, but if you wander off on side paths and get completely lost, you're likely to find all kinds of fun stuff, and more than a few rare items.

Self-esteem- Some hating to end my day

I know I've referenced the quote before, but in Fight Club, Tyler Durden tells his space monkey disciples "You are not a beautiful unique snowflake. You are the all-seeing, all-dancing crap of the world!" while shoving his angry, sexist, implausible anarchy down their directionless sheep throats.

This is the first thing I often think when people share things that are genuinely stupid and pointless and expect anyone to care.

Kind of like this blog. Isn't funny what a hypocrite I am?

I'm thinking primarily of all forms of social media, lots of art, poetry, etc, and many conversations. This occurs to me because I was just wandering around the internet, and I found myself getting increasingly annoyed by the amount of tripe floating around. Idiotic posts, crappy art, and generally obnoxious wails for attention and validation.

I think this culture over-values validation. A lot. And it starts young. You have to praise a child for everything it does, and then they have graduations for everything ever. I think it undervalues things that are actually achievements. And if you don't set the bar low and commend everyone for their every attempt at anything, you're a horrible person. Because obviously people need to be told everything they do is gold, or else their weak personalities will collapse and they'll whither away and die of bad self esteem.

I hate to break it to you all, but not everyone is or ever will be great. In all likelihood, most of us won't accomplish anything of real worth in our lives.

You know that song "The Kids Aren't Alright"? That's kind of what I'm talking about here.

You aren't a beautiful, unique snowflake. You're probably actually a grain of sand. surrounded by a bajillion others, made of the same stuff, essentially indistinguishable. There are differences, yes, but the chances of you being actually unique or new are basically nil.

Congratulations. Happy Tuesday, kids.