Deja Vu

It's funny how I can come back on here and read posts from a few months ago and go "Wow, that's exactly how I'm feeling right now! Wait a moment, that means no progress was made."

I suppose it's not completely the same--I'm still on a quest for meaning, but now the focus is on me and whatever it is that's wrong with me, if there's something wrong with me.

I can rattle off my accomplishments with ease. Reading at the age of two. Gifted program. Perfect paper on the Gauss Grade 8 Math Contest. High School Valedictorian. All of which implies that I'm an intelligent young man.

But recent events have shaken that belief in myself. Am I smart? Or was I just overachieving? It's a pretty relevant question when you consider you just spent the last eight months sitting at home doing absolutely nothing.

Oh I'm completely serious. I accomplished absolutely nothing. Well, okay, I levelled my Druid from 80 to 85. Pulled that off less than two days after release.

Managed a significant degradation of my musical skills via not practicing at all this year. Heck, I was practicing the piano earlier today when I noticed just how little control I have over my fingertips. And then it struck me--I'm a horribly uncoordinated person. My level of control starts dropping at about the wrist until I reach the base of the fingers, when control is near zero and I'm just flailing away, or it feels like I'm wearing mittens. Perhaps that's why I'm constantly punching things accidentally.

And despite this, I chose a path as a career musician. I'm such a silly person.

The questions are endless. Is a balanced humanistic education a horrible idea, where you focus on your weaknesses, become solid in everything, but sacrifice being really good at one thing and pay the price later when job hunting?

Have I been lied to all my life? All the teachers and parents and friends who said I was really smart when I was just acting really smart and making a bunch of educated guesses, or perhaps they were just trying to be nice or encouraging like they're supposed to be.

Or perhaps I truly did have the potential to be everything that people believed I could be when I graduated from high school, and my decisions in college destroyed all of that.

Potential is such a weight. It feels like you're carrying the weight of the world's hopes on your shoulders and any one misstep means we don't cure cancer, or something else just as important and weighty.

I don't even know what I'm talking about or why I'm writing this post. It's all just a big sort of cloud that I don't really understand and don't have the energy to sort, just like all the emails in my inbox.

I didn't used to be like that. Used to be super organized. All day I organized stuff in my head. I kept an agenda. Knew exactly what and when everything was going on. Life was simple and easily understood.

What happened? Is the key to understanding the fog studying the fog itself, or studying the clarity before the fog? Problem with studying the fog is that you are studying fog, which is by definition fairly indeterminate. Problem with the clarity before the fog is that it did not know what fog was, and even if you could get back to that mindset the idea of fog would infect your brain until it was all over and you couldn't get it out.

I'm just rambling, aren't I? Am I even saying anything?

Heck, maybe this is like a sermon. You know, how you listen for a few moments then you drudge off to sleep, wake up briefly and catch a few more details, daydream some more, start singing songs in your head, and really only catch a few fragments of what the preacher is actually saying.

Why am I writing this? Do I even believe any of this?

It's so easy to mock myself. Does failing condemn everything associated with that failure? I mean, obviously it shouldn't, but the question isn't whether it shouldn't, but whether it does.

I wonder if this all goes back to God. Life was so incredibly clear to me the day I got baptized, a month after grad. All of the things the Bible said were obviously true, all of the systems of the church obviously correct. Then I met this thing called doubt.

Doubt and faith are opposites. I'm sure they have other opposites, and I'm sure some academic (re: professional doubter) will find some way to reconcile the two as being either necessary for each other, not actually opposites, on the same side, insert random good thing.

Anyways. They're opposites. It would have been easier if it was absolutely true there was no God, because atheism has this nice beautiful construct it hangs life on to put your mind at ease. But that can never happen because I've seen too much. I know that there is truth in the church.

I just haven't figured out which parts are true and which parts are wishful thinking.

And that's where doubt is so evil. Having so little that you know is absolutely true, having only one church that doesn't dismiss that little you know as absoultely false, and wondering whether your doubts of the parts you aren't sure of mean there's something wrong with you or there's something wrong with the church.

It always has to end at God, doesn't it?

Shut up, brain.

All you ever do is define the question. Do you ever make a serious attempt to answer it?

Answer the question? That seems like such a silly notion.

Faith: knowing absolutely nothing and believing anyways.

So back to the original point. Ought I have faith in myself?

I mean, there's been very little evidence to suggest that I should. Sitting at home, pretty much lost all hope. Just existing, watching the days go by, try to find something to entertain myself with so the time passes--wait, no, that isn't it, try to find something to entertain myself because it is impossible for me to do nothing. And yet in doing a whole bunch of things to distract myself I am really, in essence, doing nothing, I'm just doing a whole lot of somethings to make my brain tired so I don't have to worry about thinking about how I'm really doing nothing.

Was the wonder child the same person I am now? No, it was a different time, a different person. Yes, it is the same person. Was I really a wonder child at all? If it was, can it come back?

Quit asking questions! Is this a person someone ought to have faith in? Am I supposed to have faith in myself at all? Why am I still rambling? Why the heck would anyone read this? It's not art, its just a person typing whatever is the first thing that comes to their mind, over and over. I guess that could be art. Should I even publish this post?

Well I'm out of things to talk about. Too tired to think. Don't want to bother making the effort to find something out of that soup fog. I'm getting lazy. You were always lazy. Didn't stop you before. Shut up brain.

The Canadian Election

And the lesson we can learn from the Canadian election is that if you lie, repeat the lie a little louder (x10), suspend parliament merely to hold on to power (twice), lie to Parliament, secretly alter signed documents, grossly misrepresent where money is being spent (x2), funnel millions to your friends, throw people out of your campaign stops for merely visiting the campaign stops of other leaders (x3), limit the ability of reporters to ask you questions, run a campaign solely based on character assassination...

You get to win more seats and a majority government.